Once upon a time
there was a young adult
who spent time on the dark web,
Searching for the most obscure and exotic substances humanity could offer.

Late nights tracking down vendors with the most up-to-date wares:
Drugs.
Research chemicals,
Novel psychoactive substances.
Illicit pharmaceuticals and exotic materials.
Pills, powder, liquid, tabs, any material one could find.
Uppers, downers, dissos, deliriants,
Psyches, anti-psyches, stimulants,
Depressants, anti-depressants,
*** drugs, study drugs,
'noids, 'roids, and
even vitamins.

There was the standard battery of illegal narcotics,
******* knockoffs of more popular drugs,
Drugs designed to evade anti-doping tests
and then the more experimental stuff.

Suffice to say this part of the internet is a strange and lawless world.
Not like the Wild West, more like the backstreets of Seoul.

The goal was nothing more than knowledge
of this rapidly evolving-world.

One night a vendor's listing flagged their attention
and on an intuition they acquired
a batch of synthetic cannabinoids for nothing.
A few days later a letter arrived
containing several unlabeled bags of power.

It took many months to even partially identify them.
The vendor went dark before the results came in.

One compound was entirely novel. It did not have a name
so it was assigned one. It did not have a history of human use
but had entered the wild human populace.

After identification they were destroyed.
The properties of that novel compound remain unknown.