282 - A New You In 90 Days!

Ritual: A New You In 90 Days!

Cost: 2 minor charges.

Ritual Action: The ritual is a series of guided meditation and self-actualization exercises on a pair of audio cassettes tapes intended to be performed repeatedly over multiple sessions. Sold by the Hamarati Infomatics corporation, Burt Hamarati (missing, presumed dead since 2006) leads the listener through some standard psychological exercises interspersed with gibberish invocations he calls "prelingual affirmations" and meditation to rapidly shifting tones. Perceptive listeners can make out the word 'camazotz' in the invocations, the name of the Mayan bat-god of death, night and sacrifice.

Effect: Burt Hamarati was a horrifying bat-human hybrid disguised as a man, who could only subsist on specially prepared human brains. The tapes are a disguised preparatory ritual which he propagated through a self-help organisation (a front for the cult he built around himself) that was moderately popular in the new-age rush of the 1990s. Spreading it around ensured he had both an abundant food source and a bevy of brain-damaged obsessives he could craft into an inner circle. Although he is gone now the tapes still do a brisk trade through the occult underground, if only because no one has thought to digitise and share them electronically yet.

Side effects of the ritual include an elevated sense of well-being bordering on euphoria from the intense metabolic demands that altering the brain places on the caster, it's akin to oxygen deprivation. Another is that the changes made by the ritual act as a beacon to unnatural entities. There is a cumulative 5% chance per week of consistent exercises that an entity in the local area is drawn to present itself to the caster. The entity will not be immediately hostile, any actions it takes depend on the caster's actions and its disposition. More than one would-be monster summoner has died mistaking temporary sedation for protection or control.

Several former devotees of Hamarati use the ritual regularly in an attempt to call back their missing master with occasional terrifying results but no success. A schism among them opposes this misuse on the grounds that Burt has "ascended to the profane stars" as he often claimed he would and that his stellar vigil should not be disturbed. They've killed two other cult members and one monster hunter who'd only heard of the ritual's secondary effects.

Long term users can be distinguished by telltale neurological quirks, sensitivity to high pitched noises, problems with pronouncing sibilants and a lazy right eye. Growths in the brain show up clearly on an MRI scan and any doctor would be quick to label them as tumours.