Artifact: Marie Antoinette’s Cake
Power: Significant.
Description: A carefully preserved, but ancient and crumbling, piece of bread-pastry enriched with butter and eggs making it golden and brown on the crust. Despite its obvious age there is no sign of mold and, leaning close, it still has the vague smell of being freshly baked. It tastes pretty nice.
Effect: Eating a mouthful of the cake temporarily (until the sunrise after next) relieves you of the physical and psychological effects of privation. You won’t starve, become sick from malnutrition or die of exposure in the freezing rain. However it provides no relief from actually being in that situation and in fact it makes people who are better off less inclined to help you. Anyone with a higher Status (gauged off the greater of native ability or a substituting identity) can’t perceive you as being in need and any appeals to them on that basis automatically fail. This extends to coercion and magickal effects less powerful than a significant adept spell or the channels of an avatar with an identity of less than 60%.
Artifact: Snowglobe
Power: Minor.
Description: Difficult to distinguish from an ordinary snowglobe depicting a well-known landmark, the trick is that the snow will only fall if it is actually snowing at that location in real life. Otherwise it stubbornly sticks to the bottom when you shake it. There are stories of those depicting fictional locations, but that’s probably bullshit.
Effect: Crack open the globe and slurp down all the liquid inside. It’s ethylene glycol - used as an agent in antifreeze - which is very poisonous so this is generally regarded as a bad idea. However it does allow you to ask and have one question answered correctly about the current state of the depicted location, so long as it can be answered in four words or less. Hopefully it’s worth the trip to the hospital.
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