Relic Investigator Quest

Welcome to Delta Nine Reliquary

You are a freshly conscripted Reliquary Technician, Tenth Class assigned to the Delta Nine Reliquary, and you have one of the most dangerous jobs in the galaxy: preliminary investigation of the recently excavated relics of precursor societies, some of which are believed to predate Event Zero of the current universe.

While some relics may be usefully investigated by remote handling techniques, the sad fact is that 90% of relics, from the wholly benign to the astonishingly lethal, only operate correctly – if at all! – when handled by the manipulator limbs of live animals with a Sqxnr-Smythe Neurodevelopmental Index of 17.5 or higher. The Zev-Bur-Kil would never have been identified as an inexhaustible, rate-limited source of high quality panspecific nutrition without the brave and brilliant work of our Reliquary Technicians.

Given the number of relics which can cause life-altering physiological or psychological effects on the operator and/or bystanders when operated in certain ways, there is a demand for new Reliquary Technicians which exceeds the available volunteers. To address this shortfall, a programme of conscription was introduced approximately three gigaseconds ago.

QM note: I cannot Art to a useful standard. If I could, there would be Art in this quest.

CHARACTER GENERATION

Character generation is by plan vote.

You were conscripted: (select exactly one)
[X] Through the Labour Experience Allocation Lottery on a Highly Automated World.
[X] As part of a Behaviour Reformation Programme which you were enrolled in for cause.
[X] As part of a Behaviour Reformation Programme which you were enrolled in due to an identifier collision in your cultural group's personal designation namespace.
[X] By inheritance of an ancestor's hereditary conscription status.

Your cultural group: (select exactly one)
[X] Does not use consonants in personal designations.
[X] Uses only open syllables in personal designations.
[X] Uses a mix of open and closed syllables in personal designations.
[X] Uses only closed syllables in personal designations.
[X] Does not use vowels in personal designations.

Your proper pronoun set is: (select any number greater than zero)
[X] they/them/their/theirs
[X] she/her/her/hers
[X] he/him/his/his
[X] Other (write-in)

Your expressed category of interest in relics is: (select exactly one)
[X] Relics which menace with spikes
[X] Relics which have a highly reflective finish
[X] Relics which are confirmed or suspected to originate from societies older than Event Zero.
[X] Relics which are conventionally regarded as blue
[X] Relics which emit continuous background noise
[X] Relics which have an accessible interior volume large enough to contain a typical adult bipedal sophont of the hominid pattern.
[X] Relics not otherwise classified

Your name is Aöuieue Űai, you've embraced transcendence of the gender binary since a very early age, and thanks to your grandfather's crimes and the terrible labour policies of the Confederation's central government, you have been conscripted to work as a Relic Investigator, Tenth Class on the Delta Nine Reliquary.

Based on deep analysis of your social media accounts – yes, despite them being friends-locked and heavily encrypted, apparently the Ministry of Labour is allowed to backdoor people's devices – the system has concluded that your principal interest is in relics which are older than the universe. You can't say it's actually wrong; you'd always thought that nothing could possibly pre-date Event Zero, but apparently it's not bullshit, there's hard evidence that the achronal voids some relics were recovered from are that old.

After a week of being poked, prodded, scanned, fitted with a brain implant that stops you trying to get out of doing your job by killing yourself (you never knew they took draft-dodging that seriously, and you're faintly horrified that it's not illegal), and given pieces of paper to sign acknowledging that you are a conscript, that your residual after-tax salary is ten times what you were making as a tour guide back home, that your little sister is your oldest surviving relative descended from your grandfather, that you are entitled to free room and board for your entire contract term, and so forth, you are sitting at a workbench.

Relic 24457-98afe-881db3
Pressure-sensitive keypad?

The relic in front of you is a matte beige box of a material that feels like a synthetic polymer, but clearly can't be if it's as old as it's supposed to be. On one of the large square faces of the box, there are ten circles of crosshatched engraving arranged as a 3x3 grid with one number below. The previous investigator – your grandfather – has put self-adhesive labels numbered 0-9 on the buttons. Three metal rods with rounded ends stick out of the 7/8/9 edge of the box, running in line with the 1-4-7, 0-2-5-8, and 3-6-9 columns of numbers.

There's a list of combinations written in your grandfather's notes. Many sequences just result in a clicking sound. Pressing all the "buttons" in a single column seems to make the matching rod glow for a few seconds, after which the box makes a clicking sound. An annotation in different writing, following your grandfather's last note, reports that at the end of his final session with the relic, your grandfather pressed the '9' button ten times in a row, all three rods glowed for five seconds, and your grandfather pressed them to his forehead while they were glowing.

You realize nobody has actually told you how your grandfather died.

You have a relic. You are expected to investigate it.

[X] Corroborate some of your grandfather's notes. (But definitely not the bit from the other investigator's notes about spamming '9'.)
[X] Press all the buttons in numerical order. (Apparently your grandfather never tried this, or if he did, he didn't write down what happened.)
[X] Try seeing if the rods will unscrew.
[X] Requisition some inert test materials and press the rods against them while they're glowing.

Voting is open immediately.