Worldbuilding 203: Poisons, venoms, toxins

Greetings and spicate! …I do have a spear at home… Anyway, welcome back! After a very long hiatus, Anne and I have returned! And well, mostly me for now. Before getting onto the topic at hand, I have two announcements to make.

The first and most impactful one is that instead of doing weekly, we will do biweekly. Anne and I still haven’t managed to get our lives fully back to how things used to be, but we think an every other week schedule will be manageable for us without a problem.

The second is that this day to return was not picked at random. Yesterday, exactly one year ago, I accepted myself as a transgender woman 🙂 I have kept it quiet for this time for many reasons, but recently, I’ve gotten very comfortable about being open, so here we are so everyone can know. Remember the post I did back in March on alien queerness? That was no coincidence. So will this revelation change anything? Nothing besides the fact that Anne will stop using Zhi/Zhim for me and use She/Her instead. Now onto today's blogpost! 

Definition

What is a good way to start the return but by giving one of my favourite things, a definition?

A poison is any substance that, when it enters the body of an organism through any means, disrupts the natural biological processes of said organism.

It is a broad one, and honestly, I would include social media in it because that sure disrupts any normal thinking. But what about the other words?

A toxin is a biologically produced poison.

Simple as pie.

A venom is a toxin that is actively delivered by the organism that produces it.

Which means bites, scratches, etc, can deliver it, then it is venom. If it is passive, like some bipedal monster comes up and licks you, then it is poison.

Those are the words! Now to move onward!

Poison vs venom in biological beings

Now, why would an organism want to be venomous or poisonous? Attack and defence, of course! A general rule of thumb is this: venoms are for offensive, poisons are for defensive.

A venom makes it easier for an organism to attack its prey. Imagine yourself as an animal, you’re stalking a prey, and then the chase begins, and eventually you catch up to them, and then the struggle begins. They don’t want to be eaten, so of course they struggle and bite and scratch, and you get hurt! And you don’t have any antibiotics, any open wound is a breeding ground for bacteria! It is dangerous!

But if you have a venom… You can bite them and let go, and they can run away, thinking they have gotten away. If your venom is fast-acting, that delusion won’t last long before they become too weak to do anything, and dinner is served. If it is a slower-acting venom, just take a slow walk as you follow the prey, as it again gets weaker by the minute. In the end, you can walk up to it, it cannot do anything, and all is well for you.

But if you are the prey, you cannot do anything against those mighty hunters! You are weak, you are small, even smol. Well, you can hide; camouflage works. You can run fast too and hope to get away! But what if you are neither of those nor the other options? Well… you could make a point out of the fact that eating you will have deadly consequences!

So you have a poison instead, it can be inside you, in a bladder, or on your skin. It is in you, so while you might, and even likely will, die, you take the bastard down with you! Do things out of spite! Rebellion!...wait, I am not Anne… (Anne: Am I missing a rebellion?! Oh, a poisoning… still good!) But it will mean that if the hunter survives, they will become wary of your species, and over time, will stop wanting to hunt your kind because you lot make them sick and even kill them!

This is also why poisonous animals, and even some plants, do the very opposite of camouflage; they intentionally stand out extremely much. It is to signal “I am poisonous, leave me alone, or you will die!” Which you know, works fantastic… unless some species evolves resistance to your poison, at which point it becomes a bit of a problem… Some plants had these ideas, and some bipedal sods disagreed on them being poisonous. 

Poisoning your enemy

…Or your roommate; they are the same thing, right? Anyway, if you do want to poison, you generally don’t want to venom your enemy. Is that a verb? If not, it is now! Yeah, venoming your enemy is usually a bad idea because everyone will know who did it immediately, and your enemy is likely to see you coming!

So poisoning it is, but what do you need to think about if you want to do it? Well, you don’t want the poison to be too slow-acting. If you do it too slowly, you don’t get the effect you want of them being dead soon. If it takes 35 years for them to die from it, then what is the point? They might drop dead from a stroke in that time, and you are better off letting nature take its course then.

But if it is so fast that you put it in the food, they eat a single bite and drop dead… yeah, everyone else in the room will know something is up. Someone is a murderer! And then we get the whole “who done it?” scene, and maybe that is what you want! Then this is great, but normally a murderer, such as yourself in this instance, is smart enough not to want to be that quickly detected.

So it needs to be slow enough that no one knows they have been poisoned, but fast enough that it is not more than a few days before they drop dead. A big benefit is if the poison makes it so that the soon-to-be-dead one behaves as if they are just generally sick and goes away from people. It is harder to determine if they were harmed or anything then! This is actually one reason arsenic was so popular. It took about a day or two, was not immediate, and the person behaved shortly before like they were just sick and went away from people. Then they died in bed. Genius!

So to make it into a list, a few days duration, preferably mimic an ordinary everyday illness, make people want to be away from others. If your poison does these things, it is regularly a very good poison to murder others with.

Unless you want to make a point like the Soviet Union once did, where they made the poisoning extremely obvious and the poison was excruciatingly painful and visible. The person got extremely sick, lost hair, had to go to the hospital, and more. The point was much less about hiding it and more about making the point to not cross them like that person did. What was the poison? Polonium-210. It is radioactive, so once inside the body, it wreaks havoc, and you will die a slow and agonizing death.

Types of poison

Poisons come in many flavours, based on what they target.

Cytotoxins

These poisons target individual cells in some manner and cause them to malfunction. Cytotoxins are often generic in that they don’t target specific cell types but cause mayhem to the general functionality within the machinery that keeps a cell alive. Some spider venoms fall into this group.

Metabolic poisons

These poisons target anything that has to do with metabolism. That is, in general, energy extraction is the target. This is often a form of cytotoxin because it is the metabolic pathways of the cell that are targeted. The oldest classical example here is cyanide. This kind of poison will cause the most damage to energy-demanding organs, such as the brain and the heart, which use energy all the time in large quantities.

Neurotoxin

As the name implies, they target the neurons. This isn’t in the same way that a metabolic poison can, where the target is neurological due to the high demand of neurons in terms of energy. This is specific to them and can range in terms of what they do. Some target the brain specifically and wreak havoc. They can target specific neurotransmitter function, how the nerves send signals between each other. It can also target the peripheral nerve system, so you get paralysed but are fully aware. Horrific, isn’t it? These can also cause cardiac arrest because they mess with the heart's nerves, too. 

An example is botulinum toxin…which is Botox!

Hemotoxins

They mess up the blood of an organism. It can be by destroying the blood cells, which will cause you to have massive issues getting oxygen to the rest of the body because… well, that is the blood cells' entire job. It can also start messing with your blood's ability to coagulate… which means any kind of wound will never stop bleeding. It can also cause issues with the blood vessels and you start haemorrhaging blood internally… which is not that good when you’re meant to have a closed blood system. Rattlesnakes tend to like this kind of toxin; arsenic is one as well.

Cardiotoxins

All organs that an organism has can be specifically targeted by a poison. I won’t go into all of them because … yeah, it’s a lot of them. But I will bring up this one because it is an especially important organ that never gets any rest, even for a minute. Because you will die then. Yeah, it is the heart, without it you will be dead within a few minutes at the best of times. 

There are many ways to attack the heart; you can have it stop, have it pump faster and faster, pump arrhythmically, and many other things. But if the heart is not kept in its normal pattern, death follows quickly. Quite a few cobra venoms fall here.

Other

If there is something that can be attacked, a poison can attack it, and there will be a toxin that can do it. So you can be really creative in what a toxin does. 

Venom cocktails

For biological venoms, you actually rarely have it do just one thing. A bite or claw, or anything by an organism, is usually a cocktail of many different components that do different things. For example, stopping coagulation is all good and well, but if the arteries and all are whole and not broken, besides where you bit the bugger, what good will it do? Sure, the bite you did will keep on bleeding, but that is unlikely to end in the individual dying.

Their body will break down your venom and then eventually heal up. The same is if your venom causes a lot of bleeding, the blood will clot, and the healing begins. So what does an industrious little organism do? Well… mix both! A mix of both, and more, means you can cause massive damage inside, and the body cannot clot its way out of it! Smart tactic, attack on multiple fronts, and your enemy won’t know where to defend… I am sure there is a blogpost based on battling.

Designing a poison

We now know a bit about what poisons can do, but how do we make them? Honestly, as we always do in worldbuilding, we make it up. But let’s do a step-by-step guide, shall we?

Step 1: Function

I said in my post on technology that interaction is more important than function, and that still holds here because function and function mean different things. Here, function refers to what function it has in your world. What job do you want it to do? This is also one of my rules!.

Is the job for an assassin, or is it for a mystery? Or are you like me, who likes to mix it up and be realistic, where you want it to work both as a medicine and a poison, and we follow the old toxicologist saying of “the quantity makes the poison”? After this is decided, we move on.

Step 2: Effect

After that, decide on the effect. This includes how painful and excruciating it is to die from it. If a poison attacks the muscles, you can have the victim spasming like crazy, or just tense up completely, where the muscles refuse to relax. Imagine yourself being this tense all the time, including your breathing muscles. You are in agony as you are slowly suffocating because your chest muscles refuse to take another breath.

Or if you do a magical world, maybe it manipulates the mana in the body? If you’ve read my post on magic diseases and Anne’s subsequent post where she provides ideas for such diseases, your poison could do the same! Imagine if it attacks a cell's water mana manipulation thingy, and then you start drowning because it generates water in the lungs…

Step 3: Source

Of course, the question is also, where does it come from? Nature and life are very good at coming up with all kinds of poisons that can do all kinds of horrors. So we have that as an easy option, a plant, a fungus, or an animal can supply it. There are some caveats here, then, to think on. Namely, the poison has to be tolerated by said organism, not a good poison if it kills the one producing it, right? And after that, the poison has to provide some utility to the producer. Poisons are COSTLY affairs for any organism, so maintaining them requires a definite beneficial circumstance for evolution to work.

Though if you don’t want that, you can often take metals. Metals are plentiful, and if you have magical or exotic metals–see post on materials–then they can do interesting things as well! Just be aware that these ones do not tend to be as targeted in organisms as biological poisons tend to be.

Finish

Congratulations, you got a poison now of your choice! Maybe it is horrific enough that I will feel proud of you, or maybe it is so kind that Anne will be proud of you! Either way, those are the 3 important steps I say in any design of a poison.

Summa Summarum

Poisons are fascinating in what they can do in bodies and within a world of magic or interesting struos, the amount of things they can do is exponentially increased, which creates fertile grounds for fantastic storytelling and equally rich worldbuilding. If you do have a magic system, I definitely suggest leaning into it, but as I always say, especially in my rules, it has to work together as a coherent whole, where all pieces work together.

I hope you appreciate this post of our return. We will see you all in 2 weeks!