“When you're sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on your Kentucky Derby days
I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away”
Rolling Stones
A.K.A. Trackmarkers, Tuskegees, Faucis (Ω + 1)
Are you afraid of needles? You should be. They’re not just an instrument of steel, glass and polymer, but a sacred fetish of scientific progress. A symbol pregnant with magickal power. That which cures the same pestilence it wreaks, that spreads the same agony it wipes away with blissful torpor.
Forget guns. If you’re searching for a postmodern magic wand, look no further than a hypodermic syringe. It commands power no matter who holds it. In the gloved hands of a surgeon it is a sceptre of technocratic paternalism, a divine decree that “doctor knows best”. Yet when possessed by the unwashed masses, it morphs into something else. A terrible thing of contagion and degeneration. An implicit threat of being dragged into that sordid underclass, be it through addiction or disease.
Taboo: You cannot willingly consume anything that doesn’t come in a syringe. That’s right, even a glass of water is sufficient to constitute a taboo. If you want to keep your charges, that means a permanent regime of parenteral nutrition. You could use a feeding tube if you refuse to give up eating “real” food. This won’t taboo you, but it also doesn’t count for minor charging.
Most Faucis gain charges quick and spend them faster. It's a rare kind of adept who is willing to adopt the pseudo-monastic lifestyle required to maintain charges over a long period of time.
Generate a Minor Charge: Inject yourself. The payload can be as benign as a vaccine, insulin or even just saline solution, or it can be as dangerous as heroin or crack cocaine. The catch is you can only charge off a substance once per day. You’ll need to switch things up to build up charges. Though if you’re transfusing blood, each blood type will count for a separate charge.
Generate a Significant Charge: Inject someone else. This follows the same rules as minor charging, meaning even if you can hold down a job in a vaccination clinic or emergency ward you’ll only get a handful of sig charges per day.
You can expedite charging by adulterating the substances you’re injecting. It has to be a serious enough alteration to constitute a malpractice lawsuit if you’re caught doing it to someone else. Or just start forcibly injecting people with whatever random shit you find lying around.
If you want to inject someone without their consent, that requires winning a grapple gridiron against them. If you’re just going for a needlestick, that’s a Struggle roll with a +20% shift.
Generate a Major Charge: Be responsible for a nation-wide intravenous drug epidemic. Deploy a new vaccine across the globe. Hook yourself up to a dialysis machine filled with blood from an exsanguinated Godwalker. Steal a major from another adept with Transubstitution.
Random Magick Domain: Addiction. Blood. Contamination. Iatrophobia. Injections. Obedience. Medical Horror. Pleasure and Pain. Sterility.
MINOR FORMULA SPELLS
Bloodborne
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Cast this spell after hitting someone with a needlestick. That’s already a Rank 3-5 Helplessness shock depending on how nasty the syringe looked, but you boost that by another two ranks - magickally augmenting their justifiable fear of contracting some awful disease.
Clean As A Whistle
Cost: 1-2 minor charges
Effect: Cast this spell to magickally sterilise an object, neutralising any harmful bacteria, poisons or other malign substances. This doesn’t alter the object’s appearance, a dirty needle still appears coated in diseased goo even though there’s no risk of contamination. For an extra charge you can retroactively sterilise a wound, so long as the injury was sustained within a number of minutes equal to the casting roll.
Follow The Tracks
Cost: 2-3 minor charges
Effect: Pick up a discarded syringe and relive the last time it injected someone. The vision comes from the perspective of the person being injected and lasts a number of seconds equal to the casting roll. Spend an extra charge to also learn their surface thoughts at the time of injection, though these might be pretty warped if they were shooting up hard drugs.
Dry Needling
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: This is the intravenomancy minor blast. Unlike most Fauci spells, it functions at range. Point a syringe at someone and impale them with dozens of invisible needles. These tear muscle, pierce skin, scratch bone and deal damage equal to the sum of the casting roll. If this spell kills someone, you either punctured an important organ or compromised an artery.
Stay Sharp
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Cast this spell to magick up a fresh hypodermic needle into your hand. The syringe is empty and completely sterile, still sealed in its disposable plastic packaging.
Suck Out That Venom
Cost: 2 minor charges
Effect: Cast this spell while drawing blood to remove a foreign substance from someone. This can extract poisons and venoms, even stop an overdose or hangover. But it won't work on prions, bacteria or viruses. The extracted substance remains inside the blood sample, transferrable to someone else by injection.
Take Your Medicine
Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Cast this spell to substitute your adept identity for your Struggle rating for minutes equal to the casting roll, but only while you’re in a grappling gridiron or trying to needlestick someone.
SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS
Another House Call
Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: Paging doctor whatever the fuck these are. Cast this spell to summon a Surgical Team (Book 3: Reveal, pg 84). The reality police are under no compulsion to obey you, and might even turn hostile if they deem you the most pressing threat to the natural order.
Appeal To Authority
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: The real rebellion is in perfect obedience. Produce a syringe, flick the barrel, squirt out a little fluid and denounce someone’s opinion with all the power of a global scientific consensus. Your victim suffers an Isolation shock equal to the sum of the casting roll.
Hot Shot
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This is the intravenomancy sig blast. It only targets people with a syringe in them, but it doesn’t have to be a needlestick from you - anyone on an IV drip is a fair target. Your victim takes damage equal to the casting roll as they suffer the symptoms of a fatal drug overdose.
Prophylaturgy
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Inoculate someone against a harm you’ve recently taken wounds from. Whenever they’d be hit by the specified threat, it instead harmlessly bounces off their vaccinated corpus. This occurs a number of times equal to the one's place of the casting roll. The threat doesn’t have to be an exact match - shoot yourself with a .22LR to build up a resistance to bigger bullets. Unfortunately every sig blast is considered a distinct threat, so no hexing yourself to no-sell other adepts.
Share The Love
Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Too much reality in these parts. Share anything injected into your bloodstream with a number of targets equal to the one's die of the casting roll. You’re mirroring the substance itself, not the symptoms. Give polio to a crowd of anti-vaxxers. Make cop fail his next drug test. If you’ve pulled a Dread Pirate Roberts and built up a tolerance to iocaine powder, poison an entire crowd and get away scot-free.
This Is The Cure
Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Confidently repeat the titular spell as you inject someone, healing them an amount equal to the casting roll. It doesn’t matter what’s in the needle, the spell operates on a super-charged placebo effect. For obvious reasons it’s difficult to cast on yourself, incurring a negative shift inversely proportional to your Self notches (e.g. -40% shift for one notch, +0% for nine).
Transubstitution
Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: Stick a needle into someone and draw more than mere blood. The trackmarker either steals 10% from an identity or bottles one charge, including majors. Whatever you stole can then be transfused into someone else, at the cost of a Rank 5 Self shock if they gain a new identity.
MAJOR CHARGE EFFECTS
Become an asymptomatic carrier for all diseases on Earth. Start or prevent a worldwide pandemic. Achieve immortality via vampirism, sucking the vitality out of others to extend your own life. Temporarily invert the pleasure-pain responses of an entire city, extolling them to SHOUT-REVEL-KILL.
Hugo Richard
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