Liber Squamis
Description: hardbound (red cloth) book, printed in 1895 by Zann and Grieg publishers. 128 pages of musical notation, for a number of unnamed pieces apparently scored for a flute; despite the Latin title, what text exists is in French and German. No author. There is a handwritten dedication to a ‘Herbert Vaughn,’ but the signature is illegible.
Blue Bed of Blood
Description: a child’s bed, made of blue plastic and wood and shaped somewhat like a race car. The Blue Bed of Blood is perpetually damp with, well, blood, no matter how often it is cleaned. It radiates as rather unpleasantly magical, but not quite as straight-up Evil.
Mheet™
Description: it’s synthetic, yet edible meat! It’s shelf-stable and doesn’t go stale! It doesn’t taste like chicken, it tastes like beef! There’s no slime! There’s no glow! There’s no smell! And it never, ever moves on its own! Try Mheet™ today!
Believe it or not, all of the above is true. And didn’t it take the longest time to make all of the above true, too. Basically, Mheet™ originally is what’s left over whenever someone desummons Ye Liveliest Awfulness or the Bite Lords of the Murder-Pit or what have you; even when successful, desummoning tends to leave huge chunks of sort-of organic matter all over the place. And it all has to be cleaned up. Only: somehow, somebody managed to notice the admittedly interesting culinary possibilities, so now here we all are.
Continue reading Item Seed: Magic Bats: Major League Baseball 1955Magic Bats: Major League Baseball 1955
Publication date: 1956, Pickman Brothers
Pages: 128, with numerous black and white photographs
Description: Magic Bats: Major League Baseball 1955 purports to be a somewhat superficial look at the 1955 American major league baseball season. It’s written in a style redolent of Madison Avenue, to the point where the book has no apparent author and feels like it was written by committee. Notably, there are numerous oddities in the text, starting with the actual baseball teams:
Bad Seeds
Description: a twisted and gnarled hard organic mass, about the size of a peach. It feels hard, fibrous, and vaguely itchy to the touch, and smells unpleasantly of rusted iron and mildewed hay. Consuming one is contraindicated. There is a mild enchantment on Bad Seeds that allow them to be ignored under normal circumstances, up to an including baggage checks at airports.
It’s a monster seed. Plant it in the right (read: evil, cursed, corrupted, hexed, desanctified, whatever floats your boat) ground, and a monster comes out. Sure, it will take about forty years or so for the process to complete, which is one reason why there aren’t more monsters around: but all it takes is one deranged lunatic to have successfully gotten away with seeding an area with Bad Seeds a couple of generations ago for the whole situation to blow up in somebody’s face today.
Azure Bitterspice Tea
Description: Azure Bitterspice is a fern-like plant colored a vivid blue-white. It grows only in areas contaminated with eldritch energies from ice-aspected magical disasters; the kind associated with entire neighborhoods or towns vanishing in the snow, never to return. Azure Bitterspice should never be touched with bare hands: the leaves need a half hour of immersion in boiling water before they can be safely handled.
Effects: Preservation. Someone who drinks a cup of Azure Bitterspice Tea (it tastes awful, by the way) will swiftly slip into a frozen state where all life functions almost cease to function, very much including bleeding. This is effectively suspended animation, and lasts for as long as the subject is in an environment that is below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Some people have been frozen for more than a century without ill effects.
Brosiapods
Description: appears similar to a single-serving coffee pod, and can indeed be used in standard single-serve coffee brewer. Someone opening the pod will find a small collection of sticky, honey-colored beads instead of coffee. The scent is indescribably wonderful; so is the taste.
Effects: drink a cup. Huzzah! You won’t age for the next twenty four hours. Or get sick. You should be healing much faster, too.
Psibuster
Description: a metal cube, typically carried in a cloth bag with straps. There is an obvious firing pin at the top that must be unlocked with a key before it can be removed. The lock is not particularly difficult to pick: the idea is more to keep the Psibuster from being accidentally activated. A Psibuster is generally set to ‘detonate’ when thrown against something hard, but can be primed to go off when any physically present psi actively uses a power within one yard of it.
It’s basically a satchel charge that can only be used against psionic targets. It does kind of affect non-psis, but not very strongly: anyone within its area of effect (1-yard sphere) when it goes off will feel briefly queasy, and possibly get a touch of vertigo. Those with some sort of natural psionic resistance will feel nothing at all.
But people who are psionic (very much including people using psychotronic technologies)? Hoo, boy. The effects start out with vomiting, loss of bladder/bowel control, and random muscle spasms. Anyone actively using a psionic ability at the time of detonation will likely be knocked out — possibly bleeding from the nose in the process — and God help a teleporter caught in the moment of transition, because the after-effects are rarely pretty. Mind gestalts and other shared psionic activities can get absolutely shredded in the sudden feedback loop. Psychotronic technologies fare no better: they invariably burn out, sometimes explosively. And so on.
Unspeakable Hard Drive
Description: currently, a 500 gig hard drive (Windows compatible) encased in an external hard drive shell. The hard drive itself is defective, thanks to a burnt-out motor, but can still be restored by a competent technician with the right tools. The outer shell has been painstakingly engraved with a variety of unknown symbols; staring too long at the inscriptions seems to neutralize the viewer’s current emotional state, in a manner that does not seem either entirely safe, or even ultimately desirable.
The Unspeakable Hard Drive (UHD) reputedly first belonged to a famous and beloved author; the various legends associated with the UHD attribute ownership to a variety of writers, both living and dead (obviously, the UHD has only been around for a decade or so). The drive reputedly holds unique ‘forbidden knowledge.’ Again, legends vary as to what’s in the damned thing*:
Cache AZURE FELLOWSHIP
Description: a zippered, leather travel bag with an old-style handle. It contains the following items:
