019 - DEEP SLEEP, SAFE SLEEP™

Printed on pages torn from a three-ring binder, someone has scribbled notes in the margins and on the back of what looks like part of an induction pack for a medical trial. Prefaced by instructional cartoons and legal admonishments against disclosing the details, the participant instructions for the medical procedure have been annotated by a writer who repeatedly refers to someone called “Crabby” in between providing alternative instructions and making snide and bizarre insinuations about the trial’s intended purpose.

Ritual: DEEP SLEEP, SAFE SLEEP™

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Ritual Action: The ritual/trial procedure is straightforward although the exact details are a bit murky: in a supervised environment take a large quantity of “patented pharmaceutical primers” in specific stages under the guidance of a medical technician over the course of several hours (margin note: “Dumpster dived for ages to find technical specs on the non-control group chems. Crabby thinks she’s worked out substitutions, wrote them on the back”). Recline with a “focus object” (margin note: “Anything smaller than a phonebook”) clasped across your chest and wait for monitoring equipment to be attached to you by the technician before reciting a list of 33 phonetically spelled “mnemonic alignment phrases” repetitively to “regulate your neurological state” as the drugs take effect, putting you to sleep (margin note: “Friend of Crabby’s took a look, identified backmasked fragments from ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’, ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ by Lovecraft and ‘Dream On’ by Aerosmith. As if they didn’t know what they were doing!”).

Pictographic cartoons of the steps have been defaced with crude drawings of a what is either a dreamcatcher or a spider hanging over the participant and the medical technician wearing a pyramid-shaped headdress while wielding a smoking thurible.

Effect: Among the sleeping pills and psychotropics and opiates specified in the scrawled notes is a very concerning amount of digoxin, a medication which can cause cardiac issues in high dosages. Make a Fitness roll: on a crit or matched success you are mostly okay, on a success you feel crappy for a few days afterwards (-10% to all rolls), on a failure take damage equal to the sum of the dice and the penalty, and on a matched failure or a fumble take the roll as firearms damage (immediate medical attention might save you). Between that and the other drugs you'll be out of commission for a good 8-24 hour period after waking back up depending on your tolerances.

If you get past that stage without interrupting the ritual and it works the "focus object" vanishes, disappearing into your psyche when you fall asleep. There’s no way to get it back out so I hope you didn’t need it for anything else. It will feature prominently in all of your dreams and idle thoughts from this point on.

As a side-effect of the ritual you now sleepwalk. The effect compounds with multiple castings, it’s not unusual for repeat users to be more active when they’re asleep than when they’re awake. Also the long-term consequences of having one or more physical objects lodged inside your subconscious may not be great.