| Spoiler warning! This article or section contains major spoilers for the plot of Blood is Mine Chapter 2: Blood on Mars and onward. New readers are advised to proceed with caution. |
Save the Queen, also known as just Queen or its short-form of StQ, is a mysterious, purple liquid drug that takes users on extreme hallucinogenic trips. The drug has been growing ever popular to take in the Lower Tiers. It hasn't quite made itself known much to the Middle Tiers, let alone the Upper Tiers... yet[1]. People who are 'Queened' have taken up occasionally venturing into the middle tiers and injecting random people with it.
Effects[]
People do not take Queen to accomplish much; they rant, they rave, they trash their rooms and eat whatever they can find in their surroundings[2]. They lose control and forget whatever happened during the trip, making the drug a prime cause for wacky antics; Fuse himself has taken the drug once, and woke up naked in a park two days later with zero recollection of what happened. Some users feel they experienced life-changing hallucinations[3] - this has been, in part, how a cult has arisen alongside the rise of StQ.
Save the Queen is also a mind-control drug that insidiously links users to a hive-mind, without their knowledge or permission. This effect, however, is not generally known by the public.
Origins[]
Most people who take Queen have no idea what is actually in the drug. Even the best chemists in the Lower Tiers have been unable to reverse-engineer it. The use of the drug has grown increasingly popular over the past few years, and the system is rigged like a huge pyramid scheme with no visible peak. While getting hands on it is easy enough, getting answers on where it comes from in the first place is impossible.
However, Dr. Finch studied and researched the drug thoroughly, and together with his knowledge of Jane Doe's blood, was able to determine the actual components of StQ.[4] The reason chemists have been unable to reverse-engineer it have to do with the fact there is a bio printed blood component that camouflages itself as the other hallucinogens mixed in. Dr. Finch, however, is used to camouflage - and can even identify that this bio printed blood isn't nearly as good at it as Jane Doe's blood is.
Reverse-engineering Queen[]
There are two primary non-blood elements[5] in Save the Queen:
Magic mushrooms[]
- A grossly mutated strain of psilocybin from radiation exposure.
Gabriel a.k.a. crawl[]
- A synthetic disassociative anesthetic, mostly dealt by Dicers - one of the biggest gangs in the lower tiers.
Bio printed blood[]
StQ is mainly made up of a bio printed imitation of the blood that Zone Fifty found on Mars, which causes whoever takes the drug to become a part of a 'hive-mind' controlled by the person who has the most of this bio printed blood in their system[6]. However, it lacks some of the abilities that the real deal does, as there have been no signs that TH has a red like Jane and her mother do.
As a side-note, whoever is sitting in the control seat of Save the Queen, it is likely to be someone using bad bio printed blood.[4]
Innate unfathomable hate[]
Jane's Mom's Red stated it was possible the innate, primal hatred for others like it could be built in to the bio printed blood that is being used for Save the Queen, simply because it is based on the alien blood found on Mars (see Blood on Mars for more info). This seems to track, as Jane's blood reacted aggressively when it was exposed to Save the Queen. Mom's Red also stated that the original Mars blood would probably also react aggressively to Queen, as it knows only that the blood is not itself. It wouldn't know or care that Queen is based on it, it would see it as an other, and thus react with aggression.[7]
Save the Queen versus Protagonist's Blood[]
Jane Doe did not originally have the capability of mind control, at least not intentionally or initially. Because of her blood's ability to perfectly imitate whatever it is next to, however, her blood - when it came into contact with bad bio printed blood from Mars - reacted by first overcoming the fake blood by calling it out and essentially schooling it, and then imitated Save the Queen. It did not just stop at imitating it, however, but it imitated it better, perfecting it.[1]
The alien blood within Jane Doe seeks, innately, to destroy anything of the same kind. As such, it did not react well to the bio printed fake blood. Jane Doe fell into a death-like coma the first time she was injected with Queen while the alien side of her was stirred up and awoken from its lurking state in her, and when she woke again, her blood was properly 'awake' and had overcome the fake overwhelmingly.
A such, if Jane Doe injects someone who has taken Queen with her own blood, that person is relinquished from the effects of Save the Queen, as her Jane's blood is simply 'better'; the bio printed fake is forced to submit while Jane's blood takes full control.
Who is the Queen?[]
It has been theorized that the "queen" mentioned in the name, "Save the Queen", is actually Enyo, or the Mars beast, an ancient alien originally defeated by Jane's mother in a battle that concluded over Mars. Zone Fifty found remnants of the Mars beast's blood, which was used in the Lasker Experiment, and served as a blueprint for the control blood experiments they started that Patton Thale would eventually pick up and refine.