Haven’t done one of these in a while. It’s a bit long for an Attunement, at that. Perhaps too long. Also: blame this.
A Schlock to the System (Dark Humor)
This Attunement cannot be bought normally: Kobal gives it out strictly as a gift (see below). It allows the holder to temporarily give unholy life to inanimate items, provided that the items in question are (at a bare minimum) horribly tacky. For every two Essence the demon spends, he can imbue the item with the equivalent of one Force; the item will need a minimum of one Force in each category. Calculate Body, Mind, and Soul Hits as if the item was a celestial with a vessel/2: typically, the item will have Move Silently/4, Small Weapon/4 (Knife), and Tracking/4.
The newly-imbued murder-puppet (because that’s what this Attunement is generally used for) will obey its creator’s orders for eighty five minutes before it disintegrates; in the rare situations where the demon’s orders are not already malicious, the puppet will go ahead and cheerfully interpret them maliciously anyway. Its primary limitation is that it’s extremely expensive to create a murder-puppet, and insanely so to create one at full human potential. Dumb murder-puppets can be fooled, weak murder-puppets can be ripped apart, and obtuse murder-puppets can be evaded. And, of course, fire usually works. Demons of Dark Humor thus typically invoke A Schlock To The System in situations where it’s typically difficult for victims to just run away or fight, which of course means that they deliberately try to set up bad horror movie scenarios. Dark Humor, remember?
One last note: this is practically the Impudite dream Attunement. They’re the only Band of demon that can regularly refill themselves on Essence, using A Schlock to the System practically guarantees that they’ll gain Essence via their Impudite of Dark Humor Attunement, and that same Attunement also prevents them from getting dissonant from sending a walking murder-puppet out to kill some co-eds in a typically heavy-handed fashion. In fact, done correctly an Impudite can pretend to be one of the humans being hunted, fill back up on Essence from Charming his fellow-’victims’ – and then do the big reveal at the climax, getting a good laugh in as the murder-puppet finishes the job. That clears the demon from his Word-specific dissonance condition, to boot. …And, so, obviously, Impudites find that they have to jump through absolute hoops to get this Attunement. And then watch as Kobal typically gifts it to somebody else anyway.
Dark Humor, remember?