Giving Your Players Parasites: Stutterfly Larva
Here it is, folks. The first of many entries on a long long list of horrible horrible things to do to your players by way of parasitic infections. More than mere afflictions to terrorize your friends with, I hope in my heart of hearts that you will use it to absolutely ruin the lives of countless non-player characters and to spread misery and horror and tales of woe to the far reaches of whatever realms so bless’d to call you Master.
PART ONE: THE HUMBLE STUTTERFLY
Stutterflies, also known as ridersbane, blink bees, flickerflies, and the murderous little devils what took my son Marv, are similar in appearance to the common honey bee, though their carapace is brilliantly iridescent, like oil on dark water, and they are seen to emit a faint blue glow as they seem to teleport from flower to flower.
This "teleportation" is not true teleportation or translocation, where the object in question appears to shift its location from one point to another with no apparent movement through the intervening space. A stutterfly's teleportation, rather, is anomalous near-instantaneous acceleration and is more accurately labeled as "pseudo-teleportation". This clarification having been made, "teleportation" and "pseudo-teleportation" will be used interchangeably in this document.
It should be noted that instant acceleration of the magnitude demonstrated by stutterflies should liquefy the insects. Yet the little beasts dash to and fro at impossible speeds, unscathed. Furthermore when they attack they seem to be able to pass into deeper organs and muscles without disrupting more superficial structures, including clothing and skin, which does seem to hint at a form of teleportation, or at the very least some means of temporary incorporeality. There have been many scholars that have dedicated their lives to the study of stutterflies, ultimately cursing the enigmatic little bugs from their deathbeds.
Stutterflies, as insects are known to do, begin life as microscopic eggs. In the wild they are laid in the honey that stutterflies work tirelessly to produce. Each egg will hatch a single larva the size of a grain of sand and this larvae, provided there is adequate food, will quickly grow to the size of a grain of wild rice and continue feeding for another two to four days. It will then cocoon, metamorphose, and emerge as a bright, shiny, murderous little bastard of a stutterfly, so full of innocent joy and murder.
PART TWO: STUTTERFLY LARVA INFESTATION
POINTS OF EXPOSURE
Direct consumption or internal deposition of live stutterfly eggs or larva
Raw stutterfly honey, if consumed without first being boiled and filtered, can contain countless stutterfly eggs in a single drop.
Stutterflies defend their hives by teleporting inside of their enemies. There, they inject venom and bite their victim, then teleport back out to safety. Aggressive female stutterflies often leave one to several eggs behind after retreating from an internal attack.
INITIAL PRESENTATION
Consult your local apothecary, physick, or witchdoctor if you display any of the following symptoms:
Weakness
Itching that seems to originate beneath the skin
Feeling as if there is something chewing on your muscles from the inside
Gnawing, incapacitating organ pain accompanied with deep internal itching
Patches of faintly glowing blue light beneath the skin
Sudden involuntary jerking movements in reaction to light to moderate impacts
Limbs spontaneously detaching and flinging against walls, floors, ceilings, and intervening objects
A sense of impending doom
Explosion
LIFE CYCLE
Once stutterfly eggs gain access to a creature's digestive tract or blood stream they will travel through the body, hatch into larvae, and will then seek sustenance from their host's body, either by taking up residence in nutrient-rich organs or in the sweet delicious muscles of the body. With adequate nutrients they will remain in the larval stage for anywhere from three to seven days, at which point their teleportative organs will have developed sufficient power to teleport them permanently out of their host.
THE EFFECTS OF INFESTATION BY STUTTERFLY LARVAE
While it is quite unpleasant to have one's innards and muscles nibbled at by indwelling stutterfly larvae, one can take solace in knowing that there are no documented cases of stutterfly larvae completely devouring their host, leaving nothing but blood and bones and filthy rags behind.
Though it is nearly guaranteed that the larvae will not devour their host in its entirety, it is also guaranteed that the larvae will in fact be gnawing on important things such as the liver, kidneys, spleen, appendix, kneecaps, spinal cord, and the brain itself, often with permanent consequences including internal hemorrhage, organ failure, paralysis, and death. To say nothing of their more interesting teleportative effects.
THE "TELEPORTATION" EFFECT
Aside from weakness, pain, organ failure, brain trauma, and feelings of violation, creatures that have been colonized by stutterfly larvae will be subjected to intermittent, short-distance, reactive pseudo-teleportation. As previously mentioned, "pseudo-teleportation" is a term used to describe near instantaneous acceleration, and by "near instantaneous acceleration" we are describing the average infestation generating enough force to propel the average sized host to an average top speed of 50 meters/second in approximately 1/10th of a second, for a felt acceleration of 50 times Earth's gravity by the summation of countless miniature forces. More advanced and more extensive infestations can generate much higher top speeds in less time.
Each stutterfly larva, when subjected to a sudden impact, generates a small impulse causing it to move away from the impact. When generated simultaneously by thousands of stutterfly larvae this force can be quite spectacular, enough to fling a 200lb host across a tavern like a gore-filled marionette with its strings wrapped around a hurtling ballista bolt. Classical teleportation would no doubt be preferred to the nightmarish kinetic spraying effect that ends the lives of so many sufferers of this terrible infestation. Stories abound of a simple "high-five" causing an infested arm to be torn off at the shoulder and disappearing through a hole in the wall. And how can one forget the famous tale of Eddy "Jumpin' Joe" Jehosephat, lying one moment on his deathbed in an upstairs bedroom in the throes of a raging infestation, the next moment a bloody crater in the soft dirt of the basement floor because a gull had flown through the window and landed on his chest. There are other tales of people simply disappearing in a literal fireball of blood and bone and thunder, though this sort of effect is more likely the result of a meteor impact or unleashed arcane forces.
A word of caution to magic users: Likely as an evolved defense mechanism against magical interventions, stutterfly larvae react with instant grisly results in the presence of any energy categorized as "magical" or otherwise falling under the umbrella of theoretical "Rowling Radiation" energies. Much as a pet cat domesticates its "owner", the stutterfly organism has taught magic users the wisdom of non-intervention.
TREATMENT
The most obvious treatment is to avoid any sort of force. Typically this involves lying immobile in bed until the larvae mature and abandon their host. It is critical to have help during this time, as death by dehydration, sepsis, pneumonia, and hemorrhage are commonplace.
Despite countless folk cures, ranging from the highly toxic to the ludicrously inoffensive, the only reliable cure is a massive dose of the psychedelic mushroom Periplanisi Transamonita. This cure is in itself extremely dangerous as most minds are incapable of weathering the psychological storms released by even touching the mushroom, to say nothing of ingesting enough to purge oneself of parasites. Survivors of this remedy fall into one of two categories: those that by the guilded glamour of the mushroom can play the strings of the cosmos like a harp, and those that have seen the entirety of the universe and out of sheer terror have pulled their own heads off.
USE IN THE GAME
DURATION, SEVERITY, PROGRESSION, AND LASTING EFFECTS
First symptoms appear 1d4 hours after initial contact.
Infestations last 1d4 + 5 days.
Roll 1d6 to determine the potency of the infestation. This number will reflect the severity of the infestation and will have an impact on teleportation effects.
Each day the infestation inflicts 1d4 plus its severity level in piercing damage. This damage is cumulative, so while the first day's damage may be a measly 1d4 + 2, the second day's damage is 2d4 + 4, and so on and so forth.
Every day the player must, for each attribute, beat a medium difficulty (DC 15 + infestation severity level) constitution check or suffer a cumulative -1 penalty to that attribute. This reflects the slow progression of fever, malaise, pain, and tremors as the larvae chew away at vital parts of the body.
For each stat there is a 50% chance that it suffers a permanent -1 penalty, even after a full recovery, to reflect the ruinous nature of this infestation.
Recovering all lost stat points takes 6d6 days. Recovering from any physical damage occurs at a normal pace.
Forced Movement: Any time an infested medium-sized player is damaged by way of physical violence, be it by bludgeon or blade or arrow or axe, they are thrown violently in the opposite direction to a distance of 5ft multiplied by infestation potency multiplied by the number of days infested. So if the friendly neighborhood bard, as the result of getting cheeky, is slapped in the face on day nine of a potency four infestation, he can be expected to travel 180ft (5x9x4) at a truly astonishing speed. Hopefully, provided the acceleration doesn't jellify his organs and snap his head off, there will be something soft to catch him on the other side of that wall covered in glass bottles filled with flammable liquids.
Damage From Forced Movement: due to the sudden, unpredictable, and titanic forces involved in near-instantaneous acceleration, if an infested character is forced to move their hitpoints are reduced to 1 and they are stunned and considered prone. Further forced movement in this state reduces their hitpoints to 0.
Raimi Rules: To prevent the disemboweling and dismembering of players infested with stutterfly larvae, I recommend using what I call "Raimi Rules", which are best demonstrated by Ashley J. Williams in the Evil Dead series. The Raimi Rules are simple: A protagonist's body (including all internal organs) shall hereby be instantly transmogrified into indestructible ballistic material any time they are struck a lethally forceful blow. This transmogrification will last only so long as lethal forces are applied and is instantly reversed as soon as those forces are removed. Using Raimi Rules will allow your players to have more fun with this parasitic infestation without paying the awful price of their character's life. Then again, maybe you have a group of players that are all running overpowered magical elf characters and you want to make the game a bit more interesting for them. Or you have a party of goblins that just want to have a messy good time. In both of these cases, I make the following suggestion: give them all raging cases of stutterfly larva infestations, a combat-heavy quest requiring climbing tall ladders, and suspend the Raimi Rules.
For more information on Raimi Rules, see my post by the same name.
The One Cure: Hyperhallucinogenic Mushrooms: Curing stutterfly larvae requires the character consumes 4 doses of periplanisi transamonita mushrooms raw within a 24 hour period. The mushrooms are approximately the size of a small fist, smell and taste horrible, and release copious amounts of viscous blue-black fluid when eaten. Each dose requires the player to make a hard (DC 20) wisdom save or suffer 3d8 psychic damage.
The Un-Cure: Magic: any form of magic aside from Divine Magic that is cast within or into a 25ft sphere centered on the afflicted causes the poor unfortunate host to leap in all directions at once at hypersonic velocities, showering the area with a lethal spray of blood, pulverized organs, and bone fragments. You may be perplexed right now. You may be asking, "Why, R.J.? WHY?" And my answer to you is simple: because sometimes magic is lame. You broke the key but you have a spell of mending? Want to skip the battle in the courtyard and all the cool shit in the tower and have a spell to become a fucking giant jumping spider? Nope. No way. You explode. Yep. I just checked my notes for this scenario annnnnd, yeah, it says right here "you explode". I challenge you to find a more creative way of solving this problem than magic. And…and I believe in you.
OTHER GAMEPLAY IDEAS
If a player is struck down with a full-blown stutterfly infestation, they will likely be unable to participate in any physical adventuring. But that doesn't mean that they cant embark on the greatest adventure: education! Have them read a book about flower arrangement! Or about the history of silverware! Or about self-improvement! Who says slaying goblins is the only way to have fun?
Assuming your player passes on the adventure of reading, consider this: just because someone is confined to bed doesn't mean they cant have fun. Here I'm referring to the Steven King novel, and movie adaptation of the same name, Misery. Don't try to tell me that Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) wasn't having the adventure of a lifetime with Annie Wilkes and her sledgehammer. And don't forget Kevin Smith's Tusk. Confinement is the mother of all adventures.
Jokes aside, my honest suggestion is this: bedridden characters can still participate in adventures, but you, the GM will have to be creative and find ways to bring adventures to the bedridden character. While I recoil at the notion of astral projection or of players playing in alternate "planes" (tampering with alternate planes reeks of high magic, which is not to be trusted), there's no need to state explicitly where a player is in their interdimensional dream state. Where was Dennis Quaid in the movie Dreamscape? Does Freddy Krueger attack people in their dreams, or does he draw their minds to another place? We have a poor conception of what consciousness even is, so why not abuse your sick characters and play with the concept for science? RPG characters cannot feel pain, after all...
The stutterfly organism is strange and powerful. There are no doubt a great many powerful and evil beings in the world that use it for nefarious purposes. Assassins, inventors, magic users, visionaries, and those seeking to pierce the fabled Fourth Wall. There are those that domesticate stutterflies and harvest their honey and refine it into harmless foodstuffs. Others distill its venom, the products of its strange propulsive glands, its very essence, for personal recreational use, for health tonics, or for darker purposes. Be fearless in your own exploration of its applications.
SPREADING THE INFESTATION
It is not uncommon for witches, goblins, and other unsavory characters to carry bottles of unfiltered stutterfly honey on their person, to be used as a means of terrorism, pouring a vial over the community's holiday cake, or jamming a honey-coated finger into the mouth of rude townsfolk and innocent babies alike.
Sadly, the innocent curiosity of children often sees them fall victim to the internal stings of stutterflies. While this usually means they will suffer from a minor infestation of perhaps a dozen larvae, their effect on lightweight child can be profound.
BREATHING LIFE INTO THE INFESTATION
Imagine what it would feel like to have numerous larvae living inside of your body, nibbling at your organs and muscles. It might feel like itching in the early stages of infestation and progress towards feeling sharp pinches and even spikes of pain as the larvae chew into sensitive parts of your body. Nerve damage will manifest as tingling, numbness, electric pain, and weakness, leading to paralysis of specific muscles or even limbs. If you really want to get nerdy with it, start learning about the various branches of the peripheral nervous system (start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachial_plexus).
Aside from pain and neural symptoms you would also experience rapid weight loss. You would experience mood, sleep, and psychological disturbances. Strangers would notice the itching, the involuntary movements, and something off about the look in your eyes or the cadence of your speech. Superstition, folklore, myth, and religion would invade their minds and drive a wedge between you and others.
Ultimately its up to you, the Game Master, to make this experience as serious or as comical as fits the game.
If the players are interacting with locals and the locals come to speak on the topic of stutterfly larva infestation, feel free to make up names for the affliction ("Oh, yes, Marth's son caught the Skytosser's Curse...") and nonsensical causes ("...from spending too much time behind the shed alone thinking about Franny's fanny...") and nonsensical cures ("...so he had to run around the shed three times and then drink a flagon of mastiff drool...") with grim peasant outcomes ("...and thanks only to that he's merely paralyzed and missing his arms and legs and he stinks like cheese. It could've been so much worse though! He could be in the arms of the Devil himself right now as we speak! Oh, and he's blind too. I forgot to mention that he's also completely blind. 'Cuz his eyeballs exploded. And his dingus fell off. Yep. Gone. But, well, as they say, Powerlord works in mysterious ways!").
A FINAL NOTE TO KEEP IN MIND REGARDING TRUE-INSTANTANEOUS ACCELERATION
Accelerating from standing to a leisurely walking pace of 1 meter/second over the course of 1 second produces a g-force equivalent of roughly 0.1 times the force of Earth's gravity. This is a negligible. The 2005 Bugatti Veyron, the fastest production car ever made, can accelerate from 0 to 97km/h (60mph) in 2.5s, which calculates out to approximately 1 g, or 1 time the force of Earth's gravity. That is not negligible but still nowhere near the sort of acceleration felt by the crew of the space shuttle at takeoff (3 g) which is nowhere near the lethal ranges of acceleration (or in this case reverse acceleration, or "deceleration") we would see if the previously mentioned Bugatti came to a sudden stop by encountering something like a tree (up to 100 g). Consequently, 100 g is the same amount of g-force one would experience if they were to accelerate from standing still to the leisurely pace of 1 meter/second in one one-thousandth of a second, which is still literally an infinitely larger span of time than instantaneous (0 seconds). However, one cannot divide by 0 so one cannot truly calculate acceleration over 0 seconds because that would result in <steepling fingers as the lights dim and black clouds roiling with ultraviolet lightning fill the sky> infinite acceleration. The result of which would likely be a combination creating a miniature black hole travelling faster than the speed of light, or perhaps resetting the Universe with a new Big Bang.
SO. If it is your sincere desire to actually fucking vaporize everything in your fantasy world, by all means, use true-instantaneous acceleration.
Here's the acceleration calculator I used, along with many other online physics calculators: https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/acceleration-calculator.php
Anyhow, that's it for me. Just about Hump Day, and you know what that means...
Be creative. Have fun. Get weird.
