I haven’t done one of these in a while. Recently, though, I gave the Magic Item Shop a visit, and found some pretty cool stuff!
Digging Claws
A pair of… gloves? Mittens? They go over your hands, but instead of fingers, they have long, curved, metallic claws. Aside from that, they have light brown fur, and even some cute pads! Very adorable.
There are two magical aspects to these mittens. As you can probably guess from the name I gave them, they can dig really well, and they do this in a very interesting way. I guess it’s teleportation, but it’s really more like “displacement”. Scooping up soil makes it “disappear”, evenly distributing it across the surrounding area. In other words, the elevation of the land gets sliiiightly higher with each scoop. Also, the size of the scoop always seems to be impossibly large. Somehow I always ended up digging tunnels that were, well, me-sized.
Smaller plants like grass can be dug up and… I’m not sure where it goes. If I had to guess, I’d say it gets teleported into the midst of the surrounding undug land. That’s basically what it does with the soil, so it’d make sense…
Oh yeah, it also seems like any digging done with these claws is reversed after 12 hours or so, putting everything back more or less exactly how it was. They’re moreso for movement than, say, construction.
The second magic effect of the claws has to do with this strange fastening mechanism at the wrists of them. They’re fairly small and have something like a keyhole slightly obscured by the fur. Inside the hole is some kind of lever or switch or… something… that controls the activation of a small rune. The claws of the mittens, as clumsy as they may be for just about anything other than digging, are perfect for operating this mechanism, as they fit right into the keyhole.
As for the rune’s effect, it makes the mittens very very difficult, if not impossible, to take off. I guess they’re like a safety lock, guaranteeing that your claws won’t come off while you’re digging. Pretty cool that the claws themselves are the “key” for it!
… I really wish there was a whole accompanying outfit for these. Maybe the other pieces are out there somewhere?
Blank Page
A white sheet of paper. Doesn’t seem crumpled or creased in any way, though it doesn’t feel particularly durable or bend-resistant. I couldn’t bring myself to try damaging it, but I’m not sure I could even if I wanted to.
Writing on this page doesn’t work. I’ve tried pencils, pens, crayons, paint, chalk, charcoal, and several types of light and magic. Nothing could leave a mark on it. It still affects the writing implement as if it was used successfully, wearing down the tip or consuming the ink, but the matter in question seems to simply disappear.
At first I found this frustrating, but eventually my attitude shifted. I started seeing things behind my eyes whenever I blinked. Things I’d written on the page, all the test strokes of all the different writing implements I’d used… and then, things that weren’t mine. Things written before, in lots of different languages. None of them hanging around long enough for me to read them or make any sense of them, but still a very profound experience nonetheless.
Despite my inability to see my marks on this page, the glimpses of them that I’m shown look exactly like they normally would if I drew or wrote them on ordinary paper. Lines meet up as if I’d been able to see while making them, and my handwriting is the same too.
Once the frustration passed, I began to get a different feeling from writing on this sheet of paper. My writing started to get more personal, and… it felt like someone was actually listening. Or, reading, I guess. Whatever it was, it never wrote back.
I’m going to set this page up in the MIS with some writing implements so customers can write whatever they’d like on it. I think the frustration phase can be skipped entirely as long as one goes in with an understanding that none of their marks will appear on the page. Or maybe the feelings I got from it are just all in my head and its only effect is being unalterable. Hard to say. If it really is listening, I want it to have plenty of voices to hear.
Perfect Drink-Mixer
You know those things you mix beverages in by shaking them? I don’t remember what they’re called, but uh, this is one of those. When two(?) mixable things are put inside (such as two liquids, or one liquid and one more-or-less soluble thing) and shaken, they’ll be mixed together pretty much perfectly.
In fact, they’ll mix safely, even if they wouldn’t otherwise. Hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide (don’t ask how I got them into the mixer in the first place) turned into saltwater without any explosions or fires to speak of!
The most interesting thing about this item to me is that it works with potions. I don’t think this is how potions are normally supposed to work, but by combining them with this mixer, a potion with all of their effects put together is produced! As far as I can tell, you can just keep doing this over and over, stacking more and more effects into one potion… though it starts to get kind of, um, unstable. Can’t recommend going beyond 7 or 8 effects.
I actually have some ideas for this one… I think I’ll take it home!