287 - Return to Sender

Ritual: Return to Sender

Cost: 2 significant charges.

Ritual Action: Steal a piece of mail sent by someone to a third party (with some digital trickery email counts too so long as you print it out, other forms of electronic communication do not). Encase it in clay or mud from the nearest natural body of water, etching in admonishments against delivery (‘Return to Sender’ and ‘Not at this Address’ work fine) and bake it in an oven. Cover the resulting object before you take it out of the oven, if anyone sees it the ritual fails. Place it in a legally compliant residential mailbox (not a mailslot) and leave it alone.

Effect: All mechanisms of indirect communication between the two parties fail. Phone calls drop out, messages and emails disappear into the digital ether, letters never arrive. This does not apply to face-to-face communication, they can talk just fine in person. Routing communications through a human intermediary is an acceptable workaround.

This goes on as long as the baked-clay-letter remains unseen and undisturbed and no mail is delivered or taken from the mailbox it is in. If someone pokes around in there or so much as a flyer ends up inside the ritual backfires and the caster is blocked from indirectly communicating with anybody for as long as the ritual was active. The sole exception is that the caster may remove the object by wrapping it in black satin cloth and, without looking at it, place it in a new mailbox immediately. Be careful, the clay/mud seal breaking also botches the ritual and it may not be placed in the same mailbox twice.