[UA] Center of the Web

[Bastien Pilon]

Special thanks to Scott Dorward for inspiring this. Go ahead, give
yourself a cookie.


Center of the Web

Power: Significant
Cost: 4 Sig. Charges

Effect: The caster begins to feel something moving around in her womb
(several thousand somethings actually) and rapidly gives birth to a
small horde of Spyders (detailed below). The caster can then see
through the eyes of her "children" as if she were right there. While
she can only see through her Soul stat in Spyders at any given time,
the caster can issue telepathic commands to any of them at will. She
will also continue to give birth to more of them for as long as she
lives, roughly one or two every half-hour or so.

Oh, and one more thing: there is a slight side effect to this ritual.
Soon after the caster begins to attract regular spiders as well. Male
spiders. You do the math…

Ritual Action: This ritual only works for women. Sorry guys…

First you need to create a ritual space to work in: draw a large
spider web shaped veve on the floor. Place African masks representing
Anansi on the walls. Burn special herbs found only in West Africa.
Release lots of live spiders into the area. Big ones.

Once that's done, take a large knife and inscribe it with mystical
symbols related to sight and spiders. Sit in the center of the web and
kill a goat or other similarly sized mammal (using your ritually
consecrated knife) while reciting the proper incantations in Ashanti
(basically an invitation for the spider god to come over and knock you
up). While the blood on the knife is still warm, cut out your eyes in
a single slash, right to left.

If it worked, you should know very quickly…

Note: If you ever get your eyes back somehow, you lose the ability to
see through the Spyders or issue them orders. You still keep giving
birth to them though.


Spyders
Mommy's crawling eyes
Body: 1 (Creepy crawler)
	Bite 15%
Speed: 60 (Skittery)
	Quiet as hell 55%, Dodge 30%, Initiative 45%
Mind: 10 (Smarter than the average spider)
	Follow orders from Mother 100%
Soul: 40 (Inhuman)
	
Spyders look pretty normal for the most part: flesh-toned arachnids
that range from as small as your thumb to almost as big as your hand.
A closer look however reveals that these things don't have an
exoskeleton and eyes that look far too human for comfort.

Spyders are not particularly aggressive and will try to get away if
someone attacks them unless their mother commands them otherwise (even
the bigger one's bite doesn't do any real damage, though it does hurt
a lot). A swarm of them can be dangerous though : treat it as having
Wound  points equal to the total number of Spyders, increase the Bite
skill by one for every 5 of them in the swarm and have them cause one
point of damage for every 10. Killing more than half of the swarm
should disperse it, although if you're the impatient type spraying
them down with insecticide or a flamethrower will work a lot quicker
(firearms are totally ineffective except for shotguns, which do hand
to hand damage).


What you hear…
There's a rather mean spirited avatar of the Trickster over in Ghana
who is giving out copies of this ritual to anyone who asks her for
one, with one tiny modification: this version has you cut out your
eyes from left to right. Naturally she now has quite a few eyeless
people who are VERY unhappy with her.


-- 
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the
forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom,
no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat
leaden death, demon...

Terry Pratchett