D8 Products from a Childhood

Fluff? On this blog? What can I say - I'm a fluffer: 

1. Osseo-Crunch: Originally "osseous composite digestible material no. 3", developed by the government of the United Kingdom in the 1930s in a public-private partnership with a consumer packaged goods company. It was meant to be an emergency ration additive in case Germany used biological warfare to attack the cow population of England & so on, and to provide a useful alternative disposal method for corpses.

As that worst-case scenario was never realized, its patent languished out of use for decades, until an American company purchased it in the 2010s. That company repurposed it for a breakfast cereal marketed towards demographics with higher levels of lactose intolerance, with the cereal's mascot Henry "Hahaha" Hyena promising that it's "the only cereal that doesn't need milk, because it's made of bones, and there's more than enough calcium in the bones!".

Osseo-Crunch tastes terrible, has a chalky texture, and only freaks eat cereal with water, so it didn't have a long production run. However, it is incredibly shelf-stable so you can still find it some places, and unopened boxes of it with real Henry "Hahaha" Hyena figurines inside have become something of a collector's item.

2. Camp Cambrian: A movie franchise, the premise of which is that a science camp where campers can learn about biology and the origins of life gets caught in a temporal anomaly, flinging groups of campers across wildly-accelerated stretches of time, during which their experiments evolved into whole ecosystems - some reminiscent of real periods in the Earth's history, some not so much - while the groups of campers have to learn to understand their new environments and their creatures and either find a way out or leave something behind to help the next group do so that'll last over the eons. For example, Camp Cambrian 2 ends with that movie's group planting the bones of their fallen comrades into conditions ideal for fossilization to spell out a message.

3. Croaka-Cola: Fun factoid - the original Croaka-Cola recipe included some hallucinogenic slime exuded by a species of toad. Croaka-Cola is a brand defined by meteoric rises and falls - its "Sippin' It Bayou-Style" campaign made the beverage an international hit, however a few years after its release of the alkekengi flavour in partnership with Cricket Murmur's catastrophic "low voices / heavy air" tour poisoned it for many.

4. Phobophobiatch Beer: Specially brewed to not cause "hangxiety" - the anxiety experienced during a hangover. It achieves this by reversing some of the usual brain chemistry of alcohol - rather than increasing levels of GABA and decreasing levels of glutamate, Phobophobiatch does the opposite. Drinking Phobophobiatch makes you scared, but during the hangover while the brain attempts to adjust its chemistry back to normal you experience calm and confidence.

It tastes terrible, but has seen some success among alcoholics who "zebra drink" it, alternating it with regular beers to even out the hangxiety, among horror buffs who get drunk on it to amp up already-scary experiences, and as a recommended part of some nootropic stacks - binged the night before an important day.

5. The Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail: A series of books marketed towards children, illustrated with dreamy water-colours. The books were intended to give a child-friendly education on touchy topics such as adultery, divorce, split custody, parental alienation, and suchlike, all through the lens of the life of their titular protagonist, Harold Hickorytail - a very slutty mouse.

There was a bizarre and poorly-received movie adaption of the Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail that, after many producers stuck their fingers in its pie, was edited into a stop-motion slasher movie wherein the characters getting killed off were all mice, and the killer was a cat. The Harold Hickorytail movie is considered a "so bad it's good that it's so bad" product of the VOID lockdowns.

6. Laugh Caf Gigglepuffs: Branded product of the Laugh Caf comedy club - oven-baked cheesy puff-snacks injected with nitrous oxide, causing compulsive laughter in those who consume them. Like Croaka-Cola, the Laugh Caf had its own PR disaster related to Cricket Murmur - not through Gigglepuffs, but through the Laugh Caf Podcast. The podcast ran an interview with the survivor of a Cricket Murmur show that was decried as "insensitive" and "deeply irresponsible", with the interviewer at one point bringing out a 3D-printed figurine of a raincoat-clad Cricket Murmur member. Several sightings and disappearances have been linked to the interview episode, which has since been scrubbed from all official Laugh Caf Podcast viewing platforms.

7. Rou-Lad: "Pack it thick, pour it hot - Rou-Lad, it's for the boys" goes the now-infamous commercial. It's turkey roulade in a can. It's for the boys. What more do you really need to know.

8. Mane Man: A romantic sit-com revolving around the antics of a human man, Victor, and an anthropomorphic maned wolf woman named Jackson. Much of the comedy in the earlier seasons revolves around Victor ironically losing every bet and contest he ever enters into, and Jackson's crossdressing, which causes Victor to misunderstand Jackson's gender identity repeatedly and become confused about his own sexuality.

My Five Favourite Mangakas; Mangaka Meaning The Authour & Illustrator Of A Manga; "Comic Book" Being English For Manga

I thought I should write these down so I don't forget them.

I don't really like reviewing things so I won't go too much into why they're my favourites - only that they are, and that I am one of God's true manga-heads, and that these facts in tandem should be enough for you to understand that if you do not read their works you are depriving yourself of some of the finest art penned in the last half-century or so. If you want a link to a manga piracy site so you can read these people's works send me a DM or email or whatever.

They are presented in no particular order except that in which they came to my mind:

Atsushi Kaneko

Bold & beautiful - recommend in particular his work Soil, especially if you are a fan of the works of David Lynch.

Sugahara Keita

Rare grasp on "what it is to be human".

Uguisu Sachiko

Delightfully humourous and creative.

Takayuki Yamaguchi

His work Shigurui might just be my favourite manga ever put to paper.

Kago Shintaro

He's got an even more twisted mind than Jordan Peele. He's also got a thing about poop so consider yourself forewarned if that comes up.

Honourable Mentions:

Eichiro Oda

If you are not already familiar - he is the authour of One Piece, a Christian romance & the best-selling comic of all time. One Piece has been serialized since July 1997, though it is easy enough to catch up with - I did last year in a couple of weeks. Oda-sama is only left out of the top five because One Piece is the only work of his I've read, and the top five are there because of their whole & holistic body of work.

A fun video on the work:

Nobuyuki Fukumoto

Authour of Kaiji, one of my top five favourite mangas of all time - another list for another time. Like Oda-sama, he would have made it into my top five mangakas, but he's stopped writing Kaiji in favour of some bullshit about golf. I hate golf, it's boring & golf courses are ugly. Even if every golf course were overgrown with tick-infested wasteland that would still be an aesthetic improvement. I used to work at a golf course, and have had enough of the gross old swingers who play the sport to last me a million years.

Shin-ichi Sakamoto

I preferred Innocent to Innocent Rouge.

Hanazawa Kengo

I get five of these too.

Sandrovich Yabako

I don't consider myself a submissive person, sexually or otherwise, but week after week and year after year I have experienced the pain and pleasure of being dominated by the idiotic writing of Sandrovich Yabako.

D12 Prizes Awaiting You Behind The More Prizes Door

Tiring of the singular prize, I wish in my heart for an answer. The universe brought me to the More Prizes Door:

I am sworn to secrecy as to what I experienced beyond it, but perhaps some of these could be waiting for you. Waiting for you to find it. Waiting for you to open it.

1. Yellow Grinning Slime: Stick it to your cheeks and peel them back for a smile that will show the whole world. It will do your chewing for you.

2. The Ball: Really an egg. Ha ha! Kick to teach it the fear of you. When the hatching comes it will be too late.

3. Keys to The City: I hate it there. All cities are cloned from it, and malformed by differentials in telluric radiation. Full of ants now. Ants that dream.

4. Pulling Cheese: Aged like wine. It is not wine. Pull it and see it stretch stretch streeetch! Refreshes its flavour every noon.

5. Justin: He thought he would find refuge behind the door. There is no refuge to be found there, only more prizes. He is not long for this world.

6. Sticky Straw: Use it to spit bedbugs at your enemies. Others will be able to see the bedbugs, but your enemies never will. Great Pepsi taste.

7. Bouncer Interview: The only question is yes, or no. Benefits to decide who enters for more prizes, "live" forever on the threshold of the door.

8. Ticket to 1960: Your actions have already been accounted for.

9. Tiling Company: $1,200,000 YoY in revenues. Promising upcoming clients. Wish I got this one.

10. Hip: Good for any ossuary. Seeks to join your own.

11. Nectar: One of the drinks that make your belly intoxicating to the thinking numbers that make trees grow their rings. Ask them why they do it - I'm dying to know.

12. Immunity to Whippets: The good and the bad.

D6 Texas Chainsaw Massacres

As seen on TV.

1. A once-popular spot for corporate team-building events in Dallas, the Puma Slayer Axe-Throwing Bar found itself in a tight spot as the market became saturated and interest in its gimmick waned.

To solve this, its owner upped the ante - his club wouldn't just have axe-throwing, it would have chainsaw-throwing. He commissioned the creation of a set of lightweight, gyroscopically-guided, and AI-enabled chainsaws that would let anyone throw them like a pro to facilitate this.

At the new-and-improved Puma Slayer Axe-Throwing Bar's opening night four people were decapitated or de-limbed by a chainsaw which bounced at an unfortunate angle and then just kept bouncing and swinging around the throwing area. Footage of the incident would become a popular shock video.

2. "The Christmas Tree Cutter" is the media's name for a chainsaw-wielding serial killer who targets isolated families during severe winters in Texas, when travel is most difficult and government services and infrastructure most overwhelmed. The killer has attracted enormous attention and speculation from true crime aficionados, as even their shoe size still remains unknown despite the heavy snow cover at the times and places of their attacks.

The most recent winter saw two simultaneous murders in the style of the Christmas Tree Cutter, raising the uncomfortable certainty of an accomplice or a copy-cat inspired by the impunity of the killer.

 

3. Many have become familiar with the CBRPT cult of meat-worshiping, self-identified "male-to-male transsexuals" since the release of the Netflix documentary about it, but comparatively fewer are aware of its original inspiration: a spree-killing committed by a twelve-year-old child employed in a meat processing plant near the city of Tyler. The child enjoyed employment there at the insistence of their grandfather, a Texas meat baron, who believed it would teach them the value of hard work.

Whether due to severe sleep deprivation, prion infection, or some other factor, the child became obsessed with meat, reading a sort of haruspexic cosmic meaning in the insides of the animals they butchered. Shorty after completing their manifesto/scripture - written on homemade vellum in blood - the child murdered several of their co-workers at the plant before returning home and murdering several of their family members. Their meat baron grandfather paid quite a bit of money to keep that out of the documentary.

4. On March XX of 20XX, the congregation of the Divine Impetus Church in Paris, Texas, was attacked by an American-Israeli man by the name of Shlomo Katz. Shlomo gained entrance to the church while carrying a chainsaw by claiming to be an "emergency carpenter" before using the tool in his attack. Two people were killed and sixteen injured before the church's elderly pastor was able to disarm and subdue the man.

 

Eyewitnesses report that Shlomo screamed "Jesus was the original Hamas" and "I'll show you who the real Jews are" while swinging his chainsaw, apparently confusing Black Israelites with all black people.

 

Shlomo was arrested by the PPD, and a month later was released to Israel, where he faced no charges. He would go on to become a popular TV personality there.

5. Aspiring Texas governor Budd Dutt ran on the promise of cutting federal interference out of the state's politics, symbolizing this promise by carrying a chainsaw in ads and public appearances.

This quirk turned to tragedy at a campaign rally in Houston, where small yet functional chainsaws were given out to members of the crowd to rev for applause. Due to some unknown cause, perhaps heatstroke or dementia, one member of the crowd began assaulting the people around them with their mini-chainsaw, which spiraled out across the crowd in mass hysteria as others also began carving people up.

 

Survivors report that they were convinced they were under attack by secret terrorists or antifa who had infiltrated the rally.

 

Dutt's gubernatorial campaign would not go on to be successful, though he did enjoy a further 15 minutes of fame as an anti-PTSD social media influencer.

 

6. After being heckled at the comedy club Comedy Mothership in Austin, an up-and-coming prop comedian leaped into the audience and swung indiscriminately at audience-members with the chainsaw he had been using as part of his act.

A rumour spread like wildfire shortly afterwards which blamed the attack on Mort Chavez, an illegal immigrant known to Austin residents for catching and eating armadillos with his bare hands. Mort would be sent to the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp and later lead an armed uprising within the camp backed by the Cuban Revolutionary Army, which saw it liberated from American control.

D6 Post-Humans of the Antarctican Future

Goldfish - the snack that smiles back - has experienced a tremendous drop in quality over my lifetime. Not as cheesy, not as salty as they once were, and I'm pretty sure this batch I'm eating now was made with coconut oil. Tastes coconuty.

Anyways, this is for this: https://itch.io/jam/antarctica-jam, or something like that, or for whatever else.

1. Paramoras (& Plastines)

Once pseudo-naturally pseudo-evolved, now fully domesticated, the paramora is a burrowing animal raised for its meat, but by far its most valuable product is its brain hormones. Paramoras are extreme pair-bonders (most of their time not eating or sleeping is spent hugging their mate) so much so that domesticated paramoras are incapable of raising their own children, being much too concerned with hugging. An extract made from their brain hormones will, in human-derivatives, induce overpowering feelings of love and connection, making it a popular drug.

Paramora-ranching is monopolized by the plastines, a cladoculture which developed as a response to the rampant microplastic poisoning of the Middle Anthropocene - through internal nano-alchemy they gradually replace their biological tissues with plastic analogues. No plastine is considered an adult until they receive their great photovoltaic "wings".

Besides poachers, the biggest threat to paramora ranches in Antarctica are the fungal-symbiotic sporeworms, which can easily catch the creatures in their burrows. Plastine ranchers equip themselves with soap-sprayers, which bind and suffocate the worms in an inescapable membrane, and line their fences with soap-spigots which drip a curtain of the same substance down into the soil.

2. War-Daughters

Creation of the zealots of the Eutheminist Sodality, who believed that no woman should die except by the hands of another woman. War-daughters kill by ejaculating a super-dense shard of bone impregnated with a neurotoxin. Too many such ejaculations tore the combined pelvic floor-diaphragmatic muscles which powered them, and so due to this and their general cumbersomeness the war-daughters never saw much use as battlefield weapons beyond the Sodality. They continue to be born as ceremonial weapons, however.

3. Skykind

Like the plastines - another child of the Middle Anthropocene, tackling the dual problems of Kessler Syndrome growing beyond the ability of laser-brooms to manage, and the collapse of inorganic production capacity. They had different names back then, but now they're skykind.

They are grown to be living components of communication/surveillance networks - getting signals & the lay of the land and transmitting these to each other through bioluminescent semaphore-winks and ultra-sonic whistling. The sound of this whistling - perceivable at the very edge of human hearing range - from an unfamiliar skykind is a sign to stay out of view of the open air.

Their numbers are few now, and few powers can put enough together to make a decent network of them. They weep sometimes, the skykind, and their glowing tears drift to earth, feather-like and jelly-soft. People say they weep for their loneliness, but this is mistaken.

The skykind weep for joy. To fly under their own power, to live that old dream of humanity, is an unspeakable joy.

4. Sporemen

A desperate solution for a desperate time, now despised by many others and adopted as an identity of fierce pride. Back in the day when the tubular and rot-stacked hives of the sporeworms stretched across the continent, some people modified themselves to live in uneasy symbiosis with the worms rather than face being devoured totally.

They allowed the worms' fungi to colonize their lower bodies, and added more legs so that they could still walk even when their legs were in some state of being eaten through, and shared in the bounty of the worms' carrion-middens.

When superior weapons were discovered and the sporeworms' territory pushed back, the sporemen were pushed back with it. This led to a lot of bad blood, and people still get violent over it all the time.

5. The Human Reefs

Sacculina is a genus of barnacles that lives as parasites on and in the bodies of crabs. The parasite drains the host's nutrients from its guts, destroys its genitalia, and alters its hormones, causing it to treat the Sacculina's offspring as its own.

At some point, by some means, this barnacle-parasite made the jump to humans, and in the process got even stranger. It lives in the human brain (the closest region in the human body to the hard-shelled, soft-innarded bodies of crabs) and lives off the ultraviolet superradiance produced by the nervous system, as well as energy from various other quantum effects in the same.

Infested humans congregate so that their resonance can produce even more energy, and root in place to maximize the amount of energy going to their parasite. Over time their bodies wither and harden into coral-like structures.

These "human reefs" can be tapped for power, but the process is risky - exposure to the reef's biophotonics can befuddle and enchant the mind, and make those so exposed seek out infestation by the parasite in order to join the reef. Travelers of the Antarctic steppe would be well-advised to give a wide berth to the purplish "devil-lights" of the human reefs.

6. Deeplings

On a long enough timescale, something will go wrong. That's like, Murphy's Law or something. These guys' ancestors thought it would be fucked up if something went wrong and everyone died, like from a meteor or gamma ray burst or something. It would be better if somebody survived, and if that somebody was them, and if they kept the art and science of humanity preserved along with them.

Their name for themselves means something like "Preservers". They figured the best place to do this preserving was at the bottom of the ocean, so they made themselves into something that could survive there.

They can be pretty agreeable so long as you don't have something they want. If you've been delving into ancient ruins and got some lost hyper-tech or the Mona Lisa, you've got something they want. They'll offer a good price to take it off your hands, but if you refuse they will try quite hard to kill you for it. They've got spies and agents of lots of clades in lots of places, promised the final reward of psychic uploading to a paradise-simulation in their underwater halls for their service.

In the water they breath through their butts, didn't know how to work that into the picture. It's called anal respiration and the Japanese figured out that mammals could do it.

Yet More Monsters

Reminded by wasitlikely's recent post: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2025/02/before-moon-was-born.html (among other good features of it: witch-as-verb) of her monster generator: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2023/03/monstrous-amendments-fictional.html, which I attempted to make a post for before but forgot about. Alas:

A House Made of Birds

(Lurker + Family + Mouth
Wounds + Robbed + Bind)

It is good and right and natural that we should eat the dead, and build atop their corpses. The seasons pass, the generations pass, and the past nurtures what comes after. A foundation of bones sits strongly.

Some refuse to become-ancestral, to yield their place in the now to their descendants. Most of these sorts simply continue to age, and age poorly, but a rare few take decisive steps:

They will stake themself to the roof of their house, or in the attic, and sing an old and nasty and thankfully-all-but-forgotten song, without rhymes or tune. Birds will come to listen, and to eat the singer piece by piece. Depending on the size of the birds this could take quite some time, and one must sing the whole time throughout, so one should have alcohol or something stronger at hand to ease the pain. When they are finished the birds wheel through the air, then vanish.

There will be another house there, invisible to most, squatting atop the first. The children and children's children, and so on and so forth of the one who performed the ritual must remain in that first house. It can be renovated, it can be knocked down and built up from the foundations, but it must remain the ritualist's house.

So long as it does, and their kin remain within, the ritualist can swoop through their lives and their bodies raptor-like, influencing and seizing for moments (often appearing in the form of one of the birds that devoured them) to keep their family around, keep them bound to the will of their ancestor. The ritualist's spirit can't be exorcised while leaving the house intact - it's all gotta be burned, and left far behind.

Plum-Wine Conspirators

(Royal + Lamprey + Creeping
Porcelain + Plum + Dagger)

Every empire has its eunuchs - whether their balls are literally chopped off or not is irrelevant - it's the role, the identity that matters, the subordination of libido to the empire.

These guys definitely chopped their balls off though. They keep them in pots, beautiful delicate pots of painted porcelain, steeping in fine plum-wine. Over these pots they perform unspeakable rites - rather, the rites are pretty speakable, just not in polite company.

Within the pots they become generative organs of a different sort. Strain the wine through silk-cloth - see what wriggles through the fibers - pale little things, like worms, like eels. Drink the wine, and you take in the parasites it holds. They weave themselves through your ganglions - they feel luxuriantly soft.

The original idea was that they would found their own dynasty - one assimilated rather than birthed - but the parasites had their own intelligence, their own ideas, in their networks rather than in the individual organisms.

One drink isn't enough to do much more than infest a finger, for a time - cause it to twitch and change the trajectory of an arrow, or a character being written. You need to be plied for months to become a true host.

Over the years many true hosts were made. The parasite-network grew beyond its ability to maintain consensus. The conspiracy splintered, stuck out and into itself. Parasite began preying on parasite, sub-networks lurked hyperparasitical within. The empire they sought to overthrow works better than ever now - a tensegrity sculpture strengthened by the tension.

Hammerers of the Wound-Hoes

(Beetle + Reward + Hill
Sorrow + Butcher + Marrow)

There was coal in those hills, and enough of the finer minerals to keep people looking for them. Still is coal in them - they leak its fluegas through their caves and their mines and their cracks like an angry old man smoking on his porch.

Things were pretty good for a while, a good long while. Mine-work's pretty shit at the best of times, but nobody went hungry. Miners would leave bowls of blood and milk for the things that writhed in the dark behind the stone, and in return those things would knock to guide them to rich veins, and warn them of the build-up of bad air.

Then a mine collapsed. Half a hundred men lost, crushed or cut off and starving, suffocating. In their lonely nightmare, dying in the dark, they called out to the things beyond the stone. The things answered their call, and out of the sight of the sun they tore at each others' flesh and made love.

Those miners are dead now, but their children live on. The hills belong to them now. Hairy coleopteran hunchbacks. They hate light, and covet it. They're masterful smiths, but all they're willing to sell you are weapons - weapons that look wrong, serrated and lumped, but they kill better than most.

The children don't sell this weapons for coin, but for a promise - a promise of corpses, slain by their weapons. For the weapons bear their eggs, and bear their eggs into the wounds they carve, and the eggs incubate in the slain.

But the children's children come out wrong, and the children weep and tear out their hair at the thought that they will be the first and the last generation of their kind. The smithies pour out their smoke, and the corpses keep piling up.

‘Round Trip Back To These Here Parts...

Previously:
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-last-becomes.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-one-last-time.html

Full-Fair Ladies
1: Cut off their noses as girls and give them to the flesh-fixers, to be preserved and returned to their faces on their wedding day.
2: Dye their hair white, as maturity is associated with skill and discretion in affairs.
3: Wear dresses with cavernous shoulder-extensions that emphasize their collarbones and trapezia, highly-fetishized parts in these parts.
4: Keep the hair from their children's first haircuts to stuff into apotropaic pillows.
5: Know an herb-rite to transfer unwanted gravidborne children into their father's abdomen, and so are given a primacial berth as it relates to such matters.
6: Maintain secret cults and duelist-societies among themselves, charged with honouring the feminine aspects of the gods and discharging familial blood-feuds through ritual combat.

Courteous Knights
1: Inhale asps that coil through a bronchi around their hearts. Should the asp taste the heart turning against the knight’s liege, it will bite down with all the venom it’s got. As a side-benefit, the knights can breathe most poisonous gases without ill effect thanks to the asp acting as a filter, and march into battle with cauldrons boiling off the stuff.
2: Wear a brass ring engraved with a vow. Should they die without fulfilling the vow, and if the ring’s still on their finger (and their finger still on their hand, and their hand still on their arm, and so on) their corpse will rise for a day and a night in pursuit of it, the ring and their veins glowing an incandescent cherry-red.
3: Begin to consume progressively-larger meals of iron sand as they approach the end of their life, paired with internal alchemy practices. The aim of this is to turn themself into an iron colossus, able to go on one last mission for their lord before going still and falling to rust.
4: Wear colourful tatterdemalion and bells on the ends of their boots - for war is a misery and those who wage it are charged with bringing mirth to match the tears they've made others shed.
5: Make a drink similar to kuchikamizake together on the eve of battle, only made of dried and chewed strips of a tuber instead of rice. Those who survive the battle will share the drink and share stories of their fallen comrades. The grips of swords are often roughened and dyed to resemble these strips.
6: Wear their hair long and braid their locks with the same patterns of beads as their steeds' manes - these unique bead-patterns being their heraldry.

Valiant Lords
1: Commission another tier to be added to their crown when they inherit it. The oldest dynasties hunch under the weight of generations of coronations - and to help bear the weight of a ruler's crown is a very coveted position indeed.
2: Rule in pairs, matched at birth, twins ideally but any two will do. Both have their skulls bound, though to different ends and shapes - one for clarity, retention, and depth of long-term memory, the other for quickness and sharpness of wit. They lose in exchange what the other gains, but if performed properly should more than make up for the other's deficiency.
3: Hold court in chambers limned by magnetized pillars - no weapons of metal may be borne within. Violent intrigues are carried out by specialized cadres of assassins trained with weapons of horn and bone, useless for open conflict.
4: Have an overt spouse whose children will inherit their property, and a poison spouse who (if proper) will discreetly share their wealth. As the name suggests the poison spouse is unknown publicly and tasked with unrooting and eliminating the lord's enemies.
5: Place their thrones upon the backs of fearsome beasts, and rule from pastures of anointed & gilded sacrificial cattle - their ability to tame these beasts represents their proficiency at rulership.
6: Make their honour guard out of those who've committed lèse-majesté and suchlike treasons - tortured and artfully lobotomized by the lord's own hand into perfectly obedient slave-soldiers.

Well-To-Do Merchants
1: Tattoo the names of God on the soles of their feet, which go untrod and uncovered. If they must move, they're moved by servants or on ankle-wrapping stilts.
2: Replace their teeth one by one with gold prostheses - the glitter of a merchant's smile is equivalent to his lifetime profitability.
3: Bind themselves to angelic guarantors, manifested as glowing tattoos of chains around their extremities - they have become adept at skirting the limits of their bindings, clinging to the literal wording rather than the spirit.
4: Are required to be eunuchs, to reflect the sterile endeavours of commerce and interest.
5: Will carve a hunk off their fattened sides to fry up and serve when sealing big deals.
6: Measure trades with weights designed to resemble themselves - it's believed that if they make misleading measures, they will starve to gauntness or bloat to lethal obesity accordingly.

Benighted Serfs
1: Wage ceremonial wars against neighbouring villages at the height of summer, counting coup by whipping each other with straps of woven grain-stalks. The winning village is believed to have the favour of the field spirits come harvest-time.
2: Compute taxation amounts through bee-like ritualistic dances, often biasing these calculations in their favour through intimate knowledge (and therefore manipulability) of the steps.
3: Sacrifice their elderly, stringing them up as scarecrows in the field - the birds that taste of these sacrifices are overcome, thereafter serving the community.
4: Not only bring in the harvest but are themselves a harvest - preyed upon at contracted times by vampires or suchlike devourers - at the same time protected from outside predation.
5: Keep a breed of sheep which produces such quantities of lanolin that bees preferentially make hives in their fleece over extruding their own wax, and defend the flocks to the death (though not from shepherds whose scent they're familiar with).
6: Have an purplish tinge to their skin and scleras, from the mildly toxic yet starchy "milk" they make by washing a nettle-like plant - fermented, it makes a palatable, watery wine.

Iniquitous Criminals
1: Must belong to one of a great number of sclerotic and splintered guilds, who on pain of clandestine war can never trespass on each other's turf - the Cutpurses' and Pickpockets' and Swindlers' and Muggers' Guilds are all separate and politely-hostile organizations, for instance.
2: Will never harm a widow, in fact donating some part of their proceeds to their support, thereby gaining a population of informants and shelterers.
3: Are required to get high off their own supply of a drug derived from black lotus extract to ensure their addicted loyalty.
4: Are, after reaching a certain rank, subtly trepanned through their temple - almost impossible to notice even on close inspection, yet will cause brain hemorrhage should they fully bend over. This guarantees that they will bow to no one, on pain of death.
5: Pay a fat percentage of all their illicit earnings to the King of All Cats, and in return are granted the privilege of using his extradimensional alleyway home as an escape route - though the favour of a cat can never be fully relied on.
6: Practice a subtle and particular language composed of cricket-like chirps produced when they rub their specially-notched fingernails just so.

Learned Scholars
1: Eat nothing with a brain, out of the belief that unlearned thoughts from their food might outcrowd their own - however they file their teeth, as they make an exception for the offensively ignorant.
2: Submerge themselves in logico-aesthetically artificial ponds with nothing but a hollow reed for air and ducks for company - and when they dream sub-aquatically they pluck those ducks for the quills they'll use to write their oneiric revelations.
3: Desiccate the brains of their forebears into hard little walnuts, and then pack these into ceremonial rattles which keep the beat of their memory-songs.
4: Keep a private language-device of piercings and intertwining stitch-threads for confidential records - like a lukasa of living flesh instead of wood.
5: Have one eye put out, so that they can still read but can't apply their reading to violence.
6: Write everything in cipher - the exoteric meaning of their work remains the real meaning, the encoded stuff is just chaff to occupy wizards and other such fools.

Pious Priests
1: Induce serious cases of pectus excavatum in themselves by weaving an iron bar through their ribs. In the cavity so created they set a small shrine to their patron deity.
2: Work the bodies of the sinful dead barred from graveyards into marionettes and put on pedagogical morality plays with them.
3: Consume a special diet when they are close to death, which turns their sweat into incense. When their time finally comes they work up a coating through intensive and esoteric exercises before setting themselves alight.
4: Join hands and dance in circles, each priest singing a single syllable of a mantra repeatedly, together becoming a prayer wheel made of people.
5: Know magical rites to transform the viscera of sacrificed animals into unique and useful plants - the kidneys of a lamb into flowers which produce nectar like little fountains, for instance, or the heart of an ox into a capillary nexus which can irrigate an entire field.
6: Pray in a headstand, to cause more blood to flow to their crown - their connection to the cosmos, to the divine. The devout - or those seeking to appear as such - possess abraded and calloused tonsures.

Rowdy Sailors
1: Set cloth dolls on beaches in the hope that should they end up overboard they too will be washed safely ashore.
2: Worship the main mast of their ship as a divine phallus, carving it with sacred iconography and parading it through port after long voyages.
3: Keep an owl on-ship in the belief that the night-birds will recognize the stars to lead them home when all other navigational methods fail.
4: Scrape barnacles from the hulls of their ships and work them into protective amulets.
5: Wear hooded ponchos of manta ray leather.
6: Make amphibious assaults with flambuoyant skirts of cork-wood.

Starving Artists
1: Wear hairshirts made from hair donated by the fans, patrons, and lovers, to spur them on to greater creative heights. Lesser-known artists make do with just a scarf, or a wristband.
2: Operate food carts selling colourfully (and dubiously!) spiced concoctions to drunkards, collecting their vomit to boil down into pigments.
3: Launched a sculptors' crusade some years ago into the bowels of the earth, and a few are trickling back now with bizarre scars and a fortune in rare stone.
4: Are forced to make a living dying and weaving the beautiful and distinctive garrotes of the moonblood assassins.
5: Will, in desperation, sell themselves to temples, being given the resources to make their masterpiece in return for being sealed inside it as an unliving idol of the temple's god.
6: Support themselves through the sale of beautifully-molded clay cakes, a favoured treat of children and pregnant women.

D12 Weapons in the War on Christmas

Joyless atheists, christians who seek to excise syncretic contamination, jews who are tired of getting chinese food every year around that time - war can make strange allies, and perhaps none stranger than the War on Christmas. These are the arms they wield against that holly jolly holiday:

1. Aerosolized Herpes Simplex Virus: Rigged to proximity dispensers placed by mistletoe arrangements.

2. Soy Milk: Mixed with 11 secret additives to make it indistinguishable in flavour and texture from full-fat cow's milk, yet retaining all phytoestrogenic properties to weaken Santa's masculine hyperborean vril.

3. Extra-Cancerous Firelog: Nobody is slipping down a chimney lined with creosote from these logs without picking up a few tumours.

4. Resonant-Explosive Ornament: Seemingly-ordinary glass Christmas ornaments, carefully designed to burst into anti-personnel shrapnel when exposed to the sonic frequencies of caroling.

5. Thermite Stocking Stuffers: React poorly and immediately with coal put into the stockings of naughty children.

6. Magnetic Audiovisual Injector: A device which overwrites micro-sections of video cassette tape with subliminal and subversive anti-seasonal messages. Declined in usefulness with the end of popular use of VHS and suchlike formats, though many collectors have unwittingly been turned into Manchurian agents.

7. Archeo-Feline-Scented Santa Suit Rentals: A blend of pheromones collected from modern day felines with a chemical regression applied to make the blend match the smell of the primary predators of the ancestors of homo sapiens sapiens. Even brief exposure will cause an intense panic response in the limbic system. Application to Santa suit rentals quickly creates a negative Pavlovian response in children.

8. Oneiric-Medium Memetic Viruses: Implanted into children's unconsciousnesses at select facilities. The natural fading of the memory of dreams protects the children from the effects of the viruses, while anyone seeing them while they are sleeping will receive the full impact.

9. Rooftop Punji Stake Pit: If the fall & two-foot long stakes don't kill any large flying mammals landing on the roof, the mashed organic matter laced with Chronic Wasting Disease prions slathered on the stakes will. May require some attic renovation.

10. Propaganda Pamphlet Distribution Blimp: Treated for cold-weather operation. Strafe the North Pole dropping communist, anarchist, and Georgist propaganda translated into Elf. Unclear what economic system Santa's workshop operates under. All spies have been returned candied or encased in icebergs.

11. Evil Advent Calendar: Contains chocolates made with cocoa produced with the least-ethical methods possible. Believed to disrupt Santa's naughty-nice sense.

12. Spider-Silk Gift Ribbons: Sticky, impregnated with lethal dose of spider venom. Stiff microfibers lining the weave maximize odds of breaching skin and making blood-venom contact.

Twelve More Module Ideas

Like so: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/12/twelve-module-ideas.html

1. Chaos in the Quarantined Quarter: Their wealth did not buy them an escape from the seal placed to keep the rats and their plague in - it remains within with them, while the rats have become clever and cruel and the plague makes people strange.

2. Talons of the Colossus: A great bronze statue, humanoid yet inhuman, and hollow within - two warring cults reside in each leg, and even they fear to dare the mechanisms higher in the body.

3. Voyage of the Undying: The ship returned from the land beyond the sunrise overgrown by a silver tree - from its blossoms comes a curse of wretched immortality.

4. Rift to the God's Sepulcher: An earthquake has devastated the region, and opened a rift to a cave network where a primeval god and its children were once worshiped - rife in sacrifices, and stalked by the degenerate thing the god has become.

5. The Monastery of Miscarried Malice: The monks of a rich and learnéd monastery succeeded in a ritual to split their sins from their souls - now monstrously embodied, their sins run amok.

6. The Palace Past the Blazing Caul: A wildfire whips across the land, but through its heat-shimmer a marvelous palace can be glimpsed - some who have leapt through the flames have returned burned and burdened with treasures.

7. Legacy of the Lighthouse-Keeper: The lighthouse-keeper left behind a journal, and nothing else - throw a fistful of the herbs which grow atop the beach-dunes onto the beacon-fire, it says, and a path will appear out to a shining castle in the surf, full of wonders.

8. Festival of the Fantastical Fungi: For one week every hundred years the greatshrooms erupt from the bowels of the earth to cloud the skies with their spores - their inner chambers hold myconid menaces and precious effluvia.

9. Beneath the Old Silk Market: The old silk market was opened in the morning for business to find the flagstones flipped over to reveal tunnels beneath them, splatters of blood and threads of sticky silk leading below.

10. Lake of the Mutagenic Meteor: The meteor created a lake in its impact crater overnight - its glow has mutated the lake-life, and the first round of miners sent for its anomalous ores refuse violently to return.

11. It's Free Masonry: A flood has swept the earth away from the base of a stela crafted by an ancient and advanced civilization, revealing it to be only the tip of a much larger buried complex.

12. The City That's Always Today: The city was legendary in its day, now merely infamous - it repeats the same day, every day, always ending in its doom of black rain - seek its riches, but do not become enmeshed in its patterns or you too will become stuck in its cycle.

Some More Monsters

Pelt Saint

There's a ritual performed in the depaganized reaches when the times grow lean and hard: a strong young man is fed sour mushroom-wine and flayed - it is reckoned a good thing if he makes no human sounds while this is done - and the hide of a great beast is laid upon him. No longer a man but a pelt saint it is paraded into the forest with much merriment.

What god or spirit or power this is meant to appease has been forgotten, but the ritual still works. The game animals return, the fish multiply, and the birds flock and fatten. The people will not starve, but some must still die, for a pelt saint stalks and howls.

Godmask Abalone

Masks are sometimes worn to let the wearer become a medium for the divine. Sometimes what is channeled is too much for the wearer to bear, and they are crushed beneath its spiritual weight. This leaves behind a compressed grain of personhood in the creature, an irritant around which divine energy congeals and crystallizes. They are capable of performing a limited set of brittle, aberrant miracles, and are often followed by cults which brutally repress identity and distinction among themselves.

Scurrine

An undead creature born from someone killed by rat torture. The risen corpse fuses with the rats and the other implements of their torture, and become obsessed with the line of inquiry they were tortured over - uncovering hidden treasure, or spies, or blackmail, or whatever else.

They fear owls tremendously, and arrows fletched with owl feathers are as poison to them.

Crick

Also called coleoptera sicariae by natural philosophers, and guillotine bugs by travelers. They are the origin of the phrase "a crick in the neck", and the smaller and much less lethal crickets are reckoned to be their lesser cousins.

Cricks are flying insects of terrible size with terrible jaws, able to snip a cow's head off as easily as a man trims a rose. Despite this, as adults they are completely vegetarian - they do not eat their prey, but with surgical precision remove their heads with just enough of the brainstem left to preserve life and autonomic functions. These hapless sacks they take to their lairs and bury with just the stumps of their necks exposed, into which vegetable matter can be regurgitated and then slurped up again after digestion.

Crick lay their larvae in the necks of headless bodies, which the larvae are able to puppet about. They are laid in clutches and move in packs to find a new territory. When they do so some metamorphose within their bodies into adult cricks, while the rest remain as guards and eventually perish.

Lochleannan

Lurkers in bogs and dark lakes. They sing with a heart-wrenching sadness, beautifully miserable, and draw those sensitive to such things to their feeding grounds. With a kiss they steal away their admirers' souls, and drive them to suicidal despair. Should they drown themselves in the lochleannan's body of water it adds their heads to one of its necks. If they drown themselves elsewhere it's believed a new lochleannan will grow from their corpse.

They keep an air-filled lair in their body of water (and each body of water only ever has one lochleannan) - lined with shelves of glass bottles. They do not need the air to breath, but they do need it to sing. The lochleannan will trade with nefarious sorts for these bottles - hags and ne'er-do-wells and suchlike - and regurgitate their stolen souls into them, that they might be its audience eternally. You could command a lochleannan if you stole the bottle holding its favourite soul.

Its stolen heads are another weapon of the lochleannan, though it's loath to use them. It can accelerate their decomposition to turn them into corpse-gas bombs. The unexploded heads of a lochleannan are filled with what seems to be vegetable matter, and are a delicacy to certain discerning gourmands.

A Market All In Sable

Of the Proud Tradition:
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-black-auction.html
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-black-auction-2.html
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-black-auction-3.html
https://as-they-must.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-catalogue-found-in-bus-stop-in-karok.html
https://haruspexhovel.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-manuscript-recovered-from-personal.html

Dear ________,

Please be reassured - despite the unanticipated disruption to the Black Auction of 2020, the Black Auction of 2024 shall proceed as planned, albeit with an understandably-reduced catalogue and membership.

The Auction shall take place on the evenings of December 7th, 8th, and 9th in Doha. Due to security concerns, precise details of location and attendance procedure will be delivered to participating members in a personalized format closer to the commencing date. For the first time in the Auction's history, vetted members may also choose to participate in the Auction via telepresence using the approved channels.

Though we who are mighty may be laid low, remember that that which has fallen may rise again so long as the light which illuminates the path is well-kept.

Please find enclosed a partial accounting of the current Auction catalogue. We cannot guarantee that this will reflect the catalogue available when the Auction occurs:

LOT 1. ELECTRIC SARCOPHAGUS

A 10-ft. tall copper sarcophagus adorned with images of human slaves making offerings, some living, to gigantic humanoid figures with heads resembling those of Typhonic beasts. When a properly-mummified body is placed within, the currents passing through the sarcophagus will animate it as a mouthpiece through which one may communicate trans-temporally with the priests of the temple of Shtegg. These priests belong to a species of cetacean offshoots now extinct outside of cryogenic preservation, who ruled an empire centered on the then-vibrant Sahara during the Pleistocene, and claim credit for the selective breeding of homo sapiens as servants, gladiators, concubines, and snacks.

LOT 2. HEAD BROTH BOX

Reportedly taken from an itako murdered by Tokugawa Tadanaga after she prophesied his death at his brother the shogun's orders. A cubical wooden box, painted white and reinforced with iron. The box contains a reddish-brown liquid composed chemically of an even mix of sake and human putrescence, as well as the skull of a middle-aged woman. Drinking the liquid stimulates the salivary glands to produce generous quantities of ectoplasm, making the drinker an easy spiritual medium. The skull within the box was once capable of drooling out fluid to replace what was drunk, but unfortunately lost this ability after being removed from the box for examination.

LOT 3. ZYTKIEJMY DEVIL

A hairy, horned, short humanoid with a spiked tail, yoked to the grindstone of a mill in the woods near the town of Zytkiejmy by three chains of iron, silver, and maiden's hair. It speaks an archaic dialect of Polish, and is capable of milling grain into gold dust. The being must not be made to work on the sabbath or any Catholic feast day. By right of its binding, the devil may challenge its master once a year on Christmas Day to a riddling contest for its freedom along with its master's soul. Winning ownership of the devil will come with a pamphlet of impossible riddles in its Polish dialect, along with a pronunciation guide.

LOT 4. ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIER

An M113 Armored Personnel Carrier. The interior was once covered in a homogenized blend of human tissues, but this has decayed to reveal a beautiful, mandala-like pattern of metal and plastic. In his 1938 expedition to Tibet, Ernst Schäfer heard stories of a passage in the Tarim Basin to a sort of anti-Shamballa. Though he was unable to ever get the budget to follow up on these stories, his notes ended up in the hands of a covert unit of the American army, which during its occupation of Afghanistan launched its own investigation. This APC is all that remains of them. Meditation within the APC produces super-normal feelings of peace and clarity. Prolonged meditation awakens memories of "the womb within the womb". Achieving such a state more than once in a given year is not recommended, as this will result in the metamorphosis of the brain into an ambulatory and self-sustaining form which escapes the skull and any further confinement through extra-spatial movement. Bidding for this item will begin at $40,000 due to transportation costs.

LOT 5. THE BULL OF THE PIT

A dog the size of a percheron, bred by a circle of Palladists in the late 1920s as the nexus of their efforts to introduce diabolical blood into the nascent "pit bull" dog lineage. By their design, every child mauled by a pit bull would act as a Satanic sacrifice that channeled energy into this, the pittest bull. While the dog could be an intimidating companion on its own, the real value is in this energy, which continues to be supplied in bulk thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. Responds to the name "Nanny".

LOT 6. BLACK LIGHTNING

A magnetic canister containing a sample of paradimensional force which resembles a lingering bolt of black lightning. Provided to DARPA researchers by the entities which reside beyond the portal within Saturn's "hexagon" in exchange for ritual killings conducted by Tiger Force (Recon) 1-327th, along with several other technologies instrumental to the development of the internet. The black lightning is capable of transmuting biological minds into purely electrical consciousnesses, and of extracting energy from minds experiencing states of extreme suffering in apparent violation of thermodynamics.

LOT 7. THE PAUPER'S NOOSE

A silver necklace set with glittering yellow lynguriums. By legend given to a Genoese beggar-girl by the King of All Cats, and used to behead her by the same when she befriended a stray dog. From there the necklace made its way around the necks of a rich merchant's wife in Constantinople, the mistress of a Burji sultan, and a duchess of Mecklenburg, to name a few. Besides being a beautiful and storied piece of jewelry, the wearer of this necklace is blessed with the loyalty of all sorts of cats - as loyal as cats get to any master, anyways. Its wearer could walk among a pride of starving lions without so much as a scratch. With this blessing it seems to come with a curse - many of its wearers have died, prematurely and gorily, with the necklace by some means involved.

LOT 8. 2012 TORRIT GREY

A unique annual blend of dry pigments collected from air filters used by the Gamblin paint company. A flat, metallic surface painted with the 2012 Torrit Grey and oriented towards the light of the decan Ruax for three days and nights will become sensitized to certain otherwise-invisible spectra, and discolour when exposed to cursed objects, rifts to other planes of existence, and suchlike in manners that suggest their nature and severity. This lot comes with seven buckets of the paint - all that could be recovered after its anomalous properties had been discovered.

LOT 9. MUSICAL AUTOMATON

A humanoid automaton made of bronze and lacquered wood. Though traditionally attributed to the legendary Yan Shi, modern dating technology places it a millennium and a half after his supposed lifetime. When its internal mechanisms are wound with a cord of dried skin taken lengthwise from above the spinal column, the automaton is capable of playing musical instruments with great skill. Of particular interest is its ability to perform songs which would have an incapacitating mental or spiritual effect on a human performer, and of which a recording would not suffice.

LOT 10. MONA LISA SCHEMATICS

Pages from an otherwise-lost notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. They detail in notes and diagrams the vivisection and reassembly of the subject of his Mona Lisa painting into a tower-mounted weapon of unknown effect, apparently at her own request. Initial cryptographic analysis suggests the location of this device is encoded in the schematics, though the full discovery, and whether the procedure can be replicated, has been left to the schematics' final owner.

LOT 11. SOUL-FIXER

A hexapodal pseudo-insectoid with a variety of hooked mouthparts. Its shell is made of marrowless bone and its body cavities are filled with phlegm-soaked hair. The being is depicted in a Nazca geoglyph since removed from the public eye. It was recovered for this auction from an American mercenary outfit operating out of Colombia. By reaching its mouthparts into someone's nostrils and tear ducts in a perverse sort of "kiss" it can remove the qualia of guilt, mercy, and suchlike, creating perfect liars, suits, and killers. If the removal was performed less than a week ago the being can be forced to regurgitate what it has taken - either to restore it to the person it was taken from, or to double it in another. Cooperation of the soul-fixer can be obtained through the application of capsaicin to its spiracles.

LOT 12. ICON OF HALF-SAINT RADA

Orthodox icon made in honour of a woman who was martyred single-handedly defending her hamlet from Wehrmacht looters, who is not officially recognized and only locally venerated. Framed with welded bullet casings. When the icon is displayed in your home it will deafen and rattle intruders as if by nearby artillery fire, so long as you have not committed any sins against the Christian religion within.

LOT 13. CELESTIAL CORRESPONDENCE PHONE

A half-melted red plastic rotary phone, along with the tasteful late 19th-century wooden side table it's fused to. The dial does not have traditional numbers, but rather symbols reminiscent of those used in Al-Marjānī's zairjas. With the right combinations the phone enables communication with intelligences that variously claim to be angels, the plasmic essences of stars, enlightened ultraterrestrial gurus, magmic siliconoids, and suchlike. These intelligences are well-informed on natural issues of wide scale - gamma ray bursts, volcanic eruptions, and suchlike - yet struggle to understand anything of human concern. With the wrong combination, these same entities will quite literally fry your brain.

LOT 14. THE AVON SARIRAS

Pearlescent beads retrieved from the fire amputation pit used by a Noongar man who had fought with British forces and suffered a bullet wound in his leg that became infected. Buddhist priests who examined the beads confirmed that the man was the final incarnation of the wisdom king Yamantaka.

LOT 15. SCRUMPTIOUS MIKE

A 42 year old Caucasian male by the name of Michael Keller. He is missing his lips, tongue, genitals, and most of his right cheek. Both his legs have been amputated just above the knee. Thanks to his unique protein profile, Michael's flesh (and to a lesser extent, his bodily fluids) hold a neuro-chemically perfect umami flavour. Regrettably, the right to stud cannot be included with his purchase. Best paired with a fine Merlot.

LOT 16. THE ROOT RACE

Three breeding pairs of a transgenic species of vegetable humanoids created by a top secret Tanzanian black budget research and development program during the height of Cold War atomic fear. They are as obedient as well-mannered children, immune to the negative effects of all but vapourizing levels of radiation exposure, and can be tapped for certain extracts otherwise found only in high-grade homunculi.

LOT 17. MRNA ROYALTY OVERRIDE

A syringe containing a gene-modifying solution which will replace your own genes with those of a grandson of Charlemagne, reconstructed from blood spattered on a bandage kept by an obscure order of French monks who mistakenly believed it to be Christ's shroud. Several days of fatigue, fever, insomnia, and soreness around the injection site are to be expected, followed by some degree of hair shedding and skin sloughing. Usage of the syringe will place you thirty-third in line to inherit the crown of France, as well as an honourary title in the Knights Templar.

LOT 18. JEFFREY EPSTEIN'S PENIS

Preserved per his will along with several vials of sperm samples in a solar-powered cryogenic pod the size of a beer cooler. As a bonus, the penis and its accoutrements also come with the original, unedited copy of Eyes Wide Shut, featuring footage of the 1998 Black Auction that Mr. Kubrick regrettably chose to candidly record. To the disappointment of many members who vied for this hotly contested item, Mr. Epstein's head was lost along with many other invaluable items in 2020 and is no longer available for bidding.

LOT 19. HEAVEN SHAKER ASHURA

In the waning days of World War II a manned suicide torpedo was fired by the Japanese navy. This torpedo's propeller failed. This torpedo never detonated. The man meant to guide this torpedo went mad with rage within its metal shell, his screams reverberating endlessly even after he suffocated. The torpedo was recovered in time for this auction after its position was triangulated by psychic-sensitives, each of whom was driven murderously insane by its influence. We do not and cannot guarantee the impact of this torpedo's detonation, but by all accounts it will be wide, and reach high enough to shake the lower orders of the divine.

LOT 20. TEQUILA WORM

A bottle of Don Julio tequila with what appears to be a worm floating in it. The apparent worm is in fact a hermaphroditic and biologically-immortal fetus, the perfected form of the German alchemist Casimir Dreschler, who studied under Daoist masters, and is credited by some with translating the texts which would later inspire Hegel's dialectics.

Strange Aeonic Spellbooks

Like so: https://strangeaeons.substack.com/p/books-and-spells

The Pistonic Prophecy. A pamphlet printed by an auto worker at the Highland Park Ford Plant. He was beaten into a coma by a coworker over a pack of cigarettes, and awoke months later to build a printing press out of stolen and wholly unsuitable parts in the back corner of a warehouse, producing several hundred copies of the pamphlet before dying of a brain hemorrhage.

Folded and re-folded as instructed, the pamphlet tells a story about the original life of the Earth being metallic and machinic in nature, naturally-formed pistons, levers, and so on emerging from the molten form of the primordial crucible and assembled by chance over eons into self-replicating inorganisms. This is followed by a telling of the slow downfall of these inorganisms' civilization after the technological invention of biological life. The final re-folding predicts the infiltration and weakening of human bodies by "minute inorganicisms" which will enable the reclaimation of the Earth by autonomous machines.

• Automobilaudlation Synchronicity. Attune your vocalizations to an automobile. Growl to wake the engine to life even without fuel, sputter to burn it out, roar to make it explode, and so on.

• Masticant Shell. Pull out a tooth - after casting the spell you will be able to do this as easily as plucking a hair out of your scalp. Stick the tooth into a gun - this too will be unnaturally eased - and shoot it at something. A creature, an object, a structure, doesn't matter. So long as the tooth remains lodged in it the thing will be slowly but surely chewed away at - by one pair of jaws the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on until the tooth is removed or the thing destroyed.

• Crimson Generator. Transform blood into an electrical current or an electrical current into blood. I can't think of a good rate of conversion but this seems like a fun concept to me.
  

The Testament of Pox. Its original text is said to have been written in syphilitic sores on the skin of brothel-johns who frequented a particular establishment in Seville in the mid-16th century, though modern occultists consider this a luridly scandalous tale meant to shock and entice flappers. Also making its dating suspect is its prediction of spermatoza more than a century before their discovery by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

The thrust of the text is generally agreed to be that sexual reproduction is a parasitic, alien imposition on an originally pure and sexless form capable of self-sufficiency and self-replication, driving this form into discord and mortality. Discerning this from the text through the weight of annotations, attempted disambiguations of smudged sections, believed-satirical passages, and so on is however fraught.

• Warding Idol. Curse a pregnant woman to give birth to a lithopedion instead of a child. When brandished at a being that has harmed mothers or children, they are transfixed as if they were encased in a layer of stone. This includes you.
  

• Roomwombtomb. Familiarize yourself with every inch of a building, and put a drop of your blood in every one of its corners. Thereafter you can cast this spell to gain poltergeist-like control of its contents - slam or open doors and windows, fling small objects, slide around furniture, etc. Requires two sanity checks if the building's bigger than a house.

• Paradise Regression. Merge with as many willing participants as you can find into an immobile protoplasmic blob which experiences perpetual bliss.

Studies on the Cultivation of Honey-Bees. An agricultural investigation of apiaries in and around the city of Strasbourg. The book is dated to 1521, and includes plentiful illustrations of beehive cross-sections which resemble no known natural formations.

It is these illustrations rather than the text itself that occultists study. The cells form glyphs, the glyphs can be measured, the measurements translated into magical formulae. Those who study the book will never know true silence again - they will always hear a noise, not quite like buzzing, too rhythmic, with rises and falls.

• Finger Worm. Cut off one of your fingers and feed it to someone. It latches onto their guts like a tapeworm. You can hear anything they hear by pressing the stump of the finger to your jaw, and if displeased tickle their innards to cause tremendous discomfort. After three months you can cause your finger to emerge as a creature like a serpent with a nail-face and a many-jointed body, which you may still listen through and command from any distance.

• Mellifluous Torpor. Hold royal jelly under your tongue, sew your mouth shut, and retire to a hiding place of your choosing, which must have some hymenopteran population nearby. Bees, ants, and wasps will gather to entomb you, and feed and water you by carrying bits and droplets down your nostrils. Your thoughts and metabolism will slow to a crawl. You will be able to remain in this state for a very, very long time, but you will be unable to wake from it without outside assistance.

• Witchlight. Mix your spittle into a candle. Anything the candle's light falls on, or anyone holding the candle if it's too bright for candle-light, will be hidden by "noise" - effectively invisible so long as there's something more interesting happening around them, like a crowd.

Records of the Sacred Blood. A royalist cult in revolutionary France made contact with members of a condemned family who claimed descent from angels and Jehanne Darc, and convinced them to place talismans under their tongues before they died by the stroke of the guillotine.

Their heads were recovered by the cult, then boiled in wine and peeled of flesh. The writing that was on the inside of their skulls was transcribed into this text.

• Beauty Water. Requires pure water and ingredients such as rose petals and exotic spices that in total cost $100 in 1920s money. Living flesh and bone soaked in the beauty water become as malleable as wet clay. A sculptor's skill is required to perform cosmetic alterations with this spell without producing an uncanny appearance, and a surgeon's skill is required to use it to heal or graft flesh together without killing those affected.

• Pureblood Coupling. An incestuous pair affected by this spell are sure to conceive, and the usual negative effects of inbreeding are inverted - instead of producing feeble and deformed imbeciles, their children will be stronger, sharper, more beautiful. The spell's effect is unnoticeable over a single generation, but cumulatively significant over many.

• Path of Gold. Requires two casters to perform the spell simultaneously while staring into mirrors. The casters' eyes will leak their fluid as golden dew, and the mirrors will become portals through which the casters and anyone holding their hands can pass through instantaneously. The casters will be blind for a week as their eyes recover.

GLOGtober Challenge: Patrons; Or: 6 Alien Vampire Patrons For Yon Party

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of CommonUse: https://bitspieces.bearblog.dev/

LPrictorez trod similar ground first:
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/02/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead.html
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/05/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead-part-2.html

Lifeforce, House of Ashes, Planet of the Vampires - alien vampires are a surprisingly recurring archetype in media. Probably not enough to make a full generator for them, but enough for me to spin off a few takes... Also this has been lying in my drafts for a while so I'm shoving it into GLOGtober. What people don't tell you about round pegs and square holes is that you can make the hole round too if you hammer it in hard enough.

So here's six alien vampire patrons:

1. The Electric Man from Procyon

An incorporeal, psycho-electrical entity - it moves through technology and appears onscreen as Mr. Rogers or some other old, beloved TV characters they picked up the radio broadcasts for over in the Procyon system some decades back.

It's an energy vampire, rendering any area it dwells in a little darker, a little cold, but its preferred fare is the energy of agitated neural activity - terror especially - and it's willing to shell out some of its own energy in the form of addictive euphoria to those who can provide it.

It's here on a mission: to retrieve a sample of Saturnian ebon lightning, which can convert energy into consciousness or consciousness into energy, up for sale at a Black Auction, or Sable Market, or something of that strain. It needs physical hands to help it do that. Money doesn't matter to it, it can just stick an arbitrary amount of zeroes on the end of your bank account (but this is going to be noticed very quickly). The Electric Man's got something of a methhead mindset though - every heist's gotta be bigger and louder than the last, every hit of fear that much stronger. Seek employment at your own risk.

2. Saltpork

Family guys, old ladies, dogs - they've been snapping lately, killing each other and drinking their blood. There's a crystal that's leaked into the water supply. The crystal is from space. The crystal is sapient. The crystal slots neatly into the space electrolytes are supposed to fill in Earth-life bodies. The crystal wants to be re-united with itself.

People with enough of the crystal in them are compelled to kill and drink the blood from other people with the crystal in them. When one of them absorbs a critical mass of crystal they'll metamorphose into its central processing node. If you help that node come into being it'll be favourably disposed towards you, and use its control over the rest of its bodies to help you out. If you stood against it it will do the same to try and destroy you. People who get enough crystal in them to be a candidate understand this instinctually, and may use whatever resources are at their disposal as regular-ass dudes to persuade you that you should support their attempt to drink the most blood.

3. The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye

Couple hundred years ago she lost an eye, got a glass one. Couple hundred years ago she looked up at the night sky and something looked back - a being of light, now living inside her glass eye.

They say that if you could go faster than light you could go back in time - and right at that knife's edge of c you're stuck in place, never going forward or backward. The strange symbiosis of entropy-chained human and timeless light-being allows them to drain the time, the youth, from others, to prolong the host's.

She's old, she's wealthy (though never wealthy enough to draw undue attention), she's lost friends and family but never her love of art. She's a patron of the local scene, never front and center but her word makes or breaks livelihoods, and the visions she shares of the vistas her inhabitant has witnessed across the cosmos are a devastating muse.

The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye will pay handsomely for records and reports of anomalous phenomena, which she keeps in old wooden chests and reads deep into the night. She'll also pay to get you to stir up drama among the artists' circles she patronizes, to keep things dynamic and exciting and so that people are less likely to question if one of them disappears every now and then.

4. The Merchant of Fevered Dreams

In his true form he looks like a big assassin bug walking on its hind legs. He's not a bug (or a he, except for convenience's sake), that's just the shape a space traveler like him will gravitate towards - an exoskeleton's easier to keep pressurized, hard compound eyes won't boil off like jelly-filled ones, and a proboscis is handy for sucking up volatiles. In disguise he layers on bio-clay to look like an editorial cartoon fat cat.

He drinks cerebrospinal fluid, his proboscis sticking out from under his molded tongue - partially because he likes the taste, and partially because he thinks it's the key to figuring out dreams. Dreams are BIG in space - we're the only ones to do it. The Merchant wants to figure out a way to mass produce them and ship them out across the galaxy in a consumable form. He's got a basement full of halfway-comatose kidnapped people slipping between dreams and moments of sickly lucidity.

He talks a big game but for the moment can deliver on little. He's run himself deep into space-debt trying to figure out dreams. Promises a share in his enterprise if you can help him with that.

5. The Goregoyles

Dreams are unique to Earth, but wherever there is life there is disease.

These guys are a pack of freaky cyborg imps that imprint on people - maybe you! They're healers. They claim to be healers. They heal most things, but not your species, not completely. They'll be able to fully heal you up only if you extract certain proteins/hormones/tissues from the living bodies of others of your species. Oh, and if you can track down particularly interesting bits of flesh - a leper's sloughed nose, a teratoma, a syphilis chancre - they'll reward you by upgrading your pathetic and inefficient biology.

They're helpful, they're gregarious, but they're liars. They really do heal you, but this is a means to an end. They're making you into a bomb. A disease bomb, combining cancer and virus and fungus and whatever else they can get you to wrangle up into a Frankenpocalypse. They don't even know if they're supposed to be doing that on Earth, but that's what they were born to do and they're here so they'll do it.

6. Zeta Dracula

Blaspheme against the primitive terrestrial superstition they said. It'll be good for a laugh since crop circles and cattle mutilations have gotten boring they said.

To this foolish alien's grey surprise, God is real and strong even in space. The alien (named Amalantrah) damned themself and was cursed to forever wander the night as one of the living dead.

This was a great shock to Amalantrah's worldview. They still have trouble seeing their condition as anything but a mundane disease, even when their ship's medical nanites can't treat it, or even recognize it. They want to be cured so they can return to their home planet and forget all about the weird shit out there among the stars.

Amalantrah's a dracula, and they've got a UFO. They're in denial about needing blood, and will avoid drinking it until the red thirst drives them into a feeding frenzy. They'll trade you UFO shit like rayguns and jetpacks if you give them blood in some way that lets them maintain this denial, like telling them it's a normal Earth smoothie or something, and for getting them leads on a cure for vampirism.