Power: Significant.
Description: A vintage 1993 Playskool Sing-A-Long child’s tape player/recorder. Its brightly coloured plastic facade has been modified, an embossing label maker has been used to name it and one of the microphones has been cut away so a crude, homemade EEG cap could be wired in place. Inside the circuitry is a mess, it shouldn’t even function. Instead the haphazard pattern of solder, transistors and foreign microchips is arranged in symbols found in kabbalah, raëlism and goetia. It does function just fine though, in most circumstances it acts as a normal tape recorder.
Included are 4 compact cassette tapes with a playtime of 33 minutes per side, which themselves have been modified with a green material along the magnetic strip and sides with “RECORD!!” and “PLAY” written in permanent marker. If they are used appropriately in the recorder then it performs its intended function. They are one-use objects and if you screw up with a partial recording that particular tape is rendered useless.
Effect: By attaching the EEG cap to a subject and recording for a full side on one of the tapes you can create a limited duplicate of their mind. It’s like a ghost, a recording of emotional and mental energies, an image instead of a full person. Flip it over, press play and you have a 33 minute window to interact with it via the microphone and the speakers.
Going from having a weird rubber hat on their head while hooked up to a tape recorder to suddenly finding themselves trapped in a pitch dark space with no bodily senses except a directionless voice speaking to them is predictably hard on the recording’s mental health. Try to keep them calm, if they push against it too hard the tape won’t be able to handle the stress and the whole thing will come to pieces.
Stressors reduce the fidelity of the recording (this includes anything that would cause a stress check to the original and especially coercion attempts). If it starts out at 100% then the first shock drops it to 66%, the second to 33% and a third shreds the tape's contents in a brief storm of magnetic static. If it’s necessary to determine whether a recording is able to recall things or act like the original use these percentages as either a guideline or straight chance on a dice roll.
Recorded minds have several other limitations:
- Identities possessed by the original can be accessed (with a cap of 40%) but only in ways that can be performed by a voice on a cassette player. This only applies to mundane identities: supernatural powers, adept magick or avatar channels are strictly verboten.
- While they will still act in line with them, they can not flip-flop or reroll with passions or an obsession.
- Factual recall is limited to just over 3 days prior to making the recording. Drawing attention to this probably counts as a stressor. The only exceptions are subjects and memories specifically thought about by the original during the recording process.
- You may pause playback of the recording at any time, however once a recording is started the recorded mind’s sense of the passage of time is continuous. The results of leaving them alone in what is essentially a state of total sensory deprivation for extended periods are predictably horrible.
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