Somewhere in between impulse and action, things get stuck inside your head. Thoughts or images wind up caught in mental loops, and you occasionally find yourself tripping over words, getting stuck in patterns of speech, or repeating apparently uncontrollable activities (flapping your hands, shaking your head, rubbing your wrists, and so forth) which, under most circumstances, would be

easy to stop or manage. Sometimes known as perseveration or stimming (see the Merit: Hyperfocus), these mental tics often manifest from brain damage, emotional trauma, intense stress, and /or autism and other sensory-processing conditions. Conventionally and incorrectly called “nervous habits,” these mental quirks may be attempts to control your apparently chaotic surroundings by giving your brain something that feels like you can control it. Problem is, you essentially have to shake yourself out of the locked pattern, concentrate on a new sensation in order to break the loop, invoke a sort of “ritualized” word or action that triggers a break in that loop, or employ some other method to break free of the mental lock. Until that point, you could find yourself stuttering even though you don’t have a speech impediment, feel “frozen” on words or thoughts you can’t easily articulate, lock into near-obsessive ruminations on nonsense phrases or perilous thoughts, get stuck doing the same thing over and over again, or otherwise wind up focused on an internal feedback cycle.

System

-wise, the Storyteller will occasionally drop small but annoying quirks into your character’s ability to speak, suggest small, repetitious actions for your character to perform, and otherwise screw with your character’s capacity to move beyond a single nagging thought. To break those mental locks, you’ll need to roll your character’s Willpower against difficulty 7, spend a temporary point of Willpower, or else stand around “locked up” in mid-thought or action until you can break that irritating mental block through force of will or (after five turns) the simple passage of time.