To be the first of five.
Like so: https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2025/07/facility-artefact-classification.html
Oπ - Screensaver Ball: A synthetic rubber ball, striped bright red and yellow, approximately the size of a tennis ball. It possesses a perfect coefficient of restitution, and once thrown will bounce and remain bouncing until seized. Placed in staff lunch room in sheet metal box with one face made of plexiglass as amusement.
Itself the product of an anomaly - the Matheson Toy Factory (LΩ) - a facility which was able to destructively scan the brainwaves of neurodivergent children to produce artefact-class toys.
Eρ - Mr. Crapper: Jewish-American male. Late 50s. Theorized to have a "hyper-evolutionary" gut microbiome - he excretes complex multi-cellular organisms derived from the bacteria, fungi, and archaea of his digestive tract. The transformation from micro-organism to macro-organism seems to begin in his small intestine, and be largely complete by the time they reach the colon. Each such organism he produces is unique.
While most such organisms are non-viable reproductively, testing of the Trenton sewer system indicates a self-sustaining population, possibly due to horizontal gene transfer.
Entity's diet is to consist of mild foods and beverages. Inclusion of irritants such as capsaicin or lactose result in the excretion of more aggressive organisms. Entity seems content to remain in containment as long as his delusions of being persecuted by an anti-semitic conspiracy are indulged.
PΔ - The Gussawannassagga County Fair: Mass hysteria and spontaneous manifestation of advertisements for a county fair in a county that doesn't exist. Shows up every few years somewhere in rural America - those affected become obsessed with winning the "blue ribbon prize" for some contest supposedly to be held at the fair, always related to showing up with the largest of something - largest pumpkin, largest watermelon, largest pound-cake, largest hog, largest truck, largest child, etc. Manifestations typically last a month, with most of the affected suffering amnesia about it afterwards (except those who were fed in part or in whole to hogs/children to fatten them up), and a few disappearing without a trace along with their would-be contestants.
Staff continuing to suggest that this artefact is the result of a "Native American curse" will be reprimanded.
Lπ - The Telephone Booth That When You Enter It Compels You To Dial A Random Number That Is Not In Use And Recite Your Life Story Beginning From Your Earliest Memory And Causes You To Forget Any Memory You Tell It: The Organization keeps it locked up - it's got no power over anyone so long as you don't go inside it. Occassionally unlocks it to eliminate people who know too much.
Pβ - Tooth Radio: A method to click the tongue against a golden dental crown to transmit one's thoughts to others possessing a golden dental crown on the same tooth within several miles - even when sonic signals should be blocked by intervening obstacles over this distance.
Believed to be a Pτ-class artefact for Gashmob, an acephalous collective dedicated to ending death, even on the level of individual cells. Based on observation of captured Gashmob members, separation from Tooth Radio after some period of use causes severe distress, eventually leading to non-functionality - Organization personnel are therefore advised not to attempt to listen in.
EΩ - The Orca God: Oceanic leviathan believed to have been thousands of years old. Orca populations of the resident, transient, and offshore types were all observed performing religious activities around and towards it, and the entity led pods of orcas on attacks on fishing fleets in the Pacific. Despite close association with orcas, the entity actually resembled a gigantic, shell-less sea turtle.
The Orca God was killed with depth charges back in 1958, and ornaments made from its bones are still awarded to field operatives for exemplary service.
Lχ - Winjhlains Cave: Wandering location, can appear near any populations with significant neanderthal DNA. It is a small cave with its walls covered in apparently-pedagogical cave paintings. Its floor is covered in weapons knapped from flint, sourced to a deposit in modern Germany.
Those who study the cave paintings are instilled with a desire to take up the cave's weapons and kill those who violate hunter-gatherer egalitarian norms
EΚ - The Found Footage Fiend: A member of cryptobia thampocalyptus, a designation for a group of mammalian tetrapods which are able to bend light around themselves to makes themselves "naturally blurry" - some instances are even able to use this bent light to biophotonically alter human minds & biology.
The Found Footage Fiend targets urban & cave explorers, tracking them down by some unknown means. It stages its attacks to resemble a scene from a low-budget horror film, and afterwards somehow ensures that the footage of its attack makes its way onto discussion boards and suchlike. Its victims, when their bodies are found at all, are posed and mutilated to look like they died in accidents, and were then eaten by various scavengers.
Assume human level intelligence & the physique of a grizzly bear. Further abilities such as control over technology and detecting recordings are possible.
Oρ - Mother Moloch: A clay figurine of a Rubenesque, bull-headed humanoid seated on a throne, bearing a brazier in one hand and a tool similar in appearance to a lacrosse stick in the other. The figurine has been dated to an indeterminate period during the Bronze Age Collapse. If a pregnant woman crosses within about a hundred yards of the figurine, that individual will then miscarry a mass of ash and blood, of a size dependent on how late in their pregnancy they were. This mass will soon after become animate as an entity roughly as intelligent as a six year old, dedicated to luring more pregnant women towards the figurine. At certain thresholds of critical numbers of such entities their behaviour becomes more complex, such as constructing a shrine around the figurine at seven entities.
Oτ - Lifeletter Knife: A copper-volcanic glass alloy blade, its handle sculpted to resemble some sort of alligator-butterfly hybrid creature or deity. It is believed to have been created by a Toltec splinter-culture that survived in desert communes.
Those bled by the knife are drained of some abstract "life energy" - and this affects even those entities who could otherwise regenerate or make themselves immune to harm - and channels this life energy to a plot of land in the Sonoran desert. The Organization uses this plot to cultivate certain plants with growing conditions that might otherwise be difficult to meet.