Backwater Static

An oil painting that was already old when the gallery it hangs in was new. The varnish has gone the color of weak tea, cracked into a fine web that catches the light differently depending on where you stand. Nobody working at the gallery remembers hanging it, and the accession records that should explain it don't exist. The subject's expression is neutral in every photograph taken of it, but never neutral to the naked eye - always caught mid-shift, as if it stopped moving the instant the camera did. Up close it smells faintly of linseed oil, decades after any wet paint should have stopped smelling like anything.

Hardness 6 · Health Levels 3 · Stationary

Gaze (Mental, 4 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by looking directly at it for more than a moment - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Recursive - a target who loses a Sanity Level to the Gaze notices the subject has shifted slightly the next time they look, guaranteeing they'll look again eventually (GM's call on pacing).

Fifty-two cards, and every reading comes true - just not always the way you'd want. Corners rounded soft from decades of shuffling, the pattern on the backs worn past legibility, a few cards gone so thin they're translucent held up to light. It's always cool to the touch, in any room, in any season - and it gets colder, card by card, the longer a reading runs, until by the end of a full spread it's like holding something pulled straight out of a freezer.

Corners rounded soft from decades of shuffling, the pattern on the backs worn past legibility, a few cards gone so thin they're translucent held up to light. It's always cool to the touch, in any room, in any season - and it gets colder, card by card, the longer a reading runs, until by the end of a full spread it's like holding something pulled straight out of a freezer.

How a Reading Works: the reader lays cards for whoever the reading is for, one at a time, in whatever spread the reader's own style calls for - a simple three-card line, a full cross, anything the moment calls for. The spread itself is flavor; only the final, decisive card resolves mechanically. Only the subject of the reading triggers A Card Is Drawn - a reader drawing on someone else's behalf is never affected by their own reading.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

A Card Is Drawn (Social or Mental depending on the card drawn, 3 dice, triggered automatically the first time a character shuffles or draws from the deck - no to-hit roll)

Reading the Card: the suit and rank of the drawn card decide what the reading actually is.

• Suit sets the track: Hearts or Diamonds draw a Social roll (vs. Poise); Clubs or Spades draw a Mental roll (vs. Sanity).
• Rank sets what the card means. An Ace is a single defining truth - if an Ace is drawn anywhere in a spread, it overrides whatever else was laid, and the reading becomes about that card alone. A 2 through 10 tells you how soon the omen comes due: low cards land almost immediately (this Session), high cards loom over the long term (this Arc). A face card (Jack, Queen, King) means a specific person enters the reading, not an event - the GM should have a real NPC in mind, existing or new, before revealing what the card portends.

Traits: Every Reading Is True - the drawn card's effect always comes to pass narratively in some form, independent of whether its dice connect mechanically. Can't Be Un-Drawn - a card that's already resolved for someone can't affect that same person again until a Month passes.

A battered brass horn, always missing its mouthpiece cap. Whoever plays it can't stop, and can't play anything else. The brass is dented in a shape that doesn't match any collision anyone's described, and that spot stays warm to the touch no matter how cold the morning. Set it down mid-note and the sound keeps going for a beat or two longer than breath should allow, thin and a little tinny, like it's coming from further away than the horn actually is. The case it came with is lined with velvet gone bald in the shape of a different, smaller instrument.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

The Wrong Note (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by playing it for more than a few bars - no to-hit roll)

Traits: One-Song Mind - a target who loses a Sanity Level to it hums the same off-key phrase involuntarily for the rest of the Scene.

A 78 that repeats four bars forever once the needle drops, no matter how many times it's lifted. The label's worn to a smear, no artist name, no title, just a run-out groove that never actually runs out. Lift the needle and the sound keeps playing underneath it, faint, like it's coming from a different room in the same building. The vinyl is warped just enough that it shouldn't play cleanly at all, and yet it never once skips off those same four bars.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

The Loop (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by listening through a full repeat - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Contagious - a Scene with more than one listener triggers the Loop against every listener simultaneously, not just the first.

A marching bass drum, skin gone dark with age, that starts a slow beat the moment it's touched. The rope tensioners are frayed but somehow still hold true pitch, and the drumhead stays cool under the palm even after an hour of beating. Nobody's ever caught it starting - it's always already going by the time anyone notices, like it picked up mid-phrase from somewhere else. Stand close enough and you feel the beat in your sternum before you consciously register the sound.

Hardness 3 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

March Behind Me (Social, 3 dice vs. Presence, triggered by hearing the beat within earshot - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Draws a Crowd - a target who loses a Poise Level to it feels compelled to physically follow the sound, GM's call on how far before it lets go.

An upright's paper roll, brittle and yellowed, that plays itself to an empty room. The perforations are cut in a pattern that doesn't match any published sheet music, and running a finger along the holes leaves it smelling faintly of pipe smoke with no obvious source. It only ever starts once the last person leaves and stops the instant anyone opens the door, so most people who own it have never actually heard it play, only heard about it. The keys move under an unseen touch just far enough to depress, never further, like whoever's playing learned restraint a long time ago.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

An Audience of One (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by being alone in the room while it plays - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Never Alone - the piano insists someone is sitting at the bench; a target who loses a Sanity Level to it swears they saw a hand on the keys.

A dented tip jar that was already full when the shop that owned it closed decades ago. The coins inside are a mix of eras, some currency that hasn't been minted in a lifetime, and the glass is scuffed cloudy from handling that never seems to have actually happened. It rattles faintly when picked up, coins shifting, though nothing ever spills loose no matter how hard it's shaken. The dent in the side is shaped like a shoe print, low down, like it was kicked once and never fixed.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Pay the Toll (Social, 2 dice vs. Presence, triggered by making eye contact with it while passing - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Always Full - no matter how much is dropped in or taken out, the jar is exactly as full the next time someone looks.

A woven-hair mourning ring, a keepsake style from a much older era, kept long after the mourning should have ended. The hair braided into the band is dark and fine, no longer matching whoever last wore it, and the gold around it is worn thin from a thumb that rubbed the same spot for years. It sits warm against the skin almost immediately, faster than body heat alone would explain. The clasp sticks a little on the way off, just enough to make you pause before you take it off, like it's asking you to reconsider.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Still Grieving (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by wearing it for more than a Scene - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Borrowed Grief - a target who loses a Sanity Level to it briefly grieves someone they never met, with real, specific false memories that fade over a Day.

A yellowed newspaper clipping with a blank space where the death date should be. The paper is soft at the fold from being carried, and the print elsewhere on the clipping is perfectly legible, ordinary, forgettable - just that one gap where a date should sit, clean and unbrowned, like it was left out on purpose. It doesn't smudge if you touch the blank space, and it won't take pencil or ink either. Held up to a window, the light comes through that blank patch just slightly brighter than the rest of the page.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Fill in the Date (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by reading it aloud - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Whoever's Named - the blank fills in with the reader's own name for as long as they hold it, and only their name.

A funeral guestbook, its pages already full of names in handwriting that isn't anyone's. The cover is cheap pleather, cracked at the spine the way a book gets from real use, and the pages inside are soft and thin from turning. Every name is written in a different hand, careful cursive to hurried print, but none of it matches any known signature on record. Flip through it and the ink smells faintly fresh, like it dried an hour ago no matter how long the book's been shut.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

Sign In (Social, 3 dice vs. Presence, triggered by signing your own name in it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Marks Your Return - a signed name reappears, in the same ink, if that person ever attends another funeral anywhere in the city.

Charcoal on paper, taken from a grave nobody can find anymore. The paper's gone soft and gray at the edges, charcoal smudged the way it always does after handling, and the lettering it captured is only partly legible, cut off mid-name by a crack that was already in the stone when the rubbing was made. It leaves black on the fingers like any charcoal rubbing would, but the black doesn't wash off with soap, just water. Held at an angle to the light, the worn letters seem to shift position slightly, like the crack itself is still spreading somewhere.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

The Missing Name (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by tracing the rubbing's letters with a finger - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Fades to Match - the worn-away letters on the rubbing always match whichever part of the headstone is currently most eroded, wherever it actually is.

A paper hand fan, church-pew standard issue, printed with a face that isn't the same face twice. The cardstock is warped soft from decades in humid rooms, the wooden handle stapled on the cheap way these always are, and the printed face on front looks different depending on who's holding it, though never anyone the holder actually recognizes. Fanning it stirs air that's colder than the room around it. The back still carries a faded ad for a funeral home that, as far as anyone's found, never existed under that name.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Cool Yourself (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by fanning yourself with it for more than a minute - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Borrowed Face - a target who loses a Sanity Level to it sees the fan's printed face reflected back in the next mirror they look into, once.

An iron key to a shotgun house that's since been demolished, though the key still turns something. It's heavier than a key that size should be, rust bloomed along the shaft in a pattern that never seems to spread further. The teeth are cut for a lock nobody's found, but slide it into almost any old deadbolt and it seats like it belongs there, even when it won't turn. On warm afternoons it holds onto cold longer than metal should, like it's still sitting on a shelf in a house that no longer has weather to feel.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

One More Room (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by turning it in any lock - no to-hit roll)

Traits: A Room That Isn't There - success or failure, the target has a brief, vivid sense of walking through a house that no longer exists, ending back where they started.

An old tin, dented, that still smells fresh no matter how long it's been shut. The paint's chipped down to bare metal at the corners, the lid stiff and hard to pry, but crack it open and the chicory smell hits like it was ground that morning. There's always just enough grounds inside for one more pot, no matter how many pots have already been made from it. The tin stays a little warm to the touch, like it just came off a stove that isn't there.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

One More Cup (Social, 2 dice vs. Presence, triggered by drinking from a cup poured from it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Somebody's Kitchen - a target who loses a Poise Level to it feels a sudden, specific homesickness for a kitchen that isn't theirs.

Cypress wood, worn smooth on the arms, that rocks gently on a porch with no wind. The grain's gone silver-gray from years of weather, the joints tight despite the age, no creak when it rocks, which is somehow more unsettling than if it did. It never rocks faster or slower, just that same even pace, and it stops the instant someone sits down, only to start again the moment they get up. Run a hand over the armrests and they're worn into shallow grooves shaped like hands bigger than most people's.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

Sit a Spell (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by sitting in it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Loses Track of Time - a target who loses a Sanity Level to it consistently underestimates how long they sat there by about an hour, every time.

A lady's compact, the glass split corner to corner, that shows the room a half-second behind. The case is brass gone dull, the powder puff inside long since crumbled to dust, but the mirror itself is clean, no fog, no scratches beyond the one crack. The lag is small enough to miss at first, just a flicker between a hand raised and its reflection catching up. Snap it shut and you can feel the click land a beat later than the sound actually reaches your ears.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Catching Up (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by checking your reflection in it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Delayed Reflection - the reflection always lags behind the target's actual movement, most noticeable, and most unsettling, right as it stops.

A cast-iron pot that's never once been washed empty, no matter the occasion or how many bowls are served. The bottom's seasoned black the way a pot gets from decades of use, the handle wrapped in cloth gone stiff and dark. Ladle out a bowl and the level in the pot doesn't drop, filled right back up to the same mark by the time the spoon's out again. It smells like it's simmering even stone cold, and whoever's closest to it tends to get hungry faster than they should.

Hardness 3 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

Always Enough (Social, 2 dice vs. Presence, triggered by eating from it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Obligated - a target who loses a Poise Level to it feels a real compulsion to return the favor somehow, to someone, before the week is out.

A small flannel charm bag, stitched shut, that's heavier than it should be and occasionally shifts on its own. The flannel's faded from red to a dull rust color, the stitching tight and even, done by a hand that knew what it was doing. It's noticeably heavier than a bag that size should be for whatever's rattling around inside, and every so often it settles, like something in there is getting comfortable. Press it between two fingers and you can feel something hard and uneven through the cloth, more than one shape, none of them soft.

Hardness 3 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

Bite Back (Physical, 3 dice vs. Soak, triggered by opening it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Meant to Protect Someone - the bag never triggers against whoever it was originally made for, only against anyone else who opens it.

An old, worn coin, left where two roads meet, that keeps turning up in your pocket after you've already spent it. The face is worn smooth past recognition, whatever was minted on it rubbed down to a suggestion rather than an image. It's always a little colder than the other coins around it, easy to pick out by feel alone in a pocket full of change. However far you throw it, however deliberately you leave it behind, it has a way of ending up back in the same pocket by the end of the day.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Owed a Trade (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by pocketing it a second time - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Always Comes Back - genuinely discarding it (not just spending it) only works at an actual crossroads, and only once per Month.

A single cobalt bottle, meant to hang on a bottle tree's bare branch, that hums faintly when you're being watched. The glass is thick and old-fashioned, bubbled in places the way hand-blown glass gets, the neck worn smooth where it's hung from wire for years. Held up to sunlight it throws blue light that seems slightly too saturated for how much sun is actually coming through it. The hum is low, almost below hearing, more felt in the teeth than heard in the ears, and it only starts once there's actually something worth being warned about.

Hardness 1 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Something's Caught (Mental, 2 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by holding it up to the light - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Actually Useful - a target who succeeds against the effect instead gains a genuine, GM-adjudicated warning about a real nearby threat, reflecting the ornament's original protective purpose.

A thick black candle that's burned for as long as anyone's owned it and never gotten shorter. The wax is matte black all the way through, not just dyed on the surface, and the wick stays trimmed to the same short length no matter how long it burns. The flame doesn't flicker in a draft that would gutter any normal candle, holding steady and upright like it's burning somewhere without air currents at all. It gives off real heat close up, but the wax pooled at the base never seems to actually melt.

Hardness 2 · Health Levels 1 · Stationary

Sit With It (Mental, 3 dice vs. Psyche, triggered by watching the flame for more than a minute - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Keeps Something Lit - extinguishing it by any means only works for one Round before it relights itself, unless whatever it's "for" is resolved narratively (GM's call).

A small drawstring pouch, sewn shut with red thread, that was never meant to be opened by anyone but the person it was made for. The cloth is plain and unmarked, the red thread pulled tight in stitches meant to be permanent, not decorative. It's dense with contents that shift and settle when moved, giving no clue by shape or sound what's actually inside. The knot at the drawstring resists picking apart by hand, tight in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidental, like it was tied by someone who didn't want it opened casually.

Hardness 4 · Health Levels 2 · Stationary

Not Yours to Open (Social, 4 dice vs. Presence, triggered by opening it - no to-hit roll)

Traits: Backfires Hard - unlike the rest of this file's entries, this one deliberately punishes the wrong hands; a target who loses all their Poise Levels to it in one triggering becomes Flustered immediately, no partial-connect grace.

A heavy steel cuff, a Foundation property tag riveted to the inside. A small charge-indicator light on its face stays lit whether or not it's been used. The steel is scuffed and scratched from field use, the hinge worn smooth where it opens and closes, nothing about it visually distinguishing a charged unit from a spent one beyond that light. It's cold to the touch even after being carried in a warm pocket for hours, standard for Foundation-issue gear that's seen this much handling. The property tag lists a case number instead of a name, riveted on slightly crooked, like it was attached in a hurry.

Function: forcibly severs a non-corporeal entity from a living host without lethal harm to the host.

Uses: single use per charge cycle - the indicator light goes dark once spent, and there's no known field method to recharge one.

Limits: requires direct physical contact with the host for a minimum of 4 seconds, uninterrupted. Not built for combat and does nothing against a target that isn't currently possessed. Whether a given unit still has a charge left, and what happens if one is ever used on a PC, is a GM call.

Turned up in a mortuary that had not ordered it, with no delivery note and nobody on the staff able to say when it had arrived. Three hundred and forty-sixth on the unknowns.

An ornate oak coffin. It is empty and it has always been empty.

Stand in front of it and there is nothing wrong. It is a coffin in a room.

Point a camera at it and there is a great deal wrong.

Anything recording within fifty meters of it starts producing something else. Not static: pictures, moving, detailed, and unpleasant. What they show varies with the equipment and with how close it is, and there is no pattern anybody has found.

The people standing there see none of it. They are in an ordinary room with an ordinary coffin and nothing is happening.

Inside five meters the footage stops being merely unpleasant. What comes off a camera at that distance does lasting damage to most people who watch it, and the file records the assessments in a way that makes the point without describing the content.

That is the whole effect. Nobody has been hurt by being near it. People have been hurt by watching what the cameras made.

It cannot be opened by anybody who is looking at it. It has been found open on footage.

Stored in a room with no fixed camera, no window, and a fifty meter exclusion for any device that records.

The exclusion covers telephones, and that is enforced at the door of the building rather than the room.

It is inspected by eye, monthly, by two people, who write down what they saw.

Footage that exists is sealed and is not viewed. The inventory of it is a list of dates and lengths.

Nothing recorded within five meters is retained. That was the decision after the second incident and it is not revisited.

Hardness 2 · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 4 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Nothing Is Wrong In The Room - it is a coffin, and it is empty. Everything Is Wrong On The Tape - within fifty meters, and worse as you close. Five Meters Is The Line - and what comes off inside it hurts people. It Has Been Open On Camera - and shut when anybody looked.

Give them a body-camera feed and a colleague in the room saying everything is fine.

Never describe the footage. Describe the face of the person watching it.

Somebody has a phone. That is the whole session.

Handed in by a widow who had been given it at a funeral and who said, calmly and repeatedly, that it was not her husband's. Three hundred and fifty-third on the unknowns.

A folded burial flag of the sort given to a family at a military funeral, dated to the middle of the last decade.

Own it and you remember somebody.

It has to be willing. If it is put in your locker without your knowledge, nothing happens. You have to think of it as yours, and then it starts, and distance makes no difference after that.

What arrives is a person. Not a name and a fact: a whole one. What they were like, what they were bad at, how they took their tea, an argument you had with them in a car in the rain.

They are not anybody. Every one of these people has been searched for properly and none of them has ever existed.

The memories are consistent between people. Two owners, years apart, who never met, will describe the same man, the same jokes, the same car.

It is not distressing while it is happening. People describe it as having a friend.

Giving the flag away ends it, and the memories go with it, and everybody who has given it away has asked for it back at least once.

Held in the standard archival box in general items, unowned, which is a condition rather than a location and is stated in the procedure.

Nobody on the file is to consider themselves responsible for it. The wording of the duty roster was changed for that reason.

Previous owners are traced where possible and are offered support. Most decline.

The composite of the person is held separately and is not shown to anybody who has held the flag.

It is not to be issued, presented, or included in any ceremony, ever, and the reason for that instruction is on the file.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Traits: You Have To Want It - nothing happens if it is slipped into your kit. Then You Knew Him - properly, for years, in detail. He Never Existed - and the checks were thorough. Everybody Describes The Same Man - down to the car.

Give it to a player and let them tell the table about their friend.

Nothing bad happens. Let them have him for three sessions.

Taking it away takes him. Ask them to hand it over and watch what they do.

A cemetery in Indiana reported that visitors kept coming to the office to ask after a man none of the staff had heard of, and all of them spoke about him as though they had known him. Third in Indiana.

A granite headstone. A name, two years, and a line underneath calling the man a loving father, a caring husband and a fine magician, and saying he is remembered fondly.

Read it and understand it and you will remember it exactly, and everything around you at the time, for good.

You will also think well of him. Not vaguely. You will feel admiration and you will talk about him as though you knew him, and you will not be able to say where any of it came from.

Ordinary treatment does not shift it. Heavier treatment takes most of it.

The records are all consistent. He was buried there, under that stone, and he lived in the town on and off, and he worked as a magician at parties and functions. His wife died five years before he did and is buried beside him, and her stone is nothing but a stone.

He had a son, born in the nineties. Nobody knows where the son is.

Where the stone used to stand, something still happens.

Every Friday, at thirty-four minutes past three in the afternoon, a flower appears. The kind varies and they are always the kind people give when they mean it. The flowers are flowers and can be picked up.

About one time in three there is a letter with it.

The letters are ordinary paper and ordinary handwriting. They say that things are going better, that he has met people, that he is thinking about going back to study, that he will visit soon.

They are signed with a first name. They ask whether he would be proud.

The stone is held flat in a store, face down, and the inscription is not read.

Anybody who has read it is recorded rather than treated, unless they ask, and the request is granted without discussion.

The original plot is inside a conservation fence with a maintenance pretext and is visited every Friday afternoon.

Flowers are removed and logged. Letters are photographed, transcribed and retained.

The search for the son is open and is run as a welfare trace rather than a recovery.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 3 · Movement Rate -

Traits: You Will Remember It Forever - the words and the whole afternoon around them. You Will Admire Him - and you will talk as though you knew him. The Flowers Come Anyway - every Friday, at the same minute, on an empty plot. One In Three Has A Letter - and they are getting better, and they want to visit.

Give the players the inscription. Do not tell them it has done anything.

Nobody has told the son the stone was taken away.

Somebody at your table will want to put it back. That is the session.

Came out of a customs seizure of undeclared antiquities on the river, in a crate with nineteen other pieces, none of which does anything. Ninth on the Orleans Parish list.

An embalmer's mask, made of layered linen and plaster, shaped as a jackal's head. It has no eyeholes.

Bring a dead body within ten meters and it goes to the body, through the air, and fits itself over the head.

Then it tips back and the organs come out through the nostrils of the mask.

It takes twenty to thirty-five minutes. The body dries out as it goes and what is left at the end is properly mummified, to a standard the department's own specialists describe as better than they could do.

If there are several bodies in range it does them one after another until there are none left.

What comes out turns into animals.

They look like golden wolves and their genetics say golden wolf. They have no organs of their own. Inside each one there is a single human organ, of the kind it was made from, and it works, and it keeps the animal alive.

The organ matches the blood type of the person it came out of.

Take it out and the animal grows another in two or three weeks.

So the register has one of these for each blood group for the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, the pancreas, the intestines and the stomach, and they are the reason a number of Foundation staff are still working.

They eat, they drink, they need exercise, and they behave like dogs.

The ones made from a brain are not kept. The instruction is one line and does not explain itself, and the file has no record of any of them having been observed for more than an hour.

The mask is held apart from anything dead and the store has no mortuary within a hundred meters.

The animals are kenneled properly, exercised, and named, and they are named by the staff who look after them rather than by the file.

Harvest is surgical, under anesthetic, on a rotation that allows full regrowth, and it is reviewed by a veterinary officer who has the authority to refuse.

She has refused eleven times.

Hardness 3 · Attack 4 · Defense 5 · Health Levels 7 · Movement Rate 12

One of the animals. The mask is an object and moves slowly.

Traits: Ten Meters - and it goes to the body and gets on. Half An Hour - and the body is a mummy, done well. One Organ Each - matched to a blood group, and it grows back. The Brain Ones - are not kept.

The wolves are good company and the group will get attached to one.

Then somebody they know needs a liver.

The eleven refusals are the entry. Somebody has the authority to say no and has used it.

Came out of a cemetery office's store during a disposal of unwanted furnishings, having been in the same crate since the eighteenth century with a label giving only an Italian workshop name. Tenth on the Orleans Parish list.

A marble group a little under life size: a woman knelt over a young man laid out on the ground.

It moves.

She takes him by the shoulders and shakes him. She stops, and she looks at his face, and she shakes him again, and her own face and body do the sobbing that goes with it. There is no sound at any point. He does not move on his own and is moved only by her.

The carving does what flesh does while she is doing it. The skin of his arm gives where her fingers press, her shoulders draw in, the cloth gathers. Put a hand on any of it and it is cold stone that does not yield at all, and it goes on moving under your palm.

It has never stopped and it has never varied. Four centuries of the same shaking.

Her mouth opens as part of the cycle.

The records that came with it mention a child who put their fingers in it and lost them. Imaging of the interior of the figure found eleven fingers, from at least three people, and a quantity of coins in a dozen currencies, the oldest of them contemporary with the carving.

Somebody has been feeding her for four hundred years and nobody wrote that part down.

Displayed, not stored, on a plinth with a rail at a meter and a half, in a room with a bench in it.

The mouth is not obstructed, because obstructing it was tried and the obstruction is now inside her.

Visitors are permitted and encouraged. Coins are not carried into the room. Staff are briefed that the urge to put something in is common, ordinary, and not an effect.

Hardness 8 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 20 · Movement Rate -

Traits: She Shakes Him - the same four hundred years of it, silently. Flesh To Look At, Stone To Touch - both at once, and it does not stop for your hand. The Mouth Opens - as part of the cycle, on its own. Eleven Fingers And The Coins - and no record of who.

Describe the grief first and the mechanism second. Let a player watch it for a while.

Somebody will reach out. That is not a compulsion and you should not roll for it.

The horror is the coins. Four hundred years of people deciding it was a wishing well.

Came out of the estate of a French anatomist who had been a field surgeon in the First World War, along with a great many notebooks and three other devices that do nothing. Eleventh on the Orleans Parish list.

A coffin, upright, oak, nearly four meters tall, which is a machine.

There is a brass plate on the front. It says, in French, to open it at midnight, and it is signed.

The lid is cracked and through the crack you can see some of the inside: steel gearing, copper tubing, glass vials of liquid, bellows of wood and canvas, pulleys, pistons, and a great deal that nobody can name.

It cannot be imaged. Radiography does not work, and worse, enough of it sets the thing off. What can be seen through the crack is packed so densely that nothing has been able to reach past the first few centimeters.

It is built to do something to how people perceive.

When it runs, everybody near it goes into catatonic shock, at once. Seven in a hundred of those die of it immediately.

The area it reaches keeps growing for as long as it is running.

What it actually does is not known, because nobody who has been through it has been able to communicate anything afterwards, ever, by any means.

They are alive. Several of them are still alive. They are fed and turned and talked to and they have been for a long time.

The notebooks do not explain it. They are the notebooks of a careful, decent man writing about wound closure, shock and triage, and the device is not mentioned in any of them.

Held in a vault with no personnel permitted within the largest recorded radius, which is on the door.

Nothing that emits is used near it. That includes imaging, radar, and two categories of detector that were found out the hard way.

The lid is strapped, not sealed, because it must not be worked on.

Nobody opens it. It is now half past eleven somewhere at all times, and that sentence is in the file, written by whoever did the site assessment.

Hardness 6 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 15 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Open At Midnight - which is what the plate says, and nobody knows why. Catatonia - immediate, for everybody in range, and one in fourteen does not survive it. The Radius Grows - for as long as it is running. Nobody Has Ever Said - what it did to them.

The survivors are the entry. Put the players in a ward with forty of them.

Never let anybody see inside. The crack shows gears and nothing else.

He was a good doctor. The notebooks should be kind and practical the whole way through.

Bought as a lot from a county museum that was closing, on the strength of a note in the accession book about the last time they had been played. Three hundred and seventy-sixth on the unknowns.

Twenty-seven brass and percussion instruments of the eighteen seventies. Ten drums, nine cornets, four saxhorns, two fiddles, two bugles.

Each one has a five-sided mark pressed into it, crudely, by hand.

Play them together, enough of them, close enough, and everybody for twenty to eighty square kilometers goes somewhere else.

They arrive in a version of the same place as it was in the eighteen sixties, in wartime, and it is thorough: the ground, the buildings, the weather, the smell of it.

Everybody except the players changes as well. They arrive dressed for it, armed for it, and believing themselves to be in it, and they do not remember anything else while they are there.

The players do not. They keep themselves and they keep the instruments, and they can stop, and stopping ends it.

What happens in between is what happens in a war.

People who come back come back with the injuries they took, and the count of those is in the file, and so is the count of the people who did not come back at all.

It has happened four times since the instruments were made. Three of those were accidents.

The instruments are held in twenty-seven separate cases in four separate stores at three sites.

No more than six are ever in the same building.

They are not played. Not tested, not tuned, not cleaned by anybody who can play.

The mark has been traced to a regimental band that was mustered in eighteen sixty-one and disbanded in eighteen sixty-five, and the roll of that band is in the file and eleven of them came home.

Museum and auction monitoring runs for any instrument carrying the mark. Six are unaccounted for.

Hardness - · Attack 9 · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Play Them Together - and everybody within eighty square kilometers goes. They Arrive Believing It - dressed for it, armed, and with no memory of anything else. The Players Keep Themselves - and they can stop whenever they like. Six Are Missing - and somebody has them.

The party are not the players. Let them wake up in it.

Whoever is playing can end it. Make the party work out who that is.

Eleven of the original band came home. That is in the file for a reason.

Came out of a laboratory's effects when the company was wound up. A plate on the case says it was built in the tens and modified in the forties, at a firm with a name and no other trace. Forty-ninth on the unknowns.

A disc phonograph in a wooden case, crank driven, with a tarnished silver horn.

Play any record on it and about every fourth word is different.

The rest is the record, exactly. The substitutions are in the same voice, in the same key, in time, and if you are not listening for them you will hear a song with an odd lyric. Written down in order, the substituted words make sentences, and the sentences are somebody talking to you.

They answer. Ask a question out loud and the next few substitutions are the reply, which means a conversation runs at the speed of the record and nobody gets to be impatient.

One record, one speaker. The same disc always gives the same one and they are consistent: they have manners, opinions, things they will not discuss.

They do not remember. Play the record again and the same speaker starts again, pleased to meet you, with no recollection of anything said before. This has been tested exhaustively by people who wanted very much for it to be otherwise.

The site has four hundred records and has catalogued a hundred and nine speakers. Some discs give nothing. One gives somebody who only ever asks what year it is, and is told, and the file notes that the answer does not distress them.

In a case with its records, in a dry room. Sessions are booked, transcribed word by word, and filed under the disc rather than under the speaker, which was a filing decision and has been complained about for years.

Nothing is to be promised to a speaker, because a promise cannot be kept past the end of the side.

Hardness 2 · Attack - · Defense 2 · Health Levels 3 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Every Fourth Word - in the voice, in time, and it will answer you. One Disc, One Person - consistent in manner and opinion across decades of sessions. No Memory - every playing is the first, and every goodbye is the only one.

Run it in real time. The players ask a question and then sit through forty seconds of a song waiting for four words, and you should make them wait.

Pick one speaker and make them worth the trouble: a good source, funny, and genuinely helpful. The party will come back. Every time, introduce yourself again.

The one who asks what year it is should turn up late in a campaign, on a disc nobody has played in decades, and the party should be the ones who have to answer.

Came out of a private collection of recorded sound with the rest of a bequest, correctly catalogued, with a note from the previous owner asking that it be kept together. Ninety-eighth on the unknowns.

A phonograph of about nineteen hundred in a mahogany case, of an unusual design: it takes four cylinders at once and will play all four together. It works perfectly and has never been repaired.

With it are four cylinders. They are of the right age and they are steel rather than wax, and each has two words and a number engraved on the ends. The number is a frequency.

Each cylinder plays one pure tone. Not a recording of a tone: a tone, clean, with no surface noise and no mechanism audible under it, which a wax cylinder on a spring motor cannot produce and which this one does.

Played singly they are four notes.

Played together they are not. The four in combination do something, and the file describes the effects of the eleven combinations that have been tried, and the descriptions get shorter as the list goes on.

Six combinations have not been tried. The reasoning is in a memorandum and the memorandum is one paragraph and has never been challenged.

The previous owner's note asked that the set be kept together. He knew what it did. His papers are in the file and they are the work of somebody who had been careful for a long time.

In its case, in a strongroom, with the four cylinders in the four slots, because the note asked and because separating them was tried in the sixties.

The motor is not wound. The crank is held separately by a different department in a different building, which is theater and is admitted to be theater in the procedure itself.

Any proposal involving an untried combination goes to the same committee and has been refused each time by the same margin.

Hardness 3 · Attack - · Defense 2 · Health Levels 4 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Four At Once - which is what the machine is for and what makes it dangerous. Eleven Tried - and the accounts of them get shorter as they go. Six Untried - refused repeatedly, by the same committee, by the same margin.

The party will be asked to move it. That is the adventure: a mahogany case across three hundred miles, and a crank in a different vehicle.

If you ever play it, play one cylinder. One pure note in a room, going on longer than a note should, and nothing else happens.

The six untried combinations are the campaign and you should never resolve them. If somebody in the party proposes a test, let them write the application, and let the committee refuse it.

Taken from a symphony orchestra, along with every instrument in the building, after a review appeared describing a concert nobody in the hall had enjoyed and nobody could say why. Two hundred and thirty-fifth on the unplaced list.

A violin, old, in poor condition. Chipped sound holes, a crack running into the neck, gut strings going to fray.

Played alone it sounds exactly as bad as it looks.

Played alongside other instruments it mends itself.

The repair runs faster the more instruments there are and the better they are played, and the sound it makes improves in step with its condition. With a full orchestra behind it, it went from firewood to something the players compared to the great instruments in seventeen minutes.

Stop playing it and it comes apart again. From best to worst takes about fifteen days.

The cost is the other instruments.

Anything played with it, or within about ten meters of it in line of sight, stops being able to make music. It still makes sound. A computer analyzing that sound finds music in it, correctly structured, exactly as before.

Nothing alive hears it that way. Not people, not apes, not dogs, not whales, not bees, and a test was run on plants, and there is no difference between what those instruments produce and a white noise generator.

The people playing them can still hear music from everything else. Only the instruments are ruined, and they are ruined permanently.

A hundred and forty of them are in store.

A case, alone, in a room with nothing musical in it.

It is not played. Repair by ordinary means has been attempted, does not hold and is no longer attempted.

Staff assigned to this file are asked whether they play anything, and the reason for the question is on the form.

The ruined instruments are kept together. Several were valuable. Two were somebody's.

Hardness 1 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 2 · Movement Rate -

Traits: It Mends While You Play - faster with more, and better, around it. It Falls Apart Again - fifteen days from the top. It Eats The Others - permanently, and everything alive agrees they are dead. Seventeen Minutes - from firewood to a masterpiece, given an orchestra.

Let a player hear it at its best. Once.

The ruined instruments still look fine and still work. Let somebody try to sell one.

The store is the entry. A hundred and forty, and two of them had names on the case.

Bought in at a house clearance. The clearance was necessary because the previous owner had been at the keyboard for nine days. Two hundred and forty-ninth on the unplaced list.

A baby grand, black, gloss finish, ordinary make.

It has not been tuned since it came in and it is perfectly in tune, and it is in excellent condition, and it weighs and measures what a piano of that model weighs and measures.

Play a piece on it and get it wrong, or stop before the end, and somebody appears.

It takes the form of whoever wrote the piece, or arranged it, and it is recognisably them.

It does not eat or drink. It sleeps.

It teaches.

It stays with the person who played, and it works with them on that piece, and it is patient and thorough and it does not leave.

It goes when the piece is played perfectly and it is satisfied, and it holds everybody to the same standard whether the piece is a nursery rhyme or something nobody alive can play.

It makes allowances for a body. Somebody with a hand injury is held to what that hand can do, and the file records that as the only mercy in the effect.

Otherwise it goes when the student dies.

While one is present the piano does nothing. There is only ever one.

A room with the piano in it, locked, and the key held by two people.

Nobody plays it. Nobody plays anything on it, including scales.

If one is manifested, the student is supported: quarters, food, a physiotherapist, and a rotation of people to sit with them.

Four have finished. Two took days. One took eleven months. The fourth is in the file with the piece named and the date.

Hardness 2 · Attack - · Defense 3 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate 7

It has never touched anybody. It does not need to.

Traits: Get It Wrong And They Come - the composer, or whoever arranged it. They Stay - until it is perfect, and they are patient. The Same Standard For Everything - a simple tune and a hard one are judged alike. Or Until You Die - which is the other way it ends.

Play the teacher as genuinely kind. They want you to get it.

Nursery rhymes are the trap. Everybody thinks they can manage one.

The eleven months are the entry. Ask what they talked about.

Came in on a reel of tape in a box of tapes from a university language department that was closing and did not know what half of its holdings were. One hundred and fortieth on the unknowns.

A recording of a song, sung by several voices without instruments, in a language that has not been identified and does not resemble one.

The tape holds about thirty minutes and stops abruptly, and the stop is in the middle of a phrase, so there was more.

Everybody who hears it finds it beautiful. Not interesting: beautiful, in the specific way that makes people stop what they are doing, and the descriptions across four decades of listeners are unusually consistent.

While it plays, cells divide.

Everything living within earshot grows. Tissue is generated rapidly and correctly: wounds close, fractures knit, damaged organs rebuild, and the work is not sloppy and does not produce tumors.

It does not stop at the injury.

Everything grows. Healthy tissue grows too, at the same rate, and it does not know when to stop, and a long exposure produces a person who is in excellent health and is no longer the right shape.

Short exposures are extraordinary and are the reason this file is Level 4 rather than sealed. Ninety seconds will close a wound that would have needed surgery.

The figures are in the file: what ninety seconds does, what four minutes does, and what eleven minutes did, once, in 1978.

The tape is in a vault. A master copy exists and is in a different vault and has never been played.

Playback requires two authorizations, a stopwatch, and a second person whose only duty is the stopwatch. Nothing else is in the room.

The instruction on duration is absolute and the number is small.

Nobody may hear it twice in a calendar year. That rule is about the wanting to, and the file says so.

Hardness 2 · Attack - · Defense 1 · Health Levels 3 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Ninety Seconds - closes what surgery would have had to. It Does Not Stop - healthy tissue grows at the same rate and never knows when to stop. People Want To Hear It Again - all of them, and the rule exists for that reason.

The party will have a dying colleague and a stopwatch, and somebody has to hold the button.

Play the beauty first and the mathematics second. Describe the song properly before anybody mentions the figures.

1978 is in the file with a duration and no other detail. Give them the number and let them work out why nobody wrote the rest down.

Came in from a second-hand shop with a box of tapes, labeled in ballpoint with the name of a band that never existed. Four hundred and forty-fourth on the unknowns.

A cassette from about nineteen eighty-three, slightly damaged, with thirty-two minutes of music on it by a group nobody can trace.

The music is competent and is of its period and is not remarkable.

At two minutes and seven seconds, something happens.

It requires a cassette player and it requires the tape to run to that point. Digital copies do nothing and neither does a transcription and neither does somebody singing it.

What happens to the listener is in the annex, and the annex is medical, and the summary is that it is quick.

The player does not have to be in the room. Anywhere within earshot is enough.

Nobody has heard it and lived, except the first four seconds, which several people have.

Those four seconds are described as ordinary music.

The tape has been played twice since acquisition. Both times were accidents and both are incidents.

It is not damaged by playing. It rewinds and it works again.

Nobody knows what the band were and nobody has found any other recording, and the ballpoint on the label is a person's handwriting and has not been identified.

Held in a sealed case with the tape spooled to the start and the case is not opened.

No cassette equipment is permitted in the building. That is enforced at the door and it is the only reason this file has not killed anybody since.

The case is checked by weight.

The recovery program covers the second-hand trade for the band name, and nothing has ever turned up.

The two incidents are in the file with the names.

Hardness - · Attack 10 · Defense - · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Two Minutes And Seven Seconds - and it has to be the tape, in a player. Copies Do Nothing - digital, sung, or written out. Anywhere In Earshot - the player does not need to be in the room. The First Four Seconds Are Fine - and several people have heard them.

Let somebody press play. Then count out loud.

Four seconds is ordinary music. Give them that much.

Nobody is in the room with a cassette player. Make the party bring one in.

A recording of a well known mass, by an orchestra nobody can identify, on a tape that was in a box of ordinary tapes. Four hundred and nineteenth on the unknowns.

A recording of a piece of sacred music that has been recorded a great many times. This performance is not any of them and no orchestra has claimed it.

There is something underneath it. It runs the length of the recording and it is outside what anybody can hear, and it is doing the work.

For a long time the file said it produced illusions.

It does not. What it does is show the listener somewhere real.

The listener sits and what they perceive is another place: a room, a street, a hillside, in real time, with sound and with everything else.

They can describe it while it is happening. Their descriptions have been checked. When the place has been identified afterwards, what they said was going on there was what was going on there, including things that could not have been guessed.

They do not choose the place. Whether anything chooses it has not been established.

They are not there. Nothing they do affects it and nothing has ever noticed them, with four exceptions, and the four exceptions are in the annex and are the reason for the current procedure.

The effect ends with the recording. Fifty-one minutes.

Held as the original tape, in a case, with no playback equipment in the building.

Listening is by application, with a stated reason, in a prepared room, with a scribe.

The listener is not alone. The scribe wears protection and records what is said.

No listening beyond one session per person. That came in after the third of the four.

Places identified from a session are checked. Eleven have been and four of those were useful.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Under The Music - where nobody can hear it. You Are Somewhere Else - real, now, in detail. It Checks Out - every time anybody has been able to check. Four Times Something Looked Back - and that is why you only get one session.

Have a player describe what they see while another writes it down.

Give them something checkable. Then check it next session.

Once, at the very end, have something in the room look at them.

Came out of a closing furniture warehouse with a lot of church fittings, none of which it matched. Sixty-seventh on the unknowns.

A booth of lacquered oak, about a meter square and two meters tall, tapering slightly toward the top, with a plain door.

Inside, the two leaning walls carry mirrors facing each other, so the reflections climb away overhead and appear to meet.

They do not record. Any camera taken in shows the mirrors as flat black: not dark, not underexposed, but no light at all, while the person holding the camera can see the reflections perfectly well.

There are whispers. They come from no fixed point, they are always just under the level where words would resolve, and nobody has ever made out a phrase.

Shut the door with somebody inside and it will not open.

The duration varies and there is no way to know it in advance. The shortest recorded is under a minute. The longest is eleven hours. Nothing anybody has done from outside has shortened one, including the attempts in the eighties.

Everybody comes out having decided something.

That is the finding the file is built on. Whatever a person carried in unresolved - a question, a choice they had been putting off - they come out settled on it, certain, and able to explain themselves at length.

The decisions are not always good ones. Three are in the file as case histories and one of them cost a site.

In a store, on its side, with the door strapped.

Use requires the site head and a witness, and the witness's job is to write down what the subject went in undecided about, before they go in, in their own words.

That form is compared with what they say afterwards. The comparison is the entire research output of this file and it has one conclusion, stated twice.

Hardness 4 · Attack - · Defense 3 · Health Levels 6 · Movement Rate -

Traits: The Door Holds - a minute to eleven hours, unpredictable, unforceable. No Reflections On Film - black, from a camera held by somebody who can see them. You Come Out Sure - about whatever you took in, and you will defend it.

Make the player write it down before their character goes in. One sentence, on paper, about what they cannot decide.

Then roll nothing. Ask them, when the door opens, what they decided, and hold them to it for the rest of the campaign.

The booth is the best thing in the register for a party that has been arguing about the same thing for six sessions, and it is the worst thing in the register for the same reason.

Came out of a private collection whose catalog described it as a chamber organ of the fifteenth century and said nothing else about it. Two hundred and thirty-fourth on the unplaced list.

A chamber organ, small, of no identifiable maker, built around the fourteen hundreds. Like everything of its date it has no stops.

Play it and the blood comes out of everybody who can hear it.

It leaves through the skin, slowly, and as it goes it changes into a fibrous material, so what comes off a person is not a spill but a growth of red threads.

They are held still while it happens by something they describe as an enormous weight. They are awake for it. It stops the moment the playing stops, and how far it has gone by then is what decides whether they live.

There is a safe area. A wedge behind the keyboard, thirty degrees wide, two meters deep, and the player is in it. That is the whole of the protection and it was clearly built in.

It is sound and nothing else. A person in a soundproofed box beside it is unaffected. Noise cancellation reduces it to crushing pain and high blood pressure and has never removed it.

A recording does nothing at all. Whatever is doing this is not in the frequencies that equipment records, and nobody has found what is missing.

The material itself is the part that gets requested.

Chemically it is blood. It carries oxygen. It darkens and goes purple and comes back to red exactly as blood does.

Physically it is something else. It stretches without limit, it has never been pulled to its breaking point by any rig applied to it, and nothing that has been tried has torn it. It can be burned. It stays at body temperature for as long as the effect lasts.

A sealed and soundproofed room, on its own foundation, and the room is not opened while anybody is on that floor.

It is not played. Authorization to play it exists and has been used eleven times and requires four signatures, and two of those signatures have to be from people who will be in the wedge.

The recovered material is stored. There are about nine kilograms of it and it is not disposed of, because the disposal method is burning, and the file will not authorize burning it.

Hardness 2 · Attack 11 · Defense 0 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Everybody Who Can Hear - through walls, through floors, at any volume. Behind The Keyboard - thirty degrees, two meters, and that is all. It Stops When The Music Stops - so somebody has to decide when. The Threads - which are blood, and which will not break.

Somebody has to play it. Make that the decision and make the players make it.

Describe the weight before the blood. They cannot move and they can see.

The nine kilograms in store is the entry. Somebody would not sign the order to burn it.

Recovered from a parish during a diocesan reorganization, in a fitted case, catalogued by the church as a funeral bell and by the inventory as "not to be sold". Twelfth on the Orleans Parish list.

It came with its own instructions, on a card in the case, in a hand nobody has dated. The card says when to ring it and how many times, and the Foundation has never deviated from it.

An iron hand bell, ornate, small enough to hold, made somewhere around the end of the fourteenth century.

Rung, it gives one clear note and holds it longer than iron should.

The ringer, and only the ringer, then sees somebody. Not a shape and not a suggestion: a person, solid, present, standing where there is room for them, for up to ten minutes. The person is always somebody the ringer has lost, and it is not chosen by the ringer.

They do not speak. They are aware of the ringer and they are not distressed. They look how the ringer remembers them rather than how they were.

It ends. There is no way to extend it and ringing again does nothing that day.

Nobody has been harmed by it. Four people have asked to be allowed to ring it a second time and all four requests are in the file with the same handwritten decision on them.

Held in its case with the card. Rung only on the card's schedule and only by staff who have volunteered, in a room with one other person present who does not see anything and whose job is the clock.

The four requests were refused. The reason given was the same each time and is one sentence long.

Hardness 2 · Attack - · Defense 5 · Health Levels 2 · Movement Rate -

Traits: One Ringer - only the person who rang it sees anything, and nobody else in the room ever has. Not Your Choice - the bell selects, and it has never selected somebody the ringer would have picked. Ten Minutes - and then it is over, and the same day it will not work again.

Ask the player who their character rang for, then give them somebody else. Somebody they had not thought about in years, or had not finished with. Ten minutes of a person who will not speak and is not upset.

The four refused requests are the whole item. Make sure a player wants to ring it again, and make sure the refusal comes from a Foundation that has seen this before and has one sentence ready.

Came in from a showman's yard where it had stood under a tarpaulin since a fire, and where the owner's family were very clear that they did not want it and would not take money for it. One hundred and seventeenth on the unknowns.

A mobile kiosk for making and selling candyfloss, with carved and painted panels and an arched sign. The sign says the candyfloss is free with admission.

There is smoke and fire damage down one side.

Five parts work together and none of them does anything alone: the spinning drum, a small pump, a reservoir under the counter, the sign, and the register. Remove any one and the kiosk is a kiosk. Put it back and it is not.

The reservoir does not need filling. It has not been filled since the Foundation acquired it and it has produced several hundred servings, and what is in it is not sugar syrup and has been analyzed twice and the second analysis was not circulated.

The candyfloss is ordinary. It tastes correct, it is chemically sugar, and eating it does nothing at all.

The anomaly is the line.

Put the kiosk anywhere with people passing and a line forms. Nobody decides to join it. They are walking past and then they are third in line, and asked why, they say they fancied some, and that is a complete and sincere answer.

The line is orderly and patient and it does not disperse while the machine is running. It has reached ninety-one people. The register takes no money and nobody has ever complained about that.

Stored disassembled, in five crates, in three rooms. That is the containment and it was arrived at by somebody who read the description carefully.

The reservoir crate is sealed and is not opened.

Assembly requires four signatures and has happened twice since the seventies, both times outdoors, both times with a cordon, and both times the cordon had people standing in line at it.

Hardness 4 · Attack - · Defense 2 · Health Levels 8 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Five Parts - and none of them is anything on its own. **The Reservoir** - never filled, never empty, analyzed twice and reported once. People Line Up - without deciding to, patiently, and they will tell you they fancied some.

Run it as crowd control. The party set it up for an operation that needs a crowd, and the crowd arrives, and now the party have ninety people standing in a line.

The horror is asking somebody in the line why they are there. Play the answer straight: they fancied some, they will get to the front in a minute, and would you mind not pushing in.

The second analysis is the file the party should not be able to find. Let them find the cover sheet.

Came out of the back of a seaside arcade that was closing, among a lot of machines that were sold for parts. The cord had been cut before it reached the Foundation and nobody knows by whom. One hundred and sixteenth on the unknowns.

A fortune-telling machine about two meters tall, in a glass and wood case, with a mechanical puppet of an elderly woman inside it in a white blouse and a blue shawl. There is an electric candle by her hands.

The power cord was cut fifteen centimeters from the base, badly, with something blunt. It has never been repaired.

It works anyway.

Coins do nothing. The slot is a slot. The machine energizes when it decides to, which is roughly once two weeks and has never been predicted, and when it does the candle lights, the puppet moves, and a card comes out of the tray.

The cards are printed, on old stock, in the machine's own typeface. They are addressed to somebody in the room by name.

They are not fortunes. They are one true sentence about that person which they have not told anybody, phrased kindly, and they are never about the future.

Nine hundred cards have been produced. The archive is complete and is restricted, and the restriction is not about security.

Three people have asked to have theirs destroyed and three have been destroyed, and the register of what they said is not kept.

In a store room with a chair in front of it, which is not in the procedure and is in the room.

When it energizes, whoever is present takes the card, reads it, and decides what to do with it. Nothing is required of them. The department asks only that they say whether it was true, on a form with one box, and most of them tick it.

Nobody is rostered to be alone with it. That rule is for the staff.

Hardness 3 · Attack - · Defense 2 · Health Levels 5 · Movement Rate -

Traits: No Power - the cord was cut and it runs on nothing. Once A Two Weeks - unpredicted, unprompted, and coins are irrelevant. One True Sentence - about somebody in the room, kindly put, never about the future.

When it goes off, ask the player what their character has never told anybody. Then write it on a card and hand it to them.

If they will not answer, write something yourself, and be gentle, and be right.

The archive is nine hundred people's worst secret, printed, in a cupboard, and the party have the key. What they do about that is the entry.

A closed theater in Pennsylvania where the caretaker had been going in at six every evening for nine years, and had never told anybody why. Seventh in Pennsylvania.

Four papier-mache puppets, a meter tall, on strings, with the four control bars tied together into one cross.

The material is paper and paste and nothing else, and the insides cannot be seen. Nothing has ever got a look in there.

They smell of rot, strongly, and that is not anomalous and it does not help.

At six o'clock in the evening they wake up.

They move on their own, they take an interest in things, and they are about as clever as they need to be. Outside that hour nothing gets a response.

This only happens at one theater. Take them anywhere else and they are objects, and they begin to come apart: the bodies soften and run and the smell gets worse, and it carries on until they are back within about a dozen meters of the building.

At the theater, they go to the stage and they perform.

There has never been the same performance twice. What they do changes every night and the file has nine years of descriptions and no repeats.

Somebody has to watch. One person is enough. With an empty house they do not perform and they start to decay instead.

The theater is owned through a property company and is maintained and is not let.

The puppets stay in the building. Removal is permitted for no purpose.

An officer attends at six every evening and sits in the house and watches, and writes up what was performed.

That post is filled by rotation and nobody does more than two weeks in a row. The reason is in the welfare annex.

The caretaker who was doing it before us is employed, is paid, and still attends on Fridays at his own request.

Hardness 2 · Attack 2 · Defense 3 · Health Levels 3 · Movement Rate 4

Traits: Six O'Clock, Every Evening - and nothing at any other hour. Only In That Building - take them out and they start to run. Never The Same Show Twice - nine years of it, all written down. Somebody Has To Watch - one person will do, and without one they rot.

Put a player in the seat. Ask them what they think the play was about.

Whoever is on the rotation has seen four thousand performances. Let them be tired.

If the party do not turn up, describe what is on the stage in the morning.

An ice cream van has been working an area for at least thirty years and is not registered, insured, or taxed, and nobody has ever seen who is in it. Four hundred and thirty-fifth on the unknowns.

An ice cream van, five meters long, white, with a brand name painted on it that does not correspond to any company.

It works. It drives, it plays the chime, it stops, and it serves.

Nobody has seen the person in it. There is somebody: a hand comes out and takes the money and passes the ice cream back, and the hand is a man's hand, and that is all anybody has.

The serving hatch does not show the inside. Looking through it shows the inside of a serving hatch and nothing further, from any angle, in any light.

The ice cream is ice cream and it is good and it is not anomalous.

It works residential streets in the afternoon and it works them well: it comes when children are out, it does not come when they are not, and it has never been seen anywhere that would be unprofitable.

Nothing has ever happened to anybody who bought from it. That has been checked exhaustively over eleven years and the file says so clearly.

What it does is remember.

Customers report that it knows what they had last time, and what they had as a child, and that it asks after people by name, and that the voice is friendly.

Several adults have been served by it and been asked how their mother is, by name, having last bought from it thirty years earlier.

The van is tracked through the ordinary road network and it is not intercepted.

Interception has been attempted four times. On each occasion the van was not where it had been and the file describes those attempts as unproductive.

Observation is from a distance and the observers buy ice cream.

The brand name has been researched and does not exist.

Nothing is done about it, because nothing has happened, and the file is reviewed annually with that sentence at the top.

Hardness 4 · Attack - · Defense 7 · Health Levels 6 · Movement Rate 7

Traits: Nobody Has Seen The Driver - just a hand, and it is a man's hand. The Hatch Shows Nothing - from any angle, in any light. It Remembers You - from thirty years ago, and asks after your mother by name. Nothing Has Ever Happened - in eleven years of checking.

Play the chime. Let a character buy a ninety-nine.

It asks after somebody they have not mentioned. Use a real detail.

Nothing happens. The file is reviewed annually with that at the top.

Recovered from a lot of unmarked freight that had been sitting in a bonded warehouse long enough for the paperwork to have been destroyed. Three hundred and thirty-fifth on the unknowns.

A wooden crate, two meters by two by eight.

It is not as strong as it looks and it cannot be damaged, and those two things have been tested against each other for years.

Inside there is a table, a stool, a candle, and a man.

He is old and heavy, with long hair and a great many liver spots. There is a scar up the left side of his head, starting at an empty socket and running over a bald patch to the back of the scalp.

He has Alzheimer's. He talks to people who are not in the crate and he takes our staff for friends of his from a long time ago, which makes an interview into something else entirely.

Inside the crate he can do anything.

He changes what it looks like and he changes what is in it. He makes things and unmakes them. He makes the inside bigger than the outside, and other shapes than that, and there is a log of what it has been.

None of that reaches past the wall of the crate. He cannot affect anything out here and does not appear to know that out here exists.

He makes people.

They are made of the right material and they move about and they talk, and there is nothing alive in any of them. He is working them, all of them at once, without knowing he is doing it.

He believes they are his people. He greets them, he argues with them, he worries about one of them who is unwell.

What he has built in there, over the years, is a place with somebody in it who cares about him.

Stored in a bay with the long axis clear and nothing stacked against it.

The interior is observed through the gap at the joint, which is the only access, and is not widened.

Interviews are conducted when he is willing. Staff answer to whatever name he uses for them and do not correct him. That is a working instruction rather than a courtesy: correcting him ends the session.

Nothing is passed in and nothing is taken out.

No attempt is to be made to bring him out of it. The assessment is attached. The one sentence everybody quotes is the last one.

Hardness 8 · Attack 4 · Defense 2 · Health Levels 6 · Movement Rate 2

Inside the crate, the numbers do not apply to him and do apply to everything else.

Traits: Anything, Inside The Box - shape, size, contents, all of it. Nothing, Outside It - and he does not know there is an outside. The People Are His - and none of them is alive, and he is doing all of them. He Thinks You Are Somebody He Knew - and it goes better if you agree.

Put a player in the crate. Everything they meet is him.

Somebody in there is unwell and he is worried about them. Let the party work out what that means.

The assessment says not to bring him out. Let a player read the last sentence aloud.

Bought with the contents of a staff kitchen after two fitters reported that the wall behind the counter was further away than the wall behind the counter. Two hundred and twenty-seventh on the unplaced list.

It looks like a pod coffee machine of a common domestic pattern, about forty centimeters tall.

It is not one.

Measured rather than looked at, it is a cargo vessel a hundred meters long, of a hull form built to bring goods up from South America, and the coffee machine is where the ship's bridge would be.

The ship is there. It is transparent, it cannot be seen, and it cannot be walked through, so a room holding this object has an invisible obstruction in it running out through the walls and the floor and whatever is next door.

Three buildings have been bought for this reason.

Photographs show the coffee machine. Survey equipment shows the ship. Nobody has yet produced an account of what is happening that survives a second reading.

Bring caffeine within ten meters of the hull, in any form, and the ship sounds its horns.

The horns are measured at over a hundred and thirty decibels. Nobody hears them. Ninety-seven percent of subjects report an absence of sound, which is not the same as reporting nothing, and the interviews on that distinction are the longest documents on the file.

The horns stop when the caffeine is set down in front of the bow.

What is set down is gone by the next check. The machine, meanwhile, makes coffee, and the coffee is ordinary, and people drink it.

The room is kept as a staff kitchen because the alternative is explaining a wall.

The bow lies across a corridor on the floor below and is marked on that floor with tape and a sign about a step.

Offerings are left on the taped square. The rotation for it is on the door.

Hardness 10 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 40 · Movement Rate -

The hull. Nothing has marked it and nothing has moved it.

Traits: A Coffee Machine - to the eye, to a camera, to anybody who looks. A Hundred Meters Of Ship - to a tape measure, and it is in the way. The Horns - which nobody hears, and which everybody notices. Put It At The Bow - and it stops, and the offering goes.

Walk the players into the wall before you tell them anything.

Play the silence. Ask each of them what they were doing when it stopped.

The taped square on the floor below is the entry. Somebody is on the rotation for it this week.

Six of them came up off the California coast in a fishing net, intact, with a chemical company's markings on them. The investigation that followed was a genuine environmental investigation and it found forty- four more. Hundred and sixty-fourth on the unknowns.

A hundred steel drums of the kind used for toxic waste, in good condition, each one full to the top.

Three of them have never been opened. The other ninety-seven have, by somebody.

The contents will not be identified. It is a liquid and analysis of it has produced no useful answer in twenty years.

Put it on anything that is not the inside of one of those drums and it starts.

Within half a minute the solid matter around it is plants. Not converted into plant matter: made into whole, complete, finished organisms, roots and stems and leaves, standing where the ground was. Anything alive is taken apart into single cells first and those cells go into the process too.

The plants are not like anything. They do not photosynthesize. They do not use nitrogen or carbon dioxide. What they breathe out is a gas built on argon and cobalt, neither of which is lying around in the quantities involved. Whatever they run on, they run on it about six times as fast as anything that grows here.

They kill people slowly. The gas closes down the heart and the lungs over hours. Touching a leaf or a flower produces numbness that spreads, and then the nerves go, and then breathing goes. Thirteen hours is the average from first exposure. There is no treatment.

The liquid also makes more of itself. A spill spreads a long way past where it was spilled, and before off-site testing was stopped the furthest measured was six kilometers.

Fire plus a flood of neon stops both the plants and the spread. Nothing else does.

One more drum is found, somewhere in the world, about every three weeks. That rate has not changed since the first six.

Each drum in its own vault, separated, on a floor that is itself a containment vessel.

No opening. No sampling. No testing of any kind and the prohibition is absolute.

Standing recovery teams with incinerators and neon. The teams are busy.

There is no estimate of how many drums exist. The file carries the found-to-date figure and the rate, and has no third line.

Hardness 4 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 8 · Movement Rate -

A drum. What comes out of it has no statistics and does not need any.

Traits: Thirty Seconds - and the ground around it is a garden. Wrong All The Way Down - argon and cobalt out, and nobody knows what in. Thirteen Hours - from standing in it to dying of it. Every Three Weeks - somewhere, another one.

The plants should be beautiful and obviously not from here.

Nobody fights this. The scene is a cordon, a wind direction and a clock.

One of the three unopened drums is the campaign. Somebody is going to want to know.

Located from the other end. A pattern of small craft disappearances in one stretch of coast was plotted, the plot had a center, and there was a buoy at it. One hundred and twenty-second on the unknowns.

A red sea mark buoy of a common type, correctly registered, on station where the chart says it should be. It has damage down one side consistent with being hit by a small fast boat.

The light works. In daylight and clear weather it keeps its proper character and is an ordinary navigation mark.

In darkness or heavy weather it signals distress.

The international code, correctly formed, at the proper rate, repeating. Any seaman who sees it reads it instantly, because that is what the signal is for, and turns toward it.

There is nothing there. The buoy is a buoy on a chain over sixty meters of water and no vessel has ever been found at the position.

The boats that turn toward it are the file. Most of them arrive, find nothing, report a faulty light, and go home, and the Foundation has the reports because it asks for them.

Some of them do not go home.

There is no pattern in which. Same weather, same distance, same size of craft, and the file has tried very hard to find the difference between the ones that came back and the ones that did not.

It is on station. Removing it was tried in the first year and the buoy that replaced it began signaling within two weeks, and the original was put back.

The area is charted as foul ground and is subject to a permanent local notice warning of a defective light, which is disseminated properly and which seamen read and then go and look anyway.

A vessel is on station in poor weather during the season. Its job is to be between the signal and whoever is answering it.

Hardness 5 · Attack - · Defense 1 · Health Levels 10 · Movement Rate -

Traits: A Proper Distress Signal - correctly formed, and everybody who can read it turns. Nothing Is There - sixty meters of water and no vessel, ever. Most Of Them Come Home - and nobody has found what is different about the ones that do not.

The party are the station vessel. Bad weather, a long night, and a light on the horizon that is asking for help.

Let them answer it once and find nothing, and be cold and cross about it.

Then let a fishing boat answer it while the party are twenty minutes away, on the radio, being sensible, and let the odds be exactly what the file says they are.

Brought up from a flooded wreck off the Louisiana coast, undamaged, after an unknown time underwater. Ninth in Louisiana.

A wooden table, carved all over: nineteenth century sailing ships, things in the water that are not whales, faces, and a great deal of patterning that repeats and does not quite repeat.

Standing on it is a piece of a humpback's skull with AT YOUR BEHEST cut into it. It is not fixed to the table by any means and it cannot be lifted off.

Leave food or drink on the table and something turns up.

He is about two meters, with a long plaited beard, in armor of whalebone and steel under a black leather coat covered in ships and sea monsters. He is not entirely solid and he is not entirely not.

He gives his name and says he is the patron god of scrimshaw, which is the carving of bone and ivory by sailors.

He is polite, he is enormously good company, and he is extremely keen to talk about the work. He will look at anything anybody has carved and give an honest opinion, which is generally kind and is never wrong.

The offering is consumed at once. It does not have to be much. The first time it happened was a researcher's coffee, set down while he moved something, and the cup was empty in under two seconds.

Everything he says comes out of a transcription machine in capital letters. This has never been explained and there is no way round it.

He has asked for things. Nothing large: a good light, better bone than the fragments he has been shown, somebody to teach. The third request has been made four times.

A locker, and no food or drink carried into the room.

Contact is scheduled, monthly, with an offering chosen in advance and logged, because contact is going to happen whether or not it is scheduled and scheduling it is the only control anybody has.

The craft request is unresolved. The paper is titled as a question about precedent and has been circulating for three years.

Hardness 7 · Attack - · Defense 0 · Health Levels 16 · Movement Rate -

The table. He has never been fought and nobody has wanted to.

Traits: Leave Something Out - anything, even a coffee, and he comes. At Your Behest - the bone says so, and it will not come off. He Knows The Craft - honestly, kindly, and better than anybody living. HE TALKS LIKE THIS - in every transcript, and nobody can stop it.

Do the capitals at the table. Read his lines out loud in capitals.

He wants an apprentice. Let him ask one of the players, properly, in front of everyone.

Nothing here is a trap. Let the group work out that they cannot tell whether that is true.

One of nine lots bought at a house clearance by a Foundation buyer working from a photograph of the sale, who wanted the chest it was sitting in. Thirty-second on the unknowns.

A square lantern, wood framed, waxed paper on all four sides, with a glass cup inside it for a candle. It is about a foot tall and it is not in good condition.

Put any candle in it and light it and the paper shows a shadow.

It is a person, small, one to a side, and the four sides show the same person from four angles. The shadow is not doing anything. It stands, or it sits, or it waits, and a burn of two hours gives you two hours of somebody waiting with their hands at their sides.

It ages. Over the length of the candle the figure goes from young to old, evenly, and near the end it is bent and slow and still waiting. When the flame goes out the paper is paper.

Every candle is a different person. Forty-one have been recorded closely enough for the posture to be described, and no two are the same, and one of them is a child throughout.

The residue in the cup is rendered human fat, whatever went in. The material recovered is degraded and nothing has ever been matched to a person on any record anywhere.

Held in a locker with no candle in it and no candle within five meters of it, which is a fire rule and not a containment one. Burns require sign-off and are done two a year, in a room with a fume hood, for the log.

The residue is collected, sealed, numbered and kept. There are eighty-odd jars and there is no program of work on them.

Hardness 0 · Attack - · Defense 2 · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Paper sides. Anything that would tear paper tears it, and a torn side shows nothing.

Traits: A Person Per Candle - never repeated across forty-one recorded burns. A Whole Life Per Burn - young to old at the rate the candle goes, so a stub gives you an old man in four minutes. The Cup - whatever the candle was made of, what is left is not.

It is a light source. Let the party use it as one, in a cellar, because that is when they will look at the walls.

The figure never does anything and never asks for anything, and you should resist making it turn its head. The horror arrives later, when somebody works out that the lantern has been lit for eighty-odd burns and the jars are all still in the locker, numbered, with nobody assigned to them.

Came in with the effects of a woman who had died and whose family said she had slept better in her last year than in the forty before it. Four hundred and thirty-sixth on the unknowns.

A white cotton pillow. There is something in it and the something is not physical.

Sleep on it and you go back.

What you get is a memory, played through as though it were happening, and it is one of the difficult ones: something that went wrong, something that was left unsaid, somebody who is not here any more.

It is not a nightmare. The file is firm about the distinction.

The memory is altered, slightly, and the alterations are specific to the sleeper. The difficult part is still there. What changes is that there is room in it: a pause where there was not one, an opportunity to say the thing, a door left open.

The sleeper takes it or does not. Either way they wake up.

What they report afterwards is that it is finished. Not that it did not happen: that it is done with, and that they have stopped turning it over.

It works once per memory and it works on a different one each night and it runs out. People stop dreaming on it after between four and eleven nights and then it is a pillow to them for good.

Nobody has been harmed. Some people have cried a great deal.

The entity in it has never communicated and does not appear to want anything.

Held in the medical wing rather than in a store.

Use is by application, by consent, one night at a time, with the welfare section informed.

It is not used on anybody who has not asked.

The applications are not refused except where the welfare section objects, and the welfare section has objected four times.

It is washed. That is in the procedure because somebody asked.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Traits: One Difficult Memory A Night - played through as though you were there. There Is Room In It - a pause, a door, a chance to say it. You Wake Up Finished With It - not healed, done. Four To Eleven Nights - and then it is only a pillow.

Ask the player which memory. Then give them the pause.

They do not have to take it. Let one of them not.

It is in the medical wing, not the store. Say why.

Found in a shoebox of photographs at a house clearance, and the two officers doing the clearance each recognized a different person in it. Four hundredth on the unknowns.

A black and white photograph of a man standing in front of a house. Mid-century film and processing. The house is a house and has not been identified.

Everybody who looks at it recognizes him.

Not as a famous person and not as the same person. Each viewer sees somebody they used to know: a neighbor, a teacher, somebody from a job they left, somebody they were friends with for a while.

It is always somebody they have lost touch with rather than somebody they lost. That distinction holds across every account on the file.

The recognition is complete. They can give the name, and where they knew them, and something specific that happened.

Then they start thinking about that person.

That is the whole of the effect and it is not dangerous. People think about somebody they have not thought about in years, for a few days, and some of them get in touch.

Eleven have got in touch. Nine of those conversations went well.

The man in the photograph is not any of the people identified. Where the named person has been traced, they are alive or dead in the ordinary way and they do not look like him.

Nobody has ever recognized him as somebody they are still in contact with.

Held in the archive in a sleeve and may be viewed on application.

Applications are granted. Viewing is logged and the viewer is asked to write down who they saw.

The list of names is the file. It runs to several hundred and there are no repeats.

Nobody is discouraged from making contact afterwards and the outcomes are noted where they are offered.

The photograph does not leave the archive.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels 1 · Movement Rate -

Traits: Everybody Knows Him - and it is a different person every time. Somebody You Lost Touch With - never somebody who died. You Will Think About Them - for a few days, and then it passes. Eleven People Rang - and nine of those went well.

Show it to each player and ask who their character sees. Use their answer later.

Nothing bad happens. Let one of them make the call.

Several hundred names and no repeats. Say that at the end.

Came in through a hospital in an Alabama town where the coroner had six suffocations in a year and nothing in common between them except the shopping. Third on the Alabama list.

Two soft drinks, sold only in one town, by two companies that have no history anywhere.

One is a lemon and lime, fizzed with hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide. The other is a root beer and cream. Chemically they are ordinary soft drinks and analysis finds nothing in either of them.

Both are addictive well past what their composition allows.

Both react to what is said about them. Praise the one you are holding and run the other one down and the pull of it eases. Criticize the one you are holding, in its presence, and it does something: the acidity swings, or it sets solid, or it catches, and any of those is worse once it is inside a person.

What they do to a body is the problem.

The lemon and lime rebuilds the diaphragm into a bladder that fills with hydrogen, and after enough of it a person floats, up to about three meters. Stop drinking it and the bladder collapses and they suffocate without a machine to help them.

The root beer rebuilds the lungs and the blood so that oxygen is not needed. A person who has had enough can stay underwater, or in a gas, or at altitude, indefinitely and comfortably. Stop drinking it and the body can no longer use oxygen, cannot take in what it now needs without the drink, and dies inside a day.

People who drink one hate people who have ever drunk the other. Not disagreement. Hatred, immediate, on sight, in people who are otherwise mild.

Anybody who drinks both inside about four days undergoes a reaction between the two, in the gut, and the file describes the result once and then refers back to that description.

There have been marketing campaigns. The file holds ten years of advertisements, print and radio and television, and they get worse.

The town is supplied. Both drinks, both brands, in the quantities the population consumes, through the existing distributors, paid for out of a budget line that has a different name on it.

Everybody in the town who drinks either is on a list and the list is worked every week.

Nobody is weaned off. It has been tried three times.

New residents are discouraged. Property in the town is bought quietly when it comes up and is not relet.

Hardness - · Attack - · Defense - · Health Levels - · Movement Rate -

Traits: Both Are Ordinary - by every test that exists. Float Or Breathe Nothing - and either one is yours for life. Stop And You Die - a day for one, minutes for the other. They Hate Each Other - and so do the people who drink them.

Have a character drink one because it was there. Do not mention it again for three sessions.

The abilities are real and useful. Let them be used and let somebody come to rely on them.

The supply run is the campaign. Somebody has to keep a town in fizzy drinks forever.

Not made. Found, and the finding was not written down, which is how it came to sit on the unknowns list at fifth. It was in the building when the Foundation bought the building, and the seller's lawyer listed it under fixtures.

A hand bell, brass, with no clapper. It has never made a sound.

Ring it and everything within about a hundred meters that is not natural stops for a minute. Stops moving, stops working, stops being able to affect anything. It does not care how powerful the thing is and it does not care whether it is yours.

You are inside the radius. So is everything you were relying on.

Kept apart from everything, in a room with no other contents, because a hundred meters reaches further inside a building than anybody estimates. Moved by one person on foot, never by vehicle.

The panic button, and it costs exactly as much as it saves. A minute is a long time in a fight and the party lose everything anomalous they were relying on for all of it, including whatever was keeping something else contained. Let them ring it. The scene worth running is the sixty seconds afterwards, when the thing they stopped is still there and so is everything that was holding the ceiling up.