Cherreads

Chapter 281 - Essence of the Deck of Shuffled Time

By consuming the light, smooth and peacefully timeless beverage, you gain the supernatural power to manage your time.

*You now possess the Deck of Shuffled Time, an intricate and powerful chronomantic magitech artifact in the form of a deck of twenty five metallic silver cards. The Deck can act as a powerful personal computer and holographic interface, with each flying card acting as a modular computer component, and more than matching any contemporary supercomputer in capability. It is bound to your soul and magic signature by arcane methods and magitechnical encryption, and you can freely banish or summon it from your spirit. It passively grants you agelessness through its use due to infusions of its temporal magics flowing through your being, and protects you from the undesired temporal powers or divinations of others. It also gives you a potent magic affinity for chronomancy, which it can fuel with the cards. It may or may not come with a bound spirit of time or AI, serving as a companion, teacher and manager of the device.

*Each card of the Deck barring one, can store an hour's of time, effectively skipping you forward in time. This stored time can then be drawn at any time for countless purposes, from mental time dilation, restoring your energies, super speed, time reversal, teleportation, to instantly causing the effect of an attack, or overlapping yourself with additional selves across the timestream to multiply any capabilities you possess. However, the 25th card is uniquely capable of taking time from others, and can store an entire year of time. In order to actually use this any of this time however, you must tune or retune your cards to a specialized or specific application, effectively multiplying the potence of stored time, and increasingly so the more specific the application.

*Each card is represented by an image and idea bearing a strong place in your psyche and spirit, though this is accented and colored by the specializations of the cards. By calling all the cards you can enter a brilliantly vivid trance to divine the future, whether yours, someone else's or simply a broad idea of the future. By reading the cards in this trance and observing their connections and details, you can interpret the future. The cards will provide a number of basic straightforward hints regardless of your interpretation, but the rest will rely on the growth of your skill and experience at divination.

*Finally, the Deck is capable of improving itself through exposure and analysis of other technologies and magics, especially technomagical devices, improving itself and unlocking all manner of new functions and applications, if still thoroughly colored by its theme and core.

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