"...Okay! Five minutes is not much, that's supposed to stick around for nine hours. If you don't mind larger pills I can do an extended release thing and we can fiddle with how much to release at what speeds to find something that works for a reasonable amount of time, I don't know if you want nine hours but you probably want at least one occasionally."

"Hm. Let me try something? Normally I burn through everything really fast and at different speeds, and I'm pretty sure that's 'cause of the Nine Tails? I might be able to talk him into not burning the meds out."

"Sure, go for it."

And he settles in to meditate.

Thirty minutes later, he opens his eyes, says, "Alright! He spent a bit calling me names but then I chattered at him a bunch about the meds and he asked if me getting drugged would make me less annoying so I said probably! So he'll stop filtering out that thing you just used, but he'll need a sample of each new medication before white-listing it."

Cam (who has picked up his violin in this interval) nods along. "Okay, wanna try same dose same stuff again?"

"Yeah, let's!"

"Five four three two one bam."

It takes longer to take effect this time, and is about the same amount of a mild effect, but it doesn't wear off before Naruto gets separately bored.

(It's not a game-changing amount of focus, but he can also task-switch a bit more fluidly than he had been able to.)

"Cool, how about I give you like ten of those in pill form to see how they play out with what-all you do with yourself and revisit then?"

"Alright. How often do I take them?"

"The usual practice is you take one in the morning before you start school or work, and an extra half one right before, like, a test or presentation or something like that, I don't know how that will dovetail with your scheduling habits and that is part of what the idea is to find out."

"I don't have a ton of a schedule but I can take one before starting training for the day?"

"There you go. And it's typical to skip days and not do the extra half a pill every day you take it at all, but neither's obligatory."

"I'm usually doing something but I guess I'll see. Are there side effects?"

"You may notice some but almost certainly not all of the following! Trouble falling or staying asleep, decreased appetite, increased appetite, headache, anxiety, irregular heartbeat. Some people get none, some people get several, all should go away if you stop taking it no problem, if you were allergic we'd know already."

"Not having any of those yet, but haven't been on it long I guess. I'll let you know if one comes up?"

"Yup. There's an extent to which you can chase your side effects around with more drugs - for instance it's fine to take painkillers if you get a headache - but ideally we find something that doesn't give you a hard time in the first place."

"Dunno how prone I'll be to different stuff, I haven't had meds really before and poisons flat out don't work."

"Poison is such a broad category! Even without the drug whitelisted it did work for five minutes. I know how I'm immune to poison in general but I have no idea how that can possibly work for you."

"I think it's because the fox is intelligent and deciding what to flush out? He probably didn't flag the thing as dangerous so was lazy about it."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense if the fox is... a molecular biologist? That should be on your list of things to ask him, 'are you a molecular biologist'."

He laughs. "Yeah! Once he calms down over the meds thing."

Giggle.

"I haven't gotten a chance with the other questions yet, too, I keep forgetting those..."

"Did you write them down?"