Tag Archives: lamps

Hopeless inhabitants

Keeping the lights on

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Image by Dr Abbey, story by Nimue Brown

Keeping the lights on at night is important for islander safety. Generating the energy to keep the lights on remains problematic. This latest invention purports to use the souls of the damned to provide illumination. 

Dr Lyssa assures us that there are a lot of damned souls floating about on the island, taking up far too much space in the ether. “Diverting their energy into light might do more than illuminate the town. It might even serve to reduce the miasma,” she told The Vendetta.

When asked how exactly the device worked to trap the souls of the damned and extract energy from them, Dr Lyssa said, “Very nicely, thank you.”

Several of our island’s psychics, who did not wish to be named (but you know who they are, it’s the usual suspects) have confirmed that they can see ghosts attached to the street lamps. There is consensus to that point, but not beyond it, which is probably why none of them wants to admit who exactly said what. I am reliably informed that

  1. The damned are suffering dreadfully to create light and this is just.
  2. That damned are using the lights to steal energy from everyone else and it is a conspiracy and a trap.
  3. It isn’t the damned at all, but the ghosts of things that glowed when they were alive. You can see the glow, you just can’t see the ghost making it.

Doc Willoughby wants to reassure people that street lights cannot hurt you unless they fall on you, or a massive splinter of ice drops off and stabs you to death, or you walk into one in the fog, or something thin and awful is hiding behind one.

I hope everyone is reassured by this.

Hopeless inhabitants

Lights in the darkness

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You may have wondered about the lamps. There is no grid on Hopeless, Maine. There are no gas pipes, and since the end of the trade in oil pressed from giant oceanic gnii, there hasn’t been much in the way of reliable lamp oil, either.

Of course any dead thing that washes up on a beach can be rendered down for oil, if you’ve the stomach for it. When the choice is make and use hideous corpse oil, or sit in the dark wondering what it is that you can’t see… well, it’s surprising how attractive those dead things can become. Thanks to the tides, dead things are mostly what wash up on the shores of Hopeless.

Balthazar is one of the island’s more successful inventors. No doubt his greatest achievement is having built a lighthouse, mostly from the bones of a massive sea monster. Balthazar tries very hard to be a scientist, but often finds he is an accidental occultist who has almost no idea how any of that side of his work… works.

Lamps being such good and useful things, people tend to adopt them and try to work out how to keep them going. The one powered by hurdy gurdy mercifully doesn’t need you to actually play a tune. Several are uncomplicated enough to just need oil of some sort. There’s one you have to wind by hand, and one where a weight drops on a chain. The one that was supposed to gather daylight and release it again at night somehow mostly gathers moths, and feeds on them. It is probably best to stay well away from that lamp, in case it gets ideas.