Moe Lane

Bend – Google Docs

The Bend

Canaan, Connecticut

The Bend is a patch of land about the size of an acre, located at the south end of Wagnum Lake in the town of Canaan, which is itself located in Connecticut’s Litchfield County. And… it’s one of those places that ‘defy gravity.’  Normally, that’s just a place where there’s an optical illusion in place that makes an downward slant look like a level or upward one; but in this case it’s an area where, if you put a metal ball in one particular spot, it will slowly but noticeably rise twelve inches in the air, and stay there.

And that’s pretty much it.

The best that the scientists can come up with is that it’s a knot in space-time — right, that’s not what they said at first.  It’s the immensely dumbed-down explanation that at least allows people to move on with working the problem.  Whatever it is is just exotic physics, not supernatural, but it’s really strange exotic physics, and as time goes on many of the scientists involved are getting less and less sure about whether they’re even close to accurately modeling what’s going on here.  It’s all a mystery.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a sexy mystery, from a funding point of view: which means that there’s no institutional drive to investigate.  Quite the opposite, really: the property in which The Bend is located happens to belong to somebody who once pulled over in the middle of the night to give a wet and bedraggled hitchhiker a lift, a hot meal, and fifty bucks for the bus to Hartford.  That hitchhiker now oversees Illuminati operations for the entire Eastern Seaboard, which effectively means that NO ONE MAY BOTHER THAT GOOD SAMARITAN BY TRAIPSING THEIR EXPERIMENTS ALL OVER HIS PROPERTY.  Researchers can still research, as long as they leave no traces (memory manipulation does not count as ‘no traces’). They’d be well-advised to leave no traces.

And, hey! Guess who got assigned to run interference for the latest research team!

Infinite Rope Crossbow – Google Docs

Infinite Rope Crossbow

The Infinite Rope Crossbow is fairly obviously a magic item, given that it’s a crossbow that shoots a grappling bolt attached to a cord of infinite length. Said cord can and does support up to two tons of weight (anything more than that will be somehow shaken off, gently but firmly).  Also, the Crossbow reeks of magical energy.  Malevolent magical energy, at that; which is why no intelligent mage ever carries one.  Better to let the fighters and rogues take that particular risks, hey?

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Thumpers – Google Docs

Thumpers

Thumpers are the kind of anti-psionic devices you get when psionic abilities start showing up in the population at an early-medieval level of technology.  They’re crude, brute-force, and indiscriminate in their effect — but they work, which is the important thing.  In fact, to the people in power that typically commission the devices, that’s really the only thing.

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DREAD – Google Docs

The Diversified Refurbished Equipment Acquisition / Distribution Corporation

(DREAD)

Everybody knows that DREAD is in the supernatural equipment recycling business.  Well, everybody who knows that there’s a lot of supernaturally-contaminated equipment in the world, which sometimes needs to be recycled. The rest of humanity largely muddles through, without anybody telling them anything about all the necessary infrastructure companies making a living out of the metaphysical.  Such as DREAD.

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Blame this.

Ust-Kuyga Anomaly – Google Docs

The Ust-Kuyga Anomaly

Roughly 12 hours ago, a party of illegal mammoth ivory miners came stumbling into the desolate Siberian settlement of Ust-Kuyga with an unbelievable tale. Well, unbelievable to anybody who wasn’t looking for certain keywords in babbled reports, not to say access to certain satellites that continually passively scan for spikes of certain forms of radiation. One of those satellites was in place to do a deeper scan, which turned up sufficiently positive to justify this on-the-fly briefing. It’s a long way to Vladivostok, even with military transport.  

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Beccar Harmonicas – Google Docs

The Beccar Harmonicas

So-called for their reappearance during a raid on a collector living in Beccar (a suburb of Bueno Aires that once boasted residents like Mengele and Eichmann) that revealed the existence of not only the harmonicas, but a veritable treasure-trove of Nazi memorabilia.  Which was actually mostly kitsch.  Deliberately so, in fact: hiding the existence of the harmonicas was the crucial objective, and what better way to hide them than to mix them in with horribly tacky busts and geegaws?

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Maxim Ostracod Tracer Round – Google Docs

The Maxim Ostracod Tracer Round

The Maxim Ostracod Tracer Round has the distinction of being the only tool of war to ever be successfully banned by the Royal Interplanetary Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And it took some doing: the British Empire’s Venusian forces swore by the things. But even the most jingoistic regimental colonel would privately concede that the RISPCA perhaps had a point.

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Beer Gun – Google Docs

Beer Gun

This thing, to put it simply, is a monster of mid-20th century engineering.  The Beer Gun looks roughly like a drastically scaled-down version of a M61 Vulcan rotary cannon; while it is light enough to be fired by a person, there’s a handle on the top to grab while firing. The user frankly needs it, given that this thing kicks like a mule. The Beer Gun has six muzzleloading barrels: each barrel can fit one standard-sized can of Budweiser beer from the 1950s (the US Army manual that accompanies each Beer Gun is adamant that only Budweiser is to be used).  The firing mechanism is one heavy-duty titanium spring per barrel: once a chamber has been fired, it takes a total of one minute of steady ratcheting with an included jack to cock the spring back. There are no electrical or chemical components to the Beer Gun at all, and all of the mechanical parts are designed to be as rugged as possible.

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Reasonable Metahuman Solutions – Google Docs

Reasonable Metahuman Solutions

Reasonable Metahuman Solutions (RMS) is in the metahuman employment business; which, in a world where superheroes and supervillains exist, is not particularly unusual. What does make RMS unusual is that they almost exclusively hire ex-convicts (both villains and henchmen).  The company will even hire violent ex-convicts, provided that they have served their sentences and have no outstanding warrants.  The employee demographics tend to skew towards older metahumans and henchmen, but RMS gets its fair share of younger ex-cons who had a taste of prison, and who aren’t eager to go back.

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Gumibehrs – Google Docs

Gumibehrs

Spelled that way because the trademark is still enforced, even in the 26th Century. Apparently sweetened gelatin is still going to be a thing for our descendants. Go figure, huh?

Anyway, gumibehrs are essentially transparent blobs of free-moving alien plant matter that lack any kind of bone structure or exoskeleton at all.  Their skin is, however, incredibly strong, and can get them enough traction to allow a gumibehr to reach a decent rate of speed once it gets started.  While the species is obviously highly plastic and flexible, it relaxes to a shape that is indeed reasonably ursinoid: hence, the name.   They reproduce via the usual wind-borne pollination method, albeit a bit more proactively than normal: gumibehrs typically release pollen via regular outgassing of built-up oxygen in a centralized waste orifice. Gumibehrs typically move on all fours, but can be trained to walk upright.

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Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services – Google Docs

Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services

(HADeS)

On the surface, Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services (HADeS) looks like one of your standard SoCal crystal and chakra weirdnesses: they bring animals to Hollywood productions in order to “cleanse the workspace of negative stress energy by cooperatively using primal life forces.” Basically, this means that the company brings in dogs and cats for the cast and crew to pet, play with, and feed (the crew is not supposed to feed the animals, but everybody does anyway, and HADeS never seems to really mind). Sometimes HADeS will provide something more exotic, like a rabbit or a sheep; on one memorable occasion the company brought in an actual cow, and encouraged everyone to touch it.  Oddly enough, that story never made the papers; you’d expect it to, seeing that the movie in question more or less swept the Oscars that year.

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Sometimes I write out the title, and then wait for it to tell me what it is.

Spray-Sort – Google Docs

Spray-Sort

One of the things that virtually godlike high-tech alien races soon learn to do is to regularly come up with entertaining shiny gimcracks with which to distract the rather less high-tech alien races.  Why? Because the less-advanced races can still be aggravating, or even dangerous; and if you think that technological superiority is a perfect and flawless game-winner, contemplate whether the existence of tanks and nuclear warheads makes you, personally, any safer when somebody comes up and hits you over the head with a rock.

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