173 - Pneuma Bottle & Carpet Diem

Artifact: Pneuma Bottle

Power: Significant.

Description: A blue, cloudy-glassed crystal bottle about 9 inches high and shaped like a tapered decanter. It is sealed with a crumbling, black cork that sticks if left closed for too long. When full the contents are a barely visible ripple, pulsing and swirling intermittently but difficult to discern through the thick cut, occluded glass.

Effect: Held in front of their mouth, the pneuma bottle can collect the dying breath of someone “impure” (in game terms, having acquired 3 or more notches from their own actions). It can only hold one breath at a time, uncorking it lets the current one out. Sucking the breath out of the bottle is greasily invigorating like using amphetamines that have been cut with something awful and industrial: it imparts a minor charge. With a successful Secrecy roll you can get an impression of the worst trespasses of the person whose breath was collected. The better the roll the more precise the information you receive. Obviously you only get one shot at it.

Artifact: Carpet Diem

Power: Major.

Description: A large persian rug, big enough to fill a small room. It is dirty and threadbare, in one section a hole has worn through from constant pacing. Despite this the design woven into the fabric is elaborate and beautiful, almost fractal.

Effect: While standing on the rug you can rob your future to pay for your present. Gain your choice of a +10%/+20%/+30% shift to any action you can perform while remaining standing on it. This effect can be used repeatedly for accrued positive shifts equal to your wound threshold. In response your ability to meaningfully influence the world is muted when you are not standing on the rug, reduce the rolled result of any objective milestone you reach while not standing on the carpet by -5% for petty milestones and -10% for intense milestones. Negated progress goes towards paying back this debt.

If the rug is cleaned or destroyed while you still owe, the result is catastrophic: take the debt as damage from a significant blast while simultaneously losing an equal amount from any current objective. All effects may apply multiple times to the same objective if multiple participants have debts.