Houchou

(   Houchou
Base item	spoon
Affiliation	chaotic
When carried	(none)
When wielded	instakill
When invoked	(none)
Base price	50000 zm
Weight	1

Houchou (actually pronounced hōchō, both long o sounds) is a chaotic-aligned artifact spoon in SLASH'EM. It is thrown at a target, and if it hits, it instakills the victim. There is no defense against Houchou, but if it hits a target, the tool itself is always destroyed in the process.

Save Houchou for a dangerous or difficult opponent. (Or, alternatively, ascend with it. With a price of 50000, it equals to about 28 dilithium crystals in score points.)

If thrown upwards, Houchou will kill YOU. Monsters will not throw Houchou, as they are not programmed to throw (weapon-)tools.

Being gifted Houchou unrestricts dart skill.

Origin

"Houchou" is Japanese for "kitchen knife"(包丁). The spelling and pronunciation follows one of the multiple transliteration and pronunciation standards for Japanese.

In the Japanese RPG Final Fantasy IV, there was a kitchen knife that could be thrown to instantly kill or severely damage almost any monster. At the time of the first English localization, Nintendo of America was well known for having an absurdly draconian and strongly anti-violence censorship policy; many, many localized games had to be sanitized first, at the expense of the developer, and of course adherence to Nintendo's policies superseded all other concerns, including logic and reason. The Houchou item in Final Fantasy IV was renamed "Spoon," though its effect when used - instant, violent death - was paradoxically, and humorously, maintained. It is thus that SLASH'EM's Houchou is a spoon.

Variants

In variants with both Houchou and Cthulhu, Houchou should definitely be saved for him.