Monday, August 31, 2026

GLOGust 2026 Challenge 1: Some Artefacts - The Second Dossier

GLOGust

With special thanks to Phlox for the challenge.

The challenge for this post is "Sequel to a Blogpost from Last Year". The blogpost from last year I'm sequelizing is this one: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2025/07/some-artefacts-first-dossier.html. Both this post and the last are riffing off this post: https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2025/07/facility-artefact-classification.html by friend of the blog Lexi.

Oχ - Fuck Your Excuses In The Ass!: A Bastard's Guide To Making Success Your Bitch: A profanity-laden self-help guide which includes nuggets of wisdom such as "Don't be a PUSSY when it comes to the next Big Thing!" and "If you're not WORKING UP a sweat in the Smith Machine, you're gonna be sweating in the boardroom, you stupid PIECE of SHIT!". Readers of the book, particularly when they attempt to apply its advice to their lives, exhibit a gradual decline in vocabulary and impulse control, losing the ability to express themselves except with excessive expletives (and in especially serious cases with nothing but expletives), and experiencing both more intense emotions and a weakening filter between those emotions and immediate action. Previous serious cases of exposure to this book's memetic effect have been able to be passed off as, and were likely exacerbated by, stimulant psychosis.

Lτ - The Anywhere Room: Tudor-style room without furniture. Stained wooden paneling, molded plaster ceiling, velvet curtains covering a window along one wall letting diffuse light in. Scratches along every reachable surface, but the blood has been cleaned out. Accessible from any door via a precise pattern of knocks - however once entered you cannot leave until someone else has taken your place. Do not look out the window.

EΨ - The Balsam Lake Lillypadian: An obscure cryptid which resembles a broad, flat, translucent disc with innumerable hair-thin tendrils trailing from its underside. According to local lore, the Lillypadian only comes out when it rains - a time during which it is nigh-invisible. Known only to the Organization, however, is the fact that when it rains the Lillypadian extracts buried corpses from their graves and washes them in rivers, somehow reducing them and reanimating them into roughly one-foot-tall "servitors" which cohabitate with the cryptid in its lairs. These servitors wear out over the course of months, and the Lillypadian maintains a group of six to eight of the things at once. The skeletons of disposed-of servitors have led to rumours of another cryptid in the area: a minuscule counterpart to Bigfoot. The Lillypadian is monitored by an observation team masquerading as an off-the-grid homesteader married couple, though recent reports suggest that the "wife" of the pair is developing an erotic obsession with the entity.

OΚ - Guilty Party: A fruit-themed board game which appears to groups of friends in isolated locations - holiday cabins and suchlike. It was originally believed that the game was placed in these locations by a human aide, but this has been ruled out after the game disappeared from the locked briefcase of a containment team while it was handcuffed to the team lead's wrist. The game's aim seems to be to turn those who play it against each other to the point of fatal violence. This is accomplished via special actions and activities the game prompts in play, including the Court of Apple-eals, the Punch-Down Bowl, the Confess-ction Booth, and the Bloody Ban-ana. Refusing to continue to play the game once it's begun, or refusing to participate in a drawn activity, will get the offending player placed in the Pear-ade of Agonies.

PΩ - The Mess at Izzy's Pastaria: Temporal recursions - that is to say, time loops - are recurrent-enough anomalous phenomenon to have their own generally-agreed-upon sub-categories. Some Organization scientists even believe that all time loops have the same source, stemming from the same agency or entity using them to turn sections of our space-time into a Petri dish. As time loops can only really be recognized by those outside them after they've ended, they are identified by what they leave behind - insensitively termed "causal poop". The Mess is a type I temporal recursion, because its causal poop is of the Long-Term Memory Overgrowth Syndrome variety - the people stuck in it apparently retained their memories of prior loops, leading to cumulative growth of nervous tissue that eventually made their heads explode all over Izzy's Pastaria (a family establishment which has never recovered reputationally from the incident).

Eτ - The Lady at the Crossing on 45th Street: Apparently an old lady with heavy make-up, a leopard-print coat, and big golden hoop earrings. If you offer to help her across the street she'll accept, and while walking with you share profanity-laden gossip about random people in your life that will always be true. Who these people will be and how deep the gossip is are random. The lady is surprisingly unsteady, and if allowed to stumble or if one acts offended at what she says, she will turn her insults on you, and every one of them will turn out to be true. Once helped across, the lady won't appear again for about a week. Where she comes from and where she goes after are as yet unknown. Agents making use of the ladies' services are required to report any gossip she spills about their superiors in the Organization.

Lβ - The House With Many Walls: A place well-known in occulture, second in infamy perhaps only to the Public Universal Bathroom. The firm Euler & Crake have in the last couple years launched expeditions into the House to colonize it, make it into a globally-accessible safehouse and transit node, and in their typical ruthlessly efficient manner have made great strides towards this.

OΔ - Mug of White Male Tears: A malformed mug somewhere in appearance between a Pythagorean cup, a Klein bottle, and the Elephant's Foot. The paint-job is much higher quality - rings of dainty little fuchsias on a white background. The mug is a hyper-dimensional object with internal reservoirs of hard-to-measure volumes. These reservoirs can be filled with various sorts of tears to produce various effects, from clouds of butterflies somehow still alive despite their hemolyph being replaced with champagne, to an insatiable cannibalistic hunger for eyeballs, to opening liquid portals to another dimension - apparently depending on the age and gender of the person the tears came from, the emotion that caused them to shed the tears, and other as-yet-unidentified factors. Study of these effects has been complicated by the aforementioned hyper-geometry of the object - tear-reservoirs mixing internally seems to correlate with undesirable outcomes.

Pχ - The Airce Heebie-Jeebies: A psychosomatic disorder endemic to the mountain resort town of Airce, Alberta. Those affected report itchiness, the sense that something living is moving through the pipes of their home, and a compulsion to scoop up, melt, and/or eat snow. The disorder appears in new arrivals, and disappears within a few months of living in Airce. The Organization wouldn't normally make a file on something like this, but a higher-up's niece recently moved to Airce and moved resources to make it happen.

Eπ - Green Mary: A woman who appears several-months pregnant. Mary is not her actual name. She is pregnant with a tree. Prone to automatic writing with whatever materials are available - for her comfort paper and pens are to be provided to her. Organization scientists are attempting to decipher her writings, but so far the real value of keeping her contained has been frustrating the cultist weirdos who venerate her as a conduit to their deities.

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