The Oddity Mythos: A prompt-based alternate history

[Donald Darf]

(Don't expect much historical or scientific accuracy, just give me decent prompts to work with)

I'll be describing a strange alternate version of earth via a multitude of objects in the collection of elderly and eccentric entrepreneur Vellard Mendis, a collector of strange historical artifacts and unusual secrets
Prompts will take the form of Oddity descriptions, a thing that Vellard keeps as part of their collection

Oddity Description: The physical description, capabilities, and nothing more

Then I'll write a post about where it came from and how it fits into the rest of the world, all the Oddity posts will belong to the same universe
I'll offer some examples...

Oddity Desc: A jar of human tongues, if consumed they allow one to taste the ghosts in the air

Then I might say these tongues all belong to the same creature located in the jungles of Peru, who was capable of tasting the ghosts of local animals so as to determine all the local threats to their safety, shot, cut apart, and eaten by Vellard's great great great great great great grampa
Or something like that, just give me a prompt to work with

 

[WallFlower]

Odity desc: A collection of scrolls supposedly written by a Vellard Mendis, a thousand years before Vellard Mendis was born.

 

[Donald Darf]

Oddity Desc: A collection of scrolls supposedly written by a Vellard Mendis, a thousand years before Vellard Mendis was born.

Click to shrink...

Yes quite a befuddling addition of the collection, but not one without a answer, Vellard Mendis is in fact a constant within the universe, a ontological certainty, a family will have the last name Mendis, and one day they will produce a child they name Vellard
The scrolls themselves are a analysis of this phenomenon, detailing the multiple different families that decided to name themselves Mendis, from a Oil Tycoon family that would later die of dysentery due to a poisoned nearby water supply, slum rats in Victorian London, a family of merchants in China pretending to sell foreign wares, and the earliest iteration being a powerful dynasty during the Bronze Age

The scrolls also describe the common traits of the Vellards, like the natural tans despite some variations lacking relatives with tan skin, the white hair which makes no sense, the desire to find and collect strange thingamajigs
Many of these traits seeming to originate from the Bronze Age prince iteration of the individual, the tan skin fitting with the sunny Askopra islands that the Mendis Dynasty called home, the white hair being common among the Askopites, and Prince Vellard being a well documented collector of strange objects in whatever info could be found about them

The scrolls also theorize this may be some form of forced reincarnation, though the iteration of Vellard that wrote this is unsure of the exact hows and whys of the matter
Point is... Vellard's fucking weird

P.S - The scrolls were found in a old clay jar in India, one of the archeologists digging it up knew of Vellard since they're a well known figure in the scientific community, after translating the text and reading the name on there, they went ahead and contacted the collector, then Vellard quickly arrived to steal it and ran home like hell was on their heels (In the form of pissed off archeologists)

 

[gracnieumierac]

Oddity Description: An old manual, written in blood depicting the creation of a patchwork human, found in a basement in Geneva.