Creature Seed: Oso, the God of Cocaine.

Oso, the God of Cocaine – Google Docs

Oso, the God of Cocaine

Unholy Symbol: a Grateful Dead-style dancing bear, with white paws, and white lines descending from its nose and mouth.

Why does he take the form of a black bear?  Because when you’re a dark theurgic engineer, you work with what you have.  If you have a bear that died from eating 40 kilos of cocaine, got stuffed, put in a museum, stolen, pawned off, bought by Waylon Jennings — hold on, it gets weirder — gifted to a friend of the guy who originally accidentally gave the bear the cocaine (not to mention posthumously, as the cocaine’s owner had ejected the cocaine just before he died in a tragic, yet somewhat satisfying, combination skydiving/drug-running incident), displayed in a Reno mansion for a decade, then sold to a Chinese-American apothecary who needed a display for his traditional medicine shop — look, you apotheosize the damned bear into the God of Cocaine, all right?  The mystical charge on this one was so strong that the woman who nominally owned the bear couldn’t stand it, and wasn’t able to throw it out.  It was almost irresponsible not to turn it into a god.

Almost.  Priests of Oso have only one real power at the moment, but it’s a doozy: as long as they perform a fairly simple ritual, no drug deal that they personally oversee will result in a felony conviction. Some strange coincidence will always come up — always — that will result in thrown-out charges, or a mistrial, or a plea deal, or something.  Guess what priests of Oso do in their spare time, when they’re not worshipping the image of a taxidermy bear?

Needless to say, the organizations that handle the intersection of drugs, crime, and the occult have been working to contain the problem. The normal solution would be just to shoot everybody wearing the symbol, but priests of Oso aren’t the usual necromancers with access to curses and poor impulse control. They’re just smug drug dealers who know that the law can’t keep a grip on them. Kind of hard to justify a kill-on-sight mass sanction on that sort of thing. No, really. This isn’t the Thirty Years’ War. People notice this stuff now.

So, Plan B.  Secure the bear.  Use the bear to track down the dark theurgic engineer, lean on her (for some reason, it’s usually a her) to find out how to shut down the god before it gets powerful enough to start granting the usual set of powers for Dark Priests. Neutralize the bear, preferably without letting its acolytes realize that there’s something wrong. That last bit is kind of important; at this point, priests of Oso cheerfully let themselves get arrested, just to watch the cops fume. If they don’t realize that they’re no longer safe, the entire priesthood can go to jail at once. It’d be a real win.

Fortunately, your team’s job is straightforward, simple, and easy.  The bear’s in a local museum. How hard could it be to steal it?