Tingling blue

Tingling blue is a condition caused by eating the fruit of the Spotted redberry, native of the Ventsea island. It causes the eater an intense craving for blue food, specially for the Roundleaf blueberry, and tingling sensations and sneezing whenever one tries to avoid blue food.

Causes

It is caused by eating the fruit of the Spotted redberry. It is one of the methods of the plant to win territory as both it and the Roundleaf blueberry share territory. The more Redberry is eaten, the greater the craving becomes.

Origin

Natural

Rarity

Extremely Rare

Affected species

Frugivorous animals and Ithakill

Red and black berries on black surface by Sneha Cecil

Symptoms

The first sign of this condition is the intense cravings for blue food. Because of all the blue food one eats, their tongue slowly tints to blue. Eating Roundleaf blueberry causes the tongue to tint faster, with the extra effect that their teeth and general mouth will also tint slightly.

When the afflicted does not eat blue, their mouth starts having a tingling sensation and shortly after the sneezings start. As more time passes without the afflicted eating blue food, the symptoms increase.

It is know that eating more Spotted redberry, or drinking tea from Sore elder leaves (a common tea for stomachaches or when throats hurt), causes the cravings to be more intense.

Treatment

There are a few different ways of treating Tingling blue. The most known one, for its high effectiveness yet expensive price, is to eat the purple "pearls" that grow in between the Spotted redberry's roots. Just eating two "pearls" with a two days period in between each one will leave the afflicted as if they never got the tingling.

Another treatment, which requires to avoid eating blue foods for a week, is also pretty known and while its harsh, it's much more cheaper and thus more common. It is know that drinking Sore elder's tea causes more cravings, but when drinking it while eating one blue berry, both of them cancel each other, making the afflicted not feeling the craving while also not feeling withdrawl; and it also makes the cravings take a bit longer to return. Thanks to this tea and berry effect, after taking it for a few days, the afflicted will be able to spend a whole week without eating blue food. Trying to spend a week without eating blue food without using the sore tea method is considered a torture.

Enviromental Consequences

The Spotted redberry releases a smell that tempts people to eat it, so while it is warned constantly to not eat them, the condition happens often enough in Ventsea (especially from outsiders) that the people had to act.

Initially, people went out and gathered Roundleaf blueberry and the "pearls" from the Spotted redberry. The gathering ended up causing more problems than helping, so eventually people attempted to farm the berries in the towns, but that lead to another problem: space. The island itself doesn't have too much space to farm, and most of it is needed to farm food for the inhabitants, so people had to find an equilibrium between the berries needed and food. It caused a couple of years of hunger and a couple of years with lack of berries, but eventually, an equilibrium was found.

It was quickly discovered that Spotted redberry consumes a lot of nutrients from the soil and its actually quite delicate to grow up in farmland or greenhouses (compared to its wild version), so very few of the plants are actually farmed. Albeit displaying such delicate state, farmers managed to force the plant to grow more "pearls" than its wild version does. While helpful, this hasn't effected a lot its expensive price.

While animals show similar symptoms as Ithakill, they do seem to have a timelimit for this condition, contrary to Ithakill. They are seen suffering same fate as Ithakill for between a couple weeks and a month, but afterwards, the symptoms slowly disappear and the animal goes back to normal.

Why is it so common?

Although Ventsea has a restricted access and a lot of warning everywhere, this illness keeps appearing because the plant tempts the victim rather than try to get them by ignorance, so it all ends up depending on the self-control of each person.

Spotted redberry protection?

Making its berries beautiful and delicious will usually make animals eat all the berries they can, but Redberry wants to use animals to destroy the population of the Roundleaf blueberry, so once someone or something has eaten a berry, the smell changes for them, becoming the smell of rotten, which at the same time helps people to go try Blueberries rather than Redberries.

It seems that after being treatened of the tingling, people keep smelling the rotten but tests have shown that animals don't seem to keep the smell of rotten.