The Rosewood Box

It looks like an ordinary jewellery box with a polished rosewood veneer and stained glass inlaid in the lid. However, the lid is permanently affixed to the case, and the hinges are decorative fakes. If you press on three different studs on the sides simultaneously, a catch releases and a hidden spring unfolds the box into an entirely new and inexplicable shape with mysterious extrusions and outgrowths of no obvious purpose. Whatever it might be, it’s not a jewellery box.

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The box was one of the items placed at auction in a small local fundraiser to benefit a college library, and in spite of its lack of obvious purpose, bidding for it was intense. The most aggressive bidder only dropped out of the running when an official interrupted the auction to ask him to leave, having discovered that his credentials were falsified. The winner paid in cash and hurried away with his purchase. Later the auction winner and another person were found stabbed to death in a nearby hotel room, and the box was nowhere to be found.

Possibilities

1 The box was created as an offering to Daoloth for a ceremony in which the outer god grants the celebrants powers of perception into realms that mortals ordinarily never see. Its creator never used it, and it was eventually donated to the charity auction by his descendants. The buyer and his partners, and the ejected bidder as well, were ambitious occultists who hoped to gain knowledge from beyond the human sphere by using it.

In order to present the offering, the ceremony’s priest is required to take the box in its unfolded state and reach into the god with it. At the last moment, the chief occultist baulked, afraid of what the god’s touch would do to him. Daoloth left in disgust, and took his revenge by failing to lift the state of heightened perception the celebrants were brought to in order to conduct the ceremony. Both of them went instantly mad from experiencing the world unfiltered through human senses, and were stabbed to death in self-defense by a third conspirator whose job guarding the door meant he didn’t take part in the ritual.

The third conspirator took the box and left to search for a stronger-minded occultist to perform the ceremony properly.

2 The box is a disguised mi-go device for decommissioning interplanetary portals. It was left with a human agent to shut down a portal at the site of a depleted mine, once the aliens had all returned through it to Yuggoth. Before he could carry out his task, the agent was killed by a gang of thugs working for a sorcerer who wanted a supply of the mi-go mineral in order to transfer his brain to a younger body. The sortie through the portal to Yuggoth was a failure, and most of the sorcerer’s hirelings deserted him on the alien planet. They retreated through the portal and paid themselves for the venture by selling off as many of his possessions as they could cart away with them. However, the sorcerer successfully hid from the mi-go and eventually returned to Earth through another portal. He was even able to bring some of the mineral back with him.

Now wearing a fitter man’s body, he’s rebuilding his laboratory by tracking down all his equipment and reacquiring it one way or another.

3 The device is a puzzle box, an ordinary Victorian objet d’art. It belonged to the part-owner of a shipping company, a man whose partners had for many years been blackmailing him into helping them smuggle South-African diamonds into Europe. The box has a secret compartment, which has been used by its owner to store a written confession, including a full account of the smuggling.

Feeling his death approaching, the smuggler donated most of his possessions to the fundraising effort and wrote a taunting letter to his partners, letting them know that if they wanted to stop the secret getting out, they’d have to spend some of their ill-gotten gains on charity. As a final act of revenge, he also wrote to a former business rival, informing him that the partners were now themselves open to blackmail if the confession could be found. Now at least two different groups of criminals are wrestling over possession of the box, one to destroy it, one to exploit its secrets.

© Chris Kerr