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.
Powers: Bat Prime is the ultimate Louisville Slugger. It cannot be destroyed, cannot be corrupted, and cannot even be truly countered except by another Platonic Form. In combat, it does the maximum damage allowed for a baseball bat, ignores all armor, and never takes any damage. Plus, there’s that entire ‘warp reality and make your nose bleed’ thing, but that’s kind of more of an extremely worrisome special effect.
Bat Prime clearly came out of Platonic Space, or whatever the term is for where all the ultimate forms of things come from. It hasn’t been around for very long, either — and there are trackers or something that apparently have a limited ability to sense Bat Prime, and are using that ability to get the relic back. For what it’s worth, those trackers are not malicious; but they are utterly implacable and resolute about their task. Not hard to outrun, though.
Although giving back Bat Prime would not be a bad idea. The item is simply too real for this universe; people who acquire it tend to either give it away quickly to somebody else going somewhere else, as local reality sags under the strain of trying to sustain a Platonic Form. The longer Bat Prime stays in one place, the worse things get. The only way to keep the damage to local space-time at a minimum is to keep Bat Prime in motion. Which doesn’t really work as a long-term solution, but nobody knows that.
So why aren’t people just giving Bat Prime back to the trackers? Because apparently Bat Prime doesn’t want them to. Which itself is just, well, highly unnerving. You don’t want Platonic Forms to have agendas. Especially when it’s making your nose and the walls and the local curvature of space-time bleed.
So…
It’s a bat. For the game of baseball. You detailed what happens if it’s used as a melee weapon.
But what happens when someone uses it while at bat?
I was wondering the same thing. I assume that the wielder still has to be a baseball player, able to actually put the head of the bat on the ball. However, since the bat has perfect elasticity, anytime the batter hits the ball it is going to travel the maximum physically possible distance. And since it’s unbreakable, even if the batter just hits it off of his fists it’s going to travel significant distance.
BUT since it also enhances perception, it might give a hitter better ability to identify pitches as they’re leaving the pitchers hand. All in all, I’d say it takes a solid player and turns them into a first ballot Hall of Famer. But it doesn’t take an ordinary person and turn them into even a competent ball player.