005 - Animal Therapy

It can be an ugly thing to divert pain onto others. People do it to each other all the time: we share our woes with people who care about us, lash out, behave inappropriately, blame others. We’ve made a professions and cultural institutions out of absorbing and discarding it in therapy and religious confession. In older eras this responsibility was put on to animals, literal scapegoats who would carry the sins of a community off into the desert.

A Louisiana sin-eater who was treading dangerously close to burn-out herself decided to revive these traditions when she dredged up this ritual.

Ritual: Animal Therapy

Cost: 3 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Adopt a newborn animal. Raise it without outside help. Bond with it. No, really bond with it (as in the gutter magick effect). Once a month under the waning gibbous moon with no witnesses re-enact the traumas you are trying to dispose of with the animal taking your place in the tableau. Otherwise treat it as a treasured pet. For every 3 months invested in this process pick one of your failed or hardened notches to attach to the animal. You still have them though, for now.

When the animal reaches adulthood the ritual enters the final stage: at beginning of the first month of adulthood proxy yourself to the animal (again, as in the gutter magick effect). Ordinarily this wouldn’t work and is a bad idea anyway since a creature without a human soul is too metaphysically small to have anything bad diverted onto it, but at this point your preparations mean you’ve got a 24 hour window of opportunity to fool the universe. Miss it and all the effort so far is wasted. At the end of the month ritually slaughter the animal. Take a bunch of stress checks while you’re doing all of this, you monster.

Effect: He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, right? Well, if you survive the sacrifice (proxy connections can be used to escape death, right? Miffy the terrier is sure terrified enough to try to shunt her’s on to you, if she succeeds you take the ritual roll as firearm damage) and the ritual succeeds the dead pet takes the notches with it.