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Second Life, Curse of Blood 14HP Knowing you were on a deadline helped you focus. You had never tried this sort of diluted mind business before as far as you could remember, though said memory was hazy at best if you went any further back than your previous life. You remember it mostly in images and emotion, all violent, but with that core of will that was, is, you. In patient zero, as... a sentient blood curse?? even with your limited joyridden batfaculties you could see why you probably hadn't. It was hard. Hard to think, hard to feel. Hard to coordinate untold thousands of splinters of self without a centre. It was uncomfortably like being garrotted all over at once. Or pulled apart by horses. Or falling from a very tall place unto a rigid grating. Some memories might be best left in the past. Some wounds do not heal with time, or even death.  You mentally shudder, causing the bat to cough up blood. Woops. Well there goes an hours progress. You suppers further internal screaming as what parts of yourself leaked out evaporate in the sunlight in skull shaped gouts of red coloured flame. Hopefully no one saw that. -1HP No, if you wanted to spread you needed strength. Strength to hold together no matter the distance. And for that you needed more... everything. Redirecting yourself to a new purpose, you begin growing more nodes, reinforcing them, tending them like a garden. You begin to seep into fatty tissues and muscle and bone, and so begin to see the first real signs of resistance...  Fall before you as the immune response system collapses under the both your efforts and the weight of ages. -2 HP Straining to keep patient zero together you bolster its frail constitution with your own power, giving up just enough of yourself to keep the beast flying. An uneasy truce is formed as its conscience finally recognizes your intrusion and agrees to not kick you out of its head or deliberately fly into a fire as long as you keep it relatively pain free. 1: You promise, but this means... A: Nothing. My word is empty. B: Everything. My word is law. C: The opposite. My word is falsehood. D: Chaos. What even are words? With the battle won you face no more issues mustering your seat of power, though you quickly realize that patient zero is firmly at the limit of what it can host. With day turning into night and night into dawn, the speed at which it is decaying imposes yet more inconvenience to your plans. -1HP One of its claws fell off. In the grand scheme of everything this might be one of the more minor wounds you have ever suffered, but right now the pain, even as a squatter, is all too real. You can feel the atrophy setting in. The necrosis in the very tissue you are trying to hold together. You don't have much time. Discussing Fate with patient zero is at the moment far beyond either of you, but convincing it you know where food is, is not. You urge it to fly towards the cattle pastures and so it does, undertaking the last great flight of its life, all in your service. -2HP It is not a long trip but it is harrowing. You must avoid being seen, avoid being captured, avoid loosing too much of yourself. Even a horsefly deciding to munch on your ear would spell disaster, and so you push but only very, very gently. Only by the light of afternoon do you come across your quarry. The most ridiculously over the top idyllic rolling hills grasslands you have ever laid your stolen eyes upon.  Every single blade of grass is crowned by a perfect drop of dew, all the countless flowers are in bloom and their frail beauty in the low sunlight is the stuff of epic poems. The childs-drawing-cerulean skies are dotted with silver-lined white puffy nimbu' coumoli' that would definitely have smiley faces if they could. It makes you physically sick, and you are esentially a bucket of bad blood with a grudge. You have arrived. Patient Zero has at best, nine days left. At best. If you do nothing. What now? 2: You Guide... E: Patient Zero to spread you amongst the grasses F: Patient Zero to spread you amongst the rich and healthy not to mention plentiful mounds of "organic fertilizer" G: Patient Zero to spread you amongst the bushes and trees H: Patient Zero to just straight up bite a cow
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Oct 27, 2020 21:01
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 17:07 |
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1A2H
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Oct 27, 2020 21:04
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1B 2E - If we bite a single thing, it may infect that one thing... if we infect the food, it may infect many things. Biting should be our final action of our life.
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Oct 27, 2020 21:47
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1B 2E
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Oct 27, 2020 22:40
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AE
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Oct 27, 2020 23:19
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B F Don't fear the reaper
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Oct 28, 2020 00:07
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1A. People exist to be used, and this one is near the end of its use. 2F. Betting that no one understands the risk of cross-contamination, we can "fertilize" a lot.
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Oct 28, 2020 00:35
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CH never not eat
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Oct 28, 2020 02:08
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Be.
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Oct 28, 2020 02:29
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1B 2E We can do our host a solid, for their cooperation. So much easier when they're compliant. Grasses first, let's get ingested.
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Oct 28, 2020 03:23
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1D 2E
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Oct 28, 2020 11:40
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1D2H Chaos and cows!
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Oct 28, 2020 16:45
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AH
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Oct 28, 2020 18:26
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1B2F
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Nov 1, 2020 22:04
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Second Life, Curse of Blood 9 HP You use some of your limited power to ease the burden of Patient Zero, slowing your overall work considerably, though the benefits you receive from your hosts cooperation largely outweighs this. It is a simple creature, with no mind for your great plans, but it does its best to fly amongst the grasses, avoiding the cattle whom could so easily squish it out of sheer blissful masticating + 🕊  Taking stock of your surroundings and your current abilities, you decide against going for a direct assault, and since causing Patient Zero undue bleeding is out of the question, you spend most of the rest of the day converting it's sweat-glands into, for a lack of better term, spore-spreaders. It is arduous work, but by nightfall you believe you have mastered the process, allowing for tiny amounts of -you- to be spread amongst the grasses, to be absorbed en-mass by the grazing herd. Exerting Patient Zero is not very difficult in its state and so you work until late indeed to get as much of yourself over as large an area as you can manage. The loss of material hurts you intimately, but it should re-pay itself by orders of magnitude if you can just get a single infection going, when the beasts wake to take their morning meal. Thoroughly exhausted, both you and patient zero fall into Torpor. You awaken mid-day, hidden in bush to the sound of happy mooing. You sense people nearby and so attempt to stay hidden, extending your hosts senses as much as you can afford to catch any snippet of gossip that might escape their lips, though beyond the sounds of praise for the gods and merry, hummed tunes they say little beyond praising the quality of their livestock. Each beast of burden has a name, apparently, all competing for the most cheerful sounding baby-talk nonsense this side of a children's fairytale. Not the good kind, either, the ones heralding the importance of obedience and ultraviolence, but the soft and squishy kinds written in books with rounded edges and thick pages made out of carton. Curiously, none of your spore-packets respond to your telepathic ping. Perhaps it was a bad batch? You spend the rest of the day re-working the formulae and tending to Patient Zero. The poor thing is showing real signs of wear, with one wing-hand at this point having entirely necrotized, far beyond the reach of your abilities to repair or soothe. -1 HP The night is spent much like the former, spreading your infectious fluids amongst the vibrant grasses, giving a dark compliment to the ever present drops of dew. You really are getting sick of this place. It's so.. lush!  Morning comes and goes and pain-wracked as you and Patient Zero are, you give it no thought - over-exertion at this point would be nigh suicidal and you'd rather avoid another meeting with the ferryman with nothing to show for your life such as it is. By noon a group of children arrive in the pastures to frolick, and you are forced to command Patient Zero to flee into the tree-tops lest the youths find you in their games. They spend the entire day playing with the cattle, hugging them, petting them, riding them and what-have-you, even giving them colourful bows. From your new vantage you give another ping; and get nothing in return. Why isn't it working? Even if the cows themselves had somehow avoided every patch of grass you have so painstakingly flew over at night, surely some trace of you should remain, pooled into some crevice or other? With a full-mind-sigh you once more re-work your formulae, attempting to alchemy some sort of sun-resistance into your sweat-spores, thinking maybe evaporation is to blame.  With more and more of Patient Zero succumbing to necrotization, it is taking all your willpower and concentration to work, but by the end of the day you believe you have perfected the broth - the gland now a sickly purple, dripping mana-laden ichor, wafting an evil stench whereever you fly. -1 HP  Patient Zero does not have long for this world, but you push on, spreading your now colourized sun-eating evil sweat amongst the pristine grasses and rainbow palette flowers, narrowly avoiding a strangely docile wasp that could easily have ended you both with its sting and poison. From a safe distance, you observe it patrol the pasture as if on guard duty, though with the half-heartedness only the truly drug-addled or hypnotized can ever achieve. Even a zombie would do a better job of it, you imagine. At least they can smell brains. The wasp eventually disappears, leaving you to your work of seeding. Night comes as it always does and again you work through most of it, resting only an hour or two before dawn to maximize your chances of something, anything working out in your favour.  You awaken to pain as psalm-singing villagers gather around the pasture to celebrate the life-giving cows. Some of them are wearing cow-costumes and all of them wear bright, silver bells. The children play and laugh, and much milk is had by all. You risk pinging your spores again and - nothing - all that work! All that time! Nothing! Patient Zero is crumbling before your very minds eye and there is nothing you can do about it, your experiments have failed and you are thwarted by GRASS of all things. You are never going to die this down. -1 HP 1: No. This isn't working. You have to do something different. But what? A: Urge Patient Zero to spread you amongst the rich and healthy not to mention plentiful mounds of "organic fertilizer" B: Urge Patient Zero to spread you amongst the bushes and trees C: Urge Patient Zero to just straight up bite a cow D: NO. This is a point of PRIDE. You will NOT be humiliated by GRASS. You don't care if it kills you, you over-exert patient zero to stay awake until you figure out exactly what is happening to your spores.
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Nov 5, 2020 14:56
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Cant wait any longer
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Nov 5, 2020 15:17
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C
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Nov 5, 2020 15:36
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C
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Nov 5, 2020 17:26
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D - gently caress the bat, we have PRIDE. If sweat won't do it, BLOOD will!
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Nov 5, 2020 17:43
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Why the gently caress are we spreading spores in the grass and hoping for the best? C
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Nov 5, 2020 17:51
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C gently caress you grass!
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Nov 5, 2020 18:05
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C
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Nov 5, 2020 20:10
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D
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Nov 5, 2020 22:07
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C Assume direct access.
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Nov 7, 2020 04:20
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Second Life, Curse of Blood 6 HP This isn't working. Nothing is! Time for some more drastic measures. You are pretty sure Patient Zero has at least one more spirited flop in it, maybe even a dive, and so far you've kept the rot away from the head and fangs using a not insignificant amount of your own prestigious focus and will. That said, your current set-up of sweat-sporeing isn't exactly synergistic with force-injections, so you are going to have to spend some time jury-rigging most of your hosts remaining biology into this, your last ditch effort to contaminate something that isn't just doomed outright. You painstakingly urge patient zero to clamber to a particularly auspicious tree top and begin to force open it's chakras, no longer bothering to take the slow and careful route as both of your times are very nearly up. Though it would be more efficient to devote every last speck of your magics to the process of transformation, you decide at the last moment to spare a sliver for a simple sleep enchantment, granting your host the mercy of slumber as more and more of it's body shifts and crumbles. -2 hp +1 🕊  With the final strands of magic hardening into membrane, you loose most of your senses and your connection to the outside world, now only dimly aware of the changing of light and the flow of mana that comes with it. Time passes. Hours? You are working on mobilizing your primary conversion node when you feel a familiar passing chill, as if someone had stepped on your grave, indicating the presence of some good-aligned being or other. Well wouldn't that be just your luck? Hopefully it, or they, won't spot you amongst the leaves. It's not like you are reeking of EVIL at the moment, anyway. Just your average bat cocoon, nothing to see here. You cease the nights work for the time being, waiting for the sensation to pass before you dare continue. Nothing can be allowed to jeopardize your project, but as you well know there are fates worse than death, and you'd rather avoid them again if you can. What few biological processes are still occurring within patient zero, you conclude the danger has passed some time around noon and so you do a divinatory sweep of your surroundings, to see what has changed.  -2 hp. Ah. Yes, well. Flying is out of the equation, then. As is living to see the next morrow. You should have enough juice left to disintegrate your hosts legs however, and maybe sharpen the snout a little bit. Hopefully it will be enough to pierce whatever unlucky thing passes beneath your tree, or at least rub enough gunk over them that some of you can slip inside. 1: What will you target? A: A fat cow B: A skinny cow C: A cow what ain't ashamed of its body D: One of the children that always seem to hang around the cows to play E: One of the adults that come around once or twice a day to care for the cows F: I don't care, just drop me on the first thing that passes by
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Dec 21, 2020 03:38
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A big girl means big trouble (for everyone except us)
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Dec 21, 2020 04:08
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F
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Dec 21, 2020 04:22
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D
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Dec 21, 2020 05:22
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A, though it would be just our luck for that one to get picked for slaughter.
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Dec 21, 2020 05:49
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B Skinny cow might be around longer while it gets fattened up, giving us more time to gestate
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Dec 21, 2020 07:27
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F - we don't have time to be picky.
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Dec 21, 2020 08:35
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C - any cow is good
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Dec 21, 2020 10:39
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Clearly this kind of cow won't be ashamed of a magical pathogen inside its body.
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Dec 21, 2020 17:54
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F, our time is officially up.
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Dec 21, 2020 18:02
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F. Anything.
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Dec 21, 2020 20:44
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F
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Dec 21, 2020 20:45
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Swedish Thaumocracy posted:C: Urge Patient Zero to just straight up bite a cow C won the last round's vote. Why are we still voting on what to infect here? Why haven't we bitten a cow already? This is like the time we all voted to be a bat and we were given control of a pathogen inside a bat instead. In light of these thoughts, I'm changing my prior vote for this round from
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Dec 21, 2020 21:07
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Lux Animus posted:C won the last round's vote. Because you need to actually inject something for biting to have any effect. And circumstances changed after the vote was processed, so i'm giving you an opportunity to reconsider. You were always going to be a pathogen. Ferryman posted:ᴍʏ ꜱᴇᴄᴏɴᴅ ᴏꜰꜰᴇʀ ɪꜱ ᴀ ʙɪᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴀɴ ᴏᴅᴅ ᴏɴᴇ ᴏᴜᴛ, ꜱᴏ ᴛᴏ ꜱᴘᴇᴀᴋ. ɪ ᴏʙᴛᴀɪɴᴇᴅ ᴀ ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴀᴄᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴀ ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ ᴄᴜʀꜱᴇ, ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴀᴠᴀɪʟᴀʙʟᴇ ʜᴏꜱᴛ ɪꜱ ᴀ ᴛɪʀᴇᴅ ᴏʟᴅ ʙᴀᴛ. ʟɪᴛᴇʀᴀʟʟʏ. ᴍɪɢʜᴛ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴀ ʙᴏᴅʏ ꜱᴏᴏɴᴇʀ ʀᴀᴛʜᴇʀ ᴛʜᴀɴ ʟᴀᴛᴇʀ?
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Dec 21, 2020 22:48
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Swedish Thaumocracy posted:Because you need to actually inject something for biting to have any effect. And circumstances changed after the vote was processed, so i'm giving you an opportunity to reconsider. You were always going to be a pathogen. I always knew there was some Faustian bargaining going on... I am still impatient! I want to do the bite bite~!
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Dec 21, 2020 22:52
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 17:07 |
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Don't suppose we could infect the tree we're hanging from, or is crossing the animal-plant boundary a bit much in our current state?
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Dec 21, 2020 23:48
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