The Artifact

An ancient Vicci rune that survives the sinking of Atlantis and becomes a crucial "time travel" device in 2001, directly connected to the Dark Killer.

Appearance

Variation 1: The Pure Atlantean Relic (The Mother Peak Stabilizer)

The Artifact as created by the Vicci

This is the block exactly as Vicci built it, and as the Dark Killer found it before it was ever modified by modern hands. It is entirely non-technological.

A heavy, solid cube carved out of a dark, obsidian-like stone containing compressed veins of glowing purple-blue crystal. The material feels cold to the touch and has a distinct weight that defies its size.

The six stone faces are deeply engraved with sharp, non-Euclidean angular runes and geometric circles. The carvings themselves pulse faintly with an eerie, steady phosphorescent glow, humming at a low frequency that causes a slight chronological shudder in the air around it.

Variation 2: The Andy/Kevin Special

The Artifact with modifications done by Andy and Kevin.

This configuration showcases the artifact as it exists in the 2001 narrative thread—a gritty, brilliant, yet highly unstable piece of DIY engineering in which Andy Williams and Kevin Stewart added rudimentary modern tech to an ancient power device.

The baseline of the device remains the heavy, indestructible, non-Euclidean Atlantean stone cube. Its chiseled, runic engravings and geometric circular patterns burn with a steady, deep-purple bioluminescent glow, bleeding ancient energy into the modern framework strapped around it.

To make the box portable and stable enough to travel with, Andy and Kevin have wrapped a thick, industrial-grade fabric strap tightly around its center, securing a heavy, raw-steel mounting plate directly to the front face of the stone block.

Bolted to the center of the steel plate is an un-ironic piece of early 2000s tech: a modified black plastic gaming racing steering wheel, complete with its small multi-colored face buttons and directional pad. This wheel acts as the tracking dial to lock onto specific, hidden nodes or coordinates in time.

Below the steering wheel rests a rugged metal breakout box featuring a cluster of heavy-duty, metallic toggle switches labeled "POWER", "CALIBRATE", and "ACTIVATE", alongside a retro plastic telephone-style numeric keypad for entering specific calendar dates.

Mounted directly above the steering wheel is a crude, yellow-backed LCD character module. Red glowing retro text across the display shows digital readouts of their temporal metrics: current date and target date.

Fanning out from behind the screen and control boxes is a messy, exposed network of brightly colored copper cables, grounding wires, and electrical tape that snakes wildly around the corners of the stone block, bridging the raw energy of the cosmic core straight into the hacked circuit boards.

Variation 3: The Fried Evidence (What Harold Meltzner Receives in 2007)

The Artifact after traveling through time, as given to Harold to reverse-engineer.

This shows the aftermath of the 1976 supernatural explosion—the configuration that the government confiscated from Andy Kevin StewartHarold Meltznerand Kevin in 2001 and handed to Harold in his underground Arizona lab.

The core stone cube remains entirely indestructible, but the modern components strapped to it are catastrophically ruined.

The attached steering wheel is partially melted, warped into a misshapen plastic loop. The digital display glass is cracked, shattered into webs with a completely dead LCD screen that shows nothing but a scorched black spot. Wires are frayed, exposed, and coated in a black layer of soot. The industrial metal base plate is severely scorched, rusted, and bent away from the block. The ancient runes on the stone core still burn with a faint, defiant purple glow beneath the burnt cybernetic debris, highlighting why the military scientists couldn't make any sense of the hardware.

See DISCUSSION for more info.