Artifact Stash

[Julio Juliopolis]

Note: This is an open topic. Feel free to discuss any artifacts stashed here or add your own should you happen to find any in this digsite. Be advised that any artifacts you add to the pile will be checked for authenticity.
This area is designated for the safekeeping of Juliopolan artifacts uncovered during our work.

[Julio Juliopolis]

Artifact #1 - The "Emabacus"

After much time searching through and careful examination of the all the sundry items we've been uncovering during our work here; my scholars have been pleased to inform me that they've come across a genuine magical artifact known as the "emabacus". Looking rather like a small abacus strapped to an adjustable band, the emabacus was worn by it's user in much the same fashion as a modern wrist-watch. Throughout the day, the beads would automatically move to reflect how many units of each type of emotion the wearer was feeling, adjusting themselves as necessary. According to some papers found with the artifact, it seems that only one emabacus was ever created. It was built by a wizard for one of his apprentices to make him become more self aware. Said the wizard "Whenever you have 14 units of any emotion, you lose total control of yourself to it." Unfortunately, the magic was designed only to work with the student for which the watch was created.

Archaeologist's note - Wow! What an amazing device. I wonder what a single unit of an emotion would be? I could certainly see how this would be useful for gaining self-awareness. Imagine visually seeing exactly how your building up units of various emotions throughout the day, and how you react to situations differently when your emotional unit levels are different. What happens to each of the emotions when you encounter the same situations multiple times? Or if you simply think about them? I think there's so many things a person might discover if they wore a "watch" like this. I wonder though if we might get some benefits though merely by pretending to be wearing such an item? As in, trying to visualize what the readout would say if we could see how many units of each sort of emotion we were experiencing at any time, and then tracking that over time. Seems like an effort worth considering.

[Julio Juliopolis]

Artifact #2 - "Shoes of funkiness"

Our team has just unearthed an artifact with a curious history. The papers found with the artifact tell that they were created by a local wizard for a young man who wished to woo his lady fair. Having learned that she had a penchant for dancers and being unable to dance himself the man, Rufus, approached the wizard and asked for shoes that would give him "as much control over my feet as I have over my mind". The wizard obliged the man, producing a pair of shoes with exactly that quality. Joyously Rufus put the shoes on, but no sooner had he started to get the feel of them then his shoes whisked him off of their own accord to the dance hall in which he'd planned to impress his crush. Spooked by both the speed and his apparent inability to control the shoes, Rufus thought about suing the wizard and was immediately whisked away again; this time to the local courthouse.

It did not take long for him to realize the shoes not only didn't help him to dance, they made it virtually impossible to perform any other task. When he sat down at a park bench to take them off a pretty woman happened by and he chased after her; struggling with the laces for 6 miles as she raced away from him while he stammered apologies. A policeman came around, and before he had a chance to arrest him Rufus ran straight to the jail thinking the whole time about how he didn't want to go there. Once there he was arrested and kept for 24 hours for being a public nuisance during which time he did manage to get the shoes off in jail and once more regained control of his body.

The next day, when Rufus was bringing the shoes back to the wizard to demand a refund and payment for having been the victim of such a cruel trick he was approached by Sago the Fool, who it appears bought the shoes right then and there from him for 10 times what he'd paid the wizard. Feeling better about the situation it seems Rufus decided to let it be at that, and for the next year there are many reports that Sago was seen running all over town, getting into all sorts of mischief. In spite of pressure from the police, he refused to remove the shoes even when he had opportunity too.

Not much more is known about these shoes, except that they were found in the house of a man known as Sago the Wise. Could he have been a relative?

[serloco]

Love the stories!! I have made a few 'talismans' in my day.. will maybe share some of them with you later..

[Julio Juliopolis]

Artifact #3 - "An Early Non-Working Model of the Human Brain"
Our team has found something exciting. We have no idea where the Juliopolitans got it from, but we've found an artifact that appears to have come initially from a non-human source. Apparently these aliens were in fact responsible for creating the human brain, if not the entire human model from which we originate. The artifact we found came in a box, where it was a perfect scale-model of a human brain made out of a spongy material that appears to be very resistant to biodegradation. It feels and acts much like a kitchen sponge, but it's fibers seem more resiliant and it has a bit of a "plastic" feel to it.
Along with the model were a stack of papers on which the Juliopolitans had left notes. In addition to these was another stack of metal sheets, on which were engraved symbols that do not match the Juliopolitan alphabet, nor any other known script of humankind. The Juliopolitan's notes claim these were written by aliens and that they had translated them... and now we've translated some of their translations. According to that, the alien writing was instructions written by the design team outlining the details of the model and what work was still needed. Some of the issues included...
1. There was some kind of communication foul-up in which the brain would mistake ideas which popped into it for it's own creations.2. When the owners tried on the brains, they usually thought they were the products (translators say they are about 75% confident in this translation) of the brain.3. The translators had a bit of trouble with this one. Apprently the sentence structure was akward. I guess that's what happens when you translate something from an ancient, little understood language that was originally a translation into that from an alien language. This is what they've come up with as a close translation so far... There is some sort of a valuation system in which the brain rates it's abilities compared to other brains and attributes great importance to those ratings. These brains are completely failing to process that they are basically an antenna for recieving outside inspirations and that their ability to manipulate that data is roughly equivalent to all the other brains, with the method chosen for the manipulation being the only significant difference in the quality of the results of such manipulation. The valuation system is so bad the brains choose not pay attention to the methods of manipulation but only the ratings assigned each brain. These ratings are supposed to represent each one's skill at manipulating and creating ideas, (which it only recieved through it's antenna in the first place), ambiguously called thinking. These ratings are loosely along the lines of attributing to each brain an imaginary smarty number. Those who created the tests which determine these smarty numbers can not actually define smarty nor describe what the difference in each number meant; such as what specifically a brain with a smarty number measured at 159 could do that one whose measured smarty number is 158 could not, yet the average brain refuses to consider this or ascribe it any import when it is pointed out. When witnessing the apparent results of itself or other brains' manipulation (or reception) of data, the average brain uses this information not to learn methods for duplication or look for flaws in it's own methods of manipulation, but merely to modify it's guess as to how the brains in question relate to each other on the smarty number scale. This flaw makes the human brain laughable and it must be fixed. I don't see any way to do this without replacing the cheap ego substance used for the brain matter with the more expensive xecxactic (a word apparently referring to a material that has the qualities of introspection, questioning, openess and flexibility?) material. There's more info there which has yet to be translated, but I felt this was enough to get it into the artifact stash. Thank God they fixed that early model of the human brain eh? Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be if that early model is how human brains actually ended up.

[Guest]