Posted on December 21, 2010 by Jenna
The man’s convulsions woke her; woke her to see his sweating ghost-pale face, his slit eyes, his drawn features. She tried to disentangle herself from the sheets, crying, “What ails you?”
He spoke no word, but she came to know his answer: that he had been awakened by the suffering of his realm, by the forest in the south. That he had touched the minds of a dozen beasts and seen through a dozen pairs of eyes before he found the source of the pain…and that, when he found it, he paid the price for his divinations…for the thirteenth beast was trapped within a fire…
—from Fire Stories, compiled by Édouard Guy
Difficulty 2: “Lesser Incarnation”
The Powers you know — that love you, hate you, or just hang out with you sometimes — can be with you even when their body is not. They can incarnate in their Estates. The Power of the Wind can be whatever wind blows past. The Power of Landslides can live in any landslide. The Power of Hope moves in any heart that hopes.
Your Avatar can do this as a difficulty 2 miracle.
When your Avatar incarnates in something, their consciousness goes off to live elsewhere in the world. This ignores the normal range for your miracles (pg. XX) and lasts until:
- something happens back at their body that snaps them out of it;
- a self-imposed time limit runs out; or
- a scene ends for the thing they’re living in.
They do choose, with as much precision as they like, what they’ll inhabit, but they don’t take it over and they don’t bring their whole majesty to bear. They live with it.
The things that happen to it — the things it thinks, the relationships it forms, the experiences it has — become part of your Avatar’s life story. This is backdated a bit, so you get the memories and attachments of the things that were already happening when you arrived. And your Avatar’s dreams and hopes and passions and loves and basically their ways of living become part of its nature; and that lasts even after you pull your consciousness back, more or less until the story ends.
So if you’re playing the Power of Dogs, you can go live in any dog you want. And for the rest of your life, if that dog loved someone, like most dogs do, that person will be important to you, and you to them. And for the rest of the story, that dog thinks a bit like you (and the rest like a dog) — if they see that your parents’ home is on fire, say, even if they don’t know your parents, they’ll definitely care and they might even be able to work a fire extinguisher or dial 911!
Usually the HG will just tell the story of what you experience in abbreviated form, or let you do so, or just say that it happened and tell you to let them know if it’s relevant. If you happen to incarnate somewhere where important things are going on, though, and nothing is up back where your body is, then the HG may have you play the dog, wind, hope, ghetto, song, or sunbeam you happen to be inhabiting instead of yourself!
If your Estate exists on other worlds you can possess it there, but you need a greater (level 5) miracle to extend your consciousness into someplace primal like Heaven or Hell.