Bumblebee is the drug that finally gave Twitch some real competition on Chuza’s streets – a piss-straw coloured liquid with a faint honey smell, sold in the same small glass bulbs as its older rival, each one holding four measured doses rather than one. Where Twitch sharpens the senses, Bumblebee hits like a battle stimulant: faster reflexes and a harder swing in a fight, at the cost of judgement that only gets worse the longer it’s running.
It isn’t cheap by street standards – 8sp a bulb against 2sp for Twitch – but the users who can afford it use it hard, typically twice a day. Section 18’s own accounting of one Cutters operation put several hundred silver a day moving through a single dealer’s hands on Bumblebee alone.
FILE NOTES
The supply chain runs straight back to Eskobar and the Cutters – runners handling street-level deals, Eskobar himself only showing for anything larger, and by every informant’s account a mage or sorcerer somewhere behind the operation rather than a simple chemist. Getting that far cost the Agents an undercover buy at the Gauntlet Inn, a tip from a bazaar fixer everyone calls the mumbler, and eventually a raid that turned up close to a thousand bulbs of Twitch and Bumblebee together, smashed and scattered where a wagon had gone off a rooftop rather than let itself be caught.
None of that street-level business explains what Bumblebee is actually for. Administered correctly, it doesn’t just intoxicate – it induces a genuine mental pairing between two subjects, strong enough that once linked they can be separated and used as living walkie-talkies over real distance. Dr Griffiths kept syringes of it alongside Twitch in his own lab at Get Stuffed, part of the same NIL-funded telepathic-pairing research he was running on stolen children – which raises an ugly possibility nobody at Section 18 has managed to rule out: that the drug flooding Eskobar’s corners and the drug used on Griffiths’ captive children came from exactly the same supply.
The earliest confirmed batch never stayed in Chuza at all. Once the pairing effect proved reliable, the first four doses produced were loaded aboard a ship called the Content Raider and shipped out to an island rather than sold on any street corner – a distribution decision that looks a great deal more like research logistics than drug trafficking, and doesn’t answer the question of who was waiting on the other end to receive them.
A cruder, more dangerous cut called Black Plague has been turning up further out from the city – smoked rather than dosed, from the same style of bulb, producing a thick black smoke potent enough to put most users into a shambling stupor and a smaller number into a genuine feral rage. Whether it’s a street bootleg of Bumblebee or a deliberate variant is unconfirmed. What is confirmed is a string of calm, deliberate suicides across the Section with no obvious cause – people who simply walked to a rooftop, sat, and jumped, several of them later found to carry a faint trace of Bumblebee in their blood, long after any recreational dose should have cleared.
STATUS: Filed under Equipment, contraband class. Illegal, profitable, and apparently useful for something considerably worse than a night out – see Eskobar for who’s selling it, and Griffiths for who might actually want it out there.