Aramis pods look like nothing worth a second glance – dark green, avocado-soft, with a seam that splits clean in half. Bitter at first bite, sweetening as you chew, they stain the teeth red the way a kola nut does. Dew recognised them instantly at the broken crate on Chuza wharf: “My father loves these. Do you think they’d mind if I grabbed a few?” Nobody minded. Nobody had any reason to.
That crate wasn’t an ordinary delivery. It was the same shattered coral-portal shipment that a few minutes later disgorged the Wharf Golem – nut husks, smashed pottery, driftwood carvings, and a scatter of aramis pods, all packed around the same coral ring that had just finished burning a hole through Section 18’s wharf detail. One pod in every four, by Section 18’s own later reckoning, carries something considerably worse than a stomach ache: cut into carelessly, the seed inside doesn’t split, it kicks – a segmented, wormlike grub that latches onto the nearest warm body and fuses to the spine within a round if nobody stops it in time.
FILE NOTES
Dew’s handful never stayed his own problem for long. His father Joren took one home and never fully turned – the parasite’s change outpaced what an old man’s body could carry, and it killed him rather than complete. The rest moved through the family’s own Chuza Cures apothecary on Cove Street, where Dew’s wife worked the counter, out to whoever came through the door – including Jess, Branson’s ex-wife. Section 18’s own timeline lists the toll in order: a young dock worker dead by accident, an old dock worker who cracked his own skull trying to knock the voices out, Jess, then the fire at Dew’s own flat, then Joren’s body, found with a skull no longer shaped right.
The wider supply took longer to run down. Chuza Mercantile had been sitting on a quarantined batch from the same wharf shipment, already half-rotten in a warehouse and about to be thrown out before anyone connected it to the infections. Stephan, held on unrelated charges out of the Get Stuffed raid, was the one who finally pointed the Agents at the pods by name – by which point custody of the things had already scattered across half of Chuza’s dockside families, eaten, gifted, traded, or sold on before anyone knew to be afraid of them.
“Wow, these are aramis pods. My father loves these. Do you think they’d mind if I grabbed a few?”
Agent Dew, at the broken crate
STATUS: Filed under Equipment, contraband-adjacent by circumstance rather than intent. Nobody smuggled these to hurt anyone – they came off a golem’s own crate, one further cruelty riding along with the obvious one. See Dew and Branson for where the infection actually went.