No, this isn’t an adventure seed: it’s a titan arum blooming.
“Jack” the titan arum is now blooming! View tonight from 9pm-1am (enter through Linnean Gate) or Sunday 9am-5pm. pic.twitter.com/v3jBmwv0UQ
— MO Botanical Garden (@mobotgarden) July 17, 2016
They’re called ‘corpse flowers’ because they stink like one when the flowers bloom – pollination sometimes ain’t pretty – and they only bloom rarely. Certainly rarely enough that it makes the news when it happens to one of the plants. Sometimes, they even get people outside the area to blog about it…
I like the wikipedia page which describes the various chemicals the plant releases and what they smell like: Limburger cheese, sweaty socks, rotting fish, human feces, chloraseptic, and sweet floral scent.
That would be… memorable. Especially all at once.
Maybe it should be an adventure seed, something about how when the corpse flower blooms the walls between worlds weaken and sometimes something comes thru attracted by the scent. As can be expected the things attracted to the corpse flowers scent are invariably unfriendly and sometimes not among the living. This is why most locations with corpse flowers have their own armed security teams and those teams have access to flame throwers and the local swat unit on speed-dial. On the plus side corpse flower guards are generally well paid with good medical coverage and represent a pool of untapped talent for dealing with the unusual and keeping their mouths shut about it afterwards.
Oddly the things attracted by the corpse flowers scent only ever seem to show up between midnight and exactly one hour before dawn, no one is really sure why.