Stroopwapens
Description: Stroopwapens have been around since the 18th Century AD, but the modern versions look like this, only slightly differently garishly colored. This is not accidental; the company that makes those toy guns has black ops weapon contracts with various governmental entities across the First World. The manufacturer of the ammunition is currently a Dutch bakery with even more secret weapons contracts.
Oddly, some people persist in thinking that something that shoots small pastry discs covered in tasty caramel syrup is somehow not a real weapon. Clearly, some people lack imagination. Or perhaps they don’t understand that the syrup is a hallucinogenic with properties that defy even modern analysis.
These items function as something out of a fantasy story: to wit, a reliable and effective stun gun. Everybody who gets hit (or ‘strooped’) with a stroopwapen round has the same reaction; five minutes of near-total paralysis of all non-autonomic muscular functions, followed by eight hours of REM-heavy sleep. When they awaken, most subjects report that they had vivid dreams of being banished to a surreal landscape with a vaguely candy-like motif and somewhat unpleasant inhabitants. The rest claim to have experienced nothing of the sort, but there is a certain suspicion among stroopwapen experts that those people are lying.
The official theory about what’s happening here is that humans have a weird neural tic that responds in a particular way to a particular stimulus. The unofficial (and virtually never articulated) theory is that strooping somebody actually does send their consciousness to a parallel dimension where various sticky-sweet factions contest with each other in a variety of ways. This seems to be safe for whoever got strooped, at least in the sense that nobody’s ever not woken up after a strooping and they didn’t seem to develop long-term psychological conditions, either. On the other hand: the cost of a stroopwapen and its ammunition is sufficiently high that they only get fired at high-value targets who must absolutely be stunned and captured.
This means that many people who get strooped end up not having much time to develop those long-term psychological conditions. Put another way: stroopwapens are only immediately nonlethal weapons. Getting hit with one might end getting you killed anyway, albeit at a later date and via a different method.
What effect all of this is having on the other dimension (who, after all, were not asking for humanity to temporarily send over a wide variety of often very unpleasant individuals) would be discussed, except of course that the official theory says that there’s no need to. The unofficial theory isn’t quite so sanguine, but what can you do? All the other shadowy organizations are strooping. Why be the only ones left out?