item seed – Page 34

Item Seed: The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives.

The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives

Physical description: The New Zombie Cookbook is a 300 page book, profusely illustrated – very profusely illustrated – that offers a few chapters on ingredients (zombies), utensils (cleavers feature prominently), and, most importantly ,recipes. Needless to say, the author (Elizabeth Riley), publisher/editor (Vyhle Publishers, Pittsburgh), and illustrator/photographer (R.U. Pickman) are unknown to the American publishing industry – despite the fact that the book was supposedly written in 1982.

Continue reading Item Seed: The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives.

Item seed: Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia.

Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia

Description: the core book itself dates anywhere from 1400 to 1925. It lists (in Latin) a variety of ‘recipes’ for curses that can be placed on objects, animals, and people. What makes every version of this book different from the others are the marginal notes: typically, a copy of the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia will have most of its white spaces covered with notes, lists, scribbles, and in a few cases, arguments between competing sets of annotations. The book also typically reeks of evil, or at least poor life choices. Continue reading Item seed: Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia.

Item/Creature seed: Yodeling Pickles.

Yodeling Pickles

No, not the ones on Amazon. These …these… are a bit more problematic. And possibly evidence of an act of war between us and an alien species that nobody’s ever met, and lived to tell the tale about it.

It all started with the North American Mystery Boom Strikes of 1977 and 1978. Never heard of them? Well, of course not! Those shadowy government agencies exist for a reason, macushla: and in this case the reason was that the ‘booms’ were actually what appeared to be escape pods from an alien ship that augered into, and then left a fairly impressive crater on, the dark side of the moon. Various governments hushed it up, of course – blaming it on the Concorde supersonic jet (incidentally, the story of why we had to stop doing supersonic commercial air travel is rather fascinating, if a bit grim) while frantically looking for the capsules. They found most of them, probably: unfortunately, they never found anything inside them that was actually still alive after impact. Continue reading Item/Creature seed: Yodeling Pickles.

Item Seed: Emotion Blades.

Emotion Blades

These particular items look more or less like short swords with a metal hilt and a glass blade. Mind you, the metal is actually concentrated willpower and the glass is crystallized emotion, but that’s what happens when you bring an item back from the Deep Dreaming. They’re stable in our plane of existence and don’t set off metal detectors or show up on X-Ray scanners, which is really the important thing. As is the fact that, while an Emotion Blade can be destroyed, the means to do so typically does not exist in our home dimension. Continue reading Item Seed: Emotion Blades.

Item seed: Phone Booths.

Blame this.

Phone Booths

On June 8, 2014, working phone booths mystically became rare enough to be worth using in magical rituals. Why that date? Nobody knows, actually. Magic is not yet science; there’s a certain amount of built-in uncertainty about the whole thing. If you could reliably write it out as an equation, it’d stop being magic and start being a particularly obscure branch of physics. The later registration with the Smithsonian of a working phone booth in the National Register of Historic Places had nothing to do with this directly, although that symbolic act certainly locked down some things. Continue reading Item seed: Phone Booths.

Item Seed: Mt. Shasta Diet Enlightenment (Orange).

Mt. Shasta Diet Enlightenment (Orange)

The ‘brand’ of this can of soda should not be confused with any real-life companies out there, of course. Although the company in question might sue for trademark infringement, if they A) knew of the existence of the ‘Mt.’ brand and B) could find the offenders using non-esoteric means. Emphasis on ‘might,’ though: after all, we’re talking about a company that can make literally magic drinks. Why cause undue aggravation?

Continue reading Item Seed: Mt. Shasta Diet Enlightenment (Orange).

Item Seed: Lead Balloons.

Lead Balloons

What most people don’t realize is that the phrase “It went over like a lead balloon” is actually a translation from Low Faerie. It’s not quite a perfect translation, though. The original is something more like “NO NO NOT THE LEAD BALLOON ARGGH HE POPPED IT MY EYES MY EYES BURN WITH NOTHINGNESS I CANNOT FEEL MY FACE” and then goes into mumbled bloody spittle as the poison really kicks in.

Continue reading Item Seed: Lead Balloons.

Item Seed: The Nano-INjected Jump Apparatus (NINJA) Suit.

The Nano-INjected Jump Apparatus (NINJA) Suit.

Before you ask, NINJA suits are not given out as rewards: they’re given out as sentences. Once you have one put on you, the metaphorical stopwatch is typically ticking on your remaining lifespan. Or sometimes not so metaphorical: there’s usually an integral explosive somewhere on the suit. Just to be on the safe side.

What the NINJA suit does is allow the user to operate at 15/10ths of human capacity, right up to the point where their bones break, their muscles shred off of the bone, and very possibly their heart explodes. It does this through the aforementioned nanomachines, which take an extremely brute-force approach to realizing human potential: to wit, shutting down the pain centers of the brain and pumping in aggression poisons and mood controllers by the quart. The suit itself holds in the increasingly battered body until the body cannot function; once the sensors no longer detect a heartbeat or brain activity, the suit activates the equivalent of a full-body thermite burn. This would make removing a NINJA suit difficult, except that it’s already largely considered to be virtually impossible. Nobody’s worn one for more than an hour and survived, and the one person who did had gotten a broken suit in the first place. Continue reading Item Seed: The Nano-INjected Jump Apparatus (NINJA) Suit.

Item Seed: Haunt.

Haunt

Haunt: very possibly the first designer drug to have its entire production line confiscated by the NSA and its manufacture given a Top Secret: Code Word (APPLESEED GIRAFFE). The people making it also found themselves suddenly, and reasonably profitably, working for the Alphabet Soup, too. All very deniable, all very fast – and all very effective, too.

Continue reading Item Seed: Haunt.