Sunday 29 March 2020

329 - Sweet Reggie

Artifact: Sweet Reggie

Power: Significant

Description: A small, threadbare, blue and white teddy bear. Its black plastic nose droops forlornly and sewn over the feet are a pair of little felt clogs, once part of a more complicated outfit. The fur on the left ear is a singed and melted, the result of someone's aborted attempt to "burn that thing to ash" they wish they'd followed through on.

Effect: Reggie is one of those objects people naively swear is haunted or a conduit for unholy forces. It isn't. Instead it is the product of a very disappointed little girl whose momma was always making promises she couldn't keep, receiving one of Mak Attax's charge-laden Special Orders. If they knew that it would be a hotly contested item for that reason alone.

Reggie creates bad luck for people who don't follow through on their words. It makes no difference the scale of the promise or whether it was in jest or part of an idiom. It doesn't matter if you mean it and then change your mind. If you say you'll do something and then don't, Reggie will get you.

Every one of these lies told in earshot of the bear degrades the result of the liar's next failed roll into one a step worse, failures become matched failures which become fumbles. The degraded luck manifests in a way ironically related to the lie, threatening to choke someone might see food lodged in your throat or get you clotheslined by a dangling electrical cord. If there's no way for this irony to express itself then the effect lingers, cursing the roll anyway and persisting until circumstances allow for more poetic justice.

Reggie can throw out one of these a day - counting from when the lie was told - although several can be running at once. It does this for whoever makes themselves a liar first so you could theoretically protect yourself from the consequences of your words by getting someone else to throw themselves under the bus.

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