seed – Page 64 – Moe Lane

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.

Creature Seed: Junkyard Spirits.

Junkyard Spirits

These creatures are a cross between nature and urban spirits; like the former, they are territorial, able to possess their surroundings, and have magic associated with their ‘element.’ And like the latter, they are essentially comfortable around humanity (note: not necessarily ‘nice’), able to use technology, and growing more and more corporeal every decade. At current rates, Junkyard Spirits will make the jump to an actual physical species within one hundred years. Continue reading Creature Seed: Junkyard Spirits.

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.

Creature seed: Tillinghast’s Remora.

Blame this.

Tillinghast’s Remora

This delightful creature was first discovered in the 1920s by Dr. Tillinghast, a researcher of some notoriety who did not, alas, survive the moment of discovery. Ironically, this had nothing to do with the Remoras: in fact, a Tillinghast Remora might have been able to save the life of its erstwhile discoverer. Certainly they’ve been a boon to metaphysical surveyors ever since. Continue reading Creature seed: Tillinghast’s Remora.

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).

Creature Seed: Pseudo-Hair.

Pseudo-Hair

This particular creature is waiting for us on the first planet we find whose life has a common ancestor with ours (so if panspermia isn’t real, don’t worry about it). It’s an… interesting parasite: as you might guess, it infests a human’s hair follicles, effectively replacing a host’s hair. The effect looks rather like normal human hair, except for the random wild color shifts and the way that Pseudo-Hair moves independently. You can cut Pseudo-Hair without pain… to yourself; the organism itself doesn’t like it very much, although it won’t take lasting harm unless you do the equivalent of a depilatory.

Continue reading Creature Seed: Pseudo-Hair.

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.

Adventure Seed: The Background Theme of the Universe.

The Background Theme of the Universe

Well, this is awkward. You know about that ‘cosmic noise’ thing? It’s this pervasive – as in, across the universe – sound that goes on above the 15 megahertz range; many scientists assumed that it was a relic of the Bing Bang, or something like that. Which it may very well be; however, we’ve been listening to it for about seventy years now, more or less, which has been barely enough time and sampling to give a suggestion that the sound has… purpose behind it.

Essentially, the universe has a theme song. Continue reading Adventure Seed: The Background Theme of the Universe.