Item Seed: EPSILON HOSANNAH.

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EPSILON HOSANNAH

This device is called ‘EPSILON HOSANNAH’ largely because it was captured and classified before even its creator — whose name is VERY redacted — could give it another name.  Superficially, EPSILON HOSANNAH resembles a modified 1984 TRS-80 Model 200 flip-top portable computer.  It lacks any interface jacks and does not have an immediately obvious power source; a very sophisticated radiation scanner will determine that the items is extremely mildly radioactive, but hardly dangerously so.

When booted up, EPSILON HOSANNAH will prompt the user to enter in a set of data points via the keyboard.  It doesn’t matter what the data represents, as long as it’s accurate: daily noontime temperatures for one year at one specific weather station.  The annual number of deaths by blunt instrument in one state for the last sixty years. The number of weeks a particular band’s songs have lasted on the Top Twenty charts, broken down by song and album.  If that information is put in (a process that invariably takes at least five minutes), EPSILON HOSANNAH will respond by offering four potential (and superficially random) future events, ranging from the mundane (“The Detroit Lions will win the next Super Bowl”) to the weighty (“The rebels will topple the Syrian regimes”).

Picking one of those events – and only those events – will result in a bullet list of instructions to follow in order to achieve the desired result.  Invariably, the instructions are concise, well within the capacity of the average person to accomplish, and require extremely unpleasant behavior (think back to the average episode of Friday the 13th: The Series for an idea of what ‘extremely unpleasant’ means) from the person following the instructions.  As near as anybody can tell, EPSILON HOSANNAH has never given bad directions.  They’re often absurd directions (not to mention, murderous), but everybody who has ever followed them has achieved success.

When they found out about this item the US government, naturally enough, threw it into a box and parked the box next to the Ark of the Covenant.  Believe it or not: there are people in federal service who can recognize a literally Damned Infernal Artifact on sight, and the telltale signs of looming disaster are so obvious on this one that people in the know assume that EPSILON HOSANNAH is some sort of demonic equivalent of an undergraduate research project.  

Which is to say: it’s powerful, but not very subtle. And just a little too dangerous to use. So the government keeps EPSILON HOSANNAH somewhere nice, somewhere safe, and somewhere that’s decidedly packed away.
Or, at least it did.