Talents are placed in three categories: Metabolic, Manipulative and Sensitive.
Metabolic
Metabolic powers involving enhancing or repairing one's own body. This can include long life-spans, the ability to recover from any wound, healing faster, superhuman strength, enhanced physical senses, enhanced agility, shapeshifting and any of a number of other things.Manipulative
Manipulative powers involve altering the physical world around you. This can include healing the wounds of other people, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, creation of darkness and other such things.
Sensitive
Sensitive powers are related to non-physical senses and mental powers. Telepathy, empathy, death-seers, oracles and anything else related to mind or things beyond the physical.Specific Talents
Clairsentience
Clairsentience comes in a large number of flavors, but we’re going to focus on those who have a Talent for this sort of thing. Clairsentients are able to perceive things at a distance through a variety of means but in general clairsentients experience the world, at least partially from, a non-Euclidean
perspective. They often have odd understandings on the spatial relationships between one place and the next. They very often have to tune their senses to better allow to operate the same as other people.
For those Talents that create a sort of scrying window, things are easier. In these circumstances, they default to a spatial perspective that is close or identical to the manner in which the average person perceives space. These sorts represent someone who is actually more capable of small scale teleportation than an alteration of their senses. The scrying window in this case usually functions as a consistent teleportation effect that brings light, sound and/or smell from the distant location.
Clairsentients that operate by a non-standard perspective on space have a tendency to get lost. Their understanding of how two particular places are linked is often faulty. This can make them seem quite absent-minded. In addition, due to the extension of their consciousness into the world, clairsentients
can often find themselves provoking mindscapes if they focus too long or hard on a particular person. Between clairsentients, Oracles and Prophets, the common sensory clairsentient tends to be the most distracted.
Death-Seers
Death-Seers are naturally able to see and speak to the dead. They can also see potentially fatal conditions in people, though it has to be coming fairly quickly for them to take most notice. More sinisterly, death-seers are capable of seeking out vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause death. Death-seers are relatively rare in the world, but most are tend toward non-violent attitudes.
Many supplement their talents with lessons in psychology and medicine to better deal with ghosts or act as healers. They are equally likely to become doctors or exorcists. Of course, there are a handful of combat trained death-seers but they are usually looked at with a degree of distrust by other death-seers. Even those death-seers, such as Eija Semezou, tend to prefer peaceful means first.
Trained death-seers are able to naturally banish and disrupt ghosts. Many are also able to deal with astral projectors. As they frequently have ghost friends that occasionally pop up, they can sometimes acquire information no one would otherwise be able to get. It does depend on the relative state of awareness of the ghost, however. The most self-aware ghosts rarely pop up just to chat, however, so the death-seer frequently needs to be very patient and careful in stating requests to the ghosts.
Death-seers are able to recognize ghosts, immortals, undead and other death-seers on sight. Undead and fallen death-seers usually provoke a sense of disgust in most death-seers. Fortunately, while ghosts are prevalent, there hasn't been an active undead since the late 1800s and the majority of the seals holding their spirits are monitored.
Death-seers are relatively easy to identify as they have recognizable combinations of skin, hair and eye color. Death-seers always have red irises and for some of the more advanced applications, the whites also become red, as if filling up with blood. Hair color is either bright red, deep black or pure white. Skin color, regardless of ethnicity, is either almost white or almost black. They are also frequently photophobic, bright light causing minor pain and they thus favor sunglasses rather frequently.
Flight
This is rare Talent, even most of the winged races can't normally fly, but it is one that is known. Most people capable of Flight have wings or are able to shape-change to produce wings which makes the telekinetic burden somewhat less.
Oracles
Oracles are able to perceive along the timeline without limit. Most people can remember the past that they perceived with their own senses and they can make predictions about the future, oracles can actually perceive the past and future as if they were the present. This sometimes leaves them a bit disconnected since their perceptions stretch out over eternity.
Most of the time, an oracle will perceive actions that are occur temporally close to their bodies. Sort of like the way most people generally only pay attention to the area immediately around them. Occasionally, however, something in the distance catches their eye for a little bit and they have a flash of something that happened in the far past or will happen in the far future. Rather like it would draw attention if an explosion were to occur in the distance as someone was driving along a highway.
The future is fluid and can be changed by the actions of individuals who have seen an upcoming future. In fact, this is a constant thing for the oracle. As described in the Power description, oracles have frequent visions, most of which do not come true because of the fact that they are primarily about the oracle. For example, an oracle has a vision of being pulled over by a police officer and discovering that they forgot their wallet somewhere. As a result, the oracle becomes extra
careful of both their wallet and their driving resulting in the vision not occurring. Likewise, oracles often glimpse back into the past accidentally as well, but for the most part don’t see anything really out of the ordinary.
Initially, many Oracles are of the opinion that their Talent is just a furtive imagination. It isn’t until they have an image of a major event; one over which they have no direct control, or something from the past that is certainly not run of the mill; that they begin to realize what they’re doing. For example, they’re out shopping and glimpse backwards to see an assault or murder take place, or they have a vision of people reacting to news of a natural disaster or major attack. Whereas the normal vision just gives Oracles a somewhat detached attitude, these heavier events are often traumatic in rather the same way that walking into an actual murder scene would be.
Oracles always seem to be the slightest bit disconnected from their surroundings. Their senses wander to the past and future, so they don’t always pay attention to the present. Despite this, they usually get around fairly well, since their visions are usually limited to their physical proximity. There may occasionally be oddities, for example, an Oracle in the grocery store might direct
their cart to go around a display that won’t exist for another week, but by and large they strike people as slightly absent minded.
Regeneration and other Means of Healing
The most common form of regeneration is complete healing, where the body recovers wholly no matter how bad the injury is, as long as it doesn't kill them. Severed limbs, missing eyes, severe burns and even brain damage recover completely. However, they usually heal at a normal human rate and can still bleed to death if they don't receive medical treatment for severe wounds. Fast healing is decidedly more rare and the fastest level of healing known is still less than what certain comic book characters have.
As to healing, the two best known forms of healing are Accelerate Metabolism and Exchange. The Accelerate Metabolism method heals the wounds but often at the cost of causing some level of malnutrition. Severe wounds can be dangerous to heal in this way. Exchange works by using the Life-Force of one individual to repair the body of another, usually the talent takes wounds on themselves. Both of these can heal quicker than regeneration works.
True healing is the rarest of abilities and usually accessed via High Magic, since most of the known sources are Gods.
Teleportation
Teleportation requires huge amounts of power. Trying to teleport more than five pounds requires a level of power that will kill pretty much anybody that tries. Three races are capable of teleportation: Gods, Demons and humans. Gods and Demons accomplish this because they have access to vast reserves of Life-Force beyond what their own body produces. Humans have managed to reproduce teleportation via technological means, but it is limited to a handful of experimental facilities and vehicles owned by Avalon at the current moment.
The three species achieve teleportation by different methods and it is likely that should other species discover teleportation then they will likewise have different methods.
- Coordinate Shift - This is the method through which humans have achieved teleportation. For a brief moment, they cause two points in space to become the same point. To date this has proven to be most efficient for the transportation of large numbers across long distances. Avalon may or may not have an active Mars facility due to this technology.
- Dimensional Burst - This is the method through which Demons have achieved teleportation. They sort of burst through the shell of one reality shard and bounce off the wall of a separate one before returning back to their originating reality shard but in a different physical location. While they can take people with them, Dimensional Bursting is best suited to personal travel and or tactical use.
- Medium Travel - This is the method through which Gods have achieved teleportation and the one that presents some of the most questions. Gods will develop an association with particular phenomena or materials and be able to turn such things into a doorway. For example, one God can travel between two spots where laughter is occurring. Another God might travel between doors. Medium specialists among gods are probably the most versatile teleporters though they lack the long range efficiency of Coordinate Shifts or tactical speed of Dimensional Bursts. Medium Travel has been used to spy on locations or even apply "portal cuts" in extreme circumstances. Medium Travel is also far more subtle than either other method of teleportation.
- Interesting point, the three known methods of teleportation involve one fewer points than their associated types of circles.
- Demons are associated with four point circles, good for heavy power, and their teleportation method involves leaving one point, bouncing off a second, and arriving at a third.
- Gods are associated with three point circles, good for stability, and their teleportation method involves drawing a direct connection between two different points.
- Humans are associated with two point circles, good for flexibility, and their teleporation method involves forcing two points to become a single point briefly.
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