Mask Relay 39: Mask of Venus' Smile

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A once-delicately scrimshawed bit of ivory dented with tooth marks. A bar affixed to the front attaches it to a plate of stiffened leather covered in turn by a stretched length of fuligin cloth, completely flat and featureless except for a pair of eyeholes. On the inside of the mask in the forehead region of a Venus or nymph with a heart impaled on a spear. On the back of the pasted Venus is a delicate sigil of golden ink; tucked into a hollow in the bit is a rolled-up slip of paper with a second. The two sigils bind a grue to the mask.   

You hold the mask in your teeth; you can't speak while wearing it, of course. While the mask is worn, the fuligin cloth turns into a vast, echoing hole in your face. Punches and daggers pass right throw, bullets from head on whiz harmlessly into the void. You can reach into the void yourself to pass things inside or take them out; you can hide up to three slots of items in there at a time, held by clammy hands of darkness.

You can bite down on the bit and crack open a tooth, slurped out of your mouth into the darkness, to Charm a person you've made eye contact with for so long as and whenever you wear the mask. Even though you cannot speak, they'll hang onto your every subtle movement and gesture. If you get a private moment with them, the thing inside the mask will reach out to pull them inside. It'll take their eyes and their stature and let you assume both as you please. Be mindful of where you do this; it'll leave spiraling tooth marks gouged all around you. You can do this as many times as you have teeth.

If the sigil on the Venus is damaged, next time you don the mask the eyes seal over with fuligin, and delicate threads creep in and around your ocular nerves to hold them hostage. The void in the mask becomes annihilating. If the sigil in the bit is somehow damage, the threads will fill your nose and mouth and hijack your airways, the wardings on the cloth become reflective, an obsidian mirror that charms all it sees whether you'd like or not. If both the sigils are damaged and you don it, you become a grue.

GOODRINKER ETYMOLOGY CALLOUT POST

While the phrase "drink the goo" was first used by an embryonic baddoctor all the way back in November 2019, the term and image of the goodrinker was properly coined in Phlox's Ten Blade Demigod game, December 2021; lichsgetstiches' character drank radiation goo in a poison swamp and it melted his throat (luckily, since it was also a ghost swamp, he just turned into a ghost before dying later for unrelated reasons). The precise term "goodrinker" was coined by locheil specifically before breaching the OSR server in January 2022.

Following the exodus of much of the then-active members of the OSR to the GLOG server later in 2022, the term left the server with those for a period of two years, as a GLOG ingroup term; the phrase goodrinker was first used as a combined term by deaddelver in the GLOG server in February 2023, and the goodrinker emoji was first made by firstgokun in March 2023 in the Ashes to Ashes game server. The term was finally reintroduced to the OSR server in July 2024 by weirdwriter and vodka gobalsky.

That is all.