My friend's pre-fall family heirloom kept beeping faster, but still, we found nothing.
I started to suspect that "Geiger Counter" was not old German for "Gold Collector", as he had said.
Silly him, it’s actually German for "thing that counts people who play the violin".
Or so the Germans would have you believe
Minor question: what does pre-fall mean here? Is it pre-autumn? (Yes, I'm American lol, where "fall" also means autumn) Or does it mean the years prior to the fall of the Germany in 1945? Or maybe fall of the Soviet Union? Both would be plausible for the eras where radiation sources got lost on a near regular basis.
It means neither. It's a commonly used term when roleplaying post-apocalyptic scenarios to denote "before the apocalypse". So OPs scenario is survivors of an apocalypse lead to believe a Geiger Counter is a gold detector.
Edit: to clarify, the "fall" it's referring to is the fall of civilization
Fall = WW3.