130 - Cronus Bile

Artifact: Cronus Bile

Power: Significant.

Description: A concentration of yellowish-brown sludge, it smells a little (not as much as you might think) and tastes sour. People holding it, or a container it is in, can feel a slight vibration that pulses every time an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5 occurs somewhere in the world. Most containers it is kept in need to be replaced every 36 hours, as it will gradually warp and eat away at anything except for granite. Naturally occurring, it can be harvested biannually from a dried up and abandoned healing well on a nameless rocky outcropping near the Isle of Skye. A few gallons discharge at sunset on random days in April and October.

Laboratory tests come back indicating that it is a type of ox bile, more specific results are maddeningly elusive.

Effect: So long as some of the bile is in your system (you have to take a small amount, a few drops, with regular meals for it to be effective) none of your children can harm you. Effectively at least, anyone who counts as your offspring (biologically, by adoption, through magickal rite, via unconventional relationship, etc.) automatically flip-flops any roll made to attack you to the worst possible result. Even if they have the ability to flip-flop from an obsession, passion or magickal hoo-hah, this flips it back last (unless that effect specifically goes last also, in which case the GM decides). This protection extends beyond physical attacks, coercion attempts are also covered however anything more indirect than that falls outside the effect.

There is one other use, it can be mixed with alcohol and used as a wetting agent in painting or engraving. The resulting works are haunting to your offspring regardless of quality, each is good for a single rank-4 check on a meter appropriate to the subject matter (unnatural if you can’t decide) for each of them. This doesn’t compel any kind of behaviour (though the threat of it might), it’s just awful in a way that dredges up terrible childhood memories (and invents them where they don’t exist).

Consuming a few drops of Cronus Bile regularly with food makes you immune to the artwork effect and reverses the negative flip-flopping against anyone using the first effect on you.