Artifact: The Untether
Power: Major
Description: A length of fraying, fibrous rope looped into a loose hitch knot at one end. Following the knot with you finger leads to the same line you started at despite the fact it should end. Likewise trying to follow it to the other end seems to extend endlessly despite the fact that's impossible since you're always holding the same part of the rope. At a glance it’s three feet of rope ending in a complicated loop.
Effect: The Untether only functions for those with a profound sense of alienation, a relevant disorder from the Isolation, Helplessness or Self gauges is a good guideline. Grasping it is a grounding experience, it won’t recover any of the damage but so long as they maintain contact the worst of the effects are assuaged (for a disorder, the effect itself is subsumed but the effects of high failed notches remain).
Giving yourself over to the Untether means its the only thing that can keep you here. Here being in the same dimension the rest of us occupy.
Someone experiencing the first effect of the Untether who lets go of it is shunted out of reality (it disappears too). There’s a sensation like uncontrolled falling as everything becomes hazy and indistinct. To everyone observing, you vanish. In this state the world looks like its shrouded in a dense fog and sounds are echoey and distant, for those familiar with it the effect is similar to The Space Behind. Everything is intangible as if you're a ghost. If you don’t regain contact with the Untether you might as well be.
Roll 1d100 when you release the Untether, that’s the value you have to roll under to take ahold of the rope again, hovering just out of reach as it falls away from you in slow motion. For every turn you spend dicking around, waiting for the oncoming bus to pass through you or phasing through the walls of a bank vault, subtract 10 from this number. If it hits zero the Untether suddenly speeds up its descent as it snaps back to reality without you. Falling into a heap right where you dropped it.
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