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.

Now, a quick word of defense for the Shadow Government, here: if they had found a living alien they’d have patched him, her, it, or them up as best they could and let him, her, it, or them construct a communications beacon to get picked up. Because they’re not stupid. The ethical thing was also the smart thing in this situation: build some goodwill, because you don’t know how behaving badly is going to sit with the advanced civilization with the ability to drop asteroids on your head.  But… everything organic in the capsules was dead. And starting to decompose. So doing autopsies seemed an acceptable risk. It’s not like we killed them, right?

So the Shadow Government has spent the last forty years trying to figure out the organic material in the capsules, and going nowhere. And while that was going on they only looked offhandedly at the nonorganic artifacts that were in the capsules.  Including – we’re finally getting to the point, yes – the “Yodeling Pickles.”  The Shadow Government has about three hundred intact ones.  They look like green plastic pickles.  They emit sounds that do, in fact, sound like yodeling. They were more or less all tossed in a vault and left there, because human technology wasn’t even up to analyzing the obviously broken ones.  Fortunately for humanity, somebody noticed ahead of time that Yodeling Pickles needed a supply of electrical power, so they all got hooked up to the power grid and somebody checked on them every few years.

Why fortunately? Because somebody finally took a look at the broken Pickles.  Turns out that the organic goop inside the capsules wasn’t the aliens; it was alien crash foam.  The aliens are the Pickles.

Which means that humanity may be in one heck of one.