Psionics
From Soloralwiki
There are three types of supernatural powers on the world of Micras. The first, elemental magic, opens temporary unstable portals to elemental planes in order to unleash powerful forces. The second, divine magic, is power granted directly from the gods themselves. The third is psychic ability which is drawn from manipulating the Empathi Field. Psionics can be very subtle but not necessarily weaker than the other two types of power. Elemental magic can cause a river to overrun and destroy a huge city. Divine powers can heal the most grievous of wounds and empower a legion of soldiers. But psychic ability can send messages over great distances or even through time, bewilder, confuse, demoralize, read, control, or even outright kill the mind, and can subtly reshape the local laws of the multiverse.
Psionics is a bit less intuitive to understand than the other two types. It’s also entirely possible that a psychic could be totally unaware of his own ability. Divine champions always know their purpose, and shooting fire from one’s hand is something that’s very hard to ignore, but psychic force exists mostly in the mind without flashy effects. It is possible for someone to be an absolute warlord of mental abilities without ever knowing they are psychic in the first place. Because of this there are two main classifications of psychics; empaths that draw from raw natural talent and psions that train their minds to improve their skill.
Empaths
An empath’s powers come from the sheer charismatic willpower of their psychic minds. They simply want things to happen and, if it’s in their power to control, it does. This power can be quite potent but also very dangerous to both the user and any intended targets.
An example of this is a flipping coin in the air. If an Empath wills this to come up heads, it will. On a functional level their minds are reaching out to the coin and calling upon the power of the empathy field to alter the coin’s movement so that it lands with the heads side up. This differs from elemental powers that control wind movements and divine belief that call upon the god’s ability to control events. The Empath’s mind, if it is strong enough, reshapes the universe temporarily and locally so that heads is the only possible outcome.
It’s not “making luck”; there is no amount of luck involved. It’s rewriting the local rules of the universe so that their will becomes reality. When flipping the coin, the Empath doesn’t even need to look at the outcome. There is no surprise or relief when it comes up heads. They already know it is heads because they demanded it of the universe. If a non-psychic flips 100 coins, wills them up to come up heads, and tallies the results so that 60% came up heads, they may believe they influenced probability somewhat. In reality, this sort of “checking yourself” is more undermining to the willpower of an Empath than it does to reinforce what they already should know.
The most interesting thing about this ability is that the Empath doesn’t need to really *DO* anything to use their abilities. There are no hand motions, no focuses, no words to chant. It doesn’t require sight or even being within a hundred miles of the object. It’s all about mental willpower. If the psychic really wants it to happen badly enough, it will. They don’t understand the specifics of what their mind is doing. Even if they are learned on the subject it barely matters. We know how the muscles in our arm works, but we need to simply will our hands to move and they do without any additional input.
There are, of course, limits to what an Empath can control, mostly dealing with how complicated the results are in comparison to what the Empath is envisioning as an outcome. Consider a national election. If an Empath wills a certain person to just win, likely nothing will happen. It’s too complicated. How does someone win an election? People vote for them. If an Empath wills a lot of ballots to vote for one particular person, failure is still likely because of the mind’s limitation to conceive large numbers of objects. Specific desires are more likely to succeed. If there is a machine that counts the totals, and an Empath wills the machine to change it’s count, that is very small-scale and would have a much better chance of success. The implications of the machine’s changing of the results are irrelevant as long as the Empath focuses simply on the machine. In short, the easier it is for the mind to comprehend, the more active the Empath’s powers.
Yet so far we have only considered inanimate objects. All living things follow slightly different rules. The Empathi field that psychics tap into connects all things, living or otherwise, with the quintessiental matter of the universe. Inanimate objects don’t really interact with this connection which makes them easy to control but living beings do on a mental level. Reading and manipulation of the connections to living people allow psychics to read, confuse, or control their minds, and to send information or even matter over great distances or through time.
However, living beings have a natural resistance to this attack. An Empath’s psychic power is determined by their will; likewise, the will of a living target can resist. People that are forced into doing things that they would never, ever do freely may resist, doing a half-hearted effort or possibly breaking off the control entirely. Even non-psychics can be very resistant to an Empath’s efforts; it is all a matter of confidence and belief in what should be reality.
Empaths have a hard time training or teaching eachother because they don’t really know what they’re doing even if they aware of their power. It just sort of happens. The only real way for an Empath to grow in power is to be confronted by situations where they must will things to happen. Attempting to use focuses such as PSI rods actually weaken the Empath since their power is drawn mostly from their mental willpower. Focuses undermine an Empath’s confidence and make them believe they need something else other than their own imagination.
Psions
Psionistists, or simply Psions, are Empaths that have taken a different path. When an Empath becomes aware of their power, either from being told directly by a psychic, research into other’s works, or the simple realization that something supernatural is going on, they face a fork in the road. They can continue doing what has always worked for them before and stay Empaths or they can attempt to train their minds in mental techniques and thus become classified as a Psion.
Psions realize that their minds are powerful and deadly weapons and believe that they can be trained using mental techniques to become more potent. They trade their vague “willing” of things to happen for specific and reliable mental techniques. This often takes the form of chanting ritals, mental “excercises”, focus objects, and manifestation of psychic power in certain controlled forms.
A Psions abilities allow them to train in specific areas. If they believe they have need for mind reading, they study the subject, learn ways to break resistances, and practice their abilities regularly. When confronted with the coin flip the Empath just wills it heads and it is. A Psion would need to study the nature of the coin for a few moments beforehand, and then flip it and use a specific technique of interacting with a certain local part of the Empathi Field in order to force heads to come up.
Because of their slowness of action Psions may seem weak, but that is very rarely the case. It is true that they cannot improvise very well; their devotion to knowledge and technique undermines their raw confidence. But when they are prepared to strike their abilities are often much more honed and powerful, and also less dangerous to themselves and easier to control and focus on an intended target.
Since Psions focus so much on knowledge and technique they often have much to share with others, if they are willing. Psionic guilds or “cults” are common though their membership is often very small. Psions that are willing to work together experiment with different mental manipulations as a whole in order to develop new powers and guard this knowledge secretly. Generally speaking they never practice on eachother without consent.
