Well there is always the forbearers to currently known alien technology. Some kind of device that does what the fixors do, but with a slightly more transhuman understandable mechanical/nanobot/material structure. But these would be mere toys compared to the actual fixors. Only able to support a handful of pounds, or the like. If scaled up however... Perhaps a large and very ancient version of the scour rings found on a small planetoid. To large to move easily, and far to large to fit through a gate, it none the less can dissolve materials just as easily as the smaller versions. However it seems to power on at random and seems to have no obvious control mechanisms. But if you crawl inside you might be able to determine what makes it tick... Of course there is the ship engines used by the factors, and there is all kinds of special materials and how to produce them that could fetch pretty nice prizes. Like a superlight but super strong composite material used in the Dyson Shell. As well as materials that may limit, block or enhance psi abilities.

NewtonPulsifer wrote:

On a tangent, the scour ring could be used as a limitless power source. Disassemble water into hydrogen and oxgen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen for power. Loop the system.

So where does the power actually come from? One novel I encountered had a nifty teleportation system with huge but hidden energy demands. It just took energy from Earth's rotation. It got popular, and *then* bad things started to happen as the rotation change caused the crust to melt... So maybe the scour rings are like small wormholes, and once enough mass-energy equivalent to the wormhole exotic matter framework has been converted they implode into black holes.

Right now I'm trying to come up with a host of weird alien trinkets for my players to encounter, because I want to build up some sort of affinity for the Factors as early as possible (without actually meeting one). I've got two so far: A device that looks and feels exactly like a rock. When a biomorph touches it, a cavity opens up, large enough to put your hand in, and when you do so, it pricks your fingers and interfaces with your nervous system, and serves as a radiation detector that pipes its data in through your senses of touch, taste, and hearing. A device that's a fist-sized grey sphere. When placed on your neck or back, it extends a bunch of nanotech tendrils around your torso and head - if your body takes too much damage, these tendrils immediately expand to encase your torso and head, giving you 12/12 armor but severing your limbs. I'm imagining it as some other species' version of a cortical stack.

Oh man, I had so much fun with the old Green Box generator. <3

Lilith wrote:

Oh man, I had so much fun with the old Green Box generator. <3

It is back up, you know.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Small spikes of chitin-like substance, brightly colored in complex patterns. These are Factor "books", devices that can exude sequences of memory molecules and spores. To activate, just insert an appendage in the hole at the end.

I've seen enough Hentai to know where this is going!! Sorry for the joke I could not avoid to make it XDD Great ideas anyways, here is my little contribution A 20cm literally perfect sphere, composed of an unknown crystaline like material with moving marble like paterns inside its translucid surface. It was found in an no named exoplanet by a group of gatehoppers; the sphere emits a pale blue light similar in apaerance to Cherenkov radiation, that increases a little when a living being touchs it. If someone using a biomorph(pods not included) stares at it for a time, the subjet start to suffer from some kind of synesthesic effect, and the moving patterns inside the spehere become audible for the subject literally described as "its like song from heaven" or "the most perfect melody I´ve ever touched" uncarefull users can become enthralled by the music and need some external stimulus to stop(strong noises, hunger or thrist, even their own muse can alert them) the "music" is extremely plesaurable to see/hear/touch, some subjets had compared it to the best trip of petals or other recreational drugs. If two or more subjets stare at the sphere at the same time all of them will suffer the effect, but none of them agree about the exact details of the experience, just about the beauty and the perfection of the sound. There is not know way to record or reproduce this effect, XP playbacks of the subjects just dont record any kind of sound or music. Asyncs are affected in half of the time of non async subjets in average. This objet first apeared in the exo colony of Portal, a very disturbed gatehopper gave it to the gatecrasher guild for free before jumping again to a previously unkown location; without more explanations. The researcher of the guild made some extensive research but in adition of the previous details nothing more has been discovered. The current location of the sphere is unkown, but its suspected that an hypercorp spy infiltrated in the research team, stole it, and brought it back to the Sol system. Aditional details from a firewall secret report: [....Yes we covered all the incident, seems that some of the scientifics studying the sphere went bonkers about it; two of them became really obsessed with it after a time and finally after a fight one of them stole it. Our team in Portal just managed to get in charge of the investigation and covered the incident as some kind of hypercorp espionage, but the truth is that the sphere did some kind of basilisk hack to the two over exposed scientists, they just spent more and more time staring at the sphere and bossesing with it and its music. In the personal rooms of those to scientists, they found alot of bizarre drawings of fractal motives and a recurrent drawings of crude representations of rotations in 4-dimensional Euclidean space of diferent polyhedra, and even some handwritten babbling about angels and some divine presence. Both of the scientifics manged to keep all of this in secret for a long time. Before the fight each other and one of them managed to escape to the Sol system with the sphere. Our concern now is the possible basilisk hack that the sphere induces on people; so please keep an eye on it....] Ok end of my rant hehehe....It was quite hard to translate to english the mathematical babble but I hope it makes sense