A potion of water-breathing corrupted with magma cream, and then with the sap of weeping vines, creates the most reliable amnesia potion. This combination took me a long time to discover, as it wasn’t particularly instinctive in terms of finding the right combination to produce the desired effect.

My initial experiments with night vision potions and ink sacs ended up creating some very effective blindness potions, which I was then able to refine into other options to disguise movement, weapon fire, footsteps, voices with a ghast tear and ice crystals, lots of different uses. Nothing like what I was looking for, but all still useful nonetheless.

Even when I did stumble upon the right formula for amnesia, it’s still taken many months to work out the dosages and how they actually work on memory. Scar and I are used to memory loss due to Vex possession, and it’s mostly discrete blocks of time that get cut. We remember things if They allow it, but mostly They do not.

We do need to be wearing our masks, though, for the possession to work. The Vex have never said why this is necessary for unlocking the transformations They require, but masks have been used for possession in many cultures for thousands of years, so it makes sense that the Vex are tapping into similar magics.

Memory loss is common with these possessive magics too, though not all possession does need masks. The memory loss was a surprise and a shock at first when Scar and I first got the Vex masks. I remember Scar spending hours trying to create potions to recover his memories. It did panic him at first, but the Vex soon manages to soothe him. Now he doesn’t care.

For myself, I find it, well. I notice things floating into my dreams that feel like memories, even if I can’t verify them. But I got used to the memory gaps because it’s the price I pay for what the Vex have given me.

I will admit that I have, at times, dabbled in memory recovery potions. Just out of curiosity. Just to see if it can be done. That also took a while, but combining honey, milk, and gunpowder to night vision potions did seem to be the most reliable. Of course, I tested these on someone other than me or Scar. Scar did offer, but I just felt the Vex would be mad if I used the potions on ourselves.

I’ll have to write up these recipes later, because they require some quite difficult brewing. I needed to modify a brewing stand to get the concentrations I needed. Distillation is super important and has to be done with precision or the potions won’t work. Memories are super sensitive to tampering, and an incorrectly brewed amnesia potion can remove far more than you intend, and a memory recovery potion that’s too strong can recover things you may not wish to remember. They are not potions to use trivially, and with little care. In many cases, there are reasons to simply let the memories be lost, rather than risk recovering or forgetting too much or too little.

Sometimes Scar and I stay up all night, thinking about when we first got the masks. Remembering what we can about that time. The Vex, of course, have memories of all the pranks, and we’re allowed to remember the final forms, but everything else is lost to us. Sometimes we revisit them, too. Not for any reason, just to- sometimes, it’s nice to reassure ourselves they really happened. We did those things.

Last time we did that, Scar asked me if False remembers anything. I’m not really sure. She’s never really talked to us about it. I do sometimes feel Vex magic coming from her, but something always tells me not to pry. If the Vex still have business with her, that’s for Them to deal with. We’ll know if it’s important to know. Until then, False is her own person. Can’t say I don’t think about it. She did wear a mask, even for a short time, and surely that has to have had some kind of effect. Maybe one day I’ll ask her about it.