STRANGE AEONS - SYDNEY

 It turns out the last one was actually not the final set of Strange Aeons adventures, at all.

The inestimable Dr. Crabbe. Curator of Palaeontology at the Australian Museum. Secretly a Yithian. Needs your help to fight the time war. Balmoral Theosophists. Sea monster on rampage in Hobart - murdering veterans of Antarctic expedition.

Here's me on Bluesky again, I'm going to keep linking to it. And here on itch.io is where you can download the whole thing as a book.

Last part of my occult treasure list. Check it out once more.

1. Eye Of Kanaloa. Chunk of dark matter formed during the Big Bang. Brought to Hawaii from the Pleiades by the octopus priest Pa’ao. Sculpted into a snarling totem. Temple built around it. Nobody who touches it can move more than twenty feet away from it until they offer it a chunk of human flesh.
2. Philadelphia Gargantua. Skull of a tusked ogre captured in the Alleghenies by John Savage in 1736. Constantly trying to regrow its flesh. Must be submerged in a tub of weak acid at all times. Briefly owned by Benjamin Franklin, who as an experiment let it return to life and attempted to train it as a lawyer.
3. Rattlebag. Pouch of wendigo teeth collected by the Cree shaman Jack Fiddler. Taken from his body by a Mountie after he was hanged at Norway House. Represses cannibalism taboos - as long as you’re shaking it, nobody in earshot will hesitate to consume human flesh.
4. Setebos. A Patagonian deity, once worshipped by giants. Killed by Magellan’s sailors in his Tierra del Fuego shrine. Pickled in brine and carried back to Venice by Antonio Pigafetta. Sold to the Knights of Rhodes. Resembles a fat mutant prawn with a single bulging eye. Worship him for divine favours.
5. Desiccated Salp. Dried plasticky mass like wadded cellophane. Clings to your fingers when you touch it. Expands on contact with sufficient water into a translucent oozooid the size of a barn. Taken in 1920 by HM Coastguard from a half-mad Scottish herring fisherman, found adrift on the North Sea.
6. Ice Weasel. Foot-long mustelid from the island of Tsalal in the Weddell Sea. White fur. Scarlet bones and claws. Relentlessly scratches at the planks of its wooden crate. If released, will capture and devour all black objects and creatures it can find. Abandoned in Chicago by the Crow Indian sailor Dirk Peters in 1838.
7. Green Lens. Palm-sized disc of viridian glass. Found by Ernest Shackleton in a stone hut on the banks of the Onyx River in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in 1902. Any light that passes through it becomes poisonous, inflicting cyanide symptoms in proportion with its brightness.
8. Osiris Hedron. Serpentinite die from Ptolemaic Egypt. Each of its twenty faces is inscribed with a god’s Demotic symbol. Roll the die at dawn to learn which god’s influence governs the coming day. Found in Dakhla Oasis. Used by the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano to cheat at chess.
9. Canard Explosif. An experimental self-guided aerial torpedo, designed by Jacques de Vaucanson and substantially improved upon by Vannevar Bush for the Raytheon Manufacturing Company. Looks like a wooden duck. Must be carefully trained. Liable to misunderstand verbal commands.
10. Dagon Tiki. Hand-sized translucent jade pendant shaped like a hungry fish. Purchased by a Fiordland sealer at Preservation Inlet in 1823. Inherited by the captain of the HMS Auckland, which went down with all hands at the Battle of Jutland. Said to summon angels to rescue drowning men.
11. Bottled Cloud. Vacuum flask of purple gas extracted from a vent in the Danakil Depression. Labelled with Serpent Man glyphs. Inhaling the gas causes hominids to rapidly evolve in unpredictable directions - eliminating hair, massively expanding brain size, bloating torsos and elongating limbs.
12. Vermiscope. Complicated arrangement of lenses inside a long orichalcum tube. Taken from a Yithian archive in the New Guinea highlands by the Australian gold prospector “Shark-Eye” Park. Lets you see the ethereal tapeworms attached to the chakras of various authority figures.
13. Illyrian Ancilla. Green-skinned woman from the vicinity of Betelguese. Sold by space pirates to Queen Teuta around 230 BC. Served as a handmaid in the court of Diocletian and the Republic of Ragusa. Polite. Requires minimal food. Will one day resurrect and torture everyone who has ever enslaved her.
14. Homunculus Wine. Glass samovar of ancient liquor taken from a stone burial jar on the Xiangkhoang Plateau. Pale, sullen, red-eyed embryonic creature floats inside. Drinking the wine lets the embryo control your body - it despises all life and will act intelligently to kill everything it sees.
15. Arbor Infelix. Potted black acacia found growing in a meteor crater on the Nullarbor Plain. Wants to prick you with its thorns and inject you with cryptic visions of a chthonic deity slumbering under the Gibson Desert. Will grow thirty feet tall if replanted in fertile soil.
16. Salamander. Igneous slug from Mount Nyiragongo. Curious. Burns anything it touches. Mouths froth with yellow sulphur. Hermit-crab shell of leaded glass. Babbles in high-pitched French. Born in Loki Patera - immigrated as a second-instar larva to the Ionian colonies on Earth.
17. Wonderland Hat. Silken top hat once owned by John Maskelyne. Portal to the complex plane. Can produce one random object per day, including eggs, cakes, dodos, roses, playing cards, white rabbits, lost children, other hats. Whimsical. Never quite gives you what you want.
18. Space Cash. Moss-encrusted basalt disk from the ruins of Nan Madol. Marked with an intricate hexagonal pattern. Used as money in the bazaars of Orion - the extraterrestrial equivalent of a hundred-dollar bill. Aliens will seek you out and offer you trinkets in exchange for it.
19. Crawling Midas. Translucent bruise-coloured ooze trapped in a Mason jar. Converts any living thing it engulfs to gold. Somehow extracts energy from this process. Grows larger when fed. Always hungry. Initial coin-sized blob purchased from warrior women on the Rio Negro by Francisco de Orellano in 1542.
20. Stepped Reckoner. Calculating machine built by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC. Attached via dimensional folds to an arbitrarily large universe of gears, more or less replicating the function of an early 21st-century neural network. Articulated bronze skull responds to natural-language queries about Greek science secrets.