220 - Prescriptive Divination

Unnatural Phenomenon: Prescriptive Divination

In a quiet corner of an ostentatious botanical garden located just outside a small seaside town there is an archway covered in vines and exotic flowers. The flowers are the last of their kind, but appearing to be their more mundane cousins no one - not even those who understand the properties of the arch - is aware of their significance or mild hallucinogenic properties. The nectar from its blooms causes the timing of signals between hemispheres of the brain to fall into disarray. Duplication of thought and recursion of feedback generates the sensation we call deja vu, the feeling of having done something before.

Passing through the secluded arch at noon has a more profound effect. The sensation of repetition is exacerbated into one of anticipation and more than one person has learned how to read the feeling for what turns out to be clues to the future. What you're wearing, how you feel examining the contents of your pockets, the first thing to come into you head as you pass through - take a hunch roll for mulling it over.

What only two people realize (and each of them think they're the only one) is that this isn't just chance and the eddies of fate being revealed to them, anyone who passes through has an active hand in determining their own future holds. By only wearing certain clothes and curating their personal effects to symbolically comply with a desired future they can goose fate. In game terms you can roll an appropriate identity (such as haruspex, numerologist, or brain-fried pattern matcher) once per day (it takes a time consuming amount of consideration, mechanizing the process would be a boon. GNOMON adepts, if they had a clue, would be particularly well situated to take advantage). A successful roll provides exactly the right factors to obtain that result as the hunch roll ONCE, essentially allowing you to pre-roll and then choose whether or not to go through with claiming it. There's no fate but what you make.

Objectives based around foretelling and influencing the future could incorporate the arch into one of their milestones. Doing so properly would be good for a petty local result. Destroying it in the process on the other hand, bumps this up a level to intense local/petty global. Pity about all the scratchcards you could've bought off the back of it but sometimes you want it that bad.