A shigawire recorder looks unremarkable from the outside – a small box, fitted with a Coraman crystal, holding two spools with an organic-looking wire strung taut between them. Using it is not unremarkable at all: the recorder has to concentrate and, in the words the Agents were given when they first watched one demonstrated, “become the recorder” onto the spinning wire, spending a spell – cantrip or higher – to hold the working steady while the spool winds. Each level of the caster buys roughly fifteen minutes of recording time. The wire itself isn’t manufactured; it’s cut from a vine that grows nowhere but the Green Hell.
Once a recording is set, it’s honest in a way few other pieces of evidence in Chuza are. Tampering with the wire damages its own magical integrity in the process – a loud, unmistakable hiss and distortion audible to anyone who plays it back, which makes a shigawire recording close to impossible to quietly edit after the fact.
FILE NOTES
Section 18’s own use has mostly been mundane – interview recordings, an assistant cleric drafted in to hold the spool steady while a suspect talks. What the Agents found in Dr Griffiths’ own lab was considerably less mundane: a decade’s worth of shigawire recordings, logged and kept, tracking his experiments on a numbered roster of stolen children – subjects filed in pairs, 21 and 21b, 34 and 34b, Jay Sun and Alia as 35 and 35b, a boy called Caleb catalogued as 37. The oldest recording on file runs over ten years back, Griffiths noting even then that his “more successful” subjects skewed younger, and that greater trauma to a damaged mind yielded “more fruitful results.” The newer recordings, found alongside syringes of Twitch and Bumblebee in the same lab, are worse.
“The more ‘successful’ subjects seemed to be younger… the more extreme trauma applied to ‘damaged’ minds yielding more fruitful results.”
Recovered shigawire recording, Griffiths’ own voice, Get Stuffed
STATUS: Filed under Equipment. A recording medium built to be trustworthy – which is exactly what makes what Section 18 found recorded on it, in Griffiths’ own hand and voice, impossible to explain away as anything other than true.