The Holy Earplugs Of Ignorance

By Ryan Roth

**Flaming
Feather**

The workings of Hell are insidious. Often the damage Hell's minions do comes from crafty words spoken into the right ears, rather than direct attacks. Demons have learned to use words to carry their vile attunements, Songs and resonances.

It was only natural for Heaven to look for some simple way to shield their agents from the effects.

Holy Earplugs of Ignorance

The holy earplugs are small, normal looking earplugs. When inserted in the ears, they are nearly unobservable. Like normal earplugs, they muffle sound. Unlike normal earplugs, they also protect the user from attunements, songs, and resonances carried by sound.

For each lovel of the artifact, the earplugs grant an additional point of resistance to certain effects. These effects include the Balseraph resonance, Songs like the Song of Thunder, and Attunements such as Divine Logic. The level is added to whatever trait is used to resist such attacks - the earplugs add to the user's Will for resisting Balseraphs, and add to the user's Intelligence for resisting Divine Logic, for example.

Unfortunately, the earplugs also shield out noises which the user might want to hear. Each level of the artifact penalizes the user's Perception for sound-based information. This includes detecting distrubances, normal sounds, and attunement-based information, like from the Malakim of War attunement (though in that case the angel's Corporeal Forces and not Perception is penalized). Whatever trait is used to determine how much a user hears suffers the penalty. A high-level set of Holy Earplugs can render the user completely deaf to all sound.

Of course, Hell eventually decided the things had some use for them too, so they began to make their own versions. Unholy Earplugs tend to be larger and more noticable, and also painful to wear for long periods.

**Flaming
Feather**

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