Ascension Address: The Pencil
A dark room, possibly empty. A whirring projector. A rectangle of light across a wall, showing static footage of a regular HB pencil resting on some kind of printed personality test. Either the recording is monochrome, or it is a black pencil on a grey table. A man speaks.
...we refer to them Artefacts because of the… smudging effect they exhibit on the universe, blurring the local laws of physics in some simple or complex way, from the perceptual to the physical. In nearly all observed creation events this process is… catastrophic and the original object is abhorred by its surrounding reality, being instantly destroyed or otherwise erased from the world. But in some cases reality is able to successfully… recrystallise around the Artefact, giving a jagged but stable boundary to its smudging effect.
The Artefact on screen here is the Pencil. We recovered it four weeks ago from a collector in Jerez, and the rumours about it proved true. Physical contact with another Artefact causes that Artefact to… vanish, and… as best as we can interpret our own lab notes… erase all record of it ever having existed. Whether this retriggers the same nucleation process that created the Artefact, or destroys it in some other way, we were unable to ascertain. Research was progressing as to whether the Pencil would give us secure way to dispose of certain… L-Class Artefacts, or if it was simply teleporting objects away with a simple antimemetic halo effect, when the Pencil itself… disappeared from containment. That our records of the Pencil survive suggest a theft rather than the Artefact collapsing itself under its own means. A research and retrieval team was despatched to…
As a hand reaches into view on screen, the voice cuts out, and the film flickers and slides out of frame, leaving a blank white square.
Replace “Person” with “Individual” (or “Individuals” when plural). Replace “Bookman” with “Director”.
This dynasty is inspired by the SCP Foundation and The Lost Room, two works of fiction centred on frequently mundane objects which have powerful or hazardous effects when activated, and the attempts people make to understand and contain them. I’d strongly recommend both sources, but don’t intend to follow the canon of either, or to reject proposals that go in other directions: this introduction and the opening proposals are all we’re working from.
The general gameplay direction I’m imagining is that Artefacts will have powerful effects on the gamestate and ruleset, but they are either lost in the world and require some effort (and conflict with other players) to obtain, or are locked down at the Institute with strict containment protocols are in place to prevent their casual use.
