Power: Significant

Description: Small, translucent water-soluble capsules filled with a pale red spongy material, indistinguishable at a glance from those foam dinosaur bath pods you sometimes get at dollar stores. Although increasingly rare, you can still occasionally get them in the “original packaging”—brightly-coloured but otherwise unlabelled cardboard packs of a dozen capsules. More often these days, they get passed around in small jars or Ziploc bags.

Effect: Place one pod in a bathtub full of used bathwater. The outer shell of the capsule will dissolve, and the contents of the pod will steadily grow over the next hour, absorbing most of the water and steadily growing more and more humanoid.

Once fully grown, the pod is an identical replica of whoever bathed in the water. If more than one person did so, then the replica body is an awkward collage of anatomical features from all of them—it might have Tom’s nose, Dora’s hair, Larry’s gallbladder, and so on. (It’s been known to incorporate body parts from animals that ended up in the water, too.) The body’s solid anatomy is indistinguishable from the target person’s, at least to the naked eye; it more-or-less perfectly replicates their scars, birthmarks, fingerprints, dental deformations, and even piercings or tattoos. However, it can’t copy most bodily fluids. Cut open its veins, and bathwater will seep out instead of blood. The illusion unravels even further if it’s dissected and examined under a microscope. While the body’s “cells” are all roughly the correct shape and size, their organelles are all vague, featureless blobs of disorganized proteins. It has no chromosomes, mitochondria, or reproductive cells, and contains no genetic material whatsoever. Furthermore, no part of the body is an acceptable human flesh substitute for magickal purposes.

For the first twelve hours, the pod body is capable of a few simple autonomic movements. It blinks, breathes, and turns its head to face any loud sounds or sudden movements in its periphery. While it can’t walk or independently move any of its limbs, it’ll maintain a standing position if hauled up and balanced on its feet. Again, the illusion of life quickly falls apart under scrutiny. It has no pulse, no body heat, and (if given an fMRI) no brain activity. It can’t really be “killed,” either. If you shoot it through the skull, it’ll keep breathing, keep blinking, and stay standing upright. If you saw off its head, the eyes keep blinking and the lungs keep pumping air. The only way to stop these autonomic movements prematurely is to destroy the necessary physiology: slicing off its eyelids, scooping out its diaphragm, cutting off its legs, and so forth. After those first twelve hours, the body “dies”—all its autonomic movements cease, and it goes still and rigid. Then, it will decompose impossibly quickly over the next day or two, until all you’re left with is either a sludgy, putrefied cadaver (if left somewhere wet) or a dessicated mummy (if left somewhere dry).

Encountering a “living” People Pod body unexpectedly is a Rank 2-3 Unnatural shock. If the pod body looks like you, or someone you care about, bump it up to Rank 5-6.

WHAT YOU HEAR

People Pods started showing up in the occult underground a couple decades ago, and are still intermittently passed around between friendly cabals or sold by artifact dealers. Where they actually came from in the first place is a matter of popular conjecture. A lot of people say that they’re exostock. According to another rumour, they came from the Auto Funhouse, a half-sapient toy factory in an otherspace that pumped out artifacts based on cheap, disposable toys for a few years, until the Sleepers came along and lobotomized it. At any rate, the supply of People Pods does seem to be dwindling, with unopened packages getting rarer as the years go by.

People Pods are most commonly used for pranks, or in attempts to psych out underworld rivals. They can be very effective for this. Imagine stumbling bleary-eyed into your bathroom at 2AM to take a piss and seeing yourself sitting in the foetal position in your bathtub, staring back at you with dead eyes. The main hurdle is that you need a few dozen gallons of the target’s used bathwater for best effect.

A few people have used the pod bodies to try and fake their own deaths, or to tangle up murder investigations with red herrings. That’s one of their obvious practical uses for players, too. It won’t fool a DNA test or microscopic analysis, but as long as the players provide an obvious cause of death and a ready means of identification, there’s a good chance it won’t have to. The rapid decomposition also creates some obvious problems, but clever players can find ways around that, such as embalming the body, planting it in a setting where unusually fast decay is plausible, or just waiting a while to dump it.

Keep in mind that all of the effects stated above are what happens when you drop a People Pod in fresh bathwater. (If you use water that has not recently been bathed in, you get nothing: the capsule dissolves, but the pod never expands.) According to legend, you can get very different results if you bathe in other liquids. A handful of people have experimented with this, and the results… varied:

• If you drop a pod in a chlorinated pool, all that grows is a paper-thin sheaf of translucent membranes, like a mothballed shroud made of skin.
• If you drop a pod directly into the sea, you’re most likely to get a fist-sized clump of pale, featureless grey tissue. If you collect seawater, fill a bathtub, soak in it for an hour or so, then drop a pod in, it will start growing into a replica of you, but it never gets larger than a softball and immediately begins to decompose when removed from water. Handy if “my own miniature corpse in a jar” is your idea of great home decor.
• If you drop one in a bathtub filled with blood (animal or human) that someone has bathed in, the blood coagulates into a dense, foul-smelling red gelatin over the course of the next hour. Dig through this mass of blood jelly, and somewhere, you’ll find an identical replica of the bather’s heart.

Jury’s out on what happens if you use other liquids. Maybe a variation on one of the above. Maybe something else. Maybe fuck all.