Black box
black box
Plural: black boxen
Inside this black box are recorders for time, geophysical location, temperature, humidity, acceleration, and deceleration; video recorders of your foe; chemical analyzers of your sweat; spectral analyzers for the powers unleashed by you or your opponents; audio compression and analysis tools; air quality samplers; and about half a dozen meters of more questionable merit (the aura interpreter isn't talking about the psion aura, for instance, and the I Ching caster, Electric Sheep subliminizer, and Electric Monk guilt processor seem to be right out.) Weirdly, the one thing it doesn't have is a compass.
Offhand Item
Item cannot traded, sold, or placed in a memento display
Collects crime data for Dirk Douglass.
Rental equipment is lost at rollover
How Obtained
Accept Dirk's job at Sherlock & Poirot, Crime Analysts
After every two hours of adventuring with this equipped:
| |
Your little black box beeps quietly, letting you know that it's full of data. You swing by the lab and let Dirk download everything. He puts a little tick in your IOU tally sheet, saying you've earned one favor from the group. |
You got an item: crimebusters IOU 
Notes
- The two hours count is reset at rollover, i.e. leftover time from one day does not roll to the next day.
- The time counted is the actual time spent. That is, if one gains a shorter turn though Prepunctuality or through any of the chairs, a shorter amount of time is counted.
- The only exception to the above rule is time gained through the use of throwing star - black hole. As this takes the user a minute back in time, the time gained was spent adventuring and it does count.
- The time counted includes additional time lost when being Defeated.
- Time spent resting, PvPing, or playing games does not count.
References
- Electric Sheep may refer to the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
- Electric Monk may refer to a character in the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.
