A gateway to the astral plane. Just don’t stay too long and make sure your enemies can’t find your body.

Cost: 3 significant charges

Ritual Action: Take a nail from a bridge that is still standing (I recommend a pointy nail from a wooden bridge, but a rivet might work) and drive it through your thumb. That’s right, through the thumbnail and bone. Fortunately, if the ritual fails you don’t have to take it out to start over again. Bind the nail to your thumb with a strip of white leather marinated in crushed lotus flowers. Recite the words “Shrectem Mal Tuvrae” and spend the charges.

Effect: You are now on the astral plane, with all its advantages and drawbacks. To everyone else, you appear to be in a coma. To people with aura sight you come up as blank (like nonentities).
There are two important side effects. First, you lose all sense of connection to your physical self. Alone this is worth a rank-7 Self check, but it goes even further. You can’t percieve your physical body in any way. Period. You have no way of knowing if it’s starving, thirsty, or in pain. Hell, you can’t even tell if you’ve been killed, in which case the next part will seem like a god-send.
Second, the ritual doesn’t end until you pull the nail out and say the incantation backwards (possible while astral). Even if your body dies, your spirit will remain on the astral plane. However, if you pull the nail out too late, don’t even roll. Your soul is thrown across the veil. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars.

What You Hear
There is a ritualist in North Africa who has given this to a number of rivals without telling them how to end the ritual. It seemed to work for a while, but now there are quite a few angry demons dogging his every step.