item – Page 8 – Moe Lane

Item Seed: Staff of the Wudwo.

Staff of the Wudwo – Google Docs Download

Staff of the Wudwo

Description: An incredibly ancient staff made from black oakwood. Carbon dating indicates that the Staff of the Wudwo has to be at least six thousand years old. If there were any decorations on it, they’ve long since been scoured away by time. The same is true for any kind of organized occult or mystical powers; something was done to the Staff of the Wudwo, but by now it’s all just a warm field of general magic.

Powers: somewhere between eight to fifteen thousand people have carried the Staff of the Wudwo throughout history; whoever currently holds the staff can talk to the — spirits? Shades? Ghosts? — of any of them. The spirits are friendly and helpful, but limited to what they personally know. They also cheerfully but not maliciously refuse to answer any questions about the afterlife.

Item Seed: Lyre-shoes.

Lyre-shoes – Google Docs Download

Lyre-shoes

Appearance: a pair of expensive black leather men’s dress shoes with laces. Lyre-shoes register as magical on a deep scan, but not a superficial one.

Item Seed: Humorous Balancer.

Humorous Balancer – Google Docs Download

Humorous Balancer

Description: a small handheld device made of bone, metal, and wood. On one side there is an inset trackball; inset at the top is a crystal that magically glows red, amber, or green. The whole thing is intensely magical, but in a distinctly impersonal sort of way, to the point where magical attempts to determine the creator of a Humorous Balancer will get back contradictory information.

Item Seed: Reflective Onion.

Reflective Onion – Google Docs Download

Reflective Onion
Allium cepa speculum
Description: the bulb of the Reflective Onion greatly resembles a common onion when unpeeled. The primary difference is that the inner layers of the Reflective Onion are transparent, and indeed catch the light in a way that both sparkles, and dazzles. Reflective Onions are both nutritious and palatable to most human-variant species.

“Build an organic hand laser,” they said. “Make it so that people can grow it,” they said. “Make the four or five crops you need part of the standard planetary colonization package,” they said. And, wouldn’t you know it? They were right! It worked out fine: corn for the stock; carrot for the focusing barrel; potato for the battery; beet for the laser emitter; and a Reflective Onion as the organic focusing chamber.

Item Seed: Stradwolb.

Stradwolb – Google Docs Download

Stradwolb

Description: they look like normal blow darts, although the faint blue glow is a little disconcerting if you have a background in nuclear physics. Yup, Cherenkov radiation! But don’t worry, that’s just a reaction from all the tachyons. There’s a small hollow section that can be used to fit a small note in.

There’s a lot of double talk about time travel and quantum entanglement and closed temporal loops involved, but the process itself is simple: you insert a stradwolb in its specially-made blowpipe, and shoot it at someone or something. When it hits, it uses up all of its stored energy to travel back in time for a variable amount; the average human being, if he blows really, really hard, can send stradwolb back about five minutes. It will reappear loosely attached to whatever or whoever it was shot at (not enough to cause damage, but enough to not immediately fall off, either).

Item Seed: Stroopwapens.

Stroopwapens – Google Docs Download

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.

Item Seed: Hydrogen Dioxide.

Hydrogen Dioxide – Google Docs Download

Hydrogen Dioxide

This is not hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). This is one atom of hydrogen bonded to two atoms of oxygen: and, yes, that’s impossible by the laws of chemistry! Well-spotted. Or perhaps not well-spotted, as chemists who contemplate hydrogen dioxide for too long can end up needing a nice rest cure for a while. Or else, possibly trepanning: our ‘colleagues’ behind the Iron Curtain have some alarming techniques for combating acute cases of paradigm discontinuity syndrome.

Item Seed: “Watermelons and Space-Time.”

Watermelons and Space-Time – Google Docs Download

“Watermelons and Space-Time.”

Description: a two-minute YouTube video that claims that the universe is best visualized as a watermelon, with the pulp being dark matter and the seeds being, well, everything else. Watemelons and Space-Time is done in an unfortunately garish animation style, and the voiceovers are all computer-generated, with a tone and diction that almost sounds close to normal. The account that this video was originally uploaded to has only posted one video, and has shown no signs of activity since.

Item Seed: Emotional Woundsword.

Emotional Woundsword – Google Docs Download

Emotional Woundsword

Description: a bastard sword. The blade is steel, curiously red-tinted; and the hilt is made out of a grey wood, with green leather wrappings. The Emotional Woundsword is remarkably well-balanced, in a way that is clearly magical. The item is warded against being damaged itself, but no more than usual. Aesthetically? It’s rather creepy, really.

Powers: The Emotional Woundsword inflicts emotional damage on its target; the harder the swing, the worse the damage. It does not cause physical damage, even if the pommel is used as a club. Also note that even the weakest attack from this item is an excellent way to break somebody’s concentration.

Item Seed: Pleasures of the Heart.

Pleasures of the Heart – Google Docs Download

Pleasures of the Heart

Description: an elderly book, seemingly indifferently bound, 250 pages of good but old-quality paper. The text is printed in an unknown type and written in a variant of English that seems closest to the 18th Century, albeit one with considerably more Middle-Mongolian loan words. The book is profusely illustrated, in a manner that can only be described as incredibly soothing. For that matter; merely holding the book is a remarkably refreshing and relaxing experience.

Pleasures of the Heart started showing up in the more disreputable London literary circles in the early Edwardian period. Nobody knows where the book came from or who wrote it, which only contributed to its reputation as a — well, it’s complicated. You know how some books corrupt men utterly? Pleasures of the Heart more or less does the opposite.