This choice: The Fourth Spell and Others • Go Back...Chapter #3The Fourth Spell: Gluten (Glue) by: Seuzz   The next spell in the book is almost as easy as the second, and requires even fewer ingredients.
A handful of quicklime, a handful of wood ash, a spoonful of wet plaster.
You mix it all in a bowl that's been set on the sigil and run your fingertip thrice around the sigil, then set a lighted match to the mixture. It burns a brief time, leaving a grayish slurry.
It's a paste, though one with peculiar properties. It remains perpetually wet and slimy in the bowl, and it can only be used to glue two items together: a mens and a persona. It will stick to nothing else.
You coat the back of the mens with the gluten, then carefully set it inside the mask. Now you have a complete persona. If someone puts it on, they will wake in ten minutes (unless you shake them awake earlier) with your mind and memories and in a copy of your body.
It will take them awhile to get your memories, though. That's a weird thing about gluing a memory strip to a mask, and why you often don't do it. Put a memory strip on someone, and they'll wake knowing everything you do. Add the mask, and they'll wake still with your memories. It works the other way, too. Put them in a mask, then add the memory strip, and they'll have your memories.
But if you glue the memory strip into the mask? Funnily enough, it will take them hours to get the memories.
Oh, if they concentrate really hard, searching for something in particular (like a name, an address or a phone number) then they might be able to get it. But nothing comes easily. As the hours while away, more such memories will come, and they will come more easily. But it will still be a strain. Even after twelve hours, the wearer of a completed persona will have a tough time doing the impersonation.
Sleep is the only solution. A solid six hours of sleep, you have found, will unlock the mens, giving the wearer complete and easy access to the memories, personality, talents, etc. Even then, there is something about the mask that acts as an impediment. It takes some little concentration to "get into character," and even after inertia has taken over, you have to push yourself to maintain the characterization. A sharp surprise can even scare you out of it, so that you have to again concentrate to find your footing. (It's a bit like falling off a bicycle: Easy to fall off but easy to get back on, but it takes a moment, and you have to build up the momentum again.) The whole thing can be tiring if the impersonation is carried out over the span of several days.
There's only one person you know who can so the impersonation thing without strain, right from the start, even in a completed persona: Will Prescott. The guy is spooky when put in a mask. He comes out of the magical sleep actually thinking that he is the person he's imitating, and you can see it in his face when he "remembers" who he really: Whoa! He says it gives him a five-second migraine, and a feeling like vertigo. And after that it is easy for him to switch personalities.
"It's like closing one eye, then opening and closing the other," he says. "You know how the perspective shifts just a little bit? Just like that. I look at the world with one brain. Then I shift and I'm looking at the world with the other brain."
He even says he finds it easier to stay in character than to break character. "I just kind of zone out," he says. "Instinct takes over, and I'm just that person without even thinking about. Sometimes," he adds with frown, "I have to shake myself loose, to remind myself of who I really am."
* * *
Because this spell uses the same ingredients as the first and second spells, it doesn't cost any extra. By the time you got to it, you had figured out the pattern with the book: Make the stuff, use it the way it's supposed to be used, then press the item onto the book. That will cause the page to unlock, giving you the rest of the spell and a new one.
In the case of gluten, the book didn't have much to say, except to tell you that with this stuff you can glue memory strips into masks. But as for the next spell ...  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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