The defacing dagger is a potent magical artefact of unknown provenance and great usefulness to astral travellers seeking to remain anonymous.
If, before astrally projecting, you cut yourself on the face with the defacing dagger, inflicting a number of boxes of physical damage (minimum 1) of your choice upon yourself in the process, you may add the same number to you initiate grade for the purpose of determining the effects of flexible signature and masking metamagics only. If you are not an initiate or do not possess flexible signature or masking, you are treated as if you were an initiate of a grade equal to the number of boxes of damage you inflicted and with the flexible signature and masking metamagics.
You may not use the defacing dagger to mask other characters.
The benefits of using the defacing dagger last for the duration of your astral travel, until you heal one or more boxes of the damage inflicted, or until someone else uses the defacing dagger, whichever happens first.