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The Pravaz Syringe
This particular device is a masterpiece — a bizarre, twisted masterpiece — of 19th Century technology. To begin with, it’s titanium covered in silver, which would be generally considered to be simply flat-out impossible, given that the Syringe has been verified as existing at least since 1850. It’d be like finding a handmade automatic breech-loading rifle in Grant’s Tomb: a sufficiently brilliant and obsessive tinkerer might have made it, but why didn’t they make any more?
Moving on: looking at the Syringe for any length of time suggests that it is designed to be used on an elephant. A very angry elephant. It’s not just that the reservoir holds about a pint of fluid, or that the needle is wide enough to accommodate all that fluid quickly (it’s in fact too wide for all but the largest veins). It’s that the reservoir fluid is propelled via a compressed air, spring piston pump. It takes about five minutes of pumping to reset the mechanism; and getting injected with this thing when it’s charged up is dangerous. It could splinter a bone. And, ah, yes: the plunger is of course in the shape of a cross, and is topped with a glass ball that appears to have a fragment of unleavened bread inside of it. Just in case the Pravaz Syringe was being too subtle, apparently.
And then there are the three pint-sized golden vials that come with the Pravaz Syringe. Two of them are empty, except for a small residue at the bottom of the vials. The third is full, sealed, and apparently the indirect cause since Sunday of at least seventeen deaths and forty injuries among the international intelligence community. Rather messy deaths, too, and the injured ones mostly just stare at the wall and occasionally scream.
Enjoy!