Blame this.
Adams Madeira
Back in 2015, renovators and catalogers at Kean University discovered that a portion of the university’s wine cellar consisted of a shipment of Madeira wine laid down in 1796 to celebrate John Adams’ Inauguration. The Madeira, of course, was still drinkable — the stuff can last for centuries — which is why the entire consignment was quietly stolen one night and replaced with a rather nice stock from the Illuminati’s own stores that was equally old, but not nearly as mystically potent. It was, of course, a wrench for the Secret Masters who were personally discommoded by the switch, but manners are manners. You simply do not steal from somebody else’s cellar.
Well, unless they’re treating the wine abominably. The Secret Masters are still human beings. Or at least a functional working equivalent thereof.
Anyway, at this point Adams Madeira has some serious esoteric significance associated with it. Any magical or occult ritual that uses wine as an ingredient (there are a lot of those; the Illuminati is not a great career choice for alcoholics) will be at one and a half potency, if the ritual is for the purposes of defending, healing, or aiding the United States of America. Old civic rituals that specifically require Madeira by name (there are quite a few of those, actually) will double Adams Madeira’s potency.
Adams Madeira is not the most powerful civic-flavored magical artifact out there, but the Secret Masters hope that it can be a renewable one. Experiments are underway to try “seeding” regular Madeira with it, in the hopes that the Illuminati can secure a permanent supply of heightened-potency wine, via correspondence magic. Fortunately, Adams Madeira — like all Madeiras — ages well.
Which is good, because for the next week your team will be attending a combination review board / controlled laboratory test of some of the batches of hybrid Adams Madeira that have been allowed to further ferment and develop for a full year. The bad news: your team will be ingesting some or all of the batches, because the project is at the live human testing stage. While the Illuminati knows broadly what each batch is likely to do, esoterically speaking, at some point you simply have to see how it reacts with a human body. The good news: if you really don’t want to spend the next week drinking on the clock at an Illuminati resort complex, there’s about three teams behind you that would be happy to trade, say, their current assignment of hunting sewer alligators in Camden.
Your call.