Steampunk Nusantara

Item is a pack of 78 cards, measuring 10.5 cm x 18 cm. Thickness of each card is no thicker than the kind of paper stock that normal playing cards come from. Each card seems to be made out of some kind of photonic crystal that constantly shifts and changes color, while the edges are normal paper card-stock. We can’t seem to separate the paper surface from the photonic crystal without tearing — the paper seems bonded to the crystal through some undetermined process.

Design-wise, the cards are, for all intents and purposes, classical Tarot de Marseille cards, with 22 Trumps and 56 Suit cards. The Trumps are numbered from 1 to 21, with the Le Mat card un-numbered, as per the usual, and card XIII (the D-Card) unnamed.

The most interesting feature of these cards are that they seem to shift and change with no apparent power source. The card design primarily stays constant — changing tones and mood to suit the image itself — but the card images seem to shift based on who touches it. Some of the guinea pigs junior researchers report seeing significant figures in their history appear as the players in the trump cards, while the suite cards seem to illustrate life events and realistic representations of the subject’s life situation with a rather eerie realism.

The cards don’t have a visible power source, like I said, but leaving them in a light-proof room with no visible illumination causes the cards to revert to a blank state — power conservation mode, perhaps? However, when touching those cards, or even looking at them and concentrating, the cards begin to shift and change — weakly at first, but then with increasing movement and vividness.

When we press-ganged persuaded Junior Researcher L, who scored unusually high in Ganzfeld and Zener tests, the cards began to emit light in the dark, as if the card surfaces were additive light displays (brightness levels similar to modern AMOLED displays). Running the same tests in fully-lit environments with JR L showed no difference from JRs who scored low in both Ganzfeld and Zener. Effect doesn't seem to work with any other researcher, junior or not.

UPDATE: I’d like to strongly advise that we terminate the employment of Junior Researcher K, based on the design that appeared once K touched the 5 de Épées. The other figures depicted in the cards, JR N and I, aren’t talking.

UPDATE: Also, we advise caution to researchers who touch trump card XIII, XV, XVI and XX, and suit card 3 and 10 de Épées. Some of the images are… disturbing, to say the least.

Item appears to be bronzed coconut tempurung half, measuring 8 centimeters in diameter. I say “appears”, because the item seems to be made completely out of bronze, but with the thickness of a real coconut shell. No other decoration or design anywhere else, apart from what you normally expect from a real coconut shell.

UPDATE: Microscopic analysis results have come back: turns out that the coconut shell resembles a coconut shell, even down to the microscopic level — we’re seeing remnants of cell wall formation on at least part of the coconut shell, which either means that the bronzing process goes down to the cellular level, or there’s a species of bronze-based life form out there. Alloy composition is around 88% copper and just under 12% tin, with less than %1 being a material that should be tin, but doesn’t seem to give the same kind of spectral readings.

An interesting effect occurs when you place the coconut shell, rim-side down on any flat surface — within 20 seconds, the sound of a frog croaking can be heard. Our resident creepy-crawly nerd identifies the call as belonging to a Polypedates leucomystax, or a Malaysian common tree frog.

Removing the coconut shell reveals… well, nothing. No frog. Frog calls immediately terminate upon removal of shell from the flat surface. Even tipping the shell to take a peek reveals no frog, and terminates the sounds.

UPDATE: We’ve finally managed to take a good luck at the frog itself by the simple expedient of placing the shell on a glass table. Well, it’s a common tree frog, all right.

…

That’s it. Well, that was exciting.

Item is a technical schematic written on parchment-like surface, measuring 85 × 120 cm. I say parchment-like because although it appears to look like parchment, it is damp-insensitive and completely waterproof, as well as being completely nigh-indestructible to water, fire and almost all the corrosives we tested.

The technical schematics seem to be for a tower, the design of which is very reminiscent of etchings and carvings I’ve seen of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. There’s even a bit of scrawled text on the side, with an arrow pointing to the tower, that makes light of this, and confirms that whatever the design is, it is based on the same Wonder of the World. The primary difference seems to be that instead of a square base, it is hexagonal.

In any case, the technical design seems to be of a clock-tower of some sort, except for the inclusion of lenses and what appears to be electrical and crystal resonators studded in the inside of the building. I’ll let the engineers ponder on this, but without an idea of what the basic principle behind the operation of this tower is, I’m afraid it’ll remain a mystery for quite a while.

What’s most interesting is of course the number of marginalia that peppers the document itself — by my estimation, approximately three dozen marginalia notes were written, in at least six languages, by at least seven hands:

1. Arabic
2. Persian
3. A variant of Chinese (Traditional)
4. Javanese (written in hanacaraka, although examples of it also appear in Jawi)
5. Malay (in Jawi)
6. An unknown dialect of what appears to be Kelantanese Malay with heavy Thai influence, written in a variant of Hangul (v. strange).

Apart from that, the only other notable matter seems to be a series of glyphs used by all the writers, which can be divided into two:

1. A series of glyphs that seem to be anthropic and/or based on objects. Used the way we use emoticons.
2. Another series of glyphs that are appended to the beginning of each marginalia, and used by the writers to identify themselves and others in the document.

The glyphs will be marked as « double angles » and will either be « emoticon descriptor » or « PERSON IDENTITY »

Here is a short summary of these marginalia; S&T can fill in the rest:

You heard us right. Anyway, we're going through a cleanup of the member roster, as per the following section in the policies and guidelines document:

Clean-up periods:

As administrators, we will run through a regular cleanup of the member roster, looking for inactive members and lurkers. When that happens, we'll post a announcement in the group with a deadline (typically a week after the announcement post). After that, we'll be looking at posts made between the time of the last announcement and the current deadline:

• If you haven't made a post in the employee roll-call thread, we'll remove you from the group immediately.
• If you have made a post previously, but haven't done a post between the last announcement and the current deadline, we'll remove posting access but keep you in the membership roll.
• If you haven't made a post between the last announcement and the current deadline, and you don't have posting access (likely because we removed posting access during the last round), we'll remove you from the group membership.

If you get removed due to inactivity, what do you need to do? Easy! Just reapply, and once we re-accept you, post! We'll put you back in, but keep your posting access off. Once we've received a post from you in our moderation queue, we'll reinstate posting access, and everything will be peachy.

Right. As this is the first member roster cleanup, we'll be looking at posts made from the time this community opened up, up until the deadline period, which will be Monday, 25th of April 2010.

Would like to contribute, but feel your creative juices running a little low? Take a look at our first prompts post -- you might find something there that inspires you.