Emailed the imms, got a dismissive "dunno, you must've been banned for a reason, not going to fix, appeal to imps".
Dunno how I could get banned for, I don't know, not playing the game and not posting on the forums, but the attitude made me just give up. I ain't suckin' up to no Sacer just to post once every 3 months.
Looks like a broken pointer that gets the messages from the wrong memory location that happens to contain flag names. Sorta harmless until something tries to *write* using that pointer and it's likely highway to crash city.
You always get a level-dependent frenzy effect out of it, and on rather rare occasions you get insanity (all your speech becomes random sentences in style of "they're out to get me") and you lose awareness of your stats.
Pen has 2 factors: skill and intelligence.
Failing the skill check means you can end up destroying the thing you're trying to write at any time. Once you hit your "max written characters" limit, defined by intelligence (can't remember if skill had any effect, didn't pay so close attention) the scroll gets erased when you write onto it and just says "The ink fades
Regarding 2), you also completely lose this accuracy bonus the moment you wear a single piece of metal, even a weapon... but as far as I can tell, only against players. I was happily onslaughting mobs with a metal weapon and no other metal gear, and then tried to kill some bypasser, missing 5 out of 5 ambushes. It was frustrating.
Because while in duo, the muter is outside everyone's pk range, you can see this effect by marking a muter as an assassin - while they duo, they become unharmable even though you do see them. Which basically leaves just faerie fog and the bard revealing song.