Glass Armonicas
These items are not, strictly speaking, artifacts,
as no truly esoteric knowledge is needed to either create or operate one. Indeed, that is the basic issue that both
Heaven and Hell have with the items.
The first Glass Armonica
was invented by Benjamin Franklin; he had been fascinated by the practice of
'tuning' wine glasses to produce music.
The basic idea is to take a set of glasses, fill them with various
levels of water and run a moistened finger along the edge. The level of the water dictates the tone
produced by the finger, which means that it is a relatively straightforward
matter to set up a scale and thus play music.
Franklin's innovation was to replace the glasses with bowls specifically
designed to produce the correct tone, then mount the bowls on a spindle; the
performer merely had to keep the bowls moving with a foot petal (and keep his
fingers wet, which was almost as trivial).
As usual, his invention was wildly popular. Many listeners compared the tones to angelic
music (actual celestials agree that it isn't, but they do generally think that armonicas sound very pretty) and claimed that it had all
sorts of healing virtues. That rumor is
incorrect; so was the later one that Glass Armonicas
were dangerous to one's health. The
major difference between the two rumors was that the former wasn't deliberately
spread and the latter was.
You see, the problem with Glass Armonicas
is that they are sensitive to Disturbance.
They are, in fact, precisely as sensitive to Disturbance as would be a
Symphonically Aware individual with two Celestial Forces. A Glass Armonica that 'detects' Disturbance will emit a rising
chime for as long as it is within range; when asked, the Lightning Servitors
assigned to the problem agree that the item is sufficiently sensitive to permit
working out direction, distance, flavor (any information that could be gotten
from a Symphonically Aware individual making a Perception Roll). A user would need to learn how to interpret
the results, of course - but given enough data the more common Disturbances
could be worked out empirically. Worse -
from the point of view of celestials - the results are reproducible. Every Glass Armonica
will react the same way to the same specific Disturbance.
In other words, Ben Franklin had unwittingly
invented a workable celestial detector.
For what it's worth, he's very sorry about that.
Getting rid of the blessed things wasn't hard, originally;
it's keeping them suppressed that's the problem. Ben Franklin is an icon in Western History;
like Leonardo Da Vinci (and let's not talk about the items of his that had to be hidden away,
shall we?), there's always somebody interested in recreating something that he
worked on. Both Heaven and Hell have
been doing their best to dissuade such interest; generally speaking, a bit of
financial hassling usually works, but there's been at least one armonica maker in recent memory who has simply up and
disappeared literally in thin air (albeit while flying a light airplane).
And that's just in our world.
Cost: strictly speaking, a PC wouldn't particularly
need an item like this: but if one does, 6 pts sounds approximately correct.