Tuesday, 22 October 2019

175 - Ghoulish Repast & The Last $20

Artifact: Ghoulish Repast

Power: Significant.

Description: A piece of long bone, broken in half and emptied of marrow. The broken end is shiny and smooth. Medical analysis will indicate that it is a human femur and almost 200 years old.

Effect: Added to any meal (by grinding it into bonemeal or boiling it in a stew or soup, for example) activates its effect. Anyone partaking in a meal prepared this way can ignore the psychological effects of starvation. Aside from being an aid in unhealthy attempts at weightloss this negates 10% of penalties based on not eating. This benefit is doubled for avatars of the Survivor. Unfortunately it also causes weekly nightmares of freezing cold, aching isolation, and terrified cannibalism prompting rank 4-5 stress checks on appropriate meters. These nightmares become more frequent during times of distress and may bleed over into real behaviours for the psychologically vulnerable.

Artifact: The Last $20


Power: Minor.

Description: A U.S $20 bill, crumpled and defaced. Someone has graffitied a third eye on to Andrew Jackson and drawn a speech bubble in which is written, “through me all things are possible, I guess.” There’s also a disconnected phone number for someone called Connie scrawled on the other side.

Effect: This is fated to be the last $20 bill in existence, synchronicity will find the smallest possible ways to ensure this happens. If you intend to destroy it, it goes missing. If you take it somewhere dangerous hoping its magick would protect you, you left your wallet in your other pants. Pitch it into a garbage disposal and you’ll find that was a different $20. Attempting to thwart its quasi-immortality won’t cause you any real harm, but it will be as least mildly inconvenient.

On the other hand if you take care to keep it safe, clean and whole the same synchronicity will work to make the bill stick around. Cashiers will give you back too much change or drop it on the floor (where it will get caught in your pant cuff), vending machines will spit it back out but register as paid anyway. As with the other effect, nothing super overt. At best having a little shrine where you pamper the bill is good for $20 a week of free stuff.

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