262 - Verminous Rebirth

Ritual: Verminous Rebirth

Cost: 5 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Steal an object that the residents of the city it comes from would think of as its heart and build a nest of refuse gathered from local garbage bins at least 10 feet across around it in a place they shun. Line the nest with the fresh carcasses of up to 100 wild rats from the area. Remove all hair, nails, fillings and any surgical implants or foreign materials from your body before covering yourself in a carefully inked, accurate roadmap of the city.

Flood the nest with effluent. It doesn’t have to be wastewater, it could be rain, but it does have to come from a sewer. Take a large dose of a synthetic psychedelic and submerge yourself completely (you’ll want a tube to breathe through). There are a series of meditative exercises which will keep you from drowning yourself and catalyse the transformation. The process usually takes at least an hour.

A successful ritual ends with a diffusing sense of teeth chattering vibration, a loss of proprioception and nausea. An unsuccessful one probably just gets the nausea and will never work if attempted again.

Effect: You transform into a swarm of rats, permanently.

Your actions are limited to anything a group of rats could perform. Things like heavy lifting, speech and driving a car are probably all off the table unless you’re particularly resourceful or creative. The number of rats in your swarm is equal to the ritual roll capped by the number of rat corpses you used and is your new Wound Threshold. Typical attacks can only harm one of your swarm at a time, unless the GM says otherwise you only take 1 point of damage from most sources. The number of rats in your swarm will fluctuate by 1d10-5 every 24 days as new members are born and old ones die, though specific actions, environmental factors and current swarm size can influence this change. If it ever hits zero you're gone for good.

You may divide your swarm to be in several places at once, however doing so spreads your cognition thin. All abilities or identities are capped at the number of rats you have in an area. This does not apply if your entire swarm is in one place regardless of its size.

Losing your human form doesn’t immediately rob you of your ability to perform magick, but those faculties rapidly decay. Any supernatural, avatar or adept identities you have may no longer improve and begin to decline at a rate of 1d10% per day. Spending a minor charge each day reduces this to the lowest result of 2 dice, spending a significant charge puts it off for 24 hours. This applies to each identity separately and once they are gone it also robs you of your ability to perform rituals or gutter magick.

You are physically incapable of leaving the city in which you were created. Any parts of your swarm taken outside of it die immediately. The boundary is determined by the roadmap inked on your old body.