It’s amazing what can happen when you’re surrounded by a screaming mob…

Major Artifacts

In 1957, the city education board of Little Rock, Arkansas, voted to allow the schools of the city to desegragate. Nine black teenagers were selected to attend Little Rock Central High School that year. However, the governor, Orval Faubus, was coming up for reelection soon, and his way of clinching voters was to appeal to the segragationist movement in his state by issueing a decree that no black students will attend high school with white students. To back up his claim, he surrounded Central High with National Guard units with orders to turn back any black people who were trying to attend the high school.

That day, all the students met a local preacher’s house and drove over to the school. All but one. Elizabeth Eckford was living in a house that had no telephone, and did not recieve the message to meet at the preacher’s home. So when the other students were driving to the school, she walked several blocks to a bus stop, alone, surrounded by an angry white mob that was threatening to rape and kill her. When she arrived at the bus stop, a lone elderly white woman stepped forward and along with one other white person, helped her reach the school safely, where she was turned back by the National Guard units posted there.

The immense bravery shown by these two individuals punched through to something more powerful, and it’s effects were left behind in two items. The plain book carried by Eckford on her walk completely renders someone immune to stress checks in both Helplessness and Isolation and grants the holder access to the second Warrior channel for any cause against an unjust or evil ideology, group, or individual. (Evil in the black/white sense, not in a personal sense. You could use it to help put down a dangerous gang or soften anti-Jewish sentiment, but it won’t help you wipe out a day care center, unless it’s the Day Care Center of the Damned or something like that.) The dress worn by the elderly woman was infused with the power of the Mother, and allows access to the first two channels of the Mother archetype. The book must be carried in the arms to be used, like in this picture of Eckford as she walks to the school. The woman to the right of Eckford in the photo is the elderly woman that walked with her. Her dress must simply be carried on the person of the user, however, the user must be female, due to the fact that it allows one to channel the Mother archetype.

One would imagine that either artifact in the possession of an avatar of either archeype would find their powers strenthened somewhat by the ownership of such a powerful link to the past of their archetype, but information on the location of either artifact is rather hard to find, due to their rather plain appearence. But things of this power can’t stay hidden forever…