A tool of significant power and minor silliness…

Power: Significant

Appearance: This is a one-foot-tall cereamic garden gnome. He sits with a wistful expression, a tall red hat, and a corncob pipe. A few features have been added to this particular garden gnome: he wears a crudely-made pair of wire frame glasses, a puff of cotton is glued to his pipe, and he holds a miniature paper book that’s been hot-glied to his hand. The book faces outward, and its cover reads “The Morphophonemics of Birds that Talk and Fish that Sing: By Garden Gnome Chomsky”

Effect: The pages inside Garden Gnome Chomsky’s book are just scraps of pages from an old Chicago Tribune, but if someone bothers to study and read each page (which takes about half an hour,) they temporarily gain a Soul skill called Talk and Listen to Wild Animals at 40% (or their Soul stat, whichever is lower.) Note that the reader may not be aware that they’ve gained this skill, and suddenly understanding what a bird is saying calls for a rank-4 Unnatural check. The skill wears off the next time the reader sleeps or otherwise loses consciousness.
One will find that animals are, by and large, pretty dumb and hard to start a conversation with without scaring them away, and many of them are jerks. Also, for some reason, domestic animals only speak unintelligible jumbles of words and sounds they hear a lot.
Garden Gnome Chomsky has one additional effect: if he is ever broken, everyone within 100 feet gets hit by an Aphasia spell. Fear the wrath of the gnome.

History: Garden Gnome Chomsky was created for the University of Chicago’s annual scavenger hunt (the biggest in the world) by a budding Bibliomancer. After the Hunt was over, it somehow got into the hands of Chicago’s Urbanomancers, who have figured out how to better talk to pigeons and squirrels with it, but not what would happen if it were broken.