Corporeal Forces: 1
Strength: 1
Agility: 3
Ethereal Forces: 0
Intelligence: 0
Precision: 0
Celestial Forces: 1
Will: 1
Perception: 3
Toughness +2, Charisma -2
Body Hits: 3. Note that the life support system gives
an additional Protection of 4, to the Bonsai Kitten
only.
Skills: Acrobatics/3, Climbing/4, Dodge/6, Move
Silently/3
Songs: Numinous Corpus/6 (Claws)
Discord: Angry/3, Paranoia/3. Note that these
Discords are not normally obvious (see below).
Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.
When the War is all over, one way or the other, the
victorious side is naturally going to want to sit down
and reminisce about the Old Days. When that happens,
it's certain that at least one favorite game is going
to be Top 10 Statements That Were Always Guaranteed To
Turn Your Bowels To Water. It's also certain that
these hypothetical players - whether angel or demon -
would be in universal agreement that you never, ever
wanted to hear a Technologist say, 'Well, it seemed a
good idea at the time'. Anything that even they
thought was an official Bad Idea, all things
considered... well, it usually came back to haunt
people, or at least break them down to their component
atoms.
Bonsai Kittens were a Bad Idea.
Granted, the basic idea was sound - abjectly depraved
and sick, but sound. Vapula has always been
interested in tweaking the capabilities of his demons:
biotech has been getting sexy lately; and there is
something to be said for making the whole process
modular. Sure, the Genius Archangel could have grown
a vatbrain or twenty - there's nothing wrong with
vatbrains, Vapula swears by them - but why bother when
nature will do it for you? All one really needs is a
steady supply of self-sufficient biological units.
There are certainly so many kittens around that
nobody's going to miss a gross or two.
Luckily, Vaputech cracked the problem of direct neural
interface a long time ago, to the point where it's
practically safe. Getting fitted with a special
connector jack is child's play for Technology - they
hardly ever spontaneously combust anymore - so all
that was necessary was to design an adequate
containment system for the Bonsai Kittens, and the
project was ready to go. It worked, too.
This is where the problem starts to crop up.
You see, the basic idea was to essentially give the
lucky 'volunteer' two free Forces that wouldn't count
towards normal Characteristic limits and/or maximum
number of Forces. This was actually successful: while
the extra Forces do not affect Body and Soul Hits,
they can raise a Characteristic above 12 and
Corporeal/Celestial Forces above 6. The skills and
Song that came along for the ride are similarly not s
u b ject to the normal level caps. It takes (9 -
Intelligence) days to learn how to integrate the added
bonuses (Intelligence roll to successfully use a
Bonsai Kitten during this time), but after that
success is automatic. Astoundingly, this works fine.
Now, the fact that a Bonsai Kitten acts as a Very
Addictive, Severe Withdrawal (constant) drug might
seem to be an actual problem. Nonsense. Vapula
designed the things that way: he didn't want his subjects to accidentally lose his latest inventions, and
direct electrical simulation of the pleasure centers
of the brain is a proven method for assuring that such
things never happen. True, this can cause social
problems, as it's hard to hide the fact that one has a
kitten in a glass jar stuck to his or her body, but
that's why they invented turbans, long coats and very
large wigs. Demons are supposed to show initiative,
no?
Admittedly, the mental effects were... disappointing.
One unforeseen problem (see, we're getting to actual
problems now) with pouring a kitten into a jar and
never letting it out again is that nobody ever thought
to consider the kitten's opinion in the matter. They
universally didn't like it, to make a severe
understatement. Indeed, they hated it, to the point
that every Bonsai Kitten is both transcendentally
pissed off (Angry) and suspicious of the rest of
existence (Paranoid). Of course, even if the
researchers had thought of it, they probably would
have just shrugged. Who cares what a kitten thinks?
Well, you should when you plug said kitten into
somebody else's medulla oblongata. It took a while
[(Celestial Forces) months] for the test subjects
to start being Angry and Paranoid themselves (read:
'just enough time for this disaster to start going
into formal production'), and guess what? The imposed
Discords also aren't subject to normal caps.
Seeing as a lot of the subjects were pretty bright
to begin with, a lot of them were able to successfully
Run Away, and not a few of them are now doing a pretty
good imitation of megalomania.
Tracking them down has been a bit of a chore, and
hampered by the fact that the forces of Heaven are not
particularly amused by any of this. Animals is
frothing at the mouth on general principles, while the
rest of the Host are finding the test subjects to
be especially irritating pains in their collective
necks. Heck, the situation made Novalis frown and
say, 'Oh, dear'. Demons hate it when she does that:
it carries precisely the same overtones of dread as
hearing the 'KA-CHINK!' of a pump action shotgun
behind you - for very good reasons. Never try to piss
off the Archangel of Flowers. You might get deeply
unlucky, and succeed.
But all of that isn't the entire problem. There's one
additional wrinkle, one final bit of icing on the
metaphorical cake. You see, there was no theoretical
limit to the number of Bonsai Kittens that could be
attached to a standard vessel. There's at least one
18 Force (natural) Balseraph out there with six of the
Damned Things hanging on for the ride...
Again, well, it seemed a good idea at the time.
For the record, puppies didn't respond well to the
anti-growth drugs, they couldn't stop the bunny
rabbits from suffering instant heart attacks, white
tiger and panda cubs were too rare to be useful,
koalas had an unacceptably high life support cost (so
did baby harp seals), Christopher gets really, really
intense when people start using babies for this sort
of thing and humpback whale calves were just too damn
big.
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