The Roman god Mercury, protector of travelers and merchants combined symbolically with a rare 10 cent coin and a dying feature of modern life, the telephone booth.
This ritual allows teleportation between two telephone booths (provided the ritualist knows the target booth’s phone number) using a specially prepared mercury dime.
Cost 4 Significant Charges
Ritual Actions: Take your dime, which must be a mercury dime stamped between 1916 and 1945, and polish it until it shines. Grubby, scuffed or otherwise damaged dimes will not work for this ritual. At dusk, suspend this dime over burning myhrr incense from a tripod made from of olive branches and animal tendon. After the room gets good and smokey, take a phone within hearing distance off the hook and lay the handpiece next to the tripod, taking care not to disconnect the phone. The phone used must be a land-line and cannot be cordless. When the automated operator’s voice comes on the line, start a scrap of paper with the target telephone booths’ phone number on it on fire and throw it onto the burning myhrr. Keep the myhrr burning until dawn, refilling your incense burner as necessary.
From this point on, all you need to do to use the dime is drop it down the coin slot of any public phone booth, pick up the handpiece and dial the target booth’s phone number. The ritualist will disappear immediately, but will only appear in the target booth when no-one is watching. The dime, by the way, completely disappears upon use.
I like it! Seems a little too costly for my tastes, but still, it’s got the right tone. Might throw this one into a random book of rituals my players find.
It IS teleportation, though, and with a minimum requirement of ritual paraphernalia.
I really like imagining the ritual being cast with a hurried worry because they don’t have a prepared dime and need one, soon.
Thanks for the comments. The idea behind this was to have a ritual that was almost obscolete…but not quite. Mercury dimes and phone booths are both becoming increasingly rare; in another 10 years this ritual might be completely useless.
Looking back, if someone has a lot of “hang time” waiting for the destination phone booth to be unobserved, there should probably by a Rank 8 Isolation check.
Depends on if it’s like the Cryptomancer spell where you’re just “removed” or if you experience something more like the Room of Rusty Things.