Archive of Our Own

Project Reliquary
By: Danaume Rook

The woman stood leaning against the gray SUV parked in front of the federal building, waiting patiently as she smoked a cigarette. Most would consider her young and attractive, but would think twice about striking up a conversation after seeing the clothes she was wearing, with her black dress slacks, a pressed black dress shirt with a clerical collar, polished black dress shoes, and a slate gray trench coat. Her long blonde hair was pulled into a casual ponytail, and her blue-gray eyes watched the front entrance as she exhaled a plume of smoke into the morning air.
All in all, she was easy to spot, and clearly not trying to hide her presence in the least. Though considering she was the only one parked in front of the building, it wasn’t like there was anyone for her to blend in with even if she wanted to.
She had almost smoked her coffin nail down to the filter when the door opened, and a man in his mid twenties, and a suit that just screamed ‘FBI’ stepped out of the front of the building, looking around only briefly before locking eyes with her, and starting down the steps her way.
She pulled the cigarette from her mouth in her left index finger and thumb and gave it a hard flick with her middle finger to knock the cherry from its tip completely, stomping on the cherry and grinding it into the pavement before pinching the end of the butt to make sure it was fully out, then she tucked it into her pocket and exhaled the last of what was in her lungs, pushing off the car as she stepped forward and offered a hand to the approaching man.
“Good morning, Agent…?” Her voice was warm and pleasant, but carried an edge of jaded no-nonsense behind it.
He reached out and took her hand, giving it a firm squeeze and a half shake, “Porter, Agent Franklin Porter. I assume you are the priest I was told to meet?”
She nodded and smiled, “Reverend Everly Combs, nice to meet you Frank.”
The corner of his lip twitched at being called ‘Frank’ and he asked, “Should I call you Father?” sardonically.
Reverend Everly gave a good natured laugh at that, “If that floats your boat, but you can just call me Reverend, Everly, or Eve. Whichever suits you best. Did your brass brief you about your new assignment?”
Agent Porter shook his head, “No, they said that I was to meet a priest out front who would fill me in, and that I was to do what they said until the assignment was over.”
She groaned, “They have always been so anal about this task force.” shaking her head, “Alright, you got any family or pets, any long term commitments? This is going to be a long term field work position, so you and I are going to probably be on location for at least a month.”
“I’m good. I’ll need to pack though.” he said.
Everly nodded, “Alright, why don’t you get your car, and I’ll follow you to your place. You can pack, then we will take my car from there, and I’ll fill you in on your new assignment along the way.”
He nodded, “Yeah, alright.”
A couple hours later and the two of them were on the road, with his bags in the back of the SUV beside hers, and him in the passenger seat. He frowned and glanced over at her, “Alright, so… what is this assignment I got put on? I’ve never heard of the Bureau working with any religious organizations, let alone putting one in charge of an investigation…”
Reverend Everly shrugged, both hands on the wheel, “It’s called Project Reliquary. At least by your agency. Every nation has a different fucking name for it.”
He blinked, “Should a priest be swearing?”
She smirked, “I do a lot of things that most priests wouldn’t do… it comes with the particulars of my job.” Then she sighed and watched the road in front of the car for a moment before asking, “What did you do at the Bureau before getting… reassigned to me?”
“The last task force I was on was tracking and stopping human trafficking,” he replied.
She nodded, “Let me take a wild guess. You found someone who seemed to be in a bad situation, maybe a slavery or prostitution thing… but the higher ups ignored it, and your fellow agents thought there was nothing worth investigating there. And when you complained, you got sent for a psych eval, and then the next thing you knew, you were being assigned to me?”
Agent Porter frowned, “That about sums it up… Someone tell you about that?”
She shook her head, “No, you just aren’t my first partner in this project. Some people have the ability to almost see things that others can’t… it isn’t perfect, but it’s there. This nagging sense that something is wrong when everyone else just doesn’t see anything wrong at all. That’s what this project needs. You weren’t being punished, or kicked down. You were exactly what we were looking for.”
“Doesn’t exactly make me feel better. I still don’t even know what this project is.” he said.
“Breakfast.”
Agent Porter blinked, “What?”
Everly smiled, “I haven’t had breakfast yet.” She pulled the SUV into the parking lot of a greasy spoon and parked, then reached into the inside pocket of her coat, pulling out a polaroid photo. She handed it over to him and asked, “Tell me what you see, Frank?”
He frowned and looked at the photo, “I see a boy walking his dog in what looks to be some kind of park or field…”
She nodded, then held up what looked like a class ring with a garnet stone. “Are you allergic to silver at all?”
Porter shook his head, “No…”
She smiled, “Good…” taking his left hand, she slid the ring onto his pinky finger, “You are going to want to wear this at all times, never take it off unless you absolutely have to…”
He looked down at the ring, then up at her, raising an eyebrow in confusion.
The Reverend just smirked and nodded to the photo in his other hand, “What do you see in the photo?”
“I already told you…” he said, glancing back, then his jaw dropped. “What the fuck?” He set the photo down on the dashboard and pulled the ring from his finger, then slid it back on, then repeated that process several times. “What the fuck am I seeing?”
“You tell me.” Reverend Everly said softly.
He swallowed nervously, “When the ring is off, all I see is a teenage boy walking his dog… but when it’s on, I see a boy walking a preteen girl at the end of a leash wearing just a collar… in the light of day, in a park…” he frowned and shook his head, blinking several times, “No… that… that isn’t right. I see her both ways… just… with the ring off, I just assume that she’s a dog, even though I’m seeing a naked girl… what the fuck is this?”
“The same thing that got you assigned to me, the same thing you saw that no one else saw at the Bureau, something that is ‘wrong’ with the world, that everyone else just ignores. There is an etching in the bottom of the stone in that ring, and so long as it is held against your skin, and you already have a penchant for seeing through the ‘wrongness’, it helps straighten things out, right your mind, so that you can see clearly. Welcome to Project Reliquary.”
He looked at the ring on his pinkie finger, then at the photo on the dashboard, then back, then he looked up at Reverend Everly, “Fuck.”
She just laughed, “I told you that this job had some particulars.”

“So it’s magic then?” Agent Porter asked as they sat in a booth in the diner. He rubbed the ring on his finger as if it was some sort of magical charm, or some genie would come out of it.
Everly shrugged, “Does it matter? Magic, miracles, eldritch horror, science we don’t understand yet… You can call it whatever helps you sleep at night. But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.” She poked at the eggs on her plate with her fork before eating some, gathering her thoughts before saying, “There is this cult in the religious community, it’s small, but growing. They call themselves the Church of the Bored God.”
“Bored God?” Porter asked.
Everly chuckled and nodded, “Yeah… according to their teachings, God has gotten bored of creation itself. They believe that He, or She, they aren’t unanimous on that, has gotten to the point where they want to wipe out everything and return the universe to nothingness. No Heaven, no Hell… just… nothing.”
“That’s kind of dark for a faith…” he said with a frown, taking a sip of his coffee.
She chuckled and nodded, “Yeah, so they think that their job is to entertain God. Because only if God is kept entertained, will creation remain what it is. And God… according to their beliefs, is a colossal, voyeuristic pervert.”
Agent Porter frowned, thinking of the polaroid now safely tucked back into the Reverend’s coat pocket, “Wait… wait, is this cult some kind of terror and exploitation cell? Is that what this is? Are we trying to stop this stuff from happening?”
Reverend Everly got a distant look on her face as she tapped a fingernail idly at the tabletop for a while, trying to think about how to answer the question, then finally she said, “No… see… The problem is not that the cult exists. It’s that we don’t know how they figured it out. It’s all true, but we have tried like hell to keep it secret for centuries.”
Porter just stared at her blankly, so she continued.
“It started in the Dark Ages, we became aware of… items… that had appeared, spread throughout the world, that could warp reality itself. Twist things to make impossible things seem normal, and even more impossible things very real. Most of the items are defunct, things people no longer use, their power has waned, and they have settled down. The Vatican keeps them in its vaults beneath the library. But occasionally new ones appear, modern items that reflect the way the world works now.”
She gave a weak smile, “The job of Project Reliquary is to catalog all the artifacts of the Bored God, track them as best we can, remove defunct ones from society, report to the government on who has been affected and might need aid, and help hide the impact of the major ones.”
He frowned, “So we aren’t saving anybody?”
“We are saving the whole of creation from being erased, isn’t that something?” She asked.
Agent Porter shook his head, “I don’t believe in God.”
The Reverend just shrugged, “That’s fine. Regardless, you will find out soon enough that the people that we will deal with, those affected by these artifacts, don't need us to save them. Oftentimes, trying to save them just makes their lives worse. Those who are really in over their heads and in need of help, we will help, of course. But most will happily stay in the situations they have created for themselves, even if you offer them a way out.”
“So what do we actually do?” he asked in frustration.
She smiled, “We keep things from spreading out of control.”
He grunted, “Wouldn’t it be better to just have everyone running around being a fucking pervert all the time, if that’s what we need to save the universe?”
Reverend Everly ignored his sarcastic tone, shrugging as she replied, “Think of it this way… cake is delicious, right? But if you only had cake to eat at every meal, you’d get bored of it really quick. If God is bored of creation, and a little perversion here and there helps spice things up, great… That's fine. But we keep it contained. We protect the general public from it, and keep it from spreading rampant to everyone. And at the same time, we keep it special for whoever’s watching, so that they can delight in our attempts to keep normal in the face of such things. Keeping that cake a special dessert instead of just another everyday thing.” She let him process that as she resumed eating her breakfast.
“Alright, say I buy into this… what kind of things are we dealing with here?” Porter finally asked.
Everly finished scraping her hashbrowns through the leftover yolks on the plate and ate them, then said, “I have a list in the car, let me settle up the check, and then you can read it over while I drive. I’ll be happy to answer questions on the way, but that topic is going to get too graphic for a family establishment like a restaurant.”
He glanced around, not that there were many people around them, but nodded in agreement, finishing his coffee as she got up to pay at the counter.
The two of them made their way back to the SUV, and once inside, she fished around in the back seat for a laptop, plugging it into the AUX power ‘cigarette lighter’ port on the console. “Password is Reliquary, with a one in place of the letter ‘i’. From there, open the archive icon, and it will have you log in with your FBI credentials.”
She then buckled up and started the car, letting him log in and access the archive.
He started to scroll through, and then muttered, “There are hundreds of entries here, how many of these have you dealt with?”
Everly shrugged, sticking a cigarette into her mouth before lighting it up with a zippo, “Honestly, only about a dozen or so. Most of them are defunct. A whole bunch manifested during the Victorian era… and lately the ones that are around have been getting more active. The more conservative the world gets, the bolder the artifacts seem to get in response. Apparently they were almost silent in the sixties.”
“Ever run afoul of any?” he asked.
She nodded, “A few. Most recently, my last partner stupidly held up Vaingloria’s mirror, so that I could see myself in it.” she shook her head, “That was… a shock.”
Agent Porter blinked, then looked to the laptop, running a search for it, “Vaingloria’s mirror, artifact number 741, a pink plastic framed hand mirror. Whoever sees their reflection in the mirror begins to accept that the reflection that they see is normal and natural. That doesn’t sound too bad.”
Everly shrugged, “It’s normally not. But artifacts can interact with each other… and I’ve been whammied by another in the past, and the two didn’t play off each other well. And, well… Now look at me. Not that I’m really complaining, but still…”
He frowned as he looked over at her, “What do you mean?”
“How old do you think I am?” Reverend Everly asked.
Agent Porter smirked, “If I’m being honest, not old enough to have passed seminary or anything. I’d card you before selling you alcohol.”
“Exactly. I barely look old enough to drive… Frank, I’m forty-seven.” she said in exasperation.
His smirk faded, “Wait, what?”
“Yeah. Usually the mirror doesn’t fuck with you like that… if you are dressed like a slut and you look into Vaingloria’s mirror, it makes you feel like a slut, want to be a slut. If a guy is dressed like a girl and he looks into it, it will make him more of a sissy, more effeminate, and eventually, if he keeps looking, it will make him want to transition into a girl. It just fucks with the mind. Makes you adapt to your looks… for me, it made me adapt to something else.”
Franklin swallowed, “What else?”
“A suggestion gone wrong.” she said.
“Oh… I saw something about that in here…” Franklin said, looking back to the laptop.
Reverend Everly nodded, “Yeah, the Suggestion Box, artifact number 611. I was a victim of it in high school. I was only a freshman when it happened.” She went quiet, taking a long drag from her cigarette and then cracked the window to exhale out of the vehicle.
Franklin sat quietly, watching her and waiting.
Eventually, Everly continued, “About halfway through freshman year, my best friend started freaking out. I thought she was having a nervous breakdown. She started ranting about how our school had been a boy’s only private school, and how just the day before, she, and I, and all the girls at the school, had been boys. But the school had always been co-ed. I mean, it was a weird school, don’t get me wrong, the curriculum was messed up… the day after she started freaking out, they even announced that all of us girls would be paired up with a boy, and would have to learn how to obey and appease him. Like… some porno-level sex slave stuff. But all our parents signed off on it, and it wasn’t so bad… I mean, free birth control back in the nineties? Unheard of.”
“I didn’t learn the truth until I went to seminary, and was picked to join the order, then sent to Project Reliquary. You were able to see the truth in that photo… But when I put on that ring, I was able to remember a second childhood where I was a boy, overlaid alongside the childhood I lived as a girl.” She sighed, “My friend hadn’t been crazy, she’d just been a horny idiot and made the wrong suggestion.”
“Fuck… what happened to her?” Franklin asked.
She smiled, “She happily married the guy who became her master at school, they’ve had three kids and are living happily. I keep in touch.”
Agent Porter gave a grunt, and then asked, “Does he know… that his wife used to be a guy?”
“Oh yeah, he was the idiot who made the suggestion about girls becoming sex slaves to the boys, just to prove to her that the Suggestion Box wasn’t magic… And as soon as his suggestion became real, he was granted partial immunity to its warping effect, and could remember his future wife as a guy and as a girl. Kind of a sweet story.” she said with a smile.
Franklin rubbed his face with both hands, “I fail to see how a high school training girls to be sex slaves because of something a kid wrote, could be a sweet story.”
Everly let her smile fade and said, “Well, yeah, you’re thinking about it like someone who has spent their adult life rescuing people from tragic abuse. You are used to seeing the kind of damage, trauma, and harm that slavery and rape can have on someone… but here’s the thing. These artifacts, they play by their own rules. If someone gets raped, you would expect them to pull back from people, there is a loss of trust of strangers, a sense of vulnerability, a sense of violation, a loss of self worth, post traumatic stress, public anxiety, chronic depression, and heaven forbid there is a pregnancy as a result. Right?”
Agent Porter nodded, “That sounds about right.”
“That’s one of the first ways that you will be able to tell that one of the Bored God artifacts is involved in a case. There won’t be any of that. You might interview a girl who got raped, and she is left turned on, feeling like she was only raped beacause she was pretty, like it was a compliment, and that she learned something about sex, or that somehow it helped bring her closer to her family or her friends. She will be more cheerful and energetic, less shy, and feeling empowered and wanted. Her sense of self is stronger and her ego bolstered. It’s like the exact opposite of what should happen.”
“So… what?” Porter asked, “Its fucking with their heads to make them want to be abused?”
The Reverend shrugged, “Maybe… I’m not sure. One school of thought is that it insulates them from the trauma. One school is that the ones who created the artifacts, made it so that they bless those who bear the trauma, like the Trials of Job, and come out of it better people. Another belief is that the artifacts seek out people who already kind of want it, or draw out whatever part of us might want such things and make it stronger and more powerful inside us… either way, even the most heavily abused victims of the artifacts leave better off than they started. I’ve never encountered a single victim who could truly say that they hated what became of their lives after the fact.”
“You said we’d be in the field for at least a month… What kind of damage control are we looking at doing here?” Franklin asked.
Everly took a drag from her cigarette, “Honestly, not sure yet. Your boys have already put a media blackout in place after figuring out something wasn’t right… our job will be to go in and figure out exactly what ‘isn’t right’ about it, catalog it, and if it’s dangerous, contain it as best we can. Project Reliquary teams are always two person groups, always one priest and one agent, and always one man and one woman.
Agent Porter slowly closed the laptop and pinched the bridge of his nose, "This... this is all insane..." he looked over at the reverend, "You said that you had a partner before me... what happened to him?"
Reverend Everly took another long drag from her cigarette before exhaling out the cracked car window as she focused on driving down the interstate, "Same thing that happens to all my partners on this project..."
"He died?" Porter asked nervously.
The Reverend snorted out a laugh, "What? God no... he retired. Opened a bakery during the pandemic, selling fresh sourdough bread in the last town we were stationed at. Everybody goes native eventually, you find a place that just clicks with you, and decide you don't want to keep fighting it."

#741: Vaingloria’s Mirror
(First referenced in Reality Checks by AnonyMPC)

The two of them sat in a motel room, each on their respective queen sized beds, with the chair from the desk pulled over and a box of delivery pizza propped up on the seat, open for the two of them to snag slices from as they ate their evening meal.
Agent Porter glanced over at the Reverend and asked, “Alright, so… you were telling me the story of that mirror… but we got off track in the car. What happened?”
“So it all started with this girl with body image issues… like those aren’t a dime a dozen in these times. Anyway, she was the kind of teen who caked on her makeup and had to wear the trendiest of clothes, or she’d refuse to leave the house, she’d even have panic attacks if she tried. Her mom was sick of it, and sent her off to therapy.” Reverend Everly leaned back on the bed, closing her eyes as she recounted the case.
“The therapy was supposed to be simple. Spend a few minutes at the start of each day, looking in a mirror, and reciting a mantra about how much she likes herself, while not wearing any jewelry or makeup. Just… looking at her face, natural and unadulterated. Right?”
Porter nodded, taking another slice of pizza to eat as he listened to the retelling of the case.
“Anyway, every day she strips off all her makeup, takes out her gaudy earrings, looks into this little plastic hand mirror that her mom bought her at a flea market. But she didn’t know that the mirror was special. All she can see in it is her face. With nothing on… and she’s telling herself that she looks good without anything on… and it starts to stick.”
“At first it’s great. She’s not wearing makeup, she feels comfortable in her own skin. Then it starts to go wrong. Her mom gets complaints from the school that she is barely following the school uniform. She starts to walk around the house naked. And any time anyone comments on it, she just says that she feels good as she is, she doesn’t need to cover up.” she chuckled softly, “By the time we got called in, she couldn’t bring herself to wear any clothing at all, even trying to wrap a towel around herself after a shower would make her feel like she was denying herself. She was confident, happy, and all natural… more than that, she’d started ‘helping’ her friends… she’d started a little nudist club!”
Porter nodded, “So what did you guys do?”
“Not much that we could do. I mean… no one was really hurt, right? Just some girls who felt more comfortable naked than clothed. We helped cover it up, and helped the families finance a move to a nice coastal nudist retreat where the girls would be less noticeable.” She shrugged with a smile.
“How did you know what caused it?” Franklin asked.
“You memorize all the active items in the archive, and you pay attention to what the people say. And you are very careful to never take off that damn ring.” nodding to the ring on his pinky finger.
“Can’t help but notice that you aren’t wearing one.” he said with a chuckle.
She nodded, then opened her mouth, lifting her tongue to show off the underside to him, letting him see the complex tattooed ring of symbols and lines, before pulling her tongue back into her mouth and closing her mouth, “I don’t want to ever forget myself, so I took a more permanent route.”
“Shit…” he said.
“Anyway, hand mirror with a pink plastic frame, if you know what you are looking for, it isn’t hard to figure that much out. But then my idiot partner lifts it up, the reflective side towards me, and asks if that was it… and I saw myself in it.”
Franklin frowned, “What did you see?”
“I told you about how I got turned into a girl with a suggestion, right? Well, the suggestion was something to the effect of ‘half the students should be hot young girls’, anyway, when I looked into the mirror, I saw my hot young girl self, and all the sudden I was physically fourteen again. Not supposed to be possible, but… that’s just the job you’ve been signed onto.”
“So what did you guys do with the mirror?” Agent Porter asked.
“It was packaged up and sent off to the FBI’s designated storage facility… Though like most of the active artifacts we confiscate, the box was empty by the time it was received.” the Reverend replied. “So if we are ever out in the field together, and someone or a group of people have shown a slow change in body image, and you see a small hand mirror made of pink plastic, do us both a favor, cover the glass of the mirror before you pick the thing up.”

#611: The Suggestion Box
(First referenced in The Suggestion Box by Alvo Torelli)

The next morning, after ‘enjoying’ a continental breakfast of untoasted bagels, near frozen cream cheese, and motel coffee, the two got back on the road, with Agent Porter taking a turn to drive, following the GPS navigation on the console.
Once they were underway he asked, “Alright, so… you told me about the mirror, and how it seemed to interact with that thing that made you what you are now… why don’t you fill me in on that?”
Reverend Everly shrugged, “Sure. The Suggestion Box… it’s essentially a perverted monkey’s paw. A small cherry wood box, with brass fittings, a little brass lock, and a brass plaque on the front that says, unsurprisingly, ‘Suggestion Box’. There’s a slit carved into the lid for you to push a suggestion through, and it’s almost always found attached to a wall in some official seeming place, but no one can ever remember it being put in. Oldest record of it showing up is at the start of the Efficiency movement, in the late eighteen hundreds. It is by far one of the most powerful, and the most dangerous of the Bored God artifacts, and one of the ones we will be dealing with most often.”
Agent Porter asked, “How powerful are we talking here?”
She smirked, “Well, you know that it changed my gender, and the genders of half the boys in a school, but there is anecdotal evidence of it bringing back the dead. Literally anything you write as a suggestion and put into the box, it will make it either come true, or always have been true… but it will do it in the most perverted manner it can logically twist your words into. Moreover, it happens the next time the person who wrote the suggestion wakes up, and they are the only one aware of the change. Anyone who has written a suggestion in the past is partially immune to the Suggestion Box’s alteration of memories though, which can come in handy for tracking it down.”
“Like the famous genies in pop culture, it will usually stick around long enough for three suggestions, and then just vanish, and appear in some other part of the world to wreak more havoc.” She explained.
“How often have you had to tangle with it?” Franklin asked.
Everly thought about it, “Usually once or twice a year. Sometimes it goes quiet for a year or two, though that usually just means it’s causing problems for some other nation. But if it pops up in North America for a week, it can completely redefine a town before anyone knows what is happening. You are usually pretty safe in assuming that any town wide event that we are walking into, is going to be a Suggestion Box event.”
“What was the worst one you dealt with? Other than… you know… the one that made you a girl.”
The Reverend thought about it for a while, then smirked, “Okay, this is a good one. A great example of how this artifact twists things. So was this quiet town that had never had a major crime before… one day this girl gets raped on the beach, and the police had never dealt with a rape before, so they lock down the whole beach. But you know, wind, sand, incoming tide… it’s a bitch to get evidence there. So the beach is closed for days while they try to track down her rapist. Anyway, this sanctimonious tart finds the Suggestion Box at city hall, and writes something to the effect of ‘given how she was dressed, it’s no wonder she was raped, the city shouldn’t close the beach for this, or waste so much time on it.’”
Agent Porter muttered a curse under his breath, “Victim shaming, really?”
“Right?” Everly shook her head, “Anyway, it didn’t work out how she planned, the next morning she wakes up to find that the town has decided to reopen the beach. But the girl who got raped, she’d just been in regular clothes, not dressed like a slut. This woman had thought she had been in some microkini or some shit. So anyway, the town’s new policy, under the table, was just to ignore any rape that happened on the beach, because they shouldn’t waste time on it. Nothing seems to happen at first, but the rapist strikes again. The woman complains, but not much, Bored God rules, she kind of feels complimented that someone took the time to strip and fuck her… Slowly people take notice.”
“Oh no…” Franklin groaned.
“Oh yeah… It’s exactly what you’re thinking. Guys start hanging out on the beach to rape girls, and girls start hanging out on the beach to get raped. People start calling the place ‘rape beach’ in private. And before you know it, it’s just part of the local culture. We had to come in and post signs to keep the travelers from going on the beach and getting raped by warning that it was a high crime area with toxic water…” she laughed, “Anyway, we tracked it down to the woman who wrote the suggestion. Turns out that she’d started doing hymen checks on her daughters to make sure that they weren’t ‘partaking’ in the new local passtime, but her daughters were smart, they would beg guys to only fuck their mouths and asses on the beach.”
Porter blinked, glancing over at the Reverend, “No shit?”
“I told you, Bored God rules. Rape, abuse, enslavement… it’s not the dark trauma that you would expect from anyone else. Moreover, you won’t ever find a venereal disease at one of these events. I know one case where a guy with HIV was apparently cured by just being victim to an artifact. Anyway, we never did track down what the other two suggestions were, but by the time we got there, the Suggestion Box was gone, and rape culture was in full swing. You step foot on the beach as a woman, or even a pretty guy, and you could expect to be stuck there for hours getting fucked over and over by the local ravenous population.”
Agent Porter frowned as he watched the road ahead of him in silence for a bit, then he asked, “Why didn’t the woman just move away with her family after realizing what the town had decided?”
Reverend Everly smirked, “Because she was too addicted to visiting the beach herself. She wouldn’t ever admit it to anyone, but we tailed her for a few days, and at least twice a day she would head down to the beach and get herself worked over, ‘guilt free’…”
“Fuck.”
Everly laughed, “Yeah, she got fucked.”

#588 The Wishing Candle

The tank on the SUV started to get low, so Agent Porter pulled over into a gas station, and got out to fill up. Reverend Everly slipped out of the car, asking, “Want anything from the shop?” as she walked towards the attached convenience store.
Porter called after her, “Just a couple energy drinks for me.”
He was just finishing up fueling the SUV when she returned with a bag with several drinks, some packets of chips, and several pepperoni sticks, along with a new pack of smokes for herself. She slipped behind the wheel and let him get into the passenger seat, handing him an energy drink can as she started up the car and pulled out of the station.
“So I’m almost afraid to ask…” started Agent Porter, “...but why are you carrying around a photo of a guy with a girl on a leash?”
The Reverend smirked, “Ah, yeah… artifact number 588, the Wishing Candle… It’s a birthday candle, of sorts. A black candle that when lit has an eerie blue flame. Comes with this antique printed card that says that when lit on someone’s birthday, when that person speaks their deepest wish, and blows out the candle, it will come true. What it doesn’t tell you, is that it compels the person looking into the flame to speak their deepest, darkest, most sexual wish.”
She watched the road for a bit as she got back onto the interstate, then continued with her tale, “So this little kid finds this candle at a novelty shop, and buys it for her brother as a fun little birthday surprise, because he’s into the occult. Just a silly little thing. And she knows he’s gonna get what he wants. The boy’s turning sixteen, all he’s been asking for, for months, is a car. His parents secretly got him one, it’s a huge surprise, and she is going to play it off as if the candle granted his wish, right?”
Porter nodded slowly.
“So anyway, their parents have the deed and keys to the car in an envelope on the counter. They have his cake all ready, they are just about to sing happy birthday to him, and his little sister puts the candle on the cake and lights it, then gives him the card with the instructions. He reads it, looks into that blue flame, and then says, as if in a trance, ‘I want a girl as a pet’, and blows out the candle. Apparently the boy blushed scarlet at being made to admit it, and the sister freaked out, because that was so not his wish, he wanted a car… but the parents, they just grinned and handed over the envelope.”
Franklin smirked, “The one with the deed and keys in it?”
“Yeah… only now it has a deed of enslavement, and ownership tags in it instead, happy birthday! They gave him his little sister as a pet. She freaks out… there’s no car in the driveway, the parents don’t remember ever getting him a car… the boy was disappointed that he didn’t get a car too, but hey, he got his sister as a sex slave, so… he couldn’t complain right?”
“Shit…” Agent Porter cursed.
Everly nodded, “Yeah, so anyway, this little girl knows that this is wrong, but the rest of the world just seems to go with it as if it were normal and right. Her friends think it’s so cool that she is a pet, people think she makes a cute puppy when he takes her out on walks, the police get upset if she’s out of the yard off a leash, and people even complain that he’s over-dressing her if she is wearing clothes in the summer. Cruel to do that to a dog, you know.” She shakes her head and laughs softly. “The poor girl is humiliated, but this is her life now. Finally her brother admits that he knows it’s weird and not right too, but… he isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? So he just rolled with it.”
The Agent frowned, “That sounds miserable. Betrayed by everyone she knows, consigned to a life of slavery, not even considered human by the people around her…”
“Yeah, I imagine that first year was rough on her.” Everly said, “We didn’t get called in until almost three years after it happened though, and by then she was settled in and enjoying herself. The only reason why we even needed to intervene was because other families were trying to register their girls as slaves for their boys' sixteenth birthdays at the request of their daughters, and the local town hall and animal shelters couldn’t figure out how to do that, despite apparently having done it once before.”
Franklin blinked, “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head, “I am not. It became a trend, with his friends becoming jealous of his dog, and her friends becoming jealous of her life as one.”
“For fuck sake, why?” He asked.
Everly shrugged, “Life isn’t easy or fun… There have always been people who have wanted to just check out and go with the flow. And as for the boys, well… can you honestly say that if you were a hormonal teenage boy and you were offered a naked girl that you could fuck whenever you wanted, that you would turn it down?”
He grunted, “Okay, maybe not…”
She smirked and nodded, “Maybe not.”

#520 Starter Dough
(First referenced in How It Starts by AnonyMPC)

Hours later they were sitting in the parking lot of a fast food joint, eating burgers and fries in the car. Agent Porter glanced down at the burger in his hands, several bites missing from it, and it sparked a memory. “Hey, you said that your last partner started a bakery? What’s the story behind that?”
Everly set down her burger on the dash and sighed, leaning back in her seat, “Remember how I said that most of the Bored God artifacts are defunct, and you usually don’t need to worry about them?”
Porter nodded, “Yeah.”
“This was one of those exceptions that bit us in the ass.” She took a swig of her drink, then said, “So this was back during the height of the pandemic, before they had the vaccine rolled out. Everyone was getting into baking world wide because what the fuck else was there to do, right? You couldn’t go anywhere or anything. Some asshole decides to resurrect the yeast from an old wild west ghost town, where the whole town turned on itself in a grand slaughter.”
“I thought you said the artifacts weren’t dangerous…” Franklin said, suddenly getting serious.
“They usually aren’t. But every once in a while something goes very wrong. People are still people. These artifacts, they round off the sharp edges, but they never quite rob us of our free will. They can trick us, and coerce us into doing things, but in the end, we are still the ones making the decisions. Artifact number 520, the Starter Dough, it only affects girls, you see. Has no effect on guys at all. But that doesn’t mean guys won’t be guys about things.” She sighed. “Anyway, we had all thought that this shit died with that town. But this guy brings it back, not having a clue what it is he’s playing with…”
Agent Porter frowned, “What does it do?”
“It makes bread. Sourdough bread. Damn good bread too…” she smirked.
“Fuck you, you know what I mean.” he said.
She sighed, “Any girl who eats the bread becomes addicted to it, and obsesses over feeding the starter, keeping more bread coming. But the method… well…” She shrugged, “It turns them into whores. Makes them horny, uninhibited, and willing to do anything sexual for the right price. Then they give all the money they make to whoever made the bread they ate, so that they can get more bread. And heaven forbid they eat raw dough… that fucks with them. Eat enough of the raw starter dough and they turn into bimbo prostitutes, huge tits, fat hips, thin waist, eternally wet, the works. Try to wean them off the bread or dough and they get violent. Keep em fed and fucked, and they are cheerful and can live relatively normal lives.”
“The last place it showed up, back during the gold rush, a famine caused a flour shortage, men couldn’t get flour, got desperate, and started shooting each other to get a bag of white gold, while women got angry that they couldn’t get their fix. And in under a month, there wasn’t anyone left alive to feed the dough.”
“That… just… and that’s happening again?” Franklin asked.
Reverend Everly nodded, “Yeah, we set up grain reserves outside the town, with cold storage of processed flour that should last a good five years, just in case of a famine, but… not much we can do but limit the spread. Set up customs checkpoints at all the roads out of town to make sure no bread products leave.”
She shrugged, “It spreads like a virus, at first just infecting one home, then that person shares the secret with another, then more… and eventually the whole town is infected. Every woman is willing to sell herself to give money to whoever is the ‘breadwinner’ in their home. Eventually, what started as a closely guarded secret, is a wink and a nudge secret, then an open secret, and then no one is really keeping it secret anymore. That’s when we need to put in internet blackouts on the town so they can’t post anything unfiltered to social media, reroute major roads past the town so people don’t happen into it and get trapped. That kind of thing. Anyway, my partner ended up being sold a teenaged wife while we were there, from a family that had too many daughters and couldn’t keep up with the whoring. He fell for her, and just didn’t want to leave. So… he retired and opened a bakery. Well… a brothel really, but he sells baked goods.”
Franklin frowned, “Well, you don’t ever have to worry about me doing anything like that.”
She shrugged again, “You’re my fourth partner, I’ll be really surprised if you never find something that tugs at your desires.”

#863 License Too

Agent Porter opened the laptop back up and logged back into the archive, starting to scroll through the various recorded artifacts, looking over the ones they had discussed, and picking others at random to review while Everly continued to drive.
After a while of driving in silence, he blurted out, “Here, here’s another one that sounds completely dangerous! Number 863, License Too. A novelty cellophane bag with a folded cardboard topper, stapled through twice, listing the contents as ‘Novelty Licenses, for any use you could imagine’ with instructions to fill out the license and show it to someone to use it, and to tear it up to revoke the license. Contents, five poster board blank licenses, each with a cartoony drawing of a badge, a blank spot for a name, and a blank spot for what the license allows. When filled out and presented to someone, people will accept it as real and valid, no matter how unusual, illegal, or impossible it might seem. You can’t tell me that isn’t ripe for abuse.”
The Reverend laughed, “Oh man… those licenses… yeah…”
“You think that’s funny? What if a terrorist or hit man got their hands on one of those, fuck… write license to kill on one of those and they could go around murdering people with impunity, and everyone would just let them do it!” Franklin protested.
Everly nodded, “Yeah Frank… that could happen, but it never HAS happened. That’s the point here. I’ve encountered those licenses once. They’d fallen into the hands of a teenage boy. Cute kid. Real pervert though. He’d used one to make a panty inspector license, another to make a motherhood stimulation license, and creatively, he’d used one as a slave ownership license to take ownership of his little sister. Last I heard, he was still hanging on to the other two licenses as emergency backups.”
Porter frowned, “Motherhood stimulation? So what… a MILF chaser?”
“Try maker. He’d go around inspecting girl’s panties with the first license, then if he liked what he saw, he’d use the second one to fuck them without birth control, try to knock them up. That’s actually why we ended up in town. A sudden increase in single mothers and teen pregnancies, the state wanted to know why this one town all the sudden needed a lot more SNAP benefits. Turns out, it’s because they had their own little Genghis Khan going around trying to be part of everyone’s genepool.” She snickered, shaking her head.
“Forgive me for not thinking that sounds funny… and what about his sister, ending up enslaved?” Franklin asked.
“Sweet girl for a goth, real cuckquean fetish too, got off on watching her brother fuck other people in front of her and then making her suck the slime off his dick afterwards. No idea what he does with all the panties he confiscates, but… he took a pair of mine.”
Agent Porter blinked, “You gave him your underwear?”
“Oh yeah. I told you, that ring lets you keep your wits about you, but it doesn’t make you immune. So even though I knew that his badge was bogus, I still felt compelled to go along with things. I have an IUD though, I’m not risking getting pregnant on this job, it's too hard to avoid the sex, so I didn’t have to worry about having his babies.” Everly said.
“Shouldn’t you have confiscated or destroyed his motherhood stimulation license, if it was causing a drain on taxpayer resources?” Porter asked.
Everly shrugged, “Maybe… I mean… it’s not like the funds were being used illegally, there were actual babies, who needed that aid, and they got it. That’s what it’s there for. We did talk to him about it though, let him know that he needed to slow down, and be more selective about his use of that badge. Maybe only target people who could afford more kids if he wanted to avoid government notice. To his credit, he clearly hadn’t thought of that, and when we made clear the problems he was causing, he seemed genuinely concerned for all of the mothers more than his own skin.”
“I hate to ask… but how many mothers are we talking about here?”
The Reverend shrugged, “At the time we dealt with him, he’d gotten almost sixty women pregnant, and we were able to confirm seventy-four kids either born or in utero.”
“Seventy-four… Fuck!” Porter rubbed his face with both hands, “That… that’s a lot of fucking kids.”

#789a Magic Marker
(First referenced in Magic Marker Book One by AnonyMPC)

“Alright…” Porter asked in frustration, “If these are all generally harmless, are there any artifacts that you would consider truly dangerous?”
Reverend Everly nodded, “Artifact number 789a, the Magic Marker, a fat black felt tipped marker that reads ‘Magic Marker’ and lists that it has indelible ink on its side, along with a lot of fine print…”
“A?” Franklin blinked, “That’s the first one that has had a letter after its number.”
“Supposedly it’s part of a set, but no one has ever managed to find the other pieces of the set, or confirm exactly what they do. But we know what the Magic Marker does, and it’s dangerous enough all on its own.”
Agent Porter asked, “So what does it do?”
“Whatever you write on someone’s skin with it, becomes true for that person, so long as it is possible, but it can only affect that person. Write that you are a world class dancer, and you will be able to dance better than the most graceful ballerina, but write that you are incredibly rich, and you won’t end up with any more money, instead you will just taste fatty and sweeter.”
Franklin considered that for a moment, then said, “Not to be contrarian here, but, that doesn’t sound nearly as dangerous as the last two items we talked about. It sounds pretty harmless, why would you think it was dangerous?”
The Reverend was quiet for a moment as she thought about how to phrase it, then said, “The current owner is a college kid, got it in his teens, but the owner before that was a former Project Reliquary agent. Found it on an assignment and thought that he could use it to get ahead. He’s how we know that it’s part of a set. Wrote ‘Knows the history of the magic marker’ on his skin. But he didn’t stop there. He kept writing more and more things on his skin, trying to become omniscient, and frankly, Frank? There’s some shit out there that we aren’t meant to know. By the time we figured out what was happening, what he was doing with the marker… it was too late, he had snapped. We have journals that he kept, but they get more and more erratic, the farther in they go, the more he knew… the more fucked up it gets. He couldn’t put things into words anymore. Not words that made sense anyway.”
She sighed, “So now he’s in a mental hospital, getting round the clock care, and sedation to keep him calm so he doesn’t rant about how the end is nigh, and how God is sick of us.”
Agent Porter sat silently, staring at the laptop screen, not sure how to respond to that. The death of an agent was hard enough to cope with, but you kind of got to expect it in that line of work, but to have one snap like that.
“Fortunately, most owners don’t give a shit about that kind of knowledge. They just want to exploit what the marker can do for them. And over time, it changes you. Write something on yourself often enough, and you won’t need the marker to make it real anymore… it will just become a part of you.” She said.
“What’s the current owner like?” Franklin asked.
“A jerk.” Everly said, “Not entirely his fault though. His little sister gave him the marker, and to prove it was magic, she wrote ‘jerk’ on him… and he’s kept writing ‘jerk’ on himself ever since. Of course, the things he has written on her…” she chuckled softly, “Well… he’s made her into quite the little horny slut.”
“Seriously? I’m really detecting a theme here. How many of these artifacts turn little sisters into sex slaves to older brothers?” Agent Porter blurted out.
Everly laughed, “Quite a few… but honestly, in almost every case, the artifact presented itself to the girl, not the boy. The girl was given the power, the choice, and she gave it to the boy. Most artifacts come into the hands of women far more often than men. Even Eve was first to bite the forbidden fruit.”
“Why would they give that up?” He asked.
She shrugged, “You’d have to ask them. I imagine each of them had a different reason. I’d also suspect that none of them knew exactly what they had when they gave it away…”

#139 Fairyland
(First referenced in Halloween Dolls by AnonyMPC)

They checked into another motel for the evening, ordering take out Chinese, then settled back to relax and eat dinner. Agent Porter turned on the nightly news while they ate, then frowned and muted it, motioning to the TV, “Alright, I have a question… how do you keep this stuff out of the news? With all the freaky stuff you have been telling me about, there’s no way that it wouldn’t have been plastered all over the headlines. I mean… think about how hard it is to keep a secret in the government these days…”
“It does.” Reverend Everly said simply, “Like you said, there’s no way to completely stop it. But we can downplay a whole lot of it, discredit it, hide it in the noise… people don’t want to believe stuff like this. Think about how much you keep trying to reject and fight against the stuff I’ve been telling you… but hey, here’s an example. You ever hear about the Halloween kidnappings?”
“Halloween kidnappings?” Franklin asked with a frown.
Everly nodded, “Yeah, someone kidnapping kids on Halloween night, just to return them months later, trained to pretend to behave like the costume that they wore the night they were kidnapped?”
Porter blinked, “Oh, shit, yeah, I remember hearing about that when I was in school… didn’t it take like two or three years for authorities to catch the guy?”
She smirked, “No… they never caught him.”
Agent Porter shook his head, “Damn…” taking a bite of a deep fried shrimp, “Wait… so that was one of the cases for this task force? So you guys put a stop to it, made him retire or something?”
“Wrong again… He’s called the Halloween King, and he’s still very active. He’s been abducting two to three kids on average every year for almost twenty years now.” she said as she shoved her chopsticks into her cashew chicken and poked around, “It was big news at first, until we realized that it was an event that we needed to get involved with. But then we started to mess around with the narrative.”
Porter frowned at that, “What do you mean?”
Reverend Everly swallowed a few bites of her meal, then asked, “What’s the name of the town where the kids got kidnapped?”
“Huh, uh… it’s…” Agent Porter frowned, “Hang on, it was a while ago…” he pulled his phone from his pocket and did a search for it, then started scrolling through the articles, his jaw slowly going slack as he read one after another. “Every story just says ‘the small town’ or ‘this small town’ or ‘the town’... none of them say which town… it doesn’t even say which state…”
Everly nodded, “Exactly. All the records are scrubbed. You might find an original newspaper here or there that has it… but who keeps print newspapers anymore. All the digital stuff, easy to track and alter. It wouldn’t even help if I told you the name of the town. The local freeway was routed around them, and they were taken off major navigation systems… you would have a hard time even finding the town’s name on digital maps unless you were looking for it specifically, and knew the exact addresses you were looking for.”
He dropped his chopsticks, “You… you made a whole town disappear?”
“We had to. I mean… anyone wandering into the town by accident was bound to get drawn into the whole situation. And heaven forbid they have kids and one of them gets kidnapped by the Halloween King on Halloween… then they are just stuck there until they are old enough to not be Dolls anymore.”
“What about social media, people’s families in other areas, people moving for jobs, there’s just no way to keep something like this secret forever.” Porter protested.
“You would be surprised at how helpful the towns are in making it happen. They all see it as their dirty little secret, the thing that makes them unique, scared that the big bad government or the world at large would beat down their walls with pitchforks and torches if they found out… which lets be honest… in some cases, that’s true. So they work with us, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, and help us hide the truth. People just don’t talk about these kinds of things… who would believe them?” The Reverend asked with a shrug.
He groaned as he picked up his chopsticks again, looking through the article on his phone as he took a bite of his lo mein. “How many towns out there have just been cut off from the world?”
Everly was quiet for a moment, then shrugged, “There’s more than we’d like, of course. Some states have two or three, not all of them have one though. But I’d say close to forty towns out there that just don’t officially exist. Even then though, it’s not perfect, that town has a thriving summer Halloween festival that people from all around gather to see despite our best efforts.”
Agent Porter frowned as something in the news story caught his attention, "You know... thinking back on it, I never understood why all the victims referred to the place they were kept as fairyland... I mean... what does fairyland have to do with Halloween? I'd understand a graveyard, or the beyond, or something, but..."
The Reverend chuckled, "Well, that’s the thing that eventually tipped us off. See, Fairyland is the artifact here, and in this case, there’s more than one. The oldest one known was in Ireland, used to kidnap people and keep them for a year and a day, and return them as fairies... that's where it got its name. It's gone now though."
"What happened to it?" Porter asked between bites of his takeout noodles.
She shrugged, "A Catholic monastery managed to destroy it near the end of 1844. There's also one in a small town in Germany, where Krampus and Saint Nick are real... every year Krampus sneaks into the homes of bad kids and abducts them, and the next year, Saint Nick deposits them under the trees of the good boys and girls as whatever toy that kid asked for, be it a dolly, a pet, or a little brother or sister."
"Fucking dark... you'd think they would run out of bad kids..." Porter shuddered.
Everly laughed, "No, there's always going to be brats who think it's a great idea to end up a sex toy."
Franklin groaned, “Fine, so what’s the deal with Fairyland then?”
She sighed and leaned back against the headrest of the bed, “That… is a hard one to answer. None of our agents have ever made it into a Fairyland and come back to write about it. Even the monks who destroyed the one in Ireland didn’t record what it was like inside. All we know is that it can change people, and often chooses someone as its emissary in the world to be the agent or symbol for that change. Those it changes have to spend time inside Fairyland, but that time can vary. And the level of change seems far beyond what medicine can explain.”
“Okay, I get letting some of these things just happen, but this one sounds pretty nasty, if you have to erase towns to keep it in check. If you know how to destroy it, why don’t you just wipe it out when you find one?” Agent Porter asked.
Everly nodded to his phone, “Do a quick search for ‘Ireland, 1845’…”
He did so, then his face blanched.
“Yeah… that’s why.” she said.

#874 Reality Cheques
(First referenced in Reality Checks by AnonyMPC)

The Reverend was coming out of the bathroom, just wrapped in a towel after her shower as she headed for the little vanity nook in the entryway, when she heard Agent Porter call out, “I found it!”
She glanced over, seeing him sitting on his bed, already dressed for the day, with the computer in his lap, looking… excited… perhaps even vindicated.
She smirked as she grabbed the hairbrush from her toiletries kit and started to brush out her hair, “What did you find?”
“Right here, Twisted Dream Productions… that was the site that was making the sexploitation videos I found. The ones that got me… well… moved to this project.” he said.
She took the time to brush out her hair in the mirror, asking, “Tell me about it… what happened?”
“We were tracking movement of videos on the dark web, some really sick shit. Anyway, I found this company that was clearly making child porn, like… a lot of it, and some really weird and twisted stuff at that. Usually you find this stuff, and it’s either high budget but just nude photography, or some creep in a hotel doing it all on their own, but this was like… big budget stuff that was doing it all, way more than just nudes… and I mean everything… adults with kids, animals with kids, straight, gay, the works… and there was so much of it. I thought I’d found some huge global ring…” he sighed, “I took it to my superior, and presented my evidence, and he just said that everyone appeared to be over the age of eighteen to him, and everyone had the proper permits, they just ‘looked’ young.” Franklin shook his head, “Can you believe that?”
Everly pulled her hair back into a ponytail and wrapped a hair tie around it, “Yeah, I can believe it, I’ve seen it happen before. Twisted Dreams Productions is run by that cult I was telling you about. It was started by Jeff Skinner… he used to be a part of it. Before he died anyway. I never got the chance to speak to the man, or any of his partners, but those who have said that he was a true believer. He believed in smut, and in entertaining the Bored God with it.”
“Did he start the cult?” Franklin asked.
Everly shrugged as she grabbed some fresh clothes from her bag, then stepped into the bathroom to start changing out of view of her partner, “I doubt it. My guess, he found out about the Bored God some other way, and the cult found him somewhere along the line. Like I said… things are moving faster these days.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “thanks to him, we got to see the creation of an artifact happen in real time.”
“What do you mean?”
She stepped out of the bathroom in slacks and underwear, while buttoning up her dress shirt, making Agent Porter blush and frown as he looked away studiously, “His checkbook. He used to pull a nasty prank on his actors and actresses. He’d get them to do things for the shoots, then pay them with a check, but the memo line would say exactly what they did, like ‘For your daughter fucking two dogs’ or ‘Letting your wife be gangbanged by that biker gang’. The checks would always clear… but most of the time the people he paid would be too scared to take them into a bank. But after he died, his checkbook started showing up in random places. A simple brown alligator skin checkbook usually with five to ten checks left on the book inside, all filled out and signed, with ever increasing dollar amounts ranging from a few hundred dollars, to a few hundred thousand… and the memo line filled out with what you need to do to get the money.”
Porter shook his head, “Why don’t people just cash the checks at an ATM, where no teller will have to see them, if they are already filled out and signed, it’s just free money, right?”
“That is what people who find the Reality Checks tend to think at first, yeah… they cash one to see if it will clear… and it does. Yay, free money… but then whatever was written on the memo line… happens. There’s no getting around it. Once you cash the check, your fate is sealed.” She took a bit of time to fit the cotton band of her clerical collar and adjust the neckline, then said, “I imagine that first check comes as a shock to most people. But we have yet to find someone who didn’t cash more checks afterwards, either because they didn’t believe it, or because they really wanted the money… or maybe because they were just too eager.”
“Where does the money even come from? I mean… this isn’t like making someone believe something, this is… the money has to come from somewhere, right?” Franklin asked in confusion.
Reverend Everly laughed, “Yeah, it does, it apparently took forever to track it down too. It’s all coming from a sub account of the Vatican bank… they have no idea how it was created, or who or what is funding it… but the money is always there… so…” she shrugged and smirked, “...it’s God’s money to do with as He wills.”
Despite himself, Agent Porter smirked at that.
“Come on, let's go get breakfast.” Everly said as she slipped on her shoes and reached for her coat.

#627 Ouina Board

Once on the road again after breakfast, Agent Porter glanced over at Reverend Everly for a moment as he took a turn driving, and then asked, “You ever wish it had never happened? That you could be a guy again?”
Everly considered that silently for a bit before replying, “There have been times when I’ve wished it hadn’t happened, but the grass is always greener on the other side, isn’t it? Who knows what my life would have been like as a guy. And besides, it’s not like I can really compare the two, the vast majority of my life, and all my sexual experience, has been spent as a woman.”
“Ever think of tracking down that Suggestion Box to ask to be a guy again?” He asked.
She laughed, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to track that box down? I’ve never even seen the thing in person. Though I did have a chance to get a dick once if I wanted to.”
Franklin blinked, “What’s the story on that one?”
“Two partners back, we found a family reunion that had stumbled upon the Ouina Board.” she said.
“The what?” Agent Porter asked in confusion.
The Reverend smirked, “A spirit board and planchette, you know, one of those spiritualist party games…”
He cut her off, “You mean a Ouija board?”
“Nope. I mean artifact number 627, the Ouina Board. It looks like a normal board, only instead of the sun and moon symbols, there are three other symbols; a stylized drawing of a flower to symbolize the vagina and womb, a stylized drawing of the star of chaos, you know, six arrows pointing outwards from a central point, to represent the anus and rectum, and lastly a stylized drawing of a lipstick stain, to represent the lips, mouth and throat.” She explained.
He frowned a little as he listened, but nodded for her to continue.
She smiled, “Anyway, the way it works is, the board requires two or more people playing it to work. Each person playing surrounds the board and touches the planchette, then they start to spell out a name. Once they have spelled a name out, they point to one of the three symbols, and that starts the ‘spell’. At the start of the next day, the game chooses a person that they know by that name, or if they don’t know someone by that name, the closest person to them with that name, and well…”
Agent Porter glanced over at her briefly before looking back to the road.
After pausing for effect, the Reverend continues, “That named person wakes up with the urge to fuck everyone who was touching the planchette, and an erection that won’t go away until they have done so.”
Linking this to the previous conversation, Porter asked, “And if they use this board to spell out a girl’s name?”
“It gives them ‘Ouina’.” drawling the word out so that it sounded like ‘a weiner’.
“Of course.”
She smirked. “It does more than that though… a lot more. It changes the size of the dicks of guys who are affected. Their member will gain at least half an inch, but it will essentially grow to be an inch or so bigger than the largest size of the chosen hole among the people using the planchette could take. So some people have ended up with some monstrous members. So long as they fuck one of the people in the right hole within twenty-four hours, they go back to normal. Otherwise, it stays permanent, though the permanent erection goes away.”
Franklin shook his head slowly, “Most people assume that you use those boards to ask dumb questions and get answers to them…”
“Oh, it does that too. The people using the planchette can ask a question while using the board, or while getting fucked, and the one gifted with the dick will answer it honestly to the best of their ability, even if they weren’t there when the question was asked.” she says.
Agent Porter chuckled, “I gotta say, this sounds pretty tame for an artifact. You said that this was at a family reunion, right? Some kids spell out their dad or uncle’s name… all he has to do is not fuck his family and he gets a bigger dick out of it? I mean, a reward for doing the right thing? That almost seems out of character.”
“Oh, sure. Except during that twenty-four hours, everyone except those who were playing the game think it is perfectly normal for the target of the game to hunt down, seduce and fuck the players. Moreover, on day three of fucking around with the game, the girls got one of their male cousins to play. For a laugh, they spelled out his older sister’s name and since she was known for dressing slutty, they asked if she was really a virgin or not. He thought that the game, which he knew by that point was real, would let him fuck her, not understanding it was the other way around, so he bullied the planchette up to the flower symbol.”
Franklin glanced over at her, “But boys don’t have a vagina or womb…”
“Exactly. Until he woke up that morning with one where his cock and balls used to be. Freaked the fuck out… got even worse at breakfast when he saw his big sister with a tentpole in her skirt, making a beeline for him. He spent the whole day avoiding her, not realizing that if he had just spread his legs for her, things would have gone back to normal…”
Everly sighed, “Anyway, there’s a penalty for the players who avoid getting fucked. If no one gets fucked within the twenty-four hours, and the target is permanently transformed, the players minds are altered to want to be fucked in that hole almost ravenously from then on, with a strong preference for the target, but any port in a storm… So the next morning, he and the girls who tricked him into playing, all end up horny as fuck and spreading their legs for any dick they can find. All of them ended up pregnant before the end of the family reunion.”
Porter frowned, “None of them thought to use protection?”
“I mean, they were out in the woods camping, not exactly like they had easy access to a pharmacy or a condom machine.” Everly explained with a shrug. “Anyway, my partner suggested that we get some girls to spell out my name and just not have me fuck them, they were already sluts by that point anyway… but…”
“But?” Agent Porter asked.
“The kid’s sister ended up with a cock and cunt… she’s gonna have that her whole life, gonna be fun to explain. I didn’t want to be one step extra freaky just so I could pee standing up.” she said with a smirk.”

#877 Luxuria Print

Agent Porter found a taco truck around lunch time and parked on the far side of the lot that it occupied. The two of them ordered their meals, then walked back to the SUV and leaned against its side.
Reverend Everly checked the map on her phone and said, “We’re making good time, we’re only about an hour from our destination.”
Porter unwrapped some of the foil around his burrito, then asked, “I’ve been wondering, why the two day drive? We could have just flown into the area and rented a car.”
Everly lifted one of her fish tacos from the paper basket in her hand and took a bite, shrugging as she chewed and swallowed, “Gave me time to get to know you, and fill you in on all of this. And if we do need to confiscate anything, would you rather it be in the back of an SUV with two agents who know what is going on? Or on a commercial flight at forty thousand feet in the air, suddenly sparking an orgy with no one at the controls of the plane?”
“Point.” he said, before taking a bite of his burrito. “How often do we need to confiscate artifacts? It seemed to me like most of the time we are expected to leave them out in the wild.”
“Usually, but it’s not always the artifacts that you have to worry about. The artifacts are always evolving, changing as humanity does. I had the misfortune of being part of the first team to come across number 877, Luxuria Print software… Just a fucking application, they have found it since as a CD, a DVD, a thumb drive… or just installed randomly. But the app itself isn’t the problem. It’s what it produces.” she explained.
Porter took a bite of his burrito as he listened, knowing that she would go on unprompted, watching the crowd around the taco truck jockey in line.
Everly took a sip of her drink, then did indeed continue, “You ever see one of those church signs, that has a double entendre without seeming to get it, or an advertisement that is so screwed up, you wonder how marketing got it out without anyone snickering and telling them how dumb it was? Like that burger joint commercial where the one burger is lecturing his kid sized burger for selling himself for only a dollar, or that electronics company with the ad promising a ‘free hookup with every TV you buy’.”
Franklin smirked, “Yeah, there’s a lot of those out there.”
“Yeah, well, Luxuria Print makes people take them seriously.” she said.
He blinked, “Huh?”
“The first time we found it, this town had descended into chaos. There was just random debauchery everywhere, with no apparent pattern or reason. It took forever to untangle it. Usually things follow a single theme, right? There’s only a handful of people using an artifact at most, so they tend to be fairly focused in what they do. But here… it was madness; girls fucking animals, free use sex, incest, rampant pregnancy, underaged sex, abuse, orgasm denial, forced orgasms, it was all over the place!” Everly shook her head, “Finally we found the link. It was the clothes.”
“Clothes?” Porter asked.
“Yeah… the first person to ever find and use Luxuria Print was a silk screener making novelty clothes for a mall kiosk. All kinds of joke logos and slogans. Even used it for the signage on the kiosk. Was supposed to be ‘T-shirts, Sweatshirts, Hats and Uniforms’ but Luxuria Print fucks with what you write, so it swapped Uniforms for Underwear, and all the sudden this kiosk starts selling panties, and because of the sign, everyone just takes it as normal.” she paused to finish her taco, then take a bite of another, chasing it down with another sip of her drink before continuing.
“The worst part was the clothing that this guy was printing though. It was all over the place. The town vet ordered a bunch of t-shirts that were supposed to say I love my dog, you know, with a heart in place of the word love… only Luxuria Print substituted the heart with a bone. Everyone the vet gifted the shirts to, started fucking their dogs, because the shirts told them that’s what they did, and anyone who saw them wearing the shirt, well… obviously that person fucks dogs, so why bother worrying about it.”
Agent Porter grunted as he swallowed what was in his mouth and started to put things together, “But the shirts weren’t artifacts…”
“Nope… just created by one, with lingering power over whoever saw them or wore them. And those weren’t even the worst items. We found a girl with a pair of panties that read ‘Daddy’s Lil’ Pornstar’ was supposed to be ‘princess’, but… anyway, she had gotten in trouble for trying to open a porn streaming account at the age of eight. A teen cycling group ordered shirts that were supposed to say ‘Down 2 Bike’ but came back saying ‘Town Bike’ and they ended up free use sluts, where anyone would just fuck them and they would just accept it.” she sighed as she leaned back against the car. “It was just madness, the kinds of things we found…”
“One girl got a shirt with ‘Gooner Girl’ instead of Gamer Girl, and ended up masturbating everywhere, but never letting herself cum, while another girl got panties with ‘Good Vibes’ on it, who couldn’t not have something buzzing away in her making her cum at all hours of the day. There was a shirt with a postage stamp with ‘Family Friendly’ written inside the stamp, but the software put ‘Fucking’ in cursive atop Family, and anyone who wore it ended up wanting to fuck family members, and of course their family members were totally okay with it.”
“The worst though…” Everly shook her head, “...was this twelve year old girl who got a shirt that had a yardstick on it that was supposed to say ‘You Must Be This Tall To Ride’, but instead replaced ‘Tall’ with ‘Long’. She ended up a total size queen… like off the charts here. Her mom was buying her novelty horsecock dildos online. Things longer and thicker than my arm. By the time we confiscated her shirt, she’d blown out both her lower holes to the point where she gaped open even while standing up with her legs together, and she was proud of it.”
Franklin did a spit take with his cola at hearing that, “The fuck? She’ll get better, right?”
Everly shrugged, “I mean, there are exercises that she could do if she wanted to, but I’m not sure she ever would want to. And she’s never going to be able to enjoy her time with a human guy, it’d be like throwing a hotdog down a hallway. Anyway, we reported what we had found, and registered the new artifact, and word from on high was to delete the software and confiscate the goods before it spread outside the town, because clothes travels, you know, second hand stores and all that. I’m pretty sure we didn’t get all of it though, people were proud of what they had, that kiosk had gotten popular once people started to realize what power it held.”
“The program has popped up since, usually just used to make and print signs, I haven’t seen anyone use it to print clothing since that first time. So hopefully whatever power rests behind the artifacts stopped that loophole from working.” the Reverend commented.
Porter nodded slowly as he finished his burrito.
“Anyway, when we get to town, you’re going to need to be sharp. Keep your eyes open, and treat everything you see as a crime scene. You can never know what is or isn’t related to an artifact at first glance. So it’s good to keep an open mind, and have an eye for details. Listen to what people say, and be willing to be friendly… even too friendly… sometimes. That’s one of the reasons why it’s always a male and female on the team. There are things a woman won’t tell a man, and things a woman won’t tell a woman. Likewise, things a man wouldn’t tell a woman, and things a man would never tell a man.” Everly looked down the road and frowned, letting out a deep sigh.
Porter, having grown used to her cheerful mood, blinked, “What’s wrong?”
“Look, the other reason for having mixed gender teams is because of how the artifacts work. They usually mess with one gender or another, most often females, like I said. So when we get to the town, we will have to follow whatever is going on there to blend in. That means you are going to have to pretend to be less uptight, and probably relax and have sex with some people… and depending on the event, expect to see me naked, and being used by the natives.” the Reverend said flatly.
“Oh.” was all Franklin could manage in response.

Porter pulled off the freeway and slowed down as he approached what looked to be a construction zone, with workers and construction equipment scattered about. A construction flagger with his sign turned to ‘stop’ stood at the side of the road, so Porter slowed the car to a stop, then groaned and rolled down his window.
The flagger frowned, but started to approach the car.
Franklin pulled his badge from his coat pocket and held it up for the man, not even waiting for him to check it, “Are you fucking serious? Sneakers? Not even hiking boots? What kind of amateaur shit show is this? You should be in steel toed boots or something that at least pretends to look like them. I could tell from inside my car that you aren’t a real construction worker…”
The man blinked, then blushed and frowned both, “Sorry sir.”
“Don’t be sorry, be better. You had better have proper shoes by the time we leave. What’s the situation on the inside?” he asked.
“No clue, we’re under orders not to go in. The local sheriff and her deputy have set up a station just down the road to inform incoming traffic of the new laws, so we are just diverting anyone who doesn’t have valid business in the town around it with a detour.”
Franklin sighed, “Fine… get some proper fucking shoes.” he rolled the window up and shook his head, “Seriously.”
Everly laughed softly as they drove past the agents dressed up as construction workers, “They’re trying their best, I’m sure.”
The sheriff’s checkpoint was just around the bend in the road, not taking much time to get to at all. They had set up some cement barricades, a folding table, a tent, a small trailer, and a few odds and ends, clearly planning for a longer stay.
Agent Porter took a deep breath as he drove up to the barricades, seeing a young man in a deputy uniform, and a middle aged woman who was nearly naked, save for a gray collar with a sheriff’s badge hanging from it like a dog tag.
Everly said, “Take a deep breath, it’s going to be fine.”
He stopped the car, and when the deputy motioned for them to get out, he turned it off, and the two of them exited the vehicle.
The sheriff, naked and only managing to look a little embarrassed by that fact, grinned at the two of them, “Howdy folks, what brings you to our neck of the woods?”
Porter glanced at Everly, who just smiled and stepped forward, holding out a hand, “Hi, I’m Reverend Everly Combs, this is Agent Franklin Porter. We were sent here on a joint investigative issue within the town. Nothing serious, I promise.”
The sheriff frowned, but took the offered hand, “I see, well… things have been pretty quiet in the town since the new laws went into effect. Honestly, other than a bit of rowdiness and some drunkenness, it’s like the whole town has just calmed the fuck down. So I’m not sure what the two of you are investigating, but if it’s recent, you are probably in the wrong town.”
Agent Porter cleared his throat and asked, “New laws?”
The sheriff nodded and motioned down at her nudity, “Mayor passed some new female decency and consent laws a couple weeks ago.” she nodded to her deputy, who handed her a brochure. “Most important thing is that all females in town can only wear a collar with an ID tag.”
She glanced at the Reverend, “Is that going to be a problem for you, ma’am?”
Everly shook her head, “Won’t be the first time I’ve been naked.” and then to Porter’s surprise, she just started stripping right there in the road. He coughed and turned his attention back to the sheriff, but that wasn’t much better.
The deputy came forward with a hot pink collar with a silver tag that read ‘Guest’ on it, and the sheriff explained, “These are to be worn by all outsiders, collars are color coded, but you only really need to know two colors. Pink and white. Pink means you came from out of town. White means that the wearer is too young, too old, or medically exempt from sex. Having sex with someone wearing a white collar will be considered rape.” she said with all seriousness, looking sternly at Agent Porter.
“That won’t be an issue.” he said with equal seriousness back.
“Good. Now then…” she opened the brochure, “The town has been divided into three types of zones. White zones are areas where no public sex is allowed. These are mostly places like restaurants, stores, medical facilities, and other places where people need to be focused and sterile. Blue zones are areas where sex is allowed with the woman’s consent. All private residences are considered blue zones, and a lot of public buildings are as well, though those will be clearly marked. Most parks, public spaces, and areas where it would be safe to engage in sexual activity will be blue, as you can see here on the map.”
He nodded as he looked over the map, which was honestly, predominantly blue.
“The red spaces are the ones you want to be careful of. Brewer park, Koffman street, Mr. Blank’s Tattoos and Piercings, the pound, and the locker rooms of the high school football stadium are all red zones. That means that a woman there is considered to be consenting no matter what she says.” the sheriff glanced over at the now naked Reverend who was putting the pink collar on. “That means that if someone pins you down and rapes you in one of those areas, it isn’t really rape. Stay out of those areas if you aren’t into it.”
Porter swallowed hard, “O… okay. Got it.”
“I’d suggest you stay out of those areas too… I know you’re a man, but… I just don’t want outsiders getting into trouble in those areas.”
He glanced up at the sheriff, “Have you had trouble?”
“Only in the form of kids thinking they know what they are getting into, my own daughter being one of them. Her friends all dared each other to pick a red zone and go in. She picked the tattoo parlor. Took her three days to get out, now she has a tongue stud, pierced nipples, six rings in each pussy lip, and the words ‘fuck toy’ tattooed down her spine, and she’s missed her period. A harsh lesson for a thirteen year old. But I’d wager her friend Blake has it worse… she snuck into the pound and hasn’t come out yet.”
“T… that’s kidnapping.” Porter blurted out.
“They were all warned beforehand… going into a red zone gave consent. They are getting what they were literally asking for when they went. If we haven’t heard from Blake in another week, I’ll send my deputy in to check on her…” the naked sheriff said, waving it off. “I’m sure no one is going to hurt her… she’s probably just being trained as a dog and being kept in a kennel.”
The agent swallowed and tried hard to keep his tone even and casual as he replied, “Right… of course.”
Reverend Everly cut in to ask, “Mind if I clip a faux Roman collar over this…” pointing to the hot pink collar around her neck, “I’m still a priest after all.”
The sheriff blinked, “You have something made to fit over a collar?”
Everly laughed, “Not the first collar I’ve worn.”
“I suppose it’s fine. Just don’t hide the tag. Anyway… all the rules are posted in the brochure. I don’t want to find out that you two broke any while in town. Trying to clothe a female is a serious offense now, and I’d rather not have to deal with it.”
They both nodded and the sheriff waved them back to their car, “You folks have a great day. Let me know if you need anything as part of your investigation. I spend most of my time here these days welcoming what few visitors we get to town.”
Porter and Everly got back into the car and he started to drive around the barricade, only to comment idly as he did so, “I didn’t… expect you to be waxed… down there…” which caused the reverend to break out into laughter.
“Come on, partner, let's get to work.”