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Interlude 16
🕑 Added 2025-03-10 09:32:39 +0000 UTCINTERLUDE (XVI)
The perfect Mark 4 talisman is easier to craft than you’d think. With just a handful of ingredients, this revolutionary recipe can produce crisp, ultra responsive, and highly versatile paper-slips in just a few quick and easy steps. All it takes is a little faith, a lot of blood, and a heaping helping of elbow grease, and you too can precipitate mass casualties amidst the hated ranks of the enemy (and it’s so much better then the store bought stuff!)
What You’ll Need
· Mana-Treated Paper: This much is a given, as, without paper, there can be no talisman.
· Heretical Mana: Initially used as a poor substitute, it’s since proven itself critical in maintaining the shelf life of other, less stable ingredients.
· Blood: One’s own blood is preferable. Amount needed may vary, though expect larger batches to require gallons or more.
· Soul Energy: A scrap of torn soul. It’s suggested one only take from one’s soul sparingly, and allow for ample time for rest and recovery between sessions.
· Runes: What is a talisman without its runes. Often times with rune-work, it only takes a light touch to achieve remarkable results.
How To Craft
1) Permeate the mana-treated paper with its heretical counterpart. This should lead to the cannibalization of its better half. The paper will then become uniquely responsive to heretical mana, where regular mana-treated paper is largely unreliable. It’ll then gain the special property of energy absorption. A phenomenon wherein the dark mana holds incompatible energies in a kind of stasis when it’s unable to consume them directly. You’ll know the permeation phase is complete when the paper’s turned the shade of charcoal, and radiates the slightest tinge of malice.
2) Soak treated paper in blood atop a ritualized alter under a full moon for eight to twelve hours, or, conversely, until fully saturated (should take up to ten minutes.) Thanks to energy absorption, the transient life energy located inside the blood should find itself trapped within the blackened talismans. You’ll know when the saturation phase is complete when the paper’s turned the shade of dried blood.
3) Inscribe favored runes as necessary.
4) Infuse every individual talisman with a minuscule piece of one’s soul. Used as fuel for one or more edicts. Natural truths subverted by edict are as follows (each selected for optimal economy of equivalent exchange). Small pieces make up a whole, becomes, the whole is made up of smaller pieces (cost: negligible due to it serving as a mere shift in perspective.) We are not one and the same, becomes, we are one and the same (cost: negligible due to the blood, mana, and life energy saturating the talismans, making the statement more true than it is false.)
And there you have it folks! A joint weapon of mass destruction in just four easy steps! So simple, even a baby could do it!
