An Epideromancer’s one-time weapon, now on its own in a big world.

Power Level: Significant

Alleged Cost to Create: 15 Significant Charges

History of the Sword

In the earliest years of the 21st century, a vacationing Epideromancer who called himself Michael Ecks got in a rough fight in Ontario, Canada, and had to fall back or face destruction. He left bits and peices of himself lying around, not to mention a number of blood splatters. Most of those bits died on their own, returning to the planet’s standard lifecycle.

But not all.

The Bloodspray Sword is unusual, even for a magick artifact. Nobody is really sure what it was originally supposed to do (aside from the obvious cut-people-and-make-them-dead utility inherent in all swords), but once detached from its creator it has settled into the role of a symbiotic life form. It grafts itself to the body of a human being and sustains itself on the vital elements in the host’s bloodstream. In return, it makes the host a bit more dangerous in combat.

Biology of the Sword

When independent of a body (which happens from time to time), the sword is a sharp fragment of bone only a few inches long (usually three or four), with a fold of tissue and bone about two inches long. The bone juts out of one end of the folded tissue; the other end sports a sort of claw. On one side of this fold are two “legs” for lack of a better word. Part muscle and part cartilage, each leg pulls the sword along when independent of a body.

Once the sword finds a suitable host (its criteria seem to be totally random), it grabs hold of the person’s left arm and tries to burrow into it, through the hand and the wrist. If successful, it hides the main body of itself in the forearm, between the two bones. Since this moves aside a lot of muscle and connective tissue, the grafting process is obviously not pleasant for the host — neither is the rest of the adaptation process, which changes the position of the hand and wrist relative to the arm itself. The two legs are extended fully and connected to the arm bones at the spot closest to the hand.

Fighting with the Sword

Once the host and sword have formed a rapport (which takes at least a day), then the host can call out the sword. (By force of will, not by talking to it. This will just make people stare.) The shard of bone will be pulled out as the legs contract and the entire main body will jut out of the palm. The fold of tissue finally unfolds, forming a handle; half of the fold with the bone shard points towards the “top” of the hand, where the thumb is, and the half of the fold with the claw points towards the bottom, making the claw a sort of pommel.

On its own, this would make the sword not a sword at all, but an organic, needlessly complicated and painful dagger. However, the Epideromancer that created the sword was more scientifically minded than most other people in that school, with a number of variations in his formula spells and overall philosophy. He endowed the sword with the ability to de-differentiate and re-differentiate types of cells, primarily in the matter of turning blood into bone. Differentiation, put in more-or-less simple terms, is converting specialty cells like nerves and skin and blood and bone into stem cells, then turning the stem cells into another kind of cell.

This means that once released, the sword begins drawing blood from the host to grow its blade to full size. This growth happens at magick speed, not normal organic speed, and can make a blade eighteen inches long in only a few seconds. Longer blades and even shorter blades can be formed if the host is familiar with the sword, and if there’s enough blood to supply the growth, but eighteen inches appears to be the default, making the sword more of an organic machette than anything else.

When the fight is complete, the most recent growth on the blade is changed back into blood and sloughes off, while the blade retracts. This still leaves a wound in the palm where the sword emerged and the arm itself is often quite sore.

The Price of the Sword

The Bloodspray sword needs a lot of raw material to grow, and it taps the host’s bloodstream directly for this. Normally the blood released when the sword is just emerging from the hand is enough to grow it to eighteen inches (this jumping-out-like-the-alien-from-the-guy’s-stomach causes about 5 WP of damage, but does not impare the ability of the hand to hold the sword), but beyond that length, the host must offer up any materials the sword needs to grow or repair itself. (Every two inches of length is worth another WP in the form of blood loss, and every time the sword hits something too hard at the wrong angle, the sword takes two more WP to repair the damage back. This could mean a match-fail on an attack, a matched success on the host’s opponent’s Dodge roll, or trying to break down a brick wall — stuff like that.)

Rumors and Facts about the Bloodspray Sword

Advantages to the Sword:

-Impossible to totally disarm the host without surgery

-Conceals itself/ will not set off metal detectors

-Differentiating cell growth constantly repairs damage and wear, insuring the blade is both unbreakable and lethally sharp (+6 for being big and heavy)

Disadvantages to the Sword:

-Painful to use

-Injures host physically to grow and repair itself

-Can only be held in the left hand, with the blade pointing up towards the thumb side of the hand

Rumors About the Sword:

1. It was made from animal parts and parts of the animal minds remain, intruding into the host mind and promoting violence.

2. It jumps from host to host trying to find the perfect body to reproduce inside of.

3. The blade is sharp enough to cut through steel.

4. If the blade is already jabbed into somebody elses’ body when commanded to grow, it’ll suck up their blood like a vampire and use it to grow instead of the blood of the host.

5. It was developed as a phallic symbol to counter Pornomantic magick; the host is immune to love pirate spells.

6. Same as above, except the sword causes Pornomancers to lose charges with each wound instead of protecting against the school’s spells.

7. The sword has a sister artifact, a shield made of bone that is strong enough to deflect bullets.

Truth about the Sword:

1. The sword is just human tissue magickally modified.

2. The sword was not originally designed to reproduce, but since becoming seperated from its creator it may have undergone a few mutations. (GM’s call.)

3. The sword could probably open up a car roof like a sardine can, but you’re not going to get into any bank vaults with it.

4. The blade runs on the host alone. Note that the sword will never graft to a fleshworker unless that fleshworker is its creator; in this case the sword can be used to full effect and can do many things that it can’t do when grafted to other hosts. (Ecks can feed the sword charges instead of blood to promote growth, make the blade grow much faster, et cetera. He does not gain charges from the damage caused by the sword when it emerges, so he can repair the wound magickally and make it appear that nothing was ever there.

5. It may be a phallic symbol, but it has no visible effect on Pornomancer spells.

6. It’s been used against Pornomancers in fights several times, but nobody is sure if it knocks off charges or not. (Probably not, but GM’s call.)

7. Maybe some other fleshworker invented a bone shield, but Mike Ecks didn’t. He did, however, make another DTB (Differentiating Tissue Blade) sword for the right arm — and he still has it. At the moment he’s saving it for a rainy day, so to speak.