Unknown Armies: I Wear No Mask

Another jam entry, this one for Katts' All Hallows Jam. A ritual for Unknown Armies.

B-trndl

Do you like hurting people? Good.

Get a Halloween mask. It has to be a big one, large enough to cover your entire head. It doesn't have to be an animal, but the next part will be difficult if it's not. 

Because now you need blood. It must come from the same creature the mask depicts. Pigs, chickens, and cows are the easiest to source legally. Things get harder for elephants, sharks, gorillas, and people. Fill a vessel with enough to submerge the mask and leave it to soak for 33 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Then put it on. Yes you'll choke, unable to breathe though the clotted blood and rubber. That's the point. Suppress the urge to tear it off - let the horrible thing smother you. 

When you wake up there is no mask; your face is the thing itself. Stiff, priapic, and pulsing wetly. Your orifices are lightless voids lined with wet rubber, though your senses remain unaffected. The mask stays affixed for 3 hours before sloughing off like snakeskin. The ritual can be sustained by killing a person and anointing the mask with their blood, resetting the duration.

While the ritual is active, any biological evidence you leave behind is contaminated. Instead of your DNA, it is that of your mask. This creates bizarre forensic profiles - fingerprints that are smears of chicken fat, blood from a dairy cow, discarded horsehairs, semen that must've been sourced from a dog breeder. 

If you die wearing it, the mask does not come off. It remains fused to your face; rotting away with the rest of you. This combined with the DNA contamination make you impossible to identify post-mortem, short of extraneous evidence like clothes, weapons, or personal effects.

Rye Yang

The ritual is a creature of the Sleepers, used by the organisation to anonymously harass and assassinate occultists that refused get with the program. Random patsies would be spurred into action via the conspiracy's gangstalking magic; mysterious phone calls and dead-drops instructing them on their targets, their location, and how to perform the ritual necessary to get away with it. 

These catspaws were recruited from all walks of life and political persuasions. The voice on the phone would promise them they were killing informants, fags, race traitors, right-wing pundits, pedophiles etc. Whatever they needed to hear to pick up the knife and start cutting.

The Sleepers used the ritual to great effect in the Whisper War, dispatching waves of anonymous lunatics to brutalise their opponents with untraceable violence throughout the early 00's. That was until their pet killers started smelling a rat. It only took one man going off the reservation and turning on his handlers to let the cat out of the bag. Entire cells of Sleepers were butchered in the resulting carnage, and when all was said and done the ritual was firmly in the public domain.

In the modern era of play, the ritual is beloved by serial rapists, terrorists, political dissidents, and privacy-enthusiasts. And, of course, any Cabal in need of total anonymity with no questions asked.