Power: Significant.
Description: A combination of cutting-edge technology crudely fused with the vestiges of old religion, Xipe Totecian Cybernetics are the last ditch vanity project of a DARPA-funded bureaucratic blindspot. Couched in terms of combining the latest in high-tech psychological conditioning with age old furrows of human superstition, the project is anything but the promised breakthrough in controlling human behaviour. It appears as an open mouthed ceramic mask depicting the Aztec god of harvest and warfare Xipe Totec, also known as 'Our Lord the Flayed One', festooned with a suite of VR interface equipment and suspended above a zero-g bed.
Essentially the project staff have vandalised a historical artifact by kludging a bunch of electronics on to it. If one of them wasn't an avatar of the hacker it would amount to little more than an expensive and ludicrous art project.
Effect: Ineffective until the mask was added, the suite bombards whoever lays inside of it with intense subliminal imagery and sound. It was intended to shortcut decision-making and moral squeamishness in the same way that military training prepares people to kill. Originally this produced headaches, nausea and little else in test subjects, now it relieves them of human weakness.
Spending time in the suite gives temporary protection against stress checks against Violence and Self, allowing the subject to flip-flop rolls to protect either gauge for an equal amount of time. Failed stress checks, on any gauge, during this time always trigger a frenzy result.
The withdrawal is less pleasant. For those who have gained hardened or failed notches on Violence or Self while under the suite’s influence future stress checks on that gauge are at a -20%. This is relieved only by rainfall (temporarily) or losing those notches.
Anyone hitting 5 failed notches on either gauge under either effect develops a severe alienation from their own body. A heinous aversion to their own skin. An ache to rid themselves of its covering and deliver it to the machine.
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