Ndoto
Description: a wooden rounded cylinder, two feet by one foot by one foot. It is polished, as if by long use. The item is enchanted; anyone who uses it as a head or body pillow will simultaneously have a refreshing night’s sleep, and be instantly and alertly awakened in case of danger.
Exhaustis
This stuff started out as a by-product of a handy gizmo called the ‘AntiSom’ (invented by a gadgeteer about thirty years ago). The problem with being a nocturnal superhero — or even an after-work one — is, when do you sleep? For every billionaire playboy, there’s a dozen people with day jobs who can’t function on four hours’ sleep indefinitely. So the gadgeteer came up with the AntiSom; a rugged, reasonably foolproof device that would drain the exhaustion out of a metahuman. Fifteen minutes’ worth of use would do the work of eight hours of sleep; and with no long-term effects either, because super-powers.
Forced Inspiration Generators – Google Docs
Forced Inspiration Generators
Mad Science at its best! Or maybe at its worst. Almost certainly at its worst, in fact. There’s just something about that particular interdisciplinary field of study that really, really likes things to go as badly as they can possibly go. And Forced Inspiration Generators can go quite badly, indeed.
Egghurler
Description: a scaled-down Roman-style polyboros, or repeating ballista. …OK, just picture a stationary repeating crossbow that’s light enough to be carried by one person, and with the ability to fire upwards in a sixty degree arc and you’ll be more or less correct. Oh, and it glows with arcane runes.
Socklems
Yes. They are magically animated socks. Although ‘animated’ is a fuzzy (typically, so are Socklems) term; when not being worn by someone Socklems can more or less move around like inchworms, but they can’t manipulate or carry anything. Or communicate. It’s not entirely clear that they can see.
Continue reading Item Seed: Socklems
Liber Florum
The would-be reader of the Liber Florum is well advised to not touch any copy of this book with their bare hands. This includes modern facsimiles, although it’s apparently safe enough to handle individual pages that have not been not bound in any way, up to and including sheet protectors in a three-ring binder. That’s how people know that the book is magical, by the way. And apparently actively malevolent.
Project APPLESAUCE KINETIC Cache #5 – Google Docs
Project APPLESAUCE KINETIC Cache #5
Description: a crate containing ten ‘books’ filled with microfiche sheets, with a manila folder containing the index. The crate has an opened envelope attached, containing a standard US Archives document (dated 10/15/1967) indicating that the contents of the crate are not to be declassified before 12/31/2018. The signature is illegible.
Continue reading Item Seed: Project APPLESAUCE KINETIC Cache #5.
2041 Edison Dragonfly – Google Docs
2041 Edison Dragonfly
Description: basically, it’s an electric-powered ornithopter that seats five. Top speed is 150 miles an hour, range is about 1500 miles before a recharge (which is surprisingly inexpensive). With its four wings made out of iridescent purple and green scales, and its glittering carapace of crystal and honey-colored metal, the 2041 Edison Dragonfly is the most beautiful vehicle that you will ever see. This is not a subjective statement: it simply is, objectively speaking, almost perfect from an aesthetic point of view.
Marcona Cipher Wheel – Google Docs
The Marcona Cipher Wheel
Description: a set of fifty small titanium wheels on a titanium spike, in the shape and apparent form of a cipher wheel (an archaic method for encoding messages). Each wheel has a set of fifty symbols embossed on its surface that correspond to no known language. Despite the fact that titanium is only weakly magnetic, the wheels ‘stick’ to each other fairly strongly.
Explosive Knots
Explosive Knots are an example of sufficiently-advanced technology, at least from the point of view of primitives still mired in pre-starflight cultures. It’s not really their fault; at that level of savagery many of them don’t even understand the concept of space-time, let alone how to manipulate it with a piece of string and some manual dexterity. Calling it ‘magic’ at least allows some of the marginally brighter ones to conceptualize the idea of of Explosive Knots, which is really quite admirable of the pig-ignorant brutes.
