November 16th, 2018
If you have my journal, you’re either future me, in which case ‘Hello future me. Hopefully we still have all our limbs!’ If not, then I suppose you likely have access to my storage box too and you should know about the stuff in there. Most of it is mundane but useful. If I’m not around and you’ve taken up my torch, use it. Take my notes, arm yourself, and beat back the darkness.
If you’re law enforcement and reading this and I’m in custody: I don’t know anything about a storage box with a bunch of questionably legal stuff.
Anyways, as you’ve likely guessed, my idea of a fun, light, and quiet Friday night is cataloguing the weirder stuff in my possession. This first item didn’t have a name when I acquired it. It wasn’t until after I learned what it could do that I named it. This artifact is: Quiet Box.
Quiet Box
What it looks like:
This is a solid brass cube roughly three inches on a face. Embossed across its bronze surface are spiraling conical glyphs that draw the eye. Each individual spiral builds on the next until the entire face is covered. The top, as this creation has a top and bottom, has the same spiraling motif as the other five sides, but in the very center (I measured it) is a quarter inch spike. This spike is the same color as the rest of the bronze cube, so noticing it is no easy feat. I sure didn’t spot it when I first acquired the cube.
See that little razor sharp and tiny spike acts like a tiny needle. Its perfectly designed to puncture skin and, thanks to the abnormal (Charlie would call it magic) nature of the cube, damned resilient too. I’ll admit that I haven’t put true effort into destroying the tiny spike, but I also know that it’s far from brittle or fragile.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to break it either. I’ve heard of some explosive results with destroying fancy things. I don’t feel like testing this one with destruction.
It weighs around a pound, a little more than double what a solid cube this size should weigh.
How to activate it:
While it may look like a rejected Puzzle Cube from Hellraiser, its use is far from complex or hardly as dangerous as that cinematic cube. Don’t get me wrong, using Quiet Box is dangerous for a multitude of reasons, but not innately hazardous. It doesn’t summon demons or anything like that.
I’m sidetracked: to use it, prick a finger on that nice little spike and the cube will drink your blood. It’ll suck greedily at your hand (or whatever), spreading your red lifeforce along the infinite spirals embossed all over it. At this point, the cube itself will adhere to whatever its feeding off of and take a small amount of effort to pull back off.
The dangerous side of things is this: Quiet Box only works while it feeds, and it feeds as long as it is attached to a living blood bag (I tried it with a real blood bag and it didn’t work). It will continue to feed until one of two things happens: its removed (again, not hard but does take intent and effort) or the subject it is attached to perishes of blood loss.
Don’t ask how I know the latter, I’m not super proud of it (let’s just say that I owe Charlie another pig).
The Dangers:
I know I already mentioned this, but: simply activating this object is dangerous. It feeds on blood and does so rather quickly. I know this from personal experience. I’m not a small individual and I felt woozy and lightheaded after only a few minutes of use. Caution must be exercised if it’s used at all.
I’d recommend never using it alone as if you pass out while it’s attached and you don’t have someone to pull it off you, the next person to see you is likely to find a mummy.
The other danger in its direct benefit. It makes the area around you quiet, and that works both ways. That means you should remain absolutely cognizant of your surroundings if you’re using it to remain unnoticed. You’re near silent, not invisible.
The Cost:
If you hadn’t figured it out by now: all magic has a cost and that extends to the use of items. With this one, it’s pretty straightforward. It runs on fresh blood from a living creature.
The Benefits:
There’s a reason I’m listing this so far down: this is a dangerous artifact and its use should be extremely measured. If you do take it out and make use of it here’s what you can expect: sound will be deadened around you. In some experiments, I measured the radius of the effect to a sphere of 20 feet. If you’re someone of the civilized nations outside of the US, that’s 6.1 meters. The effect isn’t blocked by walls or floors or other physical things, so if you’re hiding in a house and turn the cube on and someone is on the other side of a wall, they may suddenly notice that sound is deafened to a whisper.
And that’s what happens: any noise, loud or soft, is muffled by the cube. It doesn’t completely eliminate it, but someone just outside of the effect’s radius isn’t likely to hear any sound originating from within. I haven’t had the opportunity to test it with someone with preternatural senses, but I’d hope the magic of Quiet Box works to muffle sounds so those of a supernatural persuasion are just as hard of hearing. Of course, that deafness goes both ways. It means that if you’re not attentive, someone can sneak up on you just as easy as you on someone else.
I’d expect the best use for this thing is sneaking into someplace, but with the blood loss it causes, that’s a dangerous prospect. Of course, if you’ve got a target that’s at a distance, this would certainly make for the perfect silencer for a big gun, but our nature as hunters tends to put us in sticky and close quarters situations.
So. I’ve stuck it into storage.
The History:
Mostly including this portion of my entry for future artifacts or abnormal things I catalogue since I don’t really know much of where this thing came from. Like I wrote at the start: it didn’t have a name before I pulled it out of a Djinn’s lair and gave it one. Charlie says that everything has a history and sometimes we’re just not meant to know it.
I’m inclined to believe her and if I ever acquire something not by chance, I’ve every intention of finding out as much as I can about the item before bringing it home.
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