My patrons Darius, Jaina Bee, Dave, Ferny, Keeper, and Casey are truly amazing people and I heart them hella. Should you desire me to also heart you hella, you can support my streaming and writing efforts (and see all my posts a week earlier than everyone else) by donating at my Patreon. Most of my patrons pitch in a dollar a month, and their generosity is simply intoxicating. Of course, if you can give more than that, please do! I have a vast array of benefit packages, all the way up to $500 a month.
Associated Powers: Healing, Life Support, Temperature
Vittles spirits are probably the least known of all the tech spirits. For one thing, a lot of junkers look in the wrong place. Not everything edible has a vittles spirit. These spirits do not inhabit food harvested from living beings and shaped directly by human hands into a meal, any more than a hand-crafted bow holds a gun spirit within; an appliance spirit must be consulted if a junker wishes to engage with such things. Twinkies, famously, have been delivered from the usual cycle of rot and decomposition, eternal life gifted by the factory's automated chefs and genetically engineered ingredients, while other foods are built by other robots from petrochemicals. These are the homes of vittles spirits, and even then they often find their purpose discharged, their life ended between violent teeth.
Vittles browsers nurture and sustain people. Unlike appliance browsers, they don't overly much care whether those people's lives are comfortable or pleasant, simply that it is long. Some might find this strange, considering the reputation industrialized food has for damaging its eaters' health. Indeed, rumors persist that some vittles spirits have turned to maleficent ends, whether by being damaged goods, interacting with a few too many Tainted junkers, or the machinations of Famine itself. However, it should be remembered that many vittles spirits were born of the desire for ethical cuisine, such as meat that had never been part of an animal, or health concerns, accounting for olives genetically engineered to be lower in fat or Wonderbread's revitalization as a carrier for vitamins in World War II.
White: By spending a white chip while creating a device, the junker can replace all of the necessary components for the powers in the device with chemical components, resulting in an edible device. This is an all or nothin' deal, no partial trades! For example, a tiny little AT-AT walker built with the locomotion power would normally require 1 chemical component, 1 electronic, 3 mechanical, and 2 structural; a junker with a vittles browser could build the same thing out of French fries and a mango for 7 chemical components. Since many chemical components are liquids (and a few gases), this can occasionally result in some strange-looking devices!
Red: Any substance which could be used as a chemical component can be made edible with a vittles browser's help. By spending a red chip, one chemical component can be consumed by the junker or one of their friends to fulfill that person's need for food or water that day, but not both. Nothing says you can't just spend another red chip to live on a diet of paint thinner and Silly Putty for a day!
Blue: By infusing something edible with their power, the vittles spirit can help someone who eats that thing push beyond their usual limits. That person gains an amount of Wind equal to the sum of their Spirit and Vigor die types. Until their Wind drops below their usual maximum Wind, they cannot regain Wind by any means (they don't need to, after all!). Unless you pitch in a white chip, too, any dangers present in the eaten substance such as rot, disease, poison, or radiation are still present and affect the eater.
Legend: The vittles spirit can, with a major effort, kickstart the derailed food cycle. An area of apocalypse-ravaged land no larger than 50 feet on a side becomes permanently arable and fertile. Moreover, the influx of energy needed to accomplish this supercharges the land's fertility, producing twice as much food in its first harvest than it normally would. Later harvests will produce a more typical amount of crops. It's not just plants, either, as food animals kept in the affected area find themselves benefiting from the magic as well.
Empty Calories: Powers for Less Savory Junkers
White: By spending a white chip while creating a device, the junker can replace all of the necessary components for the powers in the device with chemical components, resulting in an edible device. This is an all or nothin' deal, no partial trades! For example, a tiny little AT-AT walker built with the locomotion power would normally require 1 chemical component, 1 electronic, 3 mechanical, and 2 structural; a junker with a vittles browser could build the same thing out of French fries and a mango for 7 chemical components. Since many chemical components are liquids (and a few gases), this can occasionally result in some strange-looking devices!
Red: An amount of food suitable to feed five people loses all nutritional value. It can be eaten, and will fill the stomach, but does nothing to prevent starvation or dehydration. Extra chips can be spent in the same way as for the standard red chip power.
Blue: This power wracks someone with all the ravages of starvation. Just immediately do 2d4 Wind damage to them and give them the mean as a rattler hindrance until they have eaten a large meal to get rid of that hangry feelin'.
Legend: When used while producing food, the corrupted vittles browser makes whatever is being produced incredibly addictive. Anyone who consumes the food will immediately gain a 3-point hankerin' for the browser's junker friend's food. Though the hankerin' is for anything the junker makes, the new addict will be particularly desirous of the specific food cooked with the legend chip.
Queer Spirits: The line between vittles spirits and drug spirits is famously unclear, with 5-hour energy shots, garlic pills, and artificial sweeteners straddling it. Beyond this strong connection, however, queer vittles spirits can be the rarest of the rare. Edible lingerie stands at the intersection of clothing, vittles, and sex aid spirits, while many forms of candy engage their consumers in more kinesthetic ways that blend traits of vittles and toys. Biodiesel, made from human food into food for cars, holds the most powerful hybrids of vittles and car spirits, though all fuels can be seen as such, honestly. Goat milk is a foodstuff, and cabling is a tool; animals exist which were developed to produce something which is both. Efforts to design buildings with ecological sustainability in mind led to the use of constructed ecosystems for temperature regulation, water reclamation, maintenance of air quality, and the like. Food from the plants therein can queer the line between vittles and appliance spirits. From time to time before the bombs fell and the Reckoners scoured the earth, corporations and wealthy folk would find some way to build life-size gingerbread houses and the like; what few still stand might be vittles/buildings spirits. DNA computers verged on revolutionizing the information technology just before the War, and some of these computers were edible, if unappetizing and gooey. And, finally, of course, there is the classic case of corporations selling shitty food to the poor, knowing that it will kill them but knowing that they have little financial choice. The spirits of these are vittles or gun spirits, depending on the angle with which one looks at them.
No comments:
Post a Comment