A Rusty Can with a String Tied Around It

In the 21^st century, a graduating anthropologist, Sapphire Circe*, encounters a rare area of "magick" in her city when she enters what she believes to be a "haunted house". She finds remnants of a woman who had died years earlier who had acquired "user" access to the nearly-prehistoric nanobots left by visitors from a more technologically advanced society.
The trouble was: no one had the owner's manual to the nanobots. The nanobot operator had been known as the "White Oak Witch" and never knew that the ancient witchcraft rituals she had learned from ancestry were being interpreted by the microscopic artificial intelligences as programming, yet never overriding their primary command from ages earlier to remain unseen to the natives of this world.
As a result, when the White Oak Witch taught Sapphire Circe the neo-pagan ritual of the rusty can, she thought she was teaching a very real magic, not how to operate advanced technology.
The ritual was simple (unlike many other magickal rituals of myth and legend). One finds a rusty old can and ties a string around it. Then while inside a circle of protection (another ritual), one asks the little invisible Entropy Spirits to bless you or curse your enemies while slowly unwrapping the string. The more specific you make your wish, the legend goes, the more likely they will make a noticeable change in your life.
If the nanobots accept the task, they might (in the guise of invisible spirits) cause micro-fissures in your opponent's weapons or tools, or repair defects in your own weapons or tools.
Regardless, when they perceive that their mission has been completed, the microscopic nanobots return to the ground and walls, leaving no trace that your phenomenal good luck (or your adversary's phenomenal bad luck) was anything but pure magick.

* Sapphire Circe is aware that her stripper name and her drag queen name would both be the same as her real name.

Item type

Magical