Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Adventurer who keeps doing things "for the vine," whatever that means
"For...the vine..." Javvi wheezes, with a kobold naginata through his spleen.
"You stupid bugger," Veng murmurs, supporting the trapsmith as he slides gently down the wall, drooling bright-red blood, and runs a hand over his hair soothingly until it's time to close his eyes.
"Well, t'were inevitable," Ozmonionis says curtly. The perpetually bandage-shrouded warlock winds his clothy hands together fastidiously, as if miming washing them. "Show the boy a perfectly ordinary unlocked door and he'd spend an hour trying to open it by pulling the hinge-pins with only his teeth, burbling the vine! like a village idiot."
"Can ye stop till he's cold, Ozo," Veng says tiredly. "Poor bastard."
"Poor bastards us," the warlock says. "Can you pick a Tjaccardius-era six-pin lock? Identify a poison-needle trap? We brought the yelling fool on for a reason."
"You miserabilist arse," Veng says, though he's not wrong, fuck him, never wrong. "D'you know aught about his vine? Some local cult, I imagine, maybe some version of the Cup-of-Plenty. Should I say the Cup-of-Plenty's funeral words over him?"
"I couldn't give a seaside harlot's skirt-stain," Ozmonionis says, then makes an interested noise. "Oh, look."
Veng looks where he nods, where the flesh of Javvi's corpse is slumping like melting wax. His ribcage cracks audibly; a blunt green tip noses out of the parting skin over his sternum, thumbtip-thick already and visibly swelling. As they watch, it unravels a pair of fleshy leaves of deep, vibrant green, and snakes further out, visibly probing the air for things to twine around, before toppling under its own weight and running across shivelling corpse-legs and the floor in fecund helices, sinking roots between the flagstones.
"Well, feck," Veng says, retreating with measured steps.
The plant's growth slows; at the tip of it, a flower opens and drops its petals quick enough to resemble a firework. The remaining nub of it swells, shifting colour from green to orange to red as it passes the size of fist and a head; keeps growing, strangely nubbed and changing colour still, paler and paler red, until Javvi's denuded bones are clattering around a writhing root-ball and a fruit the colour of a pale man's skin sits at the other end of the stem, big enough to hold a foetal-posed adult and ripe enough to verge on splitting.
"Some version of the Cup-of-Plenty," the warlock sing-songs mockingly, as the fruit's flesh wetly parts, sweet-smelling and running with juice, shrivelling back from around the pristine sleeping person-flesh of their erstwhile-stabbed companion. "Maybe I like him a little after all."
"Personally, I'm having thoughts about all those seeds he's planted along our travels," Veng says.
"Aye," Ozmonionis agrees with horrible glee.