Moe Lane

Fragments of THE Map

THE Map being a map made by the veritable Creator; it legendarily could show the whole of Creation, right down to the subatomic level (not that the people retelling the legends would put it that way, of course).  If it ever truly existed, THE Map is either long-since destroyed, or transcended, or it’s actually Creation itself now and we’re all just living on its surface. However, there are still small pieces left.  They’re oddly invulnerable to damage; every so often, a piece will neatly detach itself from the main Fragment.  And every so often, two Fragments can be combined into one larger one.

The El Dorado Saddle

Description: a handsome, hand-tooled, knot-fringed leather saddle in the charro style.  The saddle looks to be roughly twenty years old: well-used, well-maintained, and in very good repair.  The El Dorado Saddle boasts an interesting, seemingly abstract set of attached silver ornaments, several semi-precious stones arranged in an interesting pattern, and a somewhat obscure six-line poem in archaic Spanish etched into its underside.

To mangle the philosopher: this saddle has gotten more good men killed than Cecil B. DeMille.  And a powerful lot of bad ones, too. The Saddle has shown up in any number of murders, bushwackings, hijackings, and at least one flat-out massacre: once it gets in somebody’s hands, things progress inevitably to the point where the Saddle is later found, carefully packed away, in the skeletal arms of yet another poor damned fool who tried to find a golden city in the Mexican desert.

2006 Chrysler Apocalypse

Description: Picture a gun-metal grey SUV with six solid wheels, dedicated hardpoints on the sides, an empty turret on top, and a space for a rear gunner.  The ‘windows’ are metal with vision slits, the vehicle itself is immune to machine gun fire, and it seats ten fairly uncomfortably. Length: 15 feet. Weight: 10 tons.  Top speed: 30 mph.

Pallencia Codex

Description: 48 vellum pages bound in black leather and wood. Each page (one-sided) shows a naked human form, drawn in rather good style, with one of a set of intricate multi-colored patterns (24 in all) superimposed on top.  Interestingly, each pattern is seen twice; once for a male figure, and again for a female one. There is no text, but suggestive, half-meaningful patterns appear if a page is viewed under an ultraviolet light. Unlabeled, and tentatively dated as being from the 13th century AD, but the book is in almost unbelievably good condition to be that old.

The Pallencia Codex would be considered a fake, if only it hadn’t happened to have been discovered last year in an archeological dig run by a team of unquestioned professionalism and sterling reputation.  Still, it’s in far too good shape to have been buried for over eight centuries. The leather even smells kind of new.

Applesauce Ink

‘Ink’ may not be exactly the right word: perhaps ‘paint?’  Basically, there are several classes of spells (divination, warding, and exorcism) which work noticeably better if the sigils and lines used to express the spell physically are drawn or written in Applesauce Ink.  There aren’t any spells out there that require Applesauce Ink, and the bonus to cast isn’t exactly obvious: it’s more like that using Applesauce Ink helps make up deficiencies elsewhere. If a spellcaster is in a hurry, or working with substandard materials, or under stressful conditions, well, an apple a day keeps spell failures away.

YourConspiracy.exe

Oddly, YourConspiracy.exe is easy to find on the Internet.  Most public domain software download sites will have a copy; it’ll run on most PCs.  The program seems like it was designed with Windows 7 in mind.

Using YourConspiracy.exe is merely a matter of starting it up, then navigating through the five hundred, twenty three question survey that it gives you.  These questions start out intrusive (full name, aliases, credit history, blood type, bank routing number) and only get worse; later questions range from ‘What is your favorite color combination?’ to ‘How many people do you think you could order be killed before their faces started haunting you at night?,’ and seem to draw on a database based on your previous answers.  Most people don’t make it past the bank account questions; virtually nobody answers every question sincerely and truthfully.

Homelite XL-23 “Lincoln” Marine Chainsaw

Not ‘Marine’ in the sense of ‘used at sea;’ ‘Marine’ in the sense of ‘militarized, larger version of the venerable Homelite XL-12.’  And it’s definitely a mass-produced military chainsaw, manufactured around 1975 AD or so.  The XL-23 is made of extremely rugged, sturdy materials, with as few moving parts as possible.  It also runs on anything from gasoline to distilled alcohol with surprisingly good results, and is surprisingly light for its fairly large size.   The XL-23 can be operated with one hand, and there are indeed connectors that would be compatible with the ability to install it as a hand prosthetic.

Shog-Milk

You’d have to be a scholar in Ancient American — or else six to twelve standard Terran years, and a devotee of the Aunt Asenath’s Fun-Time Beanstalk television* show to boot — to know that ‘Shog’ means ‘shoggoth.’  Yes, the future has those, now. Somebody in the 24th Century came across the concept during one of that era’s neo-archaic craze, and they thought that it’d be cool to genetically engineer actual shoggoths out of slime molds, or something.  Just between you and me, people in the Gory-Twenty-Foury could get really, really weird. At least, it seems that way to their descendants, two centuries later.

Suspicious Minds: Superstitions and American Counterculture During the Cold War

Description: 300 pages long, softbound cover.  No cover photo. Published in 2017 by Routledge Publishing. DO NOT READ CONTENTS.

Eau de Mauvais Choix

Eau de Mauvais Choix is the première Infernal perfume.  It’s distilled from only the finest, most refined souls whose poor life choices rebounded in a manner that managed to wreck everybody else’s lives around them, too.  Hell’s Le Nez won’t even look at a prospective soul as possible raw materials unless it managed to drag at least twenty other mortals down with it when its mortal comeuppance finally came.  And, at that, ninety-nine percent of the souls are permanently used up in the process.