Bad Seeds
Description: a twisted and gnarled hard organic mass, about the size of a peach. It feels hard, fibrous, and vaguely itchy to the touch, and smells unpleasantly of rusted iron and mildewed hay. Consuming one is contraindicated. There is a mild enchantment on Bad Seeds that allow them to be ignored under normal circumstances, up to an including baggage checks at airports.
It’s a monster seed. Plant it in the right (read: evil, cursed, corrupted, hexed, desanctified, whatever floats your boat) ground, and a monster comes out. Sure, it will take about forty years or so for the process to complete, which is one reason why there aren’t more monsters around: but all it takes is one deranged lunatic to have successfully gotten away with seeding an area with Bad Seeds a couple of generations ago for the whole situation to blow up in somebody’s face today.
The real weird thing about Bad Seeds, though, is that they’re idiosyncratic. Each one grows a different monster: one that’s based in equal parts on the exact nature of the evil ground that it’s planted in and the local, inchoate folklore of the area. For example, a Bad Seed planted in a cult-degraded chapel in a decaying mining town will produce a very different Bad Seed planted in a murder house basement on the edges of a crumbling coastal city. It’s pretty clear that the entities that create Bad Seeds don’t really care what horrible thing that they get, as long as they get one. Which is extra-distressing, if you don’t like nihilism for its own sake. Even victims prefer to think that they’re getting preyed on for a reason, right?
Perhaps there mana in causing death this way? o_O
Probably the sort of mana that would cause me to reach for a Warlock’s Wheel no matter how much I liked magic, but still…
Minor editorial comment .. third sentence appears to have been cut short.
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Mew
Triffids by appointment only.