Tag: item

Item Seed: Transcendent Pajamas.

These might be a bit of a trap.

Transcendent Pajamas – Google Docs

Transcendent Pajamas

 

Description: one set of men’s cotton pajamas, blue and white, with an Atomic Age motiff (the pajamas were made in the early 1950s).  The Pajamas will magically adjust to fit any regular-sized human being above the age of sixteen, and do not get dirty, fray, or otherwise decay.  Theoretically the two pieces of the Transcendent Pajamas will not work if separated, but nobody’s ever been able to manage that trick for very long.  The ‘Transcendent’ modifier, incidentally, refers to the Pajamas’ appearance: they are universally considered to be hideously tacky, including by magical species that cannot otherwise understand the concept.

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Item Seed: The Baruri Carapace.

Baruri Carapace – Google Docs

The Baruri Carapace

 

This item was trawled from the bottom of the Baruri River (a tributary of the Rio Negro, which is itself a tributary of the Amazon) in Brazil, embedded in a lump of curiously hardened clay.  The Baruri Carapace is a remarkably complete set of plate (breastplate, helmet) and scale mail (arms, legs); while the (presumably leather) bindings and linings used have long since rotted away, the armor plates and scales remained essentially intact.  The Carapace was made for somebody about 5 feet 4 inches tall, although researchers are less sure about that.

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Item Seed: Sun Eggs.

Sun Eggs – Google Docs

Sun Eggs

 

Description: an ovoid shape that does look a lot like a Terran bird’s egg.  The Sun Eggs given to humanity are about the size of a human male, weigh half a ton, and are utterly impervious to any attempt to analyze them more thoroughly than ‘Well, it’s light green in color, smooth, and neither warm nor cold to the touch.’  Oh, and they don’t topple over. Or break. You can pick one up with the right tools, but Sun Eggs don’t suffer damage from anything.

 

Why ‘Sun Eggs?’ Well, that’s what the envoy from the half-mythical Elder Planets called them when they gave Earth three of the things.  The envoy went on to solemnly inform the bemused Terran diplomatic delegation that in billions of years these Eggs would hatch into new suns, and that in the meantime humanity was to protect and cherish them. As it has been done before, with countless other races, for billions and billions of years.

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Item Seed: Battery Charger.

Battery Charger

 

Not a battery recharger: a battery charger. You plug it into the wall, you pop in a standard-sized non-rechargeable alkaline battery into one of the slots provided (from AAA to E), and within half a minute it charges up the battery for you from wall current. It always works. It doesn’t seem to hurt the battery. It doesn’t care what brand the battery is, or how old it is.  You can buy a Battery Charger from a sidewalk vendor in most major cities in the Americas for about twenty bucks.

 

Just don’t show one to a chemist, unless of course you like seeing people have nervous breakdowns. The Battery Charger cannot actually work, because non-rechargeable alkaline batteries rely on a particular kind of chemical reaction that can’t be reversed simply by shooting enough electricity through it.  Unless you have a Battery Charger, apparently. The Battery Charger does things to the internal composition of the battery it’s charging that the charger, well, simply shouldn’t be able to do. And neither the chemists nor the physicists who will end up looking at one of these devices will be able to make heads or tails of it.  But the Chargers work! Somehow.

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Item Seed: Sunlight Jerky.

Sunlight Jerky – Google Docs

Sunlight Jerky

 

How do you go about turning sunlight into jerky? Well, first off you have to be really bright.  Sorry: that’s a Gnomish joke.

 

Truthfully, the stuff isn’t really sunlight itself; it’s a particular kind of dried meat from a particular kind of mountain squirrel that, when cut very finely with a particular sort of Gnomish knife during a particular sort of folk-magic ritual, can mystically absorb sunlight and retain it through the marinade and drying process.  If you do it right, the stuff has a faint yellow glow in darkness, which is one way to tell if you have ‘real’ Sunlight Jerky. The other way, of course, is to feed some to a vampire, and see if he explodes.  

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Item Seed: Ovlit.

Ovlit – Google Docs

 

Ovlit

 

Well, that’s the name inscribed along one side of this titanium club; it’s presumably is a corruption of “UV LED.”  This is a rather specific presumption, but then, there are numerous inset LEDs in the head of said club, and they emit ultraviolet light when Ovlit hits something.  It’s a reasonable guess to make.

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Item Seed: The Rockville Mosaic.

Rockville Mosaic – Google Docs

The Rockville Mosaic

 

This mosaic was recently found on a basement wall of the Red Brick Courthouse in Rockville, Maryland. It was discovered by accident about three weeks ago; a state employee looking for a file noticed the edges of it peeking out from behind a set of filing cabinets and an unused portable chalkboard.   The mosaic is reproduced below: judging from the materials and general style, it appears to have been made some time in the 1890s (which would be consistent with the history of the Red Brick Courthouse).

Congratulations: it’s your first paranormal relic!  Don’t worry, these things pop in and out from other dimensions all the time.  Probably the Red Brick Courthouse in our universe got quantumly tangled with a close analogue several universes over; they’re probably wondering over there in the other universe where their mosaic got to (it’s made out of gold inlay and gemstones, so one would hope that they’re wondering).

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Item Seed: The Blue Stuff.

Blue Stuff – Google Docs

The Blue Stuff

 

People call it “the Blue Stuff” because the terms that could actually define it properly are flagged keywords for every intelligence-gathering agency from the NSA to the Boy Scouts.  Physically, it looks like a blue liquid goop: it flows somewhat turgidly when poured, but it doesn’t clump or lump up, either. It can be used in a hypodermic needle, too.

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Item Seed: The Breasted Lexicon.

No jokes, please: that was the guy’s name, OK?

Breasted Lexicon – Google Docs

The Breasted Lexicon

 

Upon first look, this set of three standard sized, spiral bound notebooks seems utterly mundane.  The notebooks are filled with hand drawn Egyptian hieroglyphics and their English translations; at two words per page, there are twelve hundred of the most common ancient Egyptian words (arranged alphabetically by English translation), featuring the etymology of the word over time.  The text is clearly from one hand; neat, precise, using standard ballpoint ink (the pen was clearly replaced several times during the transcription), and making few mistakes.  No signature or name is associated with the handwriting, and there is surprisingly little in the way of marginalia, or even wear.

Continue reading Item Seed: The Breasted Lexicon.