Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

[Content Warning: suicide, human sacrifice]

Previous part here: /2012/10/31/for-the-undecided-plots-you-can-have-nanowrimo-edition/

First part here: /2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

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The Dalmour Parasite

a parasite that only infects suicidal people and turns them into psychopaths to make their lives better

Neil Ruthsmoke is a man who makes his friends suicidal. He cannot help it; it is not to do with his personality per se, it is just that his particular body odour trips bad wires in people’s brains; he is a freak of nature undiscovered by science. He is also quite depressed on account of this. Story is about how his psychologist both tracks the spread of the parasite and how it starts to take over hir. There is research into Ruthsmoke’s life, and the point where his friends stopped killing themselves and started becoming sociopaths is found. Good scenes might include: when the psychologist puts forth the idea that maybe, possibly, it’s all Ruthsmoke’s fault; when a friend breaks the pattern by topping hirself; when the psychologist realizes ze has probably been infected hirself.

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Exorkizein

a demon that performs exorcisms on the souls of abusive people

Kind of a reverse on the Dalmour Parasite, the Exorkize “resets” abusive people fitting a certain profile, deracinating their soul and inserting a fresh one that has to be taught things anew. The story follows an old monster hunter and his granddaughter as they try to hunt the thing down and kill it, and also deal with the fact that the demon is responsible for the death of the entire generation of family in between the hunter and his granddaughter (this was before the demon learnt how to exorcise without killing, or something). They close in on the monster and start doubting whether to actually go through with the kill. Good scenes might include: when the demon gets into the head of the monster hunter and decides he is a good person, not worthy of exorcism; when the granddaughter is caught by the police who believe the recent ‘gentling’ that has been going on is to do with her and her granddad; when a standard exorcism goes wrong and both demon (not the Exorkize) and body get emptied.

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Xenobole

an alien species that assimilates people into the alien culture, with its sapient sacrifice and blood and Old Religion

The Xenoboles are named after the first artifact found from their civilisation by humans, which is the standard naming convention. Humans have set up an ’embassy’ on the planet, but they are finding that their refined science-religion does not really work well in converting these alien heathens, and they are starting to reluctantly believe in evil, alien gods. The xenobolium itself is a giant well. It is wide enough for two humans or two aliens to stand very close in. When an alien is sacrificed atop it, its insides fall and drip down along the well, covering the two entities at the bottom of the temple-well-thing. This is how the aliens find true love (their word for true love means the same things as ‘shared trauma’). Potential scenes: A human shares trauma with an alien as a diplomatic thing, and they get married; another human starts worshipping and sacrifices themselves on the xenobolium, causing a diplomatic incident and a ‘cleansing’ of the well; alien linguistics lessons.

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Blood-Giving Fever

a disease that turns people altruistic to the point where they exhaust themselves and their heart stops (of course donating all their organs)

Town X has a ‘health wave’ and everybody starts giving blood, it becomes the blood giving capital of the country, etc. People give away all their wealth an compete with each other in goodheartedness, an then they start dropping like flies (always near an ambulance or a hospital, so that their organs can be harvested and spread. Once people figure this out, they have moral quandries. Comparison with other known, uncool diseases (like toxoplasma gondii), etc.