266 - Bird-tongue & Photographic Memory

Ritual: Bird-tongue

Cost: 2 minor charges.

Ritual Action: Eat a crow, feathers and everything, from a formal table setting arranged correctly for an eight-course meal. Save the furcula - wishbone - but make sure you finish the rest. Go outside to a place you can hear birdsong and snap the bone by squeezing it in a hand clenched over your heart.

Effect: For a number of minutes equal to the ritual roll you can understand birdsong and other avian vocalisation as though it were normal speech. This comprehension is one-way, it won’t help them understand you. Some versions of the ritual claim that if you eat the crow alive it lets you circumvent his restriction but that’s just a bullshit rumour spread to make an unpleasant activity more uncomfortable.

It might sound good but the usefulness is limited. Birds typically talk about things like predators, food, their young and mates. It might be possible to provoke specific subjects with the right stimuli. Often details humans wouldn’t realize or would consider trivial are central to the way the bird sees the world and communicates. Parrots and corvids tend to be the smartest, making them the most useful birds to eavesdrop on.

Ritual: Photographic Memory

Cost: 1 minor charge.

Ritual Action: Take a small metallic capsule made from silver-plated copper and filled with mercury. Remove any contacts, glasses or other vision corrective device (too bad if you’ve got implanted lenses). Place the capsule between your back teeth and hold your left hand, balled into a fist, beside your head. Bite through the capsule.

Effect: You gain perfect recall of whatever you’re looking at when you cast this, forever. Anything displayed through a device that would augment your perception, like spectacles or a CCTV monitor, isn’t covered (you remember it normally, a little better than average given that the associated scene is permanently burned into your brain, take a +10% shift on any roll to recall those details). Even particulars that escaped your notice when you were first observing the scene are visible, you can flip, rotate and focus in on tiny details in the mental picture like the most Hollywood depictions of forensic image analysis.

This is the one memory that will be inviolate as long as you live. It won’t change or be recoloured the more you pick at it and the details won’t shift to match new perspectives. No matter what else you forget, be it what you had for breakfast last Monday or the way your wife’s voice sounded when she was still alive, it will always be there. Unchanged.