045 - Schrodinger’s Redoubt

Artifact: Schrodinger’s Redoubt

Power: Significant.

Description: A Schrodinger’s redoubt is an opaque, sealable container ranging from the size of a shoebox to a large shipping crate. A distinguishing feature of redoubts is that they have been reinforced with pieces of an identical container, bits of lid or corner nailed or glued into approximate place, giving them the appearance of a lobster outgrowing an old shell.

Effect: Sometimes you need to kick probability in the guts a few times or at least try to buy time until somebody else can do it for you. A redoubt gives the possible state of an object a hard nudge by sealing it away from interacting with the rest of the world, until someone opens it and risks retroactively breaking the effect.

Anything stored in a redoubt is locked in a suspended state until someone looks inside the container. Whether this suspended state still remains true when the contents are observed is a 50/50 split, no matter how unlikely. A hidden cellphone won’t take calls while locked up but has a 50% chance of still being fully charged on retrieval. You can keep Mittens in the box for a month after she was hit by a car and there’s a 50% chance of her being alive (but still critically injured) when you open it. A bomb won’t go off after its timer should have hit zero, at least until someone takes a chance by peeking. Scrying and divination breaks the effect the same as mundane observation, some redoubts incorporate protection against this in the form of garish magickal symbols (-20% shift, functions once then burns out).

Technically you can’t store people this way with one caveat, so long as they aren’t conscious they don’t count as an observer and won’t break the effect of opening the box. Knock someone out with dental gas and mail them to Siberia, they (maybe) won’t starve to death. Redoubts work once, after the effect is broken it’s just an ordinary box.