We do have 1.something dot of Dreamwalking, but yes, we do not have any information (or rather, context for said information) that we can safely get right now aside from Ami lol
Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Laniakea
Manticore may possibly be out of Amu's weight class.
I am not wholly convinced Manticore is entirely out of Hikaru's weight class.
The guy has a lot more resources at his disposal than just the personal stats on his stat sheet. He wasn't the big bad of Shugo Chara because of his telekinetic brute force - he was Shugo Chara's big bad because he's the chairman of Easter. And the company's executive director, who he had kneeling to him for the majority of the series, is his grandfather Kazuomi. His power comes from having the entire resources of the Easter Corporation at his disposal. Those two ex-Manticore scientists/engineers weren't experimenting on him - they were conducting experiments for him.
Easter are a large multinational conglomerate and in this quest have at least some occult connections, because Lulu was working for them when she first met Amu (to say nothing of the connection to Ikuto's family). Canonically, they run a number of media entities too - Utau's idol career used to be managed by them before she left.
So they are in a position to be able to publicly blow the lid on Manticore, if they had the evidence. It would simply be a matter of how quiet they could keep their investigation beforehand. Manticore might also have the resources to burn down their offices and bury them in legal or regulatory red tape, but it would take some effort and they'd only do it if they knew Easter was going after them.
But if they take too late to catch on and Easter has everything ready to broadcast on live televsion, Easter can sink them.
Obviously, gathering the evidence down low is the hard part, but money can make things a lot easier. And unless something has changed in the last couple of years, Easter have a lot of money - they run their own bank.
EDIT:
....As it happens, I even have an idea of how it could be done.
The key to it would be to establish a working relationship with the Kirijo Group and have them do most of the legwork. They are basically the one organization we can be 100% sure are not deliberately working with Manticore, since Mitsuru Kirijo is the current head of the group and she would never condone human experimentation thanks to her personal past experiences with it all.
Since Kirijo's Shadow Operatives are also part of the Japanese government, they are actually perfectly placed to infiltrate Manticore if they can get someone "transferred" to the other organization. Looking into where Manticore are getting all their Persona suppressants looks a lot less suspicous when the ones doing the sniffing are the original company who used to manufacture the stuff in the first place. This might still make Manticore wary, but it would be the Kirijo Group getting all the scrutiny from them.
They would be the perfect smokescreen for Easter. It would be difficult to consider there being another private sector megacorporation secretly collecting the leaks behind them in preparation for dropping their own bomb.
The only issue is that, while Hikaru probably knows ABOUT the Kirijo Group due to their size and could set up a meeting with Mitsuru, he doesn't know that she's clean and would abhor Manticore's activities to the point that she'd likely be willing to help for free.
This plan could only be done after Mitsuru has been positively identified as an ally.
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Which dots would be useful for that: Bureaucracy?
- Location
- Laniakea
Not dots. Money and connections.
As I put in my edit, he'd ideally contract the work out to a proxy group to disguise the fact that Easter are the ones collecting all the information and getting ready to do a tell-all live broadcast about corruption and illegal human experimentation in the Japanese government.
The best partner I can think of would be the Kirijo Group. They are perfectly positioned to infiltrate Manticore and Hikaru can actually set up meetings with Mitsuru Kirijo without looking suspicious, as they are both leaders of big businesses.
Looks like a solid plan this way, and doesn't have OOC/IC divide barriers aside from this one:
Ethical Concerns aside, would Mind Control or Empathy 4 be sufficient for this sort of verification, Baughn?
(To check my understanding of the proposed plan, Kirijo does the legwork, and Easter eats the PR backlash/aggro on Kirijo's behalf?)
- Location
- Laniakea
Kirijo makes the silver bullet (gathers up all the evidence). Easter chambers and fires it (does the broadcast from their media outlets).
Kirijo's people are the ones who will be directly attracting all the scrutiny from Manticore if they go digging around. In the best case, Manticore may not even realize Kirijo are planning to sabotage them when they come offering to help with the psychic research in exchange for access to their labs and won't notice when photos and reports go missing, until they suddenly resurface when Easter dumps everything on live TV.
In less optimal cases, they might start getting suspicious of people linked to Mitsuru Kirijo and tighten up the information flow. They might start putting pressure on her either through legal or regulatory means (i.e. trying to get the Shadow Operatives' budget cut or even shut down) or hire hitmen to go after her people. But they'll think their main enemy is Kirijo and be so busy with their shadow war against her, it will open up a lot of opportunities for Easter to act.
At the minimum, it would make it easier to slip under their notice if Easter also conducts its own investigations. They could send Nikaido to start poking around and Manticore could come off believing he was working for Kirijo.
More deviously, they could also approach Manticore when they're in the midst of their trouble and offer to help them against Kirijo, framing it as taking the opportunity to bury a business competitor, without Manticore realizing Easter and Kirijo were already working together the whole time and that Easter is going to backstab them at the first opportunity.
First two scenarios seem legit, but
Problem: How would Easter know of (espionage) troubles of Manticore, and be trusted to assist (how?) instead of ganking Manticore instead as we are planning on doing?
(I don't see how assisting Manticore with financial problems is gonna help the investigation)
- Location
- Laniakea
So right now, Manticore have (or had, if they've captured Naomi) a problem with their facilities being raided by some murderous teenage mercenaries after their drugs.
Imagine if this problem got worse and Manticore came to suspect that the Shadow Operatives were leaking the locations of their facilities and that the Kirijo Group were paying armed mercenaries to break into them, steal evidence and free their test subjects. Imagine if the pipeline for their drugs and equipment were being held up and they suspect the Kirijo Group were diverting the supplies and deliberately making it hard for them to get hold of what they needed for their project.
They would likely need some new facilities in secure locations that couldn't be leaked to the Kirijo Group and a supply chain that couldn't be sabotaged by them.
What's this? Easter Corporation has an old disused employee dorm that got converted into a Chara research facility several years back? They've got some men who used to work for Manticore with them? They have experience in running human experiments and can provide the necessary equipment and raw material shipments?
Why, that sounds absolutely lovely!
You say all you need is a cut of the Kirijo assets after Manticore dismantles the Kirijo Group? Yeah, that sounds perfectly fair in exchange for lending us your buildings, equipment and expertise. Best deal ever!
Hmm, after thinking about it for a day or two. I get the impression on the current vote matter so far that only two options seem particularly interesting to try.
- Nero plan to try and fix the area with Utau
- Call Ami for help
Both of these at least give a chance of going somewhere constructive.
I suppose speculatively one could try to combine the two together? What does @Nero200 , or anyone else for that matter think of that?
- Nero plan to try and fix the area with Utau
- Call Ami for help
Both of these at least give a chance of going somewhere constructive.
I suppose speculatively one could try to combine the two together? What does @Nero200 , or anyone else for that matter think of that?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Mind Control is a telepathy-adjacent skill, and he has that, though he actually lacks the skill to use it for telepathy and would need to learn; in effect, he'd need to convert one specialty do to a generalised one. Or, since that's not really a thing you can do by the game rules, add a second generalised dot.
Character sheet coming up shortly, now that I'm less exhausted, but there's something else I want to get you first.
Hikaru is very aware of his condition. He had integrity 0 when Amu and Utau fought him, and is already fighting to get that up as fast as possible. If anything, it'd be "doing anything besides training integrity" that needs a good reason.
There really isn't any single skill that maps directly to "alter the mental state of a cognitive palace", partly because there's a lot of different ways to do it. For the sake of argument, let's say I take the average of dreamwalking, illusion, mind control and empathy—but the proportions in that mixture are going to define how it's done, and somewhat the consequences.
In practice there wouldn't be a dice roll; either Utau, Ami or Amu could do it, though Ami would be slightly better at it. The outcome isn't actually random chance, either way.
Oh, and Hikaru could also do it, but please don't ask him to.
No, none of them could change it to a "happy fun science palace". Hikaru would come closest.
See next post. But no, in general it only eats WP to make opposed rolls; and that's mostly an abstraction over forcing it through despite the opposition, the same idea as getting to spend WP to add successes. You can also just not force it through, in which case it doesn't cost any WP.
Kagutsuchi opposes any and all uses of magic and psionics, in general, but is so exhausted and overworked by this point that small-scale uses typically slip under the radar. Especially psionics, which is... 'smoother'? Slipperier? It does far less damage to the world than the equivalent sorcery would. (And many types of psionics don't interact with reality at all, so there's that.)
See also next post, but- integrity, in Shards, represents several superficially different abilities that all are based on the same mechanical feature of a mind.
Amu likes herself. She doesn't especially want to change, beyond growth; there are things she wants to be better at, but it's rare for her to decide her decisions were wrong, for any reason other than "I didn't know / I didn't have the experience to decide". She typically goes along with her own impulses, and then doesn't see reason to second-guess them; she doesn't have much in the way of a persona or a shadow, in Persona terms.
Her mind is, in short, well integrated. None of this means she can't feel uncertain or vacillate, and in fact indecision is one of her major character traits—though she's gotten better at that—but she doesn't pretend otherwise. If she's unsure what to do, she'll meet all her options head-on, consciously; she doesn't really have personality elements that are just suppressed. In turn, once she's made her decision, all of her will go along with it; she isn't going to change her mind later, and that includes subconsciously. Some people sabotage herself if they're trying to do something they aren't sure of, but Amu isn't one of those people.
That's about fifty percent of what Integrity means. The other fifty percent is—it means you can largely ignore social attacks that don't, y'know, base themselves on genuine facts. It's relatively easy to win over Amu in social combat by lending weight to some side of her that was already there, but you aren't gonna succeed otherwise.
Amu's mind doesn't fully trust itself, but in a healthier way than a sentence like that would suggest. Psionic skills like empathy or mind control, or the cognitive fog, function by directly altering the state of those parts of her mind that are directly exposed... but the deeper parts are fully aware that that's an option, and 'trust, but verify' is the phrase of the day.
Her mother, of course, can wrap her around her little finger; that's partly because Amu trusts her so much, if Midori tells her she's doing something wrong / using bad data / not reasoning correctly, Amu will just believe her. But she isn't going to let some arbitrary other adult do that. Not again.
—
In Exalted terms, Integrity is the stat used to resist unnatural mental influence in combat. Being well-integrated, having a consistent and well-functioning mind that runs self-checks, is how that's implemented in this story.
So of course most of the population has either 0 or 1 dots.
Something has changed: They're no longer following the orders of a six-year-old, so Easter is significantly more profitable now.
Which can be represented as dots.
Investigation also exists, though you're right that connections are the most important element.
Yes, easily. See next post.
I think you should ask yourself which you want to happen first, and what you'll do if Ami recommends against it. To be clear though, Ami hasn't gone out of her way to test this sort of thing; her normal stance on spaces like this is "Stay away".
Nero's plan makes two assumptions.
1. That there are Shadows still around, I sure haven't seen any, but only Baughn can say whether Amu perma killed them or not.
2. That Utau "fixing" it wouldn't be as or possibly even more damaging to Yui's psyche than Amu just tearing it apart.
Overgrowth
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
There's been some question of what dots in psionic skills actually mean, and I think it's about time I clear that up. Though first, a little bit about Overgrowth-
Human minds, at least in Amu's universe, all follow a reasonably consistent design.
Someone asked the obvious question: "Why do we use our thinky-bits as crowbars?"
Which is why Amu has a fifth category of mind-stuff.
Of course these are loose categorisations, and it'd be easy to find spots where they bleed into each other.
It's important to note that none of these categories are monolithic. They each consist of a few hundred thousand to a few billion components, all physically mixed up, though counting the parts is a question similar to measuring the length of a coastline. To a psionic like Amu there's a 'grainy' feel; this is where the numbers come from.
You'll probably have expected a 'persona' or 'shadow', but these are not part of the baseline mind-design, and in many cases—young children, especially—do not exist. When they do, they're defensive responses to that person's interactions with the outside world; as such, they're highly personalised. It's possible, though unlikely, for a perfectly ordinary human being to nevertheless never develop a persona or a shadow, even when embedded in modern society. If you raised one on an isolated island it'd be far more probable.
When they do exist, they're typically subsections of the 'administrative' grouping, but- remember that said grouping isn't a person. If ejected as a Shadow, it'll normally stay connected enough that it's still capable of using everything in the non-administrative sections of their mind, but the connections are weakened; and, lacking a coherent set of choices, insanity is the inevitable result. It's impossible for a Shadow to act sanely when they're missing the skill to predict that their actions won't lead to the world they wish to live in.
Overgrowth also functions as a secondary health track; what has been termed 'mental abrasion' in the story. I'd rather not decide on concrete math for this if I don't have to, as that would imply someone significant to the story is likely to get written out, but if I do, it'll go somewhat like this:
Human minds, at least in Amu's universe, all follow a reasonably consistent design.
- Inference / world modelling
It's in the name. The largest part of any mind is the ability to predict the outside world, but it runs both ways. With any of these systems you can set the end state to whatever you want, then use a variety of strategies, ranging from simulated annealing to explicit logic, to back-predict a series of actions that will bring about that end.
It's a wonderfully general approach, equally capable of walking, designing jet liners or befriending your classmates, but it does depend on something else to make the policy decisions.
- Administration
Personality, in a word. Any human being has multiple ways to approach any problem, but they won't all have the same side-effects. The administrative section of the mind is the part that looks through all the presented options and effects thereof, weighs them for goodness, and selects whichever they prefer.
For a psionic like Amu, who is capable of seeing this process in action, it's the part of their mind they're most likely to identify themselves with. This is a mistake. "Administration" is just that—it's a different type of cognition, but still just a small part of the whole. Not a homunculus pulling the strings.
- Sensory / generative / motor control
Really just a lower level version of world modelling, but there's a lot that can be done with the input from your eyes, without needing to say much about the world. Autoencoders, if you're familiar with modern AI; compression, if you're not. Human senses provide a relative flood of information, and the first stage is always to run edge detection, object categorisation, and generally compress it into a format that's easier to deal with.
The same works in reverse for your muscles, though of course it's partly bidirectional; proprioception is a thing.
Not much else to say here. This is by far the oldest part of the mind; it hasn't changed in hundreds of millions of years, not really, and there's nothing human-specific here. There's not even really anything biology-specific. Nevertheless: It exists, and it's a surprisingly large fraction of the whole.
- Maintenance
In real life this is covered by autonomous functions inside single nerve cells, as well as the microglia, lymphatic system and so on. In Amu's world this is... still partially the case. However, a significant percentage of human minds are no longer dependent on a physical substrate.
There are therefore elements that have developed specifically to handle low-level maintenance tasks such as growth, damage repair and clearing out debris; all the things that biology had to do since well before brains even existed, but since this component came after the computational aspect in Amu's world — for part of her, at least — it depends on the proper functioning of her mind, and is integrated with it in a way that wouldn't be possible for simple biology.
This has benefits! Functional regeneration, for one thing. Since the evolutionary process had access to genuine intelligence, it was capable of building these maintenance functions such that they operate off of a blueprint, comparing reality to the blueprint and doing whatever work is necessary to make the one match the other.
This is to say that there's no risk of mind-cancer, and ageing isn't particularly a thing either. Though the same can't be said for Amu's biological brain.
Someone asked the obvious question: "Why do we use our thinky-bits as crowbars?"
Which is why Amu has a fifth category of mind-stuff.
- Overgrowth
This is where the rubber meets the road. The categories described above were, effectively, brain emulations; and brains aren't supposed to be exposed to the environment! In any location other than the inside of Kagutsuchi, the fact that most people's brains effectively are exposed to the environment would, in fact, be a bit of an issue. Thankfully the CU exists, and provides a modicum of insulation... though the CU is also the only reason this is happening at all.
But, in any case, the cognitive elements of Amu's mind aren't directly exposed to the environment. She's got overgrowth in-between.
The name comes from the fact that it's a bit of an invasive species. If the parts described above are simply computers (inference / sensory / administration), and robotic maintenance, then overgrowth is kudzu. It's the result of the maintenance routines going berserk, eating the surrounding CU—albeit at a low enough rate that nothing sapient considers it to be a problem—and mutating until they're no longer describable as mechanical, but instead its own form of biology.
Most people who even have an Overgrowth track have it as 0 dots, and at 0 dots it's all effectively armor. A skull, grown around the otherwise exposed extrusion of their mind into the collective unconscious. This is still beneficial—it makes them far less susceptible to UMI or mental abrasion—but it doesn't give them psionics. At 1 dot or above it includes the equivalent of muscles or limbs, though if you were to represent it in diagram form it'd be far more likely to look like organically grown antennas, bizarre messes of wiring, or ORT.
Central control is retained, however. Overgrowth doesn't represent a form of cancer. There is still someone in charge, and the mind in charge is still very much that of the child or teenager that it's growing from.
This doesn't mean there aren't problems. Overgrowth, being focused on interacting with the environment instead of computation, frequently lacks the thoughtfulness and communications channels to remain fully under control of the person it is growing from. It won't normally harm them, but that might be a weak relief if it instead harms a stranger, or their friends.
Integrity, as I'm sure you've already realised, is the stat that counters this. It represents many things, all of which act beneficially in this regard; everything from "Don't have suppressed feelings of rage that some part of you might act on without your conscious say-so", to "explicitly lace your overgrowth with more control systems than it would naturally grow".
The amount to which it matters depends on what your skillset looks like. Control matters a lot less if your overgrowth is all basically armor. Whereas if it's a finicky, extradimensional flamethrower that can create devastating flares of heat anywhere within your eyesight, and it's been deliberately forced to grow well beyond your ability to control...
...
Overgrowth never naturally causes harm to its owner, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. You can have a shadow-self without having any overgrowth, but adding overgrowth to the mix does make the things rather more dangerous.
Of course these are loose categorisations, and it'd be easy to find spots where they bleed into each other.
It's important to note that none of these categories are monolithic. They each consist of a few hundred thousand to a few billion components, all physically mixed up, though counting the parts is a question similar to measuring the length of a coastline. To a psionic like Amu there's a 'grainy' feel; this is where the numbers come from.
You'll probably have expected a 'persona' or 'shadow', but these are not part of the baseline mind-design, and in many cases—young children, especially—do not exist. When they do, they're defensive responses to that person's interactions with the outside world; as such, they're highly personalised. It's possible, though unlikely, for a perfectly ordinary human being to nevertheless never develop a persona or a shadow, even when embedded in modern society. If you raised one on an isolated island it'd be far more probable.
When they do exist, they're typically subsections of the 'administrative' grouping, but- remember that said grouping isn't a person. If ejected as a Shadow, it'll normally stay connected enough that it's still capable of using everything in the non-administrative sections of their mind, but the connections are weakened; and, lacking a coherent set of choices, insanity is the inevitable result. It's impossible for a Shadow to act sanely when they're missing the skill to predict that their actions won't lead to the world they wish to live in.
Overgrowth also functions as a secondary health track; what has been termed 'mental abrasion' in the story. I'd rather not decide on concrete math for this if I don't have to, as that would imply someone significant to the story is likely to get written out, but if I do, it'll go somewhat like this:
- Without Overgrowth
Human minds, at baseline, have very little capacity to endure damage. They're defended mainly by obscurity; you get one -0 level, two -2 health levels, one -4 health level, and then 'comatose'. Keep in mind, anything that hits this is in effect direct brain damage. There would be added damage, ranging from loss of ability dots—temporary or otherwise—to personality derangements. Just don't.
- With Overgrowth
Just for having the stat, you get two additional -1 health levels and one -0 health level. Every second dot above 0 adds an additional -0 health level (on evens); on odd, it's a -1 health level. Additionally, any damage that doesn't take you to -2 or below will have no long-term consequences.
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- Location
- Laniakea
This sounds extremely specific.
I recall Naomi mentioned as being a pyrokinetic. I guess if we ever have to fight her for any reason, we now know exactly how to do it - blind her.
Can't make heat anywhere within eyesight, if your eyesight is fked.
Which is a significant departure from Exalted baseline, where truth and facts are a pretty minor factor in how well an argument works, and Dodge MDV applies the same to a factually-grounded argument as it does to bullshit or to an appeal to emotion.
I, uh... wouldn't count on Baughn to speak that precisely. I'm guessing "anywhere within your eyesight" is more of a rough indicator of how this person would usually target the effect, and a very fuzzy indicator of its range.
They could likely blind-fire the effect even with their eyesight disabled. On the other hand, I doubt this person could, say, look at the moon and place the effect there. It seems like psi is usually either way more powerful than I expect, or completely incapable of doing what I expect, so I could easily be wrong on both fronts, though.
On the Manticore front, don't forget, exposing Manticore doesn't actually bring them down. It'd probably weaken their position heavily, but it also tips our hand and forces their hand. It'd be likely to provoke a lot of rash and desperate action.
If we try to face down Manticore as independent operators, "expose Manticore's crimes" is probably our endgame. It brings a massive level of heat down on them, and trying to go any further is too risky. But if the plan is to pull in a pile of high-tier backing to do the investigation for us? That kind of backing might be able to get Manticore's facilities raided before publicizing their crimes, or even without publicizing the information at all - they might prefer to use the info as political leverage.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Nah. This is more a reflection of the fact that, if someone makes a good argument, you probably won't roll those dice in the first place.
Or at least I hope you won't? It would be awfully arbitrary, but it is technically a thing one could do.
This is correct, and I hope the informational post I'm currently writing will help somewhat.
Though, uh. If you take away Naomi's eyesight, then she can't safely use her power unless she's willing to set everything around her on fire. Or she already has a decent idea of where you are, which she very well might.
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Power scaling & feat examples
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Here's some examples of feats you should be able to accomplish at a given number of dots. These are all 'single use' examples, at the limits of what's achievable; for sustained use, drop down one level.
(That is to say: Using psionics at this level costs willpower, which a mature psionic tends to have a lot of.)
Most of these are also usable at level 0, but only as parlor tricks. "Keep a cup of tea warm", let's say. This still depends on having spent a modicum of time practicing the skill, as there's a difference between "the cognitive machinery technically exists" and "the character knows how to use it".
Mental Range sets the upper limit to how far away you can apply any of these skills, but targeting information is typically also needed. If you think it might be needed, then it's needed.
Telekinesis
At zero dots: Lift a pencil. Generally speaking this is what Charas are at; it's what allows them to act as though they have bodies, which makes telekinesis almost universal for anyone who had one. If you still have one, then the skill resides in the Chara—not their child.
Thermokinesis
At zero dots: Keep a cup of tea warm, or slowly chill that drink.
Teleportation
At zero dots: Teleport a small object from your pocket to your hand.
Biokinesis
At zero dots: Heal bruises. Biokinesis typically manifests first as a subconscious reaction to injuries, and is normally excused as "I heal fast". Which yes, you do heal fast at ten, but—half an hour?
Clairvoyance
At zero dots: You can guess what's on the other side of a card someone is holding—if you're concentrating—and thereby cheat at poker. It won't be perfect, but you'll be banned from Las Vegas in a hurry.
There are two variants of present-tense clairvoyance: "Vague impressions" and "clear sight". The information feed is the same for both, but it's too much information; the latter must always be focused on a smaller area, the definition of which varies with rating. Clairvoyance can be trained towards one or the other.
In practice, "three dots" is the maximum rating for Clairvoyance that's viable for a regular human. To push it beyond that point it needs to be limited in some form, or else its user will cease to be human. Specialisations are very much viable.
It's the odd one out, as scaling can't be handled simply by adding overgrowth machinery; the information needs to be actually processed to be useful.
Precognition
At zero dots: Nothing notable that can't be mistaken for vague feelings of doom about upcoming tests.
Extra special note: The size of the event matters. The larger it looms in the future, due to either high probability or high impact, the longer the range and higher the chance a precog will spot it. This means the literal apocalypse, which is an almost completely inevitable event that affects the entire world, can be spotted a year out even at one dot; meanwhile, Amu's english scores would take five dots to predict precisely.
Additionally, Outsiders / Demons of Makai / Exaltation Shards et cetera always disrupt precognition, simply by their nature. They can only be accounted for post-fact.
Dreamwalking
At zero dots: Lucid dreaming—that is, remaining conscious in dreams. Not all the time, since this is as usual the limit of what you can do, and few people can burn willpower in their sleep, but for Dreamwalking on its own... this is it. Uniquely, non-psionics are also capable of this; however, non-psionics more frequently mistake dreamwalking for simple dreaming. Or vice versa.
Most human souls are exposed and vulnerable during sleep, but there are rules protecting them from arbitrary domination by the entities that live there. By Awakening, you discard those protections.
When using Dreamwalking in conjunction with another skill, you can expect both to be magnified and warped.
= More to come, hopefully =
These take a surprisingly long time to write out! If there's a specific skill you're curious about, let me know and I'll add it.
If you don't have the same (or larger) number of Overgrowth dots, then your psionic skill will be hobbled somehow. How it is hobbled should be relatively consistent. For instance, with telekinesis:
- At a one-dot deficit, using the skill at full power is simply tiring. The character needs to pay 1 WP per use.
- At a two-dot deficit, you're missing finesse. You still need to pay the WP surcharge, but fine control will be lacking; essentially, those 'muscles' tremble too hard under the load to give you the same exactness you'd manage otherwise.
For someone who's already lacking in fine control, like Amu, there's a definite risk you'll accidentally break the thing you're holding. Not that she doesn't already do that with pencils.
Three-dot deficits are not allowed; you cannot train a skill that far beyond the overgrowth rating.
(That is to say: Using psionics at this level costs willpower, which a mature psionic tends to have a lot of.)
Most of these are also usable at level 0, but only as parlor tricks. "Keep a cup of tea warm", let's say. This still depends on having spent a modicum of time practicing the skill, as there's a difference between "the cognitive machinery technically exists" and "the character knows how to use it".
Mental Range sets the upper limit to how far away you can apply any of these skills, but targeting information is typically also needed. If you think it might be needed, then it's needed.
Telekinesis
At zero dots: Lift a pencil. Generally speaking this is what Charas are at; it's what allows them to act as though they have bodies, which makes telekinesis almost universal for anyone who had one. If you still have one, then the skill resides in the Chara—not their child.
- Normal human strength. Lift anything you'd be able manipulate by hand—assuming you aren't a strongman!
- Absolute limits of human strength. Casual flight. Lift a couch, without feeling (excessive) strain. Move a car through the air. (How is this not just blatantly better than incrementing Strength? Well, it kinda is.)
- Lift a helicopter; with a small amount of help, soft-land it without harming its occupants.
- Lift a typical residential building.
- Lift a skyscraper.
Thermokinesis
At zero dots: Keep a cup of tea warm, or slowly chill that drink.
- Given minutes of time, heat a pot to boiling. Chill the drink you just got from your backpack, faster than you're drinking it. ...assuming you aren't gulping it down.
- Give someone heatstroke, serious burns, or chill them until they shut down from hypothermia. In a matter of seconds.
- Heat the air fast enough to form a ball of plasma; a moving furnace. Instant, fatal burns. Melt the structural beams of a building in a matter of minutes, or keep a swimming pool at a comfortable temperature in winter.
- Create liquid nitrogen in large quantities; cool a small object to absolute zero; heat an entire building to its flash ignition point, in a matter of seconds.
- Stop the progress of time for a small object, or speed it up. Flash-vaporise a skyscraper. Freeze Tokyo Bay.
Teleportation
At zero dots: Teleport a small object from your pocket to your hand.
- Move large, unorganic objects around within your line of sight, touch range; limited in mass and size by your Overgrowth rating. Anything you'd be able to lift with telekinesis, if you had the skill.
- Teleport yourself, safely, within your line of sight.
- Teleport to anywhere you have a suitable anchor; bring friends along, safely; teleport A-to-B when you're at C. Reflexive, combat-time teleportation, to dodge or to remove incoming attacks.
- Inter-city teleportation. In combination with Illusion or Dreamwalking: Warp space to work around the range limit, or create a permanent portal.
- Arbitrarily edit connectivity, given sufficient time. Create and function in non-Euclidean space.
Biokinesis
At zero dots: Heal bruises. Biokinesis typically manifests first as a subconscious reaction to injuries, and is normally excused as "I heal fast". Which yes, you do heal fast at ten, but—half an hour?
- Heal bruises or cuts, fast enough for combat time. On yourself or on others, though doing it on someone else takes all of your attention.
- Heal internal injuries, well enough to stabilise. Convert dead tissue back to living.
- Cure cancer, or subtly cause it. Intuitive immortality. Children who reach this point have a tendency to stop aging, regardless of their maturity at the time.
- Deliberate modifications. Give someone the muscles of an athlete, if not the skill to use them; restore a pensioner to the strength and mental clarity of a twenty-year-old, given sufficient time. Give yourself significant mutations, such as bone spikes or subdermal armor, without downsides other than social.
- Create an intelligent plague, destroy a plague—by counter-plague—or build almost arbitrary biological 'machinery', limited by what biology can do in the first place. Create de-novo mutations such as subdermal armor, safely, for someone else.
Clairvoyance
At zero dots: You can guess what's on the other side of a card someone is holding—if you're concentrating—and thereby cheat at poker. It won't be perfect, but you'll be banned from Las Vegas in a hurry.
There are two variants of present-tense clairvoyance: "Vague impressions" and "clear sight". The information feed is the same for both, but it's too much information; the latter must always be focused on a smaller area, the definition of which varies with rating. Clairvoyance can be trained towards one or the other.
- Limited clairvoyance. This might take the form of a mental eye you can move anywhere within your field of view, or it might give you a second sense for everything happening within fifteen metres of yourself—good for dodging, not useful as vision—but it won't do both for the same person.
- Clarity reaches the level of your regular senses, within that same fifteen-metre range. The range limit for vaguer impressions, however, extends to the limit of your mental range. There's a lot of dials this can balance, and in practice it'll be different from each person; Clairvoyance is also the psionic skill with the most subtypes. Amu has the 'base' form, so in her case this is how it works, but at higher levels she effectively needs to decide which subtype she wants to have.
- Postcognition becomes possible: Tracing back the provenance of a physical object. That includes "this piece of ground", to be clear, but equally well "this letter". At three dots, you'll be lucky to manage a day.
The 'clear focus' range triples, and clairvoyants at this level are often able to move that area around; it's no longer anchored on themselves.
- If the clairvoyant is still focused simply on range, then their skill would manifest as limited omniscience within their mental range at this point; nothing escapes their sight, assuming of course that 'nothing' hasn't been shielded against them. In practice this is far too much information for anyone to handle, and someone who tries it regardless—or is forced to do so—would likely lose their ability to act independently of outside assistance. Exceptions may exist, but Amu isn't one of them—it would require superhuman attribute and ability values, i.e. above five.
There are other development paths. One is to instead extend the 'depth' of the sight, seeing things beyond regular vision. Magic; ongoing rituals such as Hikawa's, the weak points of Kagutsuchi, and similar. Another, fairly obviously, is to extend the range of her post-cognition. A third is to extend the depth of the post-cognition, which might then allow you to understand how an object is used, simply by using it. This is the default option for Amu.
On a sidenote: At four dots it would also be possible to use Clairvoyance for mind-reading, should you train it in that direction.
- Do you want the Number Man? This is how you get the Number Man.
Ahem. At its maximum peak, the branches of clairvoyance would normally fold back in; you get all of the above, at maximum range, all of the time. It is almost entirely impossible for any sapient being to achieve this point and remain sapient, unfortunately. That does not entirely mean the dots can't be taken; but they would need to be coupled with a form of cognitive engineering that filters the input, preventing it from overloading the user. If it's then also supposed to be useful, it would need to be hooked directly to their reactions... at which point the user is no longer in control of their own actions.
In practice, "three dots" is the maximum rating for Clairvoyance that's viable for a regular human. To push it beyond that point it needs to be limited in some form, or else its user will cease to be human. Specialisations are very much viable.
It's the odd one out, as scaling can't be handled simply by adding overgrowth machinery; the information needs to be actually processed to be useful.
Precognition
At zero dots: Nothing notable that can't be mistaken for vague feelings of doom about upcoming tests.
Extra special note: The size of the event matters. The larger it looms in the future, due to either high probability or high impact, the longer the range and higher the chance a precog will spot it. This means the literal apocalypse, which is an almost completely inevitable event that affects the entire world, can be spotted a year out even at one dot; meanwhile, Amu's english scores would take five dots to predict precisely.
- At one dot, only uncontrollable but fundamentally predictable natural phenomena can really be predicted. The weather, with high likelihood of success, for three days or less; although the weather report does it better. The flight path of a bullet that's already in flight, and within your mental range. Your chances of acing the last English test.
That last one is a joke; precognition can't predict that. However, at a single dot it registers as vague senses of doom or potential wetness; if Amu's English scores are genuinely predictable (which they are), then there is no way for her to distinguish her perfectly ordinary conscious prediction of doom from the one she might have gotten from precognition.
- Still limited to events within your mental range, but the foresight becomes clearer; as in, you'll know when it happens. At this rating you're as good as the weather report. Some conditional events can be predicted, if the condition is already set in stone; for example, you would be able to predict when a timed bomb will go off. Assuming it's sometime in the next day or so.
- Forget the time limit on that bomb; add the ability to predict complicated machinery, again within a day or so. Anything at the level of a computer remains beyond what precognition can handle, but weirdly, many humans become somewhat predictable. This isn't necessarily beyond what a three-dot Socialize ability can provide... but doesn't requite socialisation, though it in fact doesn't apply as well to strangers.
Predictions at this point start failing in strange ways. While a weather mistake might just mean it's drizzling instead of overcast, precog gets more and more chaotic as you attack harder problems; it's more likely than not that not a single element of the prediction will come true.
- ...this is because there are multiple futures, as any precognitive will eventually realise. By the time they reach four dots, they're no longer limited to a glimpse of a single one; they can get glimpses of all of them, and predictions become more a range of possible outcomes than a single hopefully-most-likely possibility.
(Literally. Megaten runs on many-worlds quantum mechanics, with added cross-world interference.)
- ...and multiple presents. Why not look into a different present? ...why not cooperate with them?
Only information can be transferred, at least by the precog, but nothing stops you cooperating with yourself in a different timeline. This has interesting implications, although there aren't as many timelines as it feels like there should be, and far fewer than science would predict. There's a reason for that, which psionics will not provide.
Additionally, Outsiders / Demons of Makai / Exaltation Shards et cetera always disrupt precognition, simply by their nature. They can only be accounted for post-fact.
Dreamwalking
At zero dots: Lucid dreaming—that is, remaining conscious in dreams. Not all the time, since this is as usual the limit of what you can do, and few people can burn willpower in their sleep, but for Dreamwalking on its own... this is it. Uniquely, non-psionics are also capable of this; however, non-psionics more frequently mistake dreamwalking for simple dreaming. Or vice versa.
Most human souls are exposed and vulnerable during sleep, but there are rules protecting them from arbitrary domination by the entities that live there. By Awakening, you discard those protections.
- Leave the immediate contextual surroundings of your sleeping body. Instinctive avoidance of the most obvious dangers.
- Remain conscious in dreams, without effort. Navigate from waypoint to waypoint, following the most obvious paths. Speak the language of dreams. Bring small objects into reality, or vice versa.
- Navigate from anywhere to anywhere, if you understand their ideals and the paths connecting them. Dip your hand in a river, and shape the water to suit your perceptions. Instinctive understanding of the lesser dangers; the gremlins that populate the dreamlands. Walk from Dream into Reality, or vice versa, by a pre-existing path.
- Walk your own paths in the Dream. Force it to follow your lines of thinking, instead of vice versa. Create a path into Reality, by whichever technique best fits your personality.
- [REDACTED]
When using Dreamwalking in conjunction with another skill, you can expect both to be magnified and warped.
= More to come, hopefully =
These take a surprisingly long time to write out! If there's a specific skill you're curious about, let me know and I'll add it.
If you don't have the same (or larger) number of Overgrowth dots, then your psionic skill will be hobbled somehow. How it is hobbled should be relatively consistent. For instance, with telekinesis:
- At a one-dot deficit, using the skill at full power is simply tiring. The character needs to pay 1 WP per use.
- At a two-dot deficit, you're missing finesse. You still need to pay the WP surcharge, but fine control will be lacking; essentially, those 'muscles' tremble too hard under the load to give you the same exactness you'd manage otherwise.
For someone who's already lacking in fine control, like Amu, there's a definite risk you'll accidentally break the thing you're holding. Not that she doesn't already do that with pencils.
Three-dot deficits are not allowed; you cannot train a skill that far beyond the overgrowth rating.
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- Location
- Laniakea
It's not just the "crimes" that need to be exposed.
The most important thing is actually the list of all the names and faces involved, most critically the main financial and political backers.
If Manticore are a government organization with military hardware, there is a black budget somewhere that someone is signing off on. If the man directly approving the budget isn't himself in the know (i.e. because the items on it are faked and the funds aren't really being used for what the paper says it's for) then the person who submitted that budget in the first place is likely one of the ones at the top of the chain.
If these actors get dragged out in front of the public, the funding they are providing will dry up. The masterminds, even if they can wiggle out of getting arrested somehow, will have their every move scrutinized from that point onward and won't easily be able to just set up a new agency doing the same thing, but under a different name.
Without the money and political support, Manticore will be dead.
Otherwise, as you pointed out, just exposing the crimes themselves isn't a decisive deathblow. As long as the masterminds are still hidden, they'll can cut loose the low level staff, move the money and equipment away and set up shop again under a new name. If all we wanted to do was expose the crimes, we can already do that by having Kana point at the facilities the Scavengers raided and put her in front of a camera to narrate her experiences.
It just wouldn't accomplish much.
We need the list of major players and evidence to tie them to Manticore to make it work and that is hard to acquire without infiltrating them. Just raiding labs is unlikely to provide that kind of information.
Yeah, but these people aren't all just going to roll over, especially the ones likely to face life sentences or death penalties. They might, say... decide to launch retaliatory strikes before they go down. Or kill all the kids they're holding hostage and bury as much evidence as possible that those people were there. Or decide to try their luck with a coup. Or just flee the country. We'd want to get strikes launched before they even start thinking about doing any of that. This includes raiding as many of the financial and political backers as possible, to gather evidence before they can destroy it.
That isn't an "us" job, that's a JP job.
We certainly wouldn't be doing it personally, but we wouldn't be personally doing the investigation or the media side of things either. Very little of this plan is an "us" job.
With a plan that already involves pulling in the Shadow Operatives, Easter, and the Kirijo Group, how things go is more of a "what would those people do" issue than a "what do we want to do" issue. I don't think those people would decide to publicize everything and only then start working on how to handle the aftermath.
- Location
- Laniakea
That would depend on what kind of resources Manticore are found to have, who the actual people at the top are and the existing evidence that can be dug up.
Depending on how clean they've kept their hands (or how good at removing the evidence they were) it could turn out to be difficult to actually directly get them charged and prosecuted in a court of law. In which case, the court of public opinion might be the only way to tie their hands up.
Gets doubly difficult if they have occult resources at their disposal. Since even with enough evidence, if it turns out the ones in charge are sorcerers or magic-users.... good luck finding a prison that can hold them. Assuming they don't have mind control abilities (or access to mind controllers) that can be used to manipulate court proceedings. Bringing in JP's might be the only way to deal with them if those types are involved, but JP's might also want to cover it up if occult activity was a part of it.
Can't really predict and plan for the aftermath without more info.
For all we know, it goes all the way up to the top and the "aftermath" might mean "Japan's prime minister arrested" in which case how to handle the fallout is going to be a lot different from if the top of the chain was just some army general.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
I feel the conversation is wandering a little bit away from the issue at hand, so let's see where we stand...
Well, okay. Looks like I can call this tomorrow, but before then, is there anything I can add that would make this decision easier? Let me think...
It would be something like "none of the options are traps", I suppose.
- If you pick Midori, she will succeed at defeating the shadow. That might not specifically resolve the situation, but it won't harm Yui (or Kana), and will get you one step closer.
- If you pick Amu or Utau's first ideas, and pass the dice roll... obviously that will work. If you don't pass it, then Yui will still be better off than if you didn't come; and I don't mean "well, at least now she's dead". Though calling in JPs gets pretty likely at that point, as Ami won't be able to handle the fallout.
- If you pick Ami, then the downside is more or less that you'll learn more about Ami, which I'm not sure that counts as one, though also she'll counsel you away from risky actions like the one above. Which means you don't get a terrible outcome, but also means you won't get the best one.
Then there's Nero's write-in. While I can't specifically say if that'll work, it is an acceptable one and would certainly do something you might find interesting.
Well, okay. Looks like I can call this tomorrow, but before then, is there anything I can add that would make this decision easier? Let me think...
It would be something like "none of the options are traps", I suppose.
- If you pick Midori, she will succeed at defeating the shadow. That might not specifically resolve the situation, but it won't harm Yui (or Kana), and will get you one step closer.
- If you pick Amu or Utau's first ideas, and pass the dice roll... obviously that will work. If you don't pass it, then Yui will still be better off than if you didn't come; and I don't mean "well, at least now she's dead". Though calling in JPs gets pretty likely at that point, as Ami won't be able to handle the fallout.
- If you pick Ami, then the downside is more or less that you'll learn more about Ami, which I'm not sure that counts as one, though also she'll counsel you away from risky actions like the one above. Which means you don't get a terrible outcome, but also means you won't get the best one.
Then there's Nero's write-in. While I can't specifically say if that'll work, it is an acceptable one and would certainly do something you might find interesting.
Wait, doesn't that have entropy shenanigans (the physics breaking kind)?
So I take this doesn't work on opponents
Huh. Thought that it was an open question whether we were solving the correct problem in that scenario.
Does anyone know the success rate of 3 + 2 + 3 + 2(stunt) + 2 (WP) + 1(Key?) dice Vs DC3?
(Utau's idea has better dice, she has more WP left, and fits better narratively so no reason not to go with that instead of Amu btw)
Otherwise I'm probably now leaning towards Midori's idea, since at least we make progress without all/fragments-of-Yui gambles
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Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
Since when have Psionics cared about a little thing like breaking conventional physics, hm? Though really, cooling an object to abzero is basically just holding it in place so there's zero molecular movement even if other atoms bump into it. It's the kinda thing I wanna say is probably logically easier for a really good telekinetic than a thermokinetic, tbh?
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