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| Artist: Felipe Escobar Bolivar. |
Rats were trained in a Skinner box to approach the food cup when a distinct click was sounded. Ribonucleic acid was extracted from the brains of these rats and injected into untrained rats. The untrained rats then manifested a significant tendency (as compared with controls) to approach the food cup when the click, unaccompanied by food, was presented.
It's uncomfortable to admit, but many of our behaviours are ultimately controlled by simple chemistry. Love, fear, depression, loathing. They're all born from a cocktail of chemicals bubbling away inside the brain. This is the principle exploited by the Habit Former - a small insect about the size of your fist. By injecting you with a cocktail of specially-curated ribonucleic acids, it can completely transform your personality.
A persistance hunter, the insect carefully tracks humans from the shadows and isolates individuals with favourable characteristics. People who leave out food, for example, or people who are forgetful. It waits until they fall asleep. Then, it crawls up their bed and inserts its long, sharp, impossibly thin proboscis slowly into their brain to extract the critical chemicals it requires. A powerful numbing agent makes it impossible to feel this happening. Disturbing it during this process is not advisable.
When you wake, the only trace will be a feeling of numbness and a wound at the base of your neck, or behind your ear - easy to mistake for a bad mosquito bite, at first glance. In a town haunted by a colony, almost everyone will have these marks.
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| SIMON SHIM/Shutterstock.com |
It keeps its harvest in colourful sacs, which it can draw from at will. The hive will hold the full collection, but it takes a careful selection out on each expedition, stuck around its thorax with glue-like secretions. Each sac holds different traits, harvested from different people. One might have a cocktail of helpful, submissive, obedient traits, which it injects into people it needs as servants. Others might have acids harvested from people with uncontrollable rage and anger issues, which it uses to create guardians and bodyguards. Piece by piece, it develops and refines its library.
The creature is blessed with a slow metabolism and a long life - much longer than a human life. It moves slowly, but with purpose. Over months, it pierces its victims and extracts or injects the chemicals it desires. Over decades, it slowly cultivates its garden of people, spreading favourable traits and pruning unfavourable ones.
It starts small: It cultivates people who leave their trash out. It cultivates people who find its traits cute and appealing, instead of disgusting and terrifying. Slowly it gets more and more ambitious. It cultivates people who build shelters for it, and then people who let it crawl across their face, people who leave their fridge open and let it gorge its fill on overripe fruit while they stare on with vacant smiles.
Small towns are its preferred hunting ground - places with a small group of people who tend to stay there, for generation after generation, while the conditioning can slowly take hold over decades. Such a town will be filled with people who have small, subconcious habits they can't explain. Intrusive thoughts or automatic, unstoppable reactions that work in its favour. These people may not even realise that it exists, or have any idea what they're doing. But still, they serve its desires.
In the final stages, people will even take their children out to empty alleyways or deserted fields, and leave them there. The children themselves have been trained and injected from birth. The doctors stood aside to let it happen. They won't resist as the insects land on them, and the colony takes root inside them. From this fertile soil, the insect grows its young.
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| Sarah Ferguson. Native Australian Stingless Bees Tetragonula carbonaria. Inside the hive. |
To destroy the colony, you'll have to find the corpses and kill the queen. It will be in a closely guarded location, perhaps an empty field or an abandoned house in the heart of town. The children will be networked together into a hive of birthing pods around a vast mound of dirt, surrounded by offerings left by the townsfolk. The townsfolk themselves will do anything to stop you from getting to the colony, without even knowing that's what they're doing.
When a new person sleeps in a town with a colony, they will be injected with a potent mix of acids that has been refined over years. They will quickly find themselves developing subconcious habits. Trying to avoid the habits is like quitting smoking - it's possible, but you'll feel more and more stressed, unstable, restless. If you aren't careful, you'll find themselves doing it automatically - like pulling out your phone and looking at it without realising.
The conditioning will become harder and harder to resist the more you're injected. Eventually, resisting will give you a pounding migraine. You'll be unable to concentrate, and the need to complete that habit will be ever-present in your mind. When you do finally indulge, you'll feel an overpowering sense of relief and clarity.
Common Habits
The colony can inject you with a wide variety of useful traits. Roll d10 for each character who sleeps in town. You must make a will / wisdom check to avoid indulging your habit. You get -2 to the check for each time you've been injected (Which will happen whenever you sleep, or if the townsfolk hold you down while the insect does its work).
- An impulse to separate yourself from your friends and loved ones. A need to split up, stay apart, get alone.
- A self-destructive impulse. You want dive into dangerous situations and ignore safety precautious.
- Anger management issues. You lash out at your friends, blow up at the slightest provocation, attack wildly
- A submissive impulse. You do whatever other people suggest, even when it harms you. You struggle to go against the grain. You do whatever the creature wants.
- A depressive impulse. You struggle to get out of bed, or to do critical and urgent things.
- A forgetful impulse. You leave out food, forget your belongings,
- A selfish impulse. You abandon your friends, your loved ones, your children.
- An affection impulse. You find the creature cute, adorable, lovable. The idea of hurting it is sickening, vile, awful - like kicking an innocent puppy.
- A self-hatred impulse. You blame yourself whenever things go wrong. You think your friends would be better off without you. You abandon your goals - you could never achieve them anyway.
- An impulse to abandon your items, your possessions, your home. Your posessions are weighing you down.
An average colony will have 2d20 drones and dozens of larvae, clustered around a single queen. Each one has d4 hit points. It's possible to collect the RNA sacs from the hive, which would provide a wide range of personality traits and habits that could be injected. Some of them will be positive - traits that can make you happier, healthier, more productive. Many would pay dearly for such a treasure.
If a colony is not dealt with, over time the habits becomes self-reinforcing. People incorporate the conditioning as a core part of their personality and self-image. This is who they are. Eventually, the insect no longer needs to inject you at all.
Even long after the colony is dead, people will find themselves automatically leaving their child alone in a deserted field, and driving away. They will never know why.
The idea of a child born into this, with no real sense of individual identity whatsoever, is particularly creepy.
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