Staff of the Stars

The Staff of the Stars is a black cane set with gemstones and one of the Abraham family's most dangerous artifacts. It can turn sufficiently accurate mental images into teleportation or reenacted supernatural phenomena, but an incomplete image can produce a distorted destination, effect, or creature.

History

The Abraham family's exchange

Dorian Gray Abraham explains the staff's rules when the Abraham family negotiates with the Tarot Club. Klein accepts it in exchange for the Box of the Great Old Ones, with Fors serving as the family intermediary. The trade puts a Grade 0 artifact in Klein's hands while removing a different, increasingly dangerous sealed object from Abraham custody. (Chapters 1209–1210)

Klein and later Tarot Club use

Klein first uses the staff to reach Chernobyl by reconstructing a location he saw in a dream divination. He subsequently reenacts attacks and powers, crosses great distances, and uses the staff as a hard striking weapon. Its rank also lets it suppress Creeping Hunger when Sasrir's influence makes the glove degenerate. Teleportation can nevertheless be disrupted or diverted by sufficiently powerful spatial and Black Emperor effects. (Chapters 1221–1222, 1236, 1244–1260, 1305, and 1351–1365)

Years later, Leonard carries the staff in a Tarot Club operation and visualizes Pallez Zoroast as a wall clock to reproduce an attack. This is later custody in action, but the corpus does not explain whether Klein formally transferred ownership or merely lent the artifact for the mission. (Chapter 2566)

Abilities and properties

• By visualizing a real place in accurate detail, the holder can teleport there. Errors or inadequate knowledge can send the user to an unknown location, while high-level spatial interference can distort or block the journey. (Chapters 1209, 1221–1222, and 1305)
• By visualizing a known Beyonder power, person, or scene, the staff can reproduce the phenomenon or let the imagined figure make a single attack. The result depends on the user's understanding: an inaccurate Lightning Storm once transformed the user into a frog, and Leonard relies on intimate knowledge of Pallez to obtain a usable reenactment. (Chapters 1209, 1236, and 2566)
• The cane is physically formidable. Striking a target can cause an unpredictable mutation, exemplified by a victim's body being divided across a doorway, but the precise pool of possible mutations is not defined. (Chapter 1209)
• The bearer must keep their mind empty except for the intended image. Stray thoughts can immediately become hazardous reality. When not sealed or watched, the staff may move on its own and generate unpredictable anomalies, so its custody requires constant mental discipline and containment. (Chapter 1209)

Ownership and custody