Alchemy is hard.
At least, the more complex mixes are. Any novice can throw together potions of health and mana, tonics for superficial transformations, and "love potions" that inspire infatuation rather than genuine feelings of affection. Child's play. The real complicated brews—those potent enough to shock the dead back to life, mold flesh into radical new forms, and capture real, pure love and devotion in a one-ounce bottle—those require careful measurements and a steady hand. The likelihood that something will blow up in your face, or worse, is a constant concern. That's not to mention that gathering advanced reagents can be as dangerous and tedious as the brewing process. Archfiend's knuckle hair is more difficult to obtain than people think, and the blood of an unblemished ox calf carried in a blessed silver vessel and thrice exposed to a first quarter moon falling on the night of an autumnal solstice isn't something you can pick up at the supermarket. For any great reward, there's bound to be great risk, right?
When the means to an end are so much trouble, why would someone sell their hard-won labors?
The way Danielle Obrove sees it, she shouldn't have to. She's running the long con, and she has yet to be caught. Her ploy involves impressing the public with word of her renown, maybe wasting one or two genuine tinctures for demonstration's sake, and then selling them placebos and sugar water while keeping the quality elixirs to herself. Invisibility potions, incendiaries, fluid facial symmetry, this is the stock that Danielle Obrove of Danielle Obrove's Traveling Panacea Emporium will claim to sell to you, when in reality you're just getting chameleon extract, bottled bottle rockets, and acne cream.
The reason Danielle has been able to get away with swindling so many people and not suffering repercussions is due to Mercurial Motion, a potion that serves as a, in a manner of speaking, "dimensional lubricant." The mixture allows her body to slip between the bounds of the Hither and Thither, moving from a reality in which she's successfully bamboozled the public at large, and starting over on a plane unfamiliar with her dubious tendencies. Danielle is certain to only ever market her goods to the lower or middle classes, never to any individuals that might be in contact with wizards or other powerful figures that could give chase once she "slips by." It usually works.
In her early life, Danielle was a prodigy alchemist at her home plane's school of magic, devising incredible new formulae meant to benefit the common man, or to make life unpleasant for enemies of the king. She was brilliant, but she could not stand to see her work used and abused by others, whether to hurt or to help, after going through all the arduous work gathering and preparing ingredients. The discovery of Mercurial Motion was the last straw for Danielle. Rather than see her greedy professors and the royal courts use her transdimensional marvel to wage conquest on other worlds, she packed up what she could and squeezed into the next reality over. It wasn't even due to a difference in ideology; Danielle was just sick of not getting to play with her potions herself! Before she departed, she stole a specialized cart outfitted with all manner of chemical apparatuses and room to store ingredients and completed potions. It was just what she needed to begin freelance potions sales, as well as to continue to hone her craft between pitches. Danielle slathered herself and the cart with a dose of Mercurial Motion, said goodbye to her home plane, and said hello to a multiverse full of suckers.
Danielle Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the blinkmage privateer turned pensioner with a seaside view, Daniel Obrove. She is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. She's the Obrove if Obrove were a brilliant but greedy traveling potioneer, while the sailor is Obrove in the form of a scaly retiree.
Other Obroves, some of them honest, and some of them practicing even worse deceptions, can be discovered on their alt list, here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!