Sunday 1 September 2019

124 - Trick Hat, Money Lemon and Lalonde's Sawbox

Artifact: Trick Hat

Power: Minor.

Description: A man’s silk top hat, size 7 & ¾. It’s obviously very old and scuffed. Part of the brim looks like it’s been gnawed on by a small animal.

Effect: Any inanimate object placed in the hat that fits inside entirely vanishes the moment no one is looking at it. No inspection or damage to the hat will retrieve it. Only the person who placed it there can do so by reaching into the hat without looking. A trick hat has the power to perform this effect 2 and a half times: the third time an object is disappeared into the hat it cannot be retrieved but turns up in the place the person who put it there would least like it to.

Artifact: Money Lemon

Power: Minor.

Description: An ordinary looking lemon (sometimes an orange).

Effect: The original magic tricks goes: take a $1 bill from someone and conspicuously destroy it in front of them, then cut open the lemon to discover it hidden inside. At some point a willworker got curious and decided to see if that money could grow on trees.

All plants grown from seeds of a money lemon will bear fruit with a duplicate of the original $1 bill inside, down to the serial number and wear on one of the corners, as will the seeds from that fruit and so on. Money lemons and their descendents have no nutritional value and taste awful regardless of what fruit they came from.

Artifact: Lalonde’s Sawbox

Power: Significant.

Description: A magician’s box for the sawing-a-woman-in-half trick. Tracing its providence leads back to the 1936 Montreal performance by George Lalonde in which he was non-fatally stabbed in the neck by a well-intentioned and befuddled audience member who mistook the trick as genuine.

Effect: If someone is bloodthirsty enough to attempt a genuine sawing on someone trapped in this box, there is a 50% chance of survival. The results aren’t pretty but all the otherwise life-threatening wounds are healed over (further surgery will be required in the long-term, c.f hemicorporectomy). Wound threshold is permanently reduced by the result of the roll. Subjecting someone to this is a rank-8 violence check, experiencing it is a rank-9 check.

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