The Oracle of Rusting Steel
It was not born of this Age. In the Third, its gears and pins were a cosmic abacus, calculating the decay of star-stuff and the lifespan of civilizations. Its "balls" were spheres of captured light, and its "payouts" were truths that could unravel a philosopher's soul. It fell silent when the world was reset, a god-machine sleeping in the dirt.
The Korinto-kai found it in the 1920s, mistaking it for a bizarre European novelty. They polished its chrome, replaced its light-spheres with steel, and put it in the corner of a smoky parlor. It became a game of chance. But it never forgot what it was. It whispered probabilities into the clatter of the balls, nudging fortunes, building an empire of luck around a single yakuza clan.
Daimon Kiyota does not play it. He converses with it. He reads the patterns in the chaos, the future written in the ricochets. Before the bomb, it sang to him of stock market crashes and political assassinations. Now, its song is broken.
The casing is cracked, a fine web of fractures spidering from the payout tray. It no longer spits out jackpots, only rusted ball bearings that trace the paths of Filth tendrils through the city's sub-levels. It still whispers, but now it speaks only of aftershocks, of probabilities of containment failure, of the beautiful, final mathematics of decay.
-- From a fragmented Dragon data cache, designated "Broken Toys."