Soil of the Tarnished Bounty
Description: about a pound or so of soil, reddish-black in color, stored in a bag made from a dubious leather. It is perpetually damp to the touch, leaving an unpleasant smelling stain that cannot be removed by any kind of cleanser. Any stain that comes from casual contact with flesh will eventually fade away as new layers of skin form, but long-term users of Soil of the Tarnished Bounty can end up with a mark that goes all the way down to the bone marrow.
Bat Prime
Description: A wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Anyone who sees it will immediately recognize it as being the most Louisville Slugger of a Louisville Slugger possible. Seriously, it is the Platonic Form of a Louisville Slugger; staring at it for too long makes all the shadows sharper, the air take on an awful, pitiless clarity, and your nose bleed. Generally, the wielder of Bat Prime keeps it covered with a cloth, which has to be replaced after a week because the fabric tends to crumble.
Exo-Ossein
Description: an intricate and delicate-looking exoskeleton made out of human bone. The Exo-Ossein covers the body, ears, and eyes, but leaves the nose and mouth free. The chest features a large green gem that provides absolutely no esoteric powers or benefits whatsoever. There is typically a faint aroma of ozone. Exo-Osseins are surprisingly durable, in more or less exactly the same way that Undead skeletons are.
This thought seems familiar, somehow. Kind of Laundry RPG-ish, although a quick scan of the books didn’t bring anything up. Ach, well.
Operation FRIDAY CURIOSITY
Background: From 2013 to 2019 the human sacrifice death cult known mundanely as ‘Islamic State’/’Daesh’ (hereafter referred to as ‘IS’) operated as a proto-nation state in Syrian and Iraqi territory. IS attempted to mix its alarmingly brutal ritualistic practices with the maintenance and creation of a functional civic infrastructure, and achieved some success before the cult was eventually forced out of its physical territory. Preliminary checks by untainted Abrahamic theurgists have not uncovered conclusive proof of actual contractual diabolism, but ritual purification of important IS sites is ongoing.
The Anagnorisis Pattern
Description: various auditory and visual artifacts, generally distributed via social media. To most of the mundane population, any one item that qualifies as an ‘Anagnorisis Pattern’ will appear to be interesting, but ultimately not engrossing. Alas, those susceptible to the Pattern will instead find it irresistible, and at least psychologically addictive.
Effects: exposure to the Anagnorisis Pattern seems to encourage a particular kind of weak-willed subservience in some people. Even brief exposure makes the susceptible inclined to obey anyone who incorporates elements of the Pattern in their dress, conversation, ideology, and/or iconography. Prolonged exposure accelerates the process, and encourages a certain reckless disregard for personal safety. Anybody’s personal safety, really.
Nega-Demon Serum
Description: a transparent vial filled with a golden-white fluid that glows in the darkness, yet casts no shadow. Don’t bother trying to analyze it, either. It’s not that the Nega-Demon Serum isn’t really there; it’s that, from the Serum’s hypothetical point of view, nothing in the physical universe really is.
Powers: Comprehensively destroying Evil schemes, plans, machinations, and eventually the evil entities involved with them, apparently.
Eleanor Twitty Memorial Library
Name: Eleanor Twitty Memorial Library
Function: Ghost Library
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Collection Size: 60,000 books; 40,000 multimedia
Staff: 20
Funding: Private endowment
The library itself is not particularly astounding: it is about as good as a regular public library with no children’s section, with a special emphasis on all those books that people always mean to read, when they had the time. The Old Nellie’s regulars now have that time, and they flit through the shelves contentedly enough. Don’t annoy them, of course. Annoying a ghost rarely works out well.
Russian Minuets
Description: a set of thirty minuets, scored for harpsichord and written by Makar Olegovich Samarin (1702-1756?). The individual sheet music seems to have been printed in the 19th century in France, then bound in leather a century later by a Berlin bookbinder of dubious reputation. Rumors that the leather is actually tanned human skin are false.
Powers: If a Russian Minuet is performed before a live audience of at least one hundred people, one of those people will die of heart failure before the night is out. Resuscitation can work, if there’s medical staff on hand and ready to spring into action, but there’s no way to prevent the original heart failure. As for everybody else: it is apparently a marvelous rush to feel a Russian Minuet target another person. The sensation is not physically addictive, but it definitely can produce a psychological dependence. Fortunately, both the positive and negative effects only work in a live performance; streaming, televised, and digital productions do not have the same effect.
Rutherford College
Type: Four-year college (B.S., B.Eng, M.Eng)
Founded: 1949
Location: Milburn, Nebraska
Attendance: 8,000
Faculty to Student ratio: 1:12
Accreditation: ABET
Rutherford College is located more or less in the center of Nebraska, and is considered a very good but not unusual engineering/technical school. Students generally live and spend most of their time on campus, as the surrounding community does not offer many amenities for students; in fact, many of the locals traditionally go to the Rutherford campus instead for their entertainment. The college offers reduced tuition and a fairly solid Associates program for local residents; most townies who go past a high school education started their college careers at Rutherford.
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