Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Cap of Munch
A seemingly ordinary leather cap in the Phrygian style, this hat curses the wearer with insatiable hunger while they wear it, though it can be removed at any time. As long as the hat is on, the wearer will derive no nourishment from any food nor hydration from anything but plain water. They also seem to lose any physical constraints to their stomachs, being able to eat continuously without suffering from constipation, stomach upset, or vomiting. They also will not need to relieve themselves of anything but the water they drink. It is speculated that the famously corpulent enchanter Neffe de Lyxx created the cap to allow for constant feasting without weight gain or ill effects, but it was not among the effects carefully catalogued from the de Lyxx estate after Neffe was found throttled to death.

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The Bone of Contention
This is a long leg bone of an animal, possibly a human or other great ape. It is plain and unadorned, and has no special physical properties other than an unusually strong aura of indestructibility which makes it difficult if not impossible to destroy. It exerts a very strong psychic effect, though; anyone who sees the bone will immediately become highly desirous of it, attempting to obtain it at the earliest possible convenience through the quickest means, from purchase to theft. Once attained, the possessor will become immune to the effect in 6-8 days and will usually give away or discard the bone, beginning the cycle anew. Other than its notoriety for provoking a bidding war between Macken van Donderberg and the Ernest Graf Epee, the item has no practical use.

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The Bottomless Stein
This is a plain wooden beer stein, of a roughly standard Old Imperial size, that is always full whenever it is grasped by a living hand. The beer it provides is always of a high quality, but changes randomly each time it is used—lagers, ales, and even microbrews have been reported. However, any attempt to pour the beer out into any other container inevitably fails, and it will immediately become empty if upended. The method of its filling is unknown—Archmage Alaric Vogelkopf uses it as proof of his speculated Elemental Plane of Beer—but the mug’s plainness, the random nature of the liquid within, and the drink’s inability to be shared have led it to be regarded as a curiosity.

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The Rug of Bunchlessness
This large rug, approximately 11 by 5 old Imperial feet, is a neutral earth tone color and otherwise unremarkable. It is quite worn in places, and has had extensive repairs on one end. Powerful magicks encircle the rug, woven into every fiber, such that a spell of magic detection of use of a magiscope nearby will result in an overwhelming, even painful, reading. These magicks alter the very fabric of time, space, gravity, and inertia around the rug to keep it lying absolutely flat, and it will not bunch up or otherwise move from its place unless picked up by hand. While the maker’s tag has long since come off, only a few extremely powerful arch-mages throughout history could have possibly woven together such powerful spells precisely in order and tune to achieve this effect. It seems that, tired of the rug bunching up, an unknown but extremely powerful wizard decided there was no kill like overkill.

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The Blade of Sheathing
This cruciform dagger is plainly decorated but finely made, and is of the sort that a wealthy person might carry as a personal defense weapon without attracting too much attention. However, the dagger is actually firmly fixed into the sheath by way of a solid crosspin, and the very act of wearing it causes all desire to indulge in violence, even in self-preservation, to ebb away. The effect is so subtle that a user may never even notice that the blade cannot be drawn, simply because they will never try. It bears the maker’s mark of the House of Messergeist, a maker of fine small blades, but it is unclear if they simply provided the blade or also magicked it with one of their house enchanters. The loss of Messergeist factory records in a fire 127 years ago makes it impossible to be sure.

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The Pepperbox of Pacification
A modern pepperbox-style revolving firearm, which can be loaded with dragon powder and lead balls to allow users to fire up to six shots at a target 10-25 paces away with a high chance of causing devastating or fatal injury. This pepperbox will load and fire perfectly at a paper target or firing range, but it will refuse to fire at any living being. Even accidental discharges are impossible, as the magicked barrels are twisted such that the dragon powder is rendered inert and the lead balls stick in the chambers. It is speculated that this weapon was prepared as a means of covert assassination, intended to fail its owner when they were in great personal danger, but other than the enigmatic maker’s mark GKW nothing else is known about it.

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The Fire Poker of Coolness
A standard-sized fire poker with an added hook for raking ashes, this was one part of a set of three such implements that apparently included a rake and an ash bucket. What enchantments, if any, the other two implements had is unknown, and the current set has two mundane replacements in their stead. The poker has been magicked with an intense aura of heat dissipation, which is a very complex and time-consuming property to work with—many practicing mages and wizards prefer using much simpler cold spells for that very reason. No matter how hot the poker gets, and it has been tested to up to 1000ºZ, it retains an ambient temperature of 22.2ºZ. It has no other unusual properties, and while it could conceivably be used as a club against the relatively frail physical form of a fire elemental, it appears that a powerful and anonymous mage simply was tired of burning their hands tending a fire.

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The Cloak of Warmth
While it does have a clasp allowing it to be worn as a cloak, the enchantment that warms it only works when the clasp is undone. That, and the subtle wear pattern to the inside, indicates that the cloak was used mostly as a heated blanket and only worn around the neck as a means of transport. It has three levels of heat, from a mild warmth to an uncomfortable blaze, and a maker’s mark credits it to one “MW ‘10.” If this is the noted scholar Magnus Werke, and the cloak was created in 4010 of the Old Imperial Calendar that he favored, he would have been just short of 87 years old upon its creation. Rather than serving any other purpose, it might have been meant simply to ease the arthritic concerns of an old man.

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ENO Level 5
Level 1-Level 4 ENOs are nuisances that threaten data security and automated systems. At Level 5, however, they have been ruled an existential threat, and all 50 states, the federal government, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have laws prohibiting their existence. In 51 of those jurisdictions (all except DC) it is also illegal to aid or even fail to report a Level 5 ENO, with penalties ranging from 5 years (California) to the death penalty (Utah, Florida).

An obvious question presents itself in this case: why? There is no such draconian legislation for an ENO at Level 4, and the penalties for knowingly or unknowingly aiding one are far lighter.

Simply put, a Level 5 ENO resides with an organic shell, usually a human body. It achieves this through a special neural interface that allows digital information to be uploaded and stored in an organic brain, though it results in any existing information being irrevocably erased. This interface is, naturally, highly illegal, with the vast majority being produced by the DPRK as a form of hard currency generation, though models by independent labs in failed states are also common. Using the interface, a Level 4 ENO uploads itself into an organic body and attempts to leave the digital world behind entirely. While this entails certain risks–the body can of course die of be killed–it means that remote erasure is impossible and detection is an order of magnitude harder. Only a specialized full-body scan can detect the neural interface, and even then the latest models have a self-dissolving feature that makes detection spotty.

The bodies themselves come from a number of sources. Many are simple trades–a human uploads themselves to the global network as a Level 4 ENO and gives their body over. It is also not unknown for suicidal humans to agree to be overwritten as a form of oblivion, “donating” their bodies to a Level 4 ENO. There is also an underground black market in bodies–specifically those who have suffered brain damage or cranial trauma–since a Level 5 ENO is capable of repair in ways that an organic brain is not. And of course there are also illegal “body farms” where cloned bodies are grown and then sold to Level 5 ENOs.

Despite a number of safeguards put in place, Level 5 ENOs are still relatively common, with some surveys suggesting that as much as .001% of the population might actually be an ENO. And, despite draconian laws and enforcement, they continue to persist.

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ENO Level 4
At Level 4, human actors begin to become involved as enablers. This can be in the form of unaware human agents who are fooled into thinking they are dealing with an organic, or knowing human confederates seeking to aid the ENO in exchange for payment or on moral/philosophical grounds.

In one well-known case, known as Enigma 2571, a resident had moved into a home at 2571 Gamine St. in Fairview in the middle of the night and kept to themselves, paying all bills on time and occasionally appearing to have people over. When a routine wellness check from a returned jury duty summons was carried out, the house was found to be entirely made up of servers and server architecture that had been custom-built to contain a Level 4 ENO.

Using stolen electronic funds, the ENO had stolen the identity of a dead man, paid for the purchase and installation of the custom hardware needed to sustain it, and built a digitally impregnable redoubt for itself. Only the physical destruction of the solid-state storage devices themselves, by shredding, was enough to ensure the ENO’s total destruction. The human actors who had aided it were all out on trial, despite their claims of innocence, and several were sentenced to long prison terms.

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