Pill Imps

This might have been mentioned somewhere in your writings, and I'm doing a Marlo on you by suggesting an imp I forgot I read before. Nevertheless, just in case that it isn't so, here it goes.  

The idea is to talk about how when you were young you weren't good at a certain subject, let's say maths and at the time there was a study to use a medication to increase the skill. You show a beaten up pill container from a pharmacy with the label and all with the name of the medication (e.g. arithmeticalic acid) and you state that the study was eventually shut down. But you always thought it actually did help, maybe it was a placebo effect, but who knows? 

Now you go into any maths based routine, such as the Idiot Savant one. 

It will be fun and easy to create a label that looks real and just sand it down enough to make it look old but still legible. The pills could be any vitamin. 

I know for sure you mentioned taking a pill to give you temporary super powers. I'm just not sure you ever mentioned the idea of an actual prescription. —GT

Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve written about this exact idea, but probably 90% of it in the past. It’s good to re-mention it now with the Savant Deck release and the Idiot Savant post. “I’m great at math” is just too believable a premise. And I’d be devastated if someone thought I was actually trying to convince them of a real skill. So building a backstory is essential for me. They need to know we’re in the realm of fiction—or at least that I’m not taking genuine credit for being good at math.

To give it some “depth,” I wouldn’t just say, “These are pills that make you good at math. Now watch as I’m good at math.”

I’d set it up so the math thing was a weird side effect. Maybe I got put on these pills for being a hyperactive kid. They calmed me down, but also gave me brief bursts of hyper-focus with numbers.

“The pills worked to calm me down. And the math thing was just an added benefit. My parents were thrilled. But there was another side effect as well… they shrunk my testicles down to the size of peas. I may have been a hyperactive lunatic without the pills. But still, my parents were like, well… we can’t do that to him.”

I’d say I kept a couple dozen of the pills for decades and would pop one every few years just to see if the math thing still worked. And, actually… it did.

“Let me show you…”

By now we’re clearly in the realm of the fantastical, but when I do then perform some impossible mathematical feat, it still might make them second-guess what’s real—or wonder what’s going on with my testicles at that moment.