User:Zork Implementor L/Twenty Treasures of Zork

Brass Bauble

The Brass Bauble was created in 1615 when Ludwig LVII, 56th King of Switzerwald, was in need of a ludicrously expensive plaything for his four-month old baby girl, whom he never bothered to name. He employed the greatest jewellers and artisans in his tiny (yet ridiculously opulent) kingdom to design and construct a toy that was Safe for Three Years and Under and yet contained enough precious metal to outvalue the combined annual income of all of Switzerwald's working class.

Unfortunately, this treasure met a premature end when Ludwig, during a surprise visit to the artisans in question, unknowingly sat on and squashed the fragile ornament, apparantly mistaking the artisans' workbench for a chair designed to house his massive bulk. The artisans, suddenly without a treasure to present to the King, quickly snuck into a back room, hacked off a brass doorknob from one of their doors, applied a thin layer of varnish, and showed it to Ludwig, claiming it to be the actual treasure.

Ludwig, who at that point was in the grips of syphilitic insanity, accepted the doorknob without question. However, when he returned to his castle, he suddently declared to his court that his baby girl didn't deserve a treasure as "shimmery and shiny" as the Bauble, and vowed to keep it all to himself. Several hours later, he was found dead with the Brass Bauble lodged deep in his throat.

Ludwig's will, written several days beforehand, explicitly stipulated that there must never be a king or queen more glorious than he was, and that, upon his death, all of the Switzerwald crown jewels were to be executed by drowning, and all of his living children were to be melted down into ingots and sold. Thus, six days after his death, all of the treasures of the Switzerwald royalty were tied up and thrown into the Seine river. All but the Brass Bauble and Ludwig's silver prosthetic nose were lost forever. Both of the surviving treasures were retrieved by Quendorian fishing trawlers, and the Bauble was sold to the Quendor Museum, where it remains to this day.

Large Emerald

The Large Emerald, named after its original owner, Sir Reginald Thropworth Large, was the first and only gemstone mined from the Cursed Inca Statue Eye Socket Mine of Trinidad in 1905. After being transported to Quendor via a combination of merchant ship, driftwood raft and insane castaway courier, it was soon auctioned off to Large for the sum of 3000zm and a jar of chutney.

As soon as the emerald fell into his possession, Large's fortune rapidly soured. One day after the purchase was completed, his loyal dog was crushed by an unnaturally large raindrop, his favourite wife's horse went wild and drove her carriage over a cliff into an unfilled swimming pool, and his thirty-six room mansion was carried away by a tornado while Sir Large was checking his mailbox. Needless to say, Sir Large immediately suspected the gem, and sold it to Dame Eva McFanagal. However, the Large Emerald's terrible curse was not cornfirmed until three years later, when Dame McFanagal tragically stepped on a cow pat.

Over the next two decades, the gem would change hands thrice more, with each owner meeting a horrible fate while in possession of it. Dame Eva's stedaughter, the radio actress Lucille McFanagal, inherited the gem in 1908. One month later, her career met a tragic end when her fiancee, while engaging her in a deep, passionate french kiss, accidentally sucked out her voice. Four years later, its next owner, Patrick Slain, tried to remove the curse by immersing the gem in holy water. What his father hadn't told him was that his biological mother was a succubus, and that he was half-demon. Afterward, his left arm was completely dissolved, and his right hand permanently lost the ability to make the "OK" sign. His body and spirit crushed, Patrick left the gem in the collection bucket of a nameless blind street pianist. One month later, hip hop was invented.

The Large Emerald's current whereabouts are unknown.

Pot of Gold

It is an urban legend that at the end of every rainbow is a pot of gold. In reality, there is only one such Pot of Gold, and until the 17th century it was indeed lying at the end of what was, at the time, the only rainbow in the world: the Rain's Bow, the original rainbow that God painted onto the sky after the Flood as a promise to Noah that this would be the last time that He would ever wipe out 90% of all life on Earth, no really, honest.

The Rain's Bow, despite being a divinely embellished optical illusion in the sky, did indeed meet the Earth in two locations: the summit of Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps, and in what was known at the time as "Deepest, Darkest Ireland". As mainland Ireland had yet to be thoroughly explored by European civilisation, and as Mont Blanc was four kilometres tall, both of these ends of the Rain's Bow remained mostly undiscovered until 1559.

In the summer of 1559, famed explorer, navigator and buckler of swashes Sir Roderick Swint was charged by Elizabeth I to find the Earth-bound location of either end of the Rain's Bow, and use such a discovery to conquer and claim both ends in the name of England.

...

Unfortunately, Swint had failed to take into account the fact that the Rain's Bow disappears at nightfall. Every member of his team was killed, but Swint himself survived when his fall was broken by what a moment ago was King Henry II of France.

...

Unfortunately, Swint had failed to take into account that gold is freaking heavy, yo, and the Bow's arch seemingly couldn't support the collective weight of the Pot and Swint's militia. So, in a soul-wrenching screech, the God-given Bow shattered into several million fragments.

The Rain's Bow, being an optical illusion, happened to fragment in a manner similar to that other optical illusion, the Wikipedia:hologram. That is to say, each fragment of the Bow was equal in shape and colour to the original Bow, but greatly reduced in size. These fragments, no longer securely tethered to Earth, floated in Earth's atmosphere and became evenly distributed across the globe, after which they became known as rainbows.

Needless to say, Swint and almost all of his entourage again fell from the sky, and this time they were never seen again. But one of Swint's soldiers managed to grab hold of one of the fragments as he fell, and, tightly gripping both ends, used its aerodynamic shape to glide to the safety of British airspace. The fragment

Elizabeth commemorated the New Rainsbow's colonisation in a painting that became known as the Rainbow Portrait of 1600, which featured the

Ivory torch

The ivory torch was made by the mad Arab Abu Al-Zhariif during his dungeon-exploration phase of his life. Needing some way of navigating the dark, he made a torch from the tusk of his prize elephant: however, lacking proper taxidermic training, in doing so, he killed the elephant. The torch was truly unique, however, in that due to the unity of the ivory with the high concentration of the sand in the air, a peculiar unending fuel source was born through some odd sort of thermal reaction, fueled by the torch's preserved marrow.

Al-Zhariif was last seen entering the coal-filled tomb of the pharoah Sethemanphire with the torch.