Immaterial Material Link, Lost: One Finger Options

[Karayan]

The character of a friend of mine recently had a bad run in with a mage that left said character with a major chip on her shoulder (for good reason) and the NPC mage with a body part of hers. Namely, a finger. Obviously his having that substantial an amount of DNA is not good, but neither my friend nor I have much experience with ritual sorcery. Is there something the character can do to protect herself from this, either rendering the material link unviable, or at least do something to hamper the mage in using ritual sorcery on her? Through her team, the character has the help of a couple of other mages, including an initiate, though I don't know what metamagic techniques he has use of.

If there's nothing to be done, at least the mage believes the character dead. For now.

Thanks for any ideas.

[Ancient History]

In SR3, you could use the Severing metamagic to sever the magical link.

[Catsnightmare]

You can also use reverse ritual tracking and find where the finger is and then backtrack to the finger and most likely the enemy mage for some payback.

[Snow_Fox]

It just shows, you gotta be careful to whom you give the finger.

[Karayan]

[hyzmarca]

Here is an interesting question. Say that you are a tetragametic chimera, two faternal twins fused (Dragonball Z style) in the womb to form the fully functional you. Say that a magician gets a sample of one of your two different DNA lines. Could this DNA be used use ritual magic against you as normal, would the magician suffer penalities, or would the magician only be able to cast against those parts of your body that are made from that DNA?

[Ravor]

Well, I'm not sure if its covered in the rules anywhere, but personally I'd rule that no, if the whole and living you that makes up your Aura/Soul has multiple strands of DNA, then anyone of those strands works equally as well for Ritual Magic.

[Tiralee]

Regarding the severing of material for ritual links - isn't there a quick'n'dirty way to simply "reverse-engineer" a ritual link through the target (Ie, the person missing the finger?)

For a recent run, my players quickly realized that if someone is going to make a multi-million Nyuen bioware device, they're going to retain enough material for a viable ritual link.

A quick panic-attack later (They'd been removing various bugging devices for the last hour, driving around Seattle and keeping to the "Z" zones as much as they could) and they had called in every favour they had with any initiated mage they knew to slap together an anti-track spell.

The ritual actually went off without a hitch with the main spellcaster punching through the protective wards (ouch) and sustaining a force 4 fireball (for 20 minutes) before getting the hell out of dodge, Cleansing and Sanitising as they go. (Thank F%ck for backgound counts)

If you have enough mojo and a disgruntled guinea-pig, why not plan for something similar? Or simply have the local vampire lesbian stripper ninja assassin pirate blow a hole through the head of the NPC mage with a Barrett?

-Tir

[Bodak]