The Bronze Head Speaks
Mendacamina devised this ritual to counteract a vexing limitation of the Auspex Discipline. while the Steal Secrets power makes it possible to experience the surface thoughts of a victim, the results are often a series of annoying visual images. When seeking the plans and secrets of the enemy, the Tremere require precision. When they ask a prisoner where the nearest Tzimisce haven is, they want an exact description, not a cloudy vision of a babbling brook and a moonlit bridge. This ritual permits the desired exactitude, at least when the subject is a bound and helpless prisoner headed for vivisection on Virstania's lab tables.
As assistants chant an elegy to lost souls, warning them that another doomed one is about to join them, the ritualist rubs the victim's head in an alchemical salve that saps the will, melts off interfering hair and softens the skull. She then takes a flexible bronze tube (a cannula) with a sharpened end (a trocar) and jabs it through the prisoner's right temple and on into his brain. The tube is attached to a manually operated pump. Assistants turn the pump's crank wheel throughout the rest of the process, drawing the victim's pulped brain matter through the tubing to a large bronze head. The head is expensive to produce and must be made by master craftsmen. It stands about two feet high and has an articulated jaw for speech. Its eyes are balls of ivory suspended in small, liquid-filled crystals; these bobble around whenever the victim suffers a jolt of pain or pang of regret from the secrets it hears revealed.
Once the head sputters to its semblance of life, the ritualist may ask it questions. The head's knowledge is restricted to the memories of the victim, but the unwillingness or failing memory of the prisoner poses no impediment to the head. The head can dredge down into his mind to free up long-buried memories of his pre-Cainite lifetime or even memories suppressed by magical means. the further a memory from the victim's conscious understanding, the longer the head must take to scoop it out.
The head does not speak with the voice of the victim; instead it has a rudimentary persona of its own. The head at Ceoris, dubbed Paracelsus, behaves obsequiously, asking after Mendacamina's health and taking every opportunity to praise the perspicacity that led her to construct him. He may also make grim jokes at the victim's expense or volunteer humiliating information about him ("This one was very sinful with his sister when he was ordinary flesh, I'm sad to say.") When having a hard time finding an answer to a question, it might exhort the assistants to pump harder or warn Mendacamina that the victim's now-spongy brain is unlikely to hold out much longer. Mendacamina is not always amused by his banter and may order him to silence himself, which he does.
No two heads have exactly the same personality, though all are in some way chillingly disregardful of the victim's suffering.
System: The thaumaturge's player rolls Intelligence + Occult (as normal), opposed by the victim's Stamina _ Fortitude (difficulty 9). Each net success provides the thaumaturge with one immediately useful piece of information. The exact content is up to the Storyteller.
A mortal, or a ghoul without Fortitude cannot survive the process of having her brain pulped. Vampires, especially those with Fortitude (and ghouls with that Discipline), have a chance of surviving because of their inhuman regenerative abilities. The player rolls Stamina + Fortitude (difficulty 9) and requires three successes for the character to survive and end the torture session in torpor. Five successes leave the character Incapacitated instead. Ghouls cannot enter torpor and so need five successes even to survive.
A vampire killed by the ritual can be vivisected for the purpose of using him as raw material for a Gargoyle, provided that his pieces can be used right away or magically preserved.
Historical Note: Although Paracelsus is destroyed with Ceoris in 1476, the ritual survived, and several major Tremere chantries built new bronze heads when they found themselves at war with enemies. The ritual is still in use today, its intrusive capabilities hardly eclipsed by lie detectors or truth serums.
