7th) What happens when you water fruit trees with goblin blood?
It creates the Ugly Tree, of course.
The wood of the Ugly Tree becomes knotted and warped. The grain is like spaghetti, the color is uneven, the bark peels, it never cuts evenly, its splinters constantly. The fruit turns a bitter greenish-yellow, each bulb growing a jeering face and gaining the ability to mock those in its sight, even until eaten. (They taste of durians, and the smell malingers for days) The leaves become calligraphied with florid insults, written out by the twisting of veins or the paths of worms. The flowers turn a rosy pink and take forms quite excessively pornographic.
Despite the loss of life found in creating the Ugly Tree, goblins do not mind all that much. It’s another avenue to cause mischief, and in this they celebrate their compatriots living on as sour apples and penis-shaped blooms. They are often found cavorting around the roots of the Ugly Tree, and some queens will make their home warren beneath one. On Goblinwatch Eve, the local warren will dance about it in a drunken uproar, before descending upon the town for their annual night of chaos.
A cudgel made from a branch of the Ugly Tree is a magical item. It strikes as an ordinary club, but an individual thus beaten with it will receive a permanent -1 to reaction rolls per hit, on account of being made horribly ugly.
This is possibly not magical at all, and just the result of hitting someone very hard in the face with a sturdy piece of wood.
8th) "Mommy, what are tooth faeries like, and what do they do with all the teeth?"
Thorny bodies like porcelain cicadas, voices like dentists’ drills and baby laughs. Eyes like drops of blood, mandibles like barbed fingers. Butterfly wings, orange, yellow and black.
A tooth placed under a pillow absorbs dreams, and here is where tooth fairies are born – the unconscious child-mind recalling a beetle in the garden or a wasp at the window. They will bring these eggs to the Masticate King in his faraway castle atop the Red Hill, where he will fertilize them in hopes that they might birth his long-lost White Knights.
When all 30 are returned to him, they shall mount their white horses and depart from the Hill, to hunt the Enamel Queen.
9th) Who rules the deepest ocean floor?
“And in the lights of my submersible I saw a being that has come to haunt my waking days with its terrible visage and alien beauty. Before all gods above and below I swear the following account is true.
“It stood eighty, perhaps eighty-five feet tall. Man-shaped but utterly un-manlike, a pale colossus of rotten, rugose flesh. Upon its shoulders sat a cloak of transparent tendrils swaying this way and that, soft lights pulsing at the tips. Its great tentacled mouth spewed out plumes of white and black smoke. It carried a staff of whalebone, ribs and spines. Atop its eyeless head there sat a crown of tube worms.
“Two others followed behind the first, likewise crowned and garbed, and passed out of my lights into the endless darkness. None of them gave me the least notice: I and my metal fish were as nothing to them, and as I sat in the blackness preparing for my ascent, I came to agree with them.”
- From the personal journals of the wizard Jhenir Vazvrirdios
Absolutely brilliant!
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