238: Antimirror

ENTRY 238: Antimirror

Chrome roses budding from a length of barbed wire, each bud and thorn tipped with rust, antimirror tastes of stale blood and ozone, with overtones of burning rubber as the flowers dissolve that seem to fill the head and overwhelm the senses. This petal is favored among masochists and exhumans, for whom pain is but one more sensation to be experienced and savored in all its million shades and combinations.

Each antimirror trip is a revisitation of some crime—a rape, a murder, a mutilation. The scripts tend be simple, the characters flat and mechanical. The non-player characters and settings are filled in from the user’s memory, pulled at random: friends, family, lovers. Familiar faces on empty shells playing pat parts. The user, of course, is always the victim, and suffers the worst of the events until the hallucinatory narrative ends.

The petalcrafters of antimirror pass themselves off as harmless enthusiasts, entertaining each other with their simple games, but the XP recordings that form the backbone of antimirror are culled from their vast archives of pain and fear. While they may or may not be torturers and sadists of themselves, they hoard and barter the memories of those that suffered and died at the hands of such depraved individuals, and vicariously cherish that anguish. While some are relatively harmless, others on the shadowy networks have been connected with kidnappings, unlicensed and unwilling augmentations, sexual assault, and premeditated surgical alteration on many habitats. Still, because of the disparate and secluded nature of the group, it is difficult for any legal authorities to stop their trade and barter of such materials, disguised as it is within accepted and perfectly legal peer-to-peer networks.

Antimirror Mechanics

Type	Application	Duration	Addiction Modifier	Addiction Type	Cost
Nano	O	1d6 hours	+3	Mental	Moderate

Antimirror has about a 1 in 10 chance of causing a “bad trip,” inflicting 1d10 Mental Stress on the user. Common derangements caused by antimirror addiction include paranoia and self-inflicted wounds.

Sweets

• Let the Blood Run Out (30 or more doses of antimirror in the last 30 days): Prolonged users find cathartic release through self harm; by inflicting 1d10 damage to themselves, the character can remove 1d6 Mental Stress that they have accumulated in the past 24 hours.
• Mind Numb (60 or more doses of antimirror in the last 30 days): The user develops a mental resistance to traumatic imagery and experiences; reduce all Mental Stress the user accumulates by half.
• Become the Victim (5 bad trips with antimirror): The user’s last hallucination made it onto the Mesh, and they have become a minor celebrity among the petalcrafters and users of antimirror. These individuals push the user to use the petal more often; the cost for them changes to Trivial.
• Witness (Random): The petal isn’t the typical narrative, but the XP recording of a recent unsolved violent crime. The user’s hallucination may hold clues to catch the perpetrator, or help identify the whereabouts and status of the victim.