Looking for Lovecraft... In All the Wrong Places

SPOILERS BELOW - SPOILERS BELOW 

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SPOILERS...In this entry I am going to write about a source I have used to create a scenario.
I'll be giving away key plot elements so, if you think you might be playing in one of my games - AND I NEED PLAYERS - you might want to consider skipping this entry.

                                    Turning WOLF 359 into "Weltgeist" - PART 1

 There's an episode of The Outer Limits (1963) called Wolf 359 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667852/?ref_=ttep_ep8 . It's not one of the best of the show, but it always stuck with me. Wolf 359 is not an original concept, there are similar science fiction stories going back to the 1930s (Sturgeon's Microcosmic God - 1941 is a good example) but it does treat the concept in a way that works as Lovecraftian Horror.  

The Miniature Planet - Wolf 359

    Briefly: A scientist has created a miniature world in a sort of terrarium. The world is intended to mirror conditions that astronomers have predicted on a planet of the star Wolf 359. The miniature world undergoes evolution at an accelerated rate because, for some reason,time is vastly speeded up within it (1 second = 11 1/2 days). The scientist views his artificial world through a large microscope - watching as vegetation spreads, then animal life... first primitive, then more advanced. While this is underway, but unknown to the scientist, a spectral monstrosity has arisen within the terrarium and is emerging by night to prowl about, moving through glass and walls at will.  
  There is a very creepy moment when the scientist's asssistant, while photographing the little world through the microscope, sees some "being" looking back at him and continuing to do so for several seconds... Which would be weeks or months in the miniature world. As the story progresses, the prowling being from the terrarium feeds on potted plants and then guinea pigs in the laboratory... which the scientist finds dead and shriveled but  which he fails to understand. By this time the scientist is obsessed with watching the tiny inhabitants of the micro-world as they progress to the stage of human civilization at their accelerated rate. It becomes apparent to the scientist that his tiny world is savage and brutal, even by human standards and, at some point he becomes aware of the specral being, which may be a danger to him but by that time he can't bring himself to stop his observations because he believes he will witness a mirror of the future progress of mankind.
  The story is brought to an abrupt conclusion when the exhausted scientist is saved from the spectral monster, just as it begins to feed on him, by his wife smashing the terrarium. When the glass is broken and the atmosphere rushes out, the monster evaporates. The suggestion is that the monster was a sort of genius loci or numinous spirit of the miniature planet of Wolf 359...

The Spectre of Wolf 359

 So... How is this story to be turned into a Call of Cthulhu scenario? Since mine is a 1920's setting and I like to keep "weird science" within the mythos elements, I decided that the terrarium was going to need a mysterious mythos artifact of some sort to make it work. I settled, in part because I was also inspired by the published scenario "The Colour of His Eyes" (Secrets of San Francisco by Cody Goodfellow), on a weird meteorite like the one from Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space". 
  I also wanted to use a South San Francisco location and bring in a connection to Adolph Sutro.

  I invented the character of the astronomer Robert Garrick, who is 53 years old in 1921, which is the time of the scenario.  Garrick lives in a mansion on Sign Hill overlooking South San Francisco; his father having made a fortune in dry goods during the Gold Rush.  Robert Garrick graduated Stanford in 1890 – Knew Adolph Sutro when, as a young man he had designed and built a telescope for the aging businessman/politician. A friendship ensued and when Sutro died in 1898, he willed young Garrick a strange meteorite from his curio collection. I decided the meteorite had been turned up by workmen in Nevada on land where the Sutro Tunnel was constructed.

Adolph Sutro had so many curios and odd items that he had never paid much attention to the silvery metal rock which, in darkness, glowed slightly with a reddish light. He did realize that it was a meteorite of some sort, though, and wanted it to go to someone who would appreciate it.

  Garrick examined the meteorite and found it to apparently be some odd form of nickel/iron, but with odd properties – fracturing in natural curved planes (Radially symmetrical chonchoidal blah, blah, blah…) which are nearly perfect natural mirrors. While working at the Lick Observatory, Garrick found time to grind a set of mirrors for his personal telescope in his observatory at the house on Sign Hill. The telescope was good and only when he happened to point it towards the Great Nebula Andromeda,  curious about the then raging “island universe” theory, did it perform in an unexpected way. Then he saw a world, red-lit and alien, – as clearly as the moon seen from earth. This bizarre vision was one he could not share with others as it was, in part, caused by his inhalation of dust from the meteorite while grinding the mirrors. These visions are a result of the meteorite originating as part of that distant alien world and having a seemingly occult connection with it.