Cheating can only be done at the beginning of the action that it's applied to. Regardless, the bare minimum bonus that Cheating could provide with Ridcully's stats and a double down is 19, so only one less than a Double Down. So more likely it'll provide a larger bonus.
-
Going forward, links to content from Twitter (now X) will no longer be embedded. Pre-existing links should not be affected.
The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
Cheating can only be done at the beginning of the action that it's applied to. Regardless, the bare minimum bonus that Cheating could provide with Ridcully's stats and a double down is 19, so only one less than a Double Down. So more likely it'll provide a larger bonus.
- Location
- Brazil, Minas gerais
[X] Plan Enjou T93
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
- Location
- Northern Ireland, UK
......................................... 'sigh' I'm having such a brain fart right now.
What are the Cost mechanics for Double Down and Expedite again?
The House of Xavier
In honour of Ophelia growing up big and strong, and our descent into cultist cuisine for power and profit, here's a look into...
the past
~~~
The House of Xavier
~~~
Many years ago…
When Xavier bought his apartment, he'd first thoroughly researched the area, diving into the stockpile of favours he had accumulated with Henry to find the statistically least disaster-prone sections of Avernus. Of course, after he had the reports, he then rolled the Emperor's Tarot (whatever Ridcully said, you could Tarot with five sticks and a shiny rock if you were twenty-five and up to your armpits in psychic power) to find the best one, eventually settling on a fortified block in Mirkwood's West-19B Habitation Tower. A bit expensive, and a dicey prospect to go from bunking with the Phase-Tigers (who were all six foot tall, four foot wide supermen) to going it alone but for the grace of your best tiger friend, but Xavier was made of tough stuff, and the years had only made it tougher. So he had squared his shoulders, made a volume purchase, and moved into where he was likely to spend the rest of his days in cozy comfort.
And it worked. Praise be to the Tarot! Xavier only had to rebuild his small three-bedroom hab-space fourteen times over the last century, got to sleep in all he liked because he was precognitive, and hadn't used the front door ever since he figured out how to phase through his own wards. For cleaning, every few hours he simply activated the plague quarantine and raised the temperature to a toasty two hundred degrees to cook out any spiders, and eventually they'd learned.
It was comfy. It was nice. It was home. He'd unwillingly moved into University quarters just to get ahead of the paperwork, but he still spent as much time in this secret nook of Avernus that was wholly his. Sometimes you had to be alone on your own terms.
Until now.
Tamia wrinkled her nose, adjusting the cargo bag on her shoulder. At twenty-three, she was already a promising candidate in the University, traveling down Xavier's own disciplinary road. "This place is a garbage chute."
"Hey. Hey." Xavier opened one of the storage cubbies, pulling out a disused set of linens and a deflated pillow. "I don't come into your place and rag on its many posters of boys and— and make-up. And flowers." He unrolled the blanket in a smooth motion, perfectly covering the couch in one go. Ah, psychic powers.
Tamia gave him a weird look, dropping her bag. "Is that really all you know about girls?"
Xavier, instead of answering her question, did not. Absolute genius.
"Now," he said, unfolding the couch into the bed configuration with creaking protest, "I'll sleep here. You can take my bed. Bathroom's over there, you can have the red closets."
"Who takes first watch?" asked Tamia, already looking through the fridge and scowling. "And when was the last time you went shopping?" She squinted. "Are these scorch marks?"
"I'll take first, Mittens takes second." The tiger in question was already conked out, snoring tiger snores. Such a big baby. "Anything else?"
"It's just us?" said Tamia, wide-eyed.
Xavier gasped, and covered his modesty. "I understand you may be tempted by this red hot bod, but no peeking."
Tamia scowled. "Whatever." She stalked off into Xavier's bedroom, slamming the door. Within half a minute, the shower was running.
Well, thought Xavier, at least Mittens thought he was funny. On the floor, the tiger sniffed and rolled over.
~~~
Contrary to popular opinion, recording Mittens trying to hunt a blink spider was not a waste of time, but an important study in animal behaviour. The Magos Biologis waited with bated breathmasks every week for Xavier's weekly update on the "What Mittens did today" datafeed. He was contributing singlehandedly to the advance of mankind.
Mittens pounced, two hundred kilograms of tiger scrambling around to snatch the spider in its paws. The pest Blinked up, and Mittens squashed it with a paw. The spider Blinked again, sticking to the wall, and Mittens ran around himself in a circle, overshooting and knocking over the bookshelf.
"Silly tiger," cooed Xavier, as if talking at a foolish toddler, the holocorder hanging in the air. "You can't eat that! It's a spider. It'll poison you and you'll be sick everywhere."
Mittens growled, an apex predator on a mighty hunt! Never mind that the last time he actually managed to catch the spider, Xavier had to get his stomach pumped; he was the king of the urban jungle.
"So do you just do this every day?" asked Tamia, sipping on hot cocoa in her pajamas. There were tiny music notes hand-sewn into the white silk.
Xavier shrieked, in a manly way. Mittens yowled, his stealthy approach blown by his human's primitive monkeigh yelling. The spider, thoroughly spooked, Blinked, and did not reappear.
Mittens gave Tamia a foul tiger look, and skulked through the wall. Xavier also gave her a terrible frown.
"What did I do?" asked Tamia, unheeding of the way her feminine mojo was messing up the delicate balance between a boy and his tiger.
Ugh. Girls.
~~~
Well, girls aside, Xavier was familiar with the prettier gender.
Vaguely. Like, from a distance.
He was a war-hero, after all; the finer aspects of idolatrous obsession made themselves clearer after every victory over the forces of Chaos. Unfortunately, women who found incinerating heretics an attractive thing for a man to do were also, as Lincoln and Cutter would say, faulty bolts.
Unfortunately, suddenly having a female bunkmate was not as easy as he expected. Tamia was basically an entire different species to Xavier, seeming to exist only tangentially to his own reality. Things that made sense simply didn't around her, like mirage distorting the image beyond.
Of course it was fine to eat in your pajamas! Once a week was fine for laundry, right? Seriously, let's be honest, brushing your teeth once a day was plenty. It's not like bacteria can survive an incalcination cycle anyway.
It's fiiiiine.
Apparently, according to Tamia, it was not. His solution to this problem was to ignore it, and hoped it went away and died while he wasn't looking.
~~~
"Okay, now you're just messing with me!" Tamia shouted, tossing aside the mechanical widget. "This is groxshit!"
Xavier steepled his fingers, expression grim. "Tamia, if you cannot repair a chrono, how can you repair… yourself?"
"Oh yeah?" Tamia hefted a small pot. "And why am I domesticating a cactus?" The cactus quivered, spines emerging from its skin in a threat display.
Xavier blinked. "I didn't ask you to do that."
"You did! You said it would help with my biomancy!"
"No, that one's on you." A ferroprotein spine bounced off Xavier's eyeball, which swiveled down to behold the plant in full.
"Um," said Tamia, when the staring stretched awkwardly.
Xavier reached out, ignoring the plink of needles deflecting against his palm, and plucked the solitary pink flower blooming on the spiky summit, before jamming it in his mouth and swallowing it whole. The cactus retracted its spines, cowed by a superior predator.
That's right, you dumb plant, Xavier thought. Don't fuck with me. I'm the Xavier.
(Everyone called him Xavier. Even Xavier called himself Xavier. The "X" made it sound cool. Ooh, yeah!)
~~~
"Most technological principles cannot easily be mimicked by warp powers," said Xavier. In his left hand was a smoothly burning orange flame, his right coated with a layer of lucid ice. "We can mimic the effects as we perceive them, but it takes especial effort to act through the same mechanisms of action."
Tamia poked at the flame, hissing as it burned her. "Ah, it's hot," she muttered, licking the finger.
Xavier stared, somewhat boggled. Why would you— an open flame? What?
Okay, focus. "The reason for this is that most sentients do not intuitively grasp the fundamental physics of reality, and so do not reflect these intuitions into the Warp. This flame is hot. It emits light and radiates heat, but does not consume oxygen, for the reason that the properties of flame that are immediately apparent to an observer do not include oxygen consumption. For this reason, once instantiated into physical reality, warpfire does not conform to the nature of a true carbon-hydrogen-oxygen flame, at least until its presence causes actual fires to spring up."
With a twitch, the flame brightened before guttering out. Xavier rubbed away the embers, before igniting a new flame. Unlike before, this one flickered and swayed with the currents, wisps of smoke teasing the air. "With greater understanding of physical phenomenon, one's image hews closer to reality, and it takes conscious effort to reproduce the inaccuracies of your initial attempts. This is because you have a notion of what is 'correct' for reality, and what is 'aesthetically pleasing.' However, when these are opposed…"
Tamia stared, entranced by the flicking colours. With mild curiosity, Xavier waved his hands slowly, watching her head track the flame. He snuffed the flame, and Tamia blinked back, shaking herself awake.
"Lesson over," he said, before excusing himself.
~~~
There have been moments where Xavier felt he was going to die. It wasn't as cool as the stories made them sound; facing down a Chaos Marine that had hacked his way to the top of the warp in single combat had sounded great in the vids afterward, but at the time it was mostly a stream of oh shit oh shit oh shit and fuuuuuck Mittens just got disemboweled shit shit shit and ow ow ow OW OW. Which just went to show: they cut out the bit afterward where Xavier had to burn off and regrow half his dang skin to purge corruption, because apparently that affected morale.
You know what affects morale, Governor Rotbart? Being stalked by a small lady all hours of the day so her head won't explode into daemons. It was harrowing on a level Xavier was not prepared to meet.
"Tamia," Xavier called out to the door, "I personally guarantee there is nothing you can learn from my pee."
"How would you know, Gerald?" Tamia sing-songed back through the door. "The difference between me passing or failing could be how many squares of paper I use, or how hot my shower is. Didn't you say that every bit counts?"
Okay, she was definitely fucking with him. There were many things that could change the nature of a psyker, and Xavier believed with all his heart that this was not one of them.
For the arbitrator's consideration, we would like to admit Exhibit A: A stable, sane Beta-level psyker. Exhibit B: A less stable, less sane Beta-level psyker. How does one take B, and turn it into A?
The court of arbitrators admits Exhibit C: A method of psychologically stabilizing the human mind in harnessing the unbound swirling maelstrom of the Warp. Would the court of arbitrators please note that Exhibit C is my empty hand, because we know absolutely dang fuck all about psykers?
The court of arbitrators notes so. Proceed, Primaris Xavier.
Okay, so. Theoretically, there must be some surefire method to take an unstable psyker, and make them stable. Yes, humanity was probably seventy billion years from figuring it out if the Eldar didn't kill them all first by accident again somehow, but if you took all the traits and variables of recorded psykers arranged in order of how likely their heads were to explode, mushed it into a single shape, and looked at what came out, you'd have a very rough model for a sane, uneverted psyker and what was relevant to keeping them that way.
~~~
"Is this—hng—really necessary?"
From his vantage point, Xavier did another ceiling push-up in the reversed gravity. Tamia had crashed onto the floor, defeated by the dread onus of physical exercise. "Absolutely. Fifty more reps, Tammy."
"Uggggghh."
~~~
"And part of me will always stay / through the warp and far away—"
Xavier poked his head through the closed door, eyes squinted. "Tamia."
Tamia paused in her hairbrushing. "Gerald."
Xavier blinked, very deliberately. "Your voice is very nice."
"Oh. Thank you."
"But it is three in the dang morning. Please let me sleep." Beneath his phased head, Mittens also poked his tiger face through, yowling sleepily.
"Oh, of course. Sorry."
Xavier nodded, and there was a thud against the door before he managed to phase a thumbs-up through.
~~~
Tamia stared at the door, hand hovering in front of the beacon. She jerked as Xavier swung an arm over her shoulder, looking at the nameplate.
"So this is where you went," he said, tracing the letters in JAMESON, before bopping the beacon.
Tamia flung his arm off her. "Gerald! What are you—"
The door slid open, the woman behind glancing only once before crying out, "Oh, Tamia!" She reached out, embracing Tamia in a tight hug.
Tamia squeezed back, patting the shorter woman awkwardly. "Hi, Mom."
Tamia's mother grabbed her shoulders, looking her over, eyes crinkling with the beginnings of wrinkles. "It's been so long! Couldn't the University let you free once in a while?"
"I—"
"Her schedule opened up," interjected Xavier, leaning over. "She's just been aching to visit. Couldn't stop her!"
Tamia shook herself free, and turned to Xavier. "Mom, this is Gerald Xavier. He's my tutor. Gerald, this is my mother."
"Hello," said Xavier, nodding politely and bouncing his head off the top of the doorway.
The woman's eyes widened. "My goodness. Master Xavier, of course, it's an honour! Come in, come in!" She bustled across the small hab-space, pushing away clutter. "Sorry about the mess, I wasn't expecting visitors."
"Of course, Mrs Jameson."
"Please, call me Elly. I haven't been Mrs Jameson for years." She checked over a cookpot, which was bubbling noisily. "Your father's in the shrine, honey."
"Right." In the corner stood a small podium, where a simple ash-box was hidden beneath several ribbons. "Hey, wait. Mom, where'd you put my pianoboard?"
"That old thing? I sold it years ago."
"Mom!"
"What? It was taking up space." Elly took the pot off the heat, stirring occasionally. "Are you staying for lunch? It's meat stew."
"Always up for free food," said Xavier, who had the culinary skills of a tenacious sponge.
"Gerald! Don't mooch off my mom!" Tamia hissed.
"Oh, of course you're welcome to stay as well, Master Xavier. I hope Tammy hasn't been a burden on you."
"She's been a delight." Xavier picked up a holo-disc, examining the image of a gap-toothed five-year-old Tamia with undisguised interest. "Mittens loves her. Probably because she keeps sneaking him chicken."
"Tammy's always been a people pleaser."
"Indeed? Tell me everything."
And so they had lunch.
~~~
"What a nice woman your mother is," said Xavier, fed and fattened. "She must be terribly lonely; you should visit more often!"
"You didn't have to do this," Tamia muttered, hands in pockets. A circle of personal space had opened up around her as civilians avoided the Betas by instinct. "I could have done it myself."
"And then what?" Xavier wriggled his tongue, cleaning his teeth of leftover grox. "'Hey, Mom, fifty-fifty chance I'm going to be dead by next week.' When was the last time you even talked to her, Tamia? Were you just going to walk into the Sanction Hall without even saying bye?"
"Yes," Tamia ground out. "Better than giving her false hope."
Xavier's eyebrows soared. "Wow, Tammy. That's some confidence you got there."
Tamia was silent, a shroud of static buzzing whenever Xavier strayed too close.
"Besides," Xavier added. "Now you have to pass. Otherwise you'll miss next week's bacon roast."
Tami whirled on him, furious. With the keen of tearing reality, she Blinked, vanishing from the hive.
~~~
"You think it was something I said?" murmured Xavier as he lay on Mittens. Tamia hadn't returned to the apartment, and when he asked Ridcully he'd just waved him off with 'she's alive, don't worry.'
Mittens purred, snoozing and dreaming tiger dreams.
Xavier could have just scryed for her, but peeking without warning never ended well. And he realized after several embarrassing minutes that he didn't actually know where she'd go in cases like this.
Frankly, as a psyker, not knowing the inside of someone's head when he'd been living with them for a year was shameful. Even if the first thing he'd taught her was decent shields and mind labyrinths, Xavier had a reputation to uphold.
"I mean, seriously," he said to Mittens, "she's acting like she's a dead girl walking. After a year with me! That's hella depressing, Mittens."
Fool, Mittens snuffed. Wiser.
"I guess. Have no idea what's going on in there, though."
Singing Lady. Heart. Maiden, Mittens continued, a font of sage wisdom. Best Lady. Wise. Hungry, Fish.
Xavier frowned. "But she just had a whole bowl of stew."
Mittens snuffed.
~~~
Fortunately, two days later on her birthday, Tamia was at the Sanction Hall. She looked weary, and her voice croaked when she said, "Hey, Gerald."
Xavier opened his mouth. Mittens shoulder-slammed his hip enough to send him rocking, and growled.
"Break a leg," Xavier said instead. Mittens meowed.
A small smirk blossomed on Tamia's face, and she leaned down to scratch Mittens' ear. "Make sure he doesn't go fruity. For me," she said to the feline.
Still the best, Mittens purred.
Tamia nodded, and straightened her back. With quiet dignity, she walked into the darkened chamber, and the Sanction tolled, the doors slamming shut.
~~~
What goes on inside the Sanction Hall? Different for everyone. Everybody's a little broken in different ways, and the Sanction pries open those cracks with the patient inevitability of the freeze cycle. On other planets with sensible rates of psykers per capita, the Sanctioning process was drawn out over a long period of hypno-indoctrination, surgical adjustments, psychological assessments, and training. But Avernus in the early days had implemented the accelerated Sanction system to handle the deluge of psykers, and never really felt the need to change back.
Good news! No need for compliancy testing or psycho-engram modeling! Just walk into the Hall, and if you walk (or crawl) out again under your own power, you're home free. Easy peasy, we can fit ten appointments a day, half an hour at lunchtime for the janitors to clean up the mess, with spare time for walk-ins.
What's in the Hall, exactly?
Well.
Good people shouldn't think too hard about that.
~~~
For reasons of morale, teachers weren't there to greet fresh Sanctionites, in case it turned out they weren't Sanctionites after all and needed a bolt to the head, pronto.
So the first thing Tamia saw upon waking up in the infirmary was Mittens sniffing her face.
You have awoken! he purred. How sweetly does the scent of freedom cloy in your whiskers?
Tamia blinked. Last thing she recalled with any concrete sense of reality was walking into the Hall. If she was alive now, then she passed.
--blind luck and foolish hearts you will show them the true worth of you--
She passed.
"It's pretty good, Mittens," Tamia said. "Where's Gerald?"
Master is feeding his pitiful human stomach with pitiful human biscuits. Mittens' eyes were wide and watery, a devastating effect were he not a quarter-tonne in size. He has neglected the feeding of this august self. A terrible dereliction of duty.
"Of course it is." Tamia sat up, steadying herself on Mittens as a wave of dizziness struck her. "Let's see if the welcome hamper is ready."
Singing Lady is the best.
Really, with a companion like Mittens, Tamia could face the world.
By the entryway was an ammunition box with a fat yellow ribbon wrapped around it. Inside were six bars of chocolate, a pallet of caramel drops, a colourful packet of preserved fruits, a bottle of distilled tincture, and not the robes of a Sanctionite. Instead, as Mittens sniffed for spiders, Tamia pulled out the gilt rune-sewn velvet of a Primaris psyker.
"You walked out, apparently."
Tamia turned around and kicked the ironskin shin of Xavier. "Stop fucking doing that! Oh my god."
Xavier shrugged, beaming happily. As Mittens sniffed around in his pockets, Xavier idly scratched his fur. He was also using his ridiculous height to hide something behind his back.
"'Worthy of further training,' is what Ridcully said. Tamia Jameson, Elite Primaris. How's that sound?"
Bleh, Mittens huffed. Pitiful human sugar droppings. A shameful display.
"It sounds great," said Tamia, stunned. Oh, merciful God-Emperor, another year with Gerald, her hair would fall out by Saint's Day.
Xavier beamed wider. "I got you something." He held out a long box, and Tamia draped her robes over an obedient Mittens before opening it.
She stared, before carefully pulling out the glitter-ridden and technicolour pianoboard. On the side were scrawled letters proclaiming the device belonged to tAmIA.
"Turns out your mom actually kept it," said Xavier blithely. "You know, in case you died and it was the only thing she had to remember you by. Same old, same old."
Tamia shook, gripping the pianoboard to her chest.
"So I peeked my head in, got it off her hands along with a promise to move in with someone—you know, I think Dutch and Snake have a free bunk, and—" Xavier let out a deflated breath as Tamia hugged him. "Ow, ow, the corners, Tamia, the corners—"
"I made it," Tamia murmured, eyes hot. She buried her face into Xavier's shoulder, moistening the mantle. "I made it to here."
"Um," said Xavier, looking helplessly to Mittens, who was as surprised as anyone else.
"You don't know what it's like having this—" Tamia sniffed noisily— "This voice always telling you you're not meant to be here, and you'll never be good enough, you'll never fit like you were supposed to."
Xavier patted her head with mechanical awkwardness, as if he wasn't sure how his arms worked. He raised a pleading eyebrow at Mittens in a secret code they invented years ago, begging for assistance.
Mittens, eyes very wide, walked through the table to slip Tamia's robes back in the box, before phasing through the floor like a tremendous coward.
"Well, that's… nice," said Xavier, who was bad at this. He wriggled, and Tamia squeezed tighter.
"This is happening," she muttered quietly. "Deal with it."
"'Kay," said Xavier.
~~~
…If we are to understand what truly makes a psychic individual, we must look to the beginning: at the first manifestation of a psyker's power*. In the technical form, it is known as the "initial expression," but to the common practitioner, it is given the name of "talent."** For most of the psychic populace, it heralded the coming of the indigo-robed Witchfinders to whisk them away from their friends and family to a world behind the barred bulkheads of the University, where it was the guiding sign that decided their life for the next two decades.
But what is a talent? Why is it that some children come to us breathing fire, yet others have skin of needles and bones of iron? Why one boy can see through walls, and another sees the future? What decides for these children their first touch of the beyond?
The answer is, as always, complicated.
To perform a psychic act requires three*** components: personal proximity, willful intent, and logical mechanism. Personal proximity does not refer only to corporeal distance, but personal significance; that is, meaningful connection to the psyker as a person that shortens astral remoteness and metaphysical separation. Willful intent, far easier to muster, must be ruthlessly controlled at higher grades of power; what may take a day's work of concentrated focus for a Zeta may be the product of an errant musing for a Gamma, let alone a Beta. And logical mechanism is certainly not the same as a rational, reasonable mechanism; the rules that govern their action need not even glimpse at the material truth.
With this in mind, the mystery of the talent unravels. It is simply the critical accumulation of conceptual frameworks and observed veil interactions that form a theorem of sufficient fidelity to act upon, and overcome, the Materium. What a mouthful!
How does the psyker gain this knowledge? Unconsciously, for the most part, just as you are not cognizant of your digestion, or the growing of hairs, or the stretching of your veins. Do you look at a cherry and consciously choose to perceive its redness, its glossiness of skin? Do you yourself curve the shadows cast by the light of the luxbar onto its form? Or do you look and see the fruit, as swiftly and easily envisioned as reading its name? So too, does the psyker learn. Though the mind may sleep, the soul does not, crafting and fashioning new tools even as they corrode and fail beneath the onset of time and shifting circumstances that outpace their delicate mechanisms of action.
So the nascent psyker, coming into his or her power, has by the efforts of their soul generated a modicum of lore, maintained and repaired against the degradation of entropy. When intent and need rear up and cry havoc, the theorem is put to the test. The psyker musters their will, utilizes whatever mindfulness and focus they have attained in their short time in the world, and acts. Or perhaps, in a flush of tumultuous emotion or overcome by immediate and uncompromising peril, they grasp out for something, anything to happen. And so the talent comes into being, crude and incomplete and raw, the first step on a road of many miles.
Or it does not. Initial attempts may fail, models too inaccurate, tools too blunt, power applied too inefficiently. Intent is leveraged where it is not needed, sparse where it is crucial. The desired effect, if there is one, instead manifests in a malformed or unexpected manner, if the framework does not simply collapse upon its own contradictory foundations. And without being bound within an effect framework, or partially contained by an incomplete one, energy and thought leaks and perturbs the veil of the Immaterium in a way detectable by the trained psy-senses of the Witch Finder.
Under a more sophisticated craft, less energy is wasted, bottled fully within a complete container. With greater knowledge and understanding, more efficient mechanisms and levers of action are discovered or created, synergies emerging to magnify effects that outstrip their predecessors twice over with one tenth the power. With the intellect and multi-threaded attention of full Sanction, the full model is refined and grasped holistically, a phantasm imagined not with the apparent fidelity of the human eye, but the true fidelity of the mechanical.
Much of the University's training focuses on the academic side of things, once considerations of sanity and stability are assured. Exercising the mind exercises the soul, and we teach methods of self-hypnosis to apply otherwise scattered thought into a controlled instrument, and assign research essays to teach a student how to assemble and connect disparate data in the way they will assemble and join psychic concepts into schemas.
As formula and craft reach a pinnacle, the consumption of energy needed to alter the Material veil approaches zero. Theoretically, there exists a critical point of consolidated knowledge, an edifice composed of sheer knowledge, skilful mastery, and sophisticated conceptual foundation, that even a soul of Rho-level, the median strength of the human population, can produce enough psychic weight to act upon reality, achieving a narrow effect through uncountable pathways of force working in concert. But if the point exists, reaching such a mark is an incredible effort; for example, if it takes a day for a Beta to learn how to produce a plasma flame with the full force of his soul, it would take a week to reduce its psychic demand to a level sustainable by a Gamma while preserving identical levels of destructive potential and accuracy, and it would be an effort of months to craft a ritual for a Delta wishing to mimic his feat.
While on the subject, a ritual is merely a formalized examination of effect frameworks of higher power for lower grades of psykers, incorporating corrective heuristics and compensatory factors normally attended unconsciously by a more powerful soul. As scope and specificity increase, most rituals balloon in kind; the Holocaust Sunderbolt, a Pyromantic technique requiring five minutes of directed effort across seven stages of mental imagination for a trained Beta, takes approximately nineteen straight days and over four hundred thousand visualisations for an Epsilon on his lonesome, as he must perform sequentially what occurs in simultaneous parallel in the more appointed soul of his senior, much as a mathematical equation conceals the immense volume of its proof. Most rituals are exercises in formally explicating a psyker's internal calculations for conscious improvement, and are usually published without the intent of actual use by a practitioner.
Not that it is without use to the poor Epsilon, as even an incompletely performed ritual provides tools created in its study. Though a majority percentage of such frameworks are bespoke fabrications for the ritual objective, even one hundredth of, say, the Holocaust Sunderbolt's customized conceptual networks being repurposed for general action provides a qualitative increase in an Epsilon psyker's skill. So it is that the advances of one become the improvements of many.
In the reverse, choirs pool the power and understanding of many psykers beneath the auspice of a singular soul. With the coordination of many different sets of psychic identities and toolsets, deficiencies in a singular soul may be compensated by the developments in another. However, given that many people often hold contradictory or adversarial natures, an uncontrolled bridging of spirits will often simply self-neutralise. It is for this reason that choirs must be lead by a trained "conductor" (typically the most skilled psyker in the choir), whose self-consistent core of knowledge serves as the primary lens of interpretation and theoretic evaluation according to which the contributions of the choir are managed and integrated.
Goodness! There sure is a lot that goes into a psyker. In the following chapter, we'll take a deeper look at the more common meta-psychic foundational safeguards practiced by the University…
*Though in truth the lines are quite blurred, for the sake of this text I refer to psychic "power" as the term encompassing the psyker's body of knowledge, trained abilities, scope of unconscious management and procession, and physical capacity to thin the veil between the Materium and Immaterium, and thus magnify the effects of psychic arts. Psychic "control" has been relegated to describing purely metapsychic and mental tools that divide and muster attention, regulate spiritual functionality, and control (obviously).
**Far more positive than the pre-Trust moniker of "curse" and in no small part spearheaded by social euphemism initiatives.
***Why three? A triangle is the simplest polygon that is structurally sound.
-- Codex Astralis: A Humble Guide for Psykers~~~
Many years later…
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, Gerald Xavier barged into Frederick's office. Given that he usually commuted by explosive inferno teleport, this was a sign of the deep respect he held for the Governor.
"Frederick!" he yelled, stomping forward. "What the hell is— are you watching kitten videos?"
Frederick did not deign to pause the footage of cute animals. "It's the latest surveillance from Greengrass Reserve. They've finally reached their population threshold." As a buff Catachan soldier was quickly overwhelmed by a pile of adorable fluffy phase-cubs and writhed in faux-agony, Frederick looked up. "What is it, Gerald?"
Xavier shook his head, and slammed down a printout, which you couldn't do with a dataslate. "You married me and Tamia together?"
Frederick took the paper in hand, examining it closely. "Yes, this all seems to be correct. Common law, Gerald."
"You married me and Tammy!"
"You are cohabitating, you are raising a child together, if you're going to claim dependents on your tax forms you'd best be prepared for the consequences." Frederick steepled his fingers. "You can't cheat the taxman, Gerald."
"Yes, I can," Xavier immediately replied.
Frederick raised an eyebrow. "You claimed grox steaks for Mittens as 'weapon maintenance.'"
"Okay, maybe not," the psyker amended. "Fix this."
"Certainly," said Frederick, sliding over a dataslate. "As it was your authorization, I merely need your thumbprint and verbal signature to rescind the contract."
Xavier pressed his thumb to the dataslate, which immediately beeped red and zapped him. "Ow! What the hell?"
"Oh, goodness. Looks like it wasn't you who approved the contract. So sorry, have a nice day." Frederick leaned back into his squishy throne. "Oh, yeah. Bureaucracy, bitches."
Xavier squinted, sucking his thumb. "I remember when I used to look up to you, Frederick. I thought you were cool."
"When I was your age I was leading a planet through the fall of human civilization as we knew it." Frederick reclined, suffused with the lazy confidence of unquestioned kung fu strength. "And I found the time to get married and have children."
Xavier gave him a flat stare.
~~~
"Oh, that," said Tamia. "That was me."
Xavier's entire apologetic rant, which he had trailed on and off for five minutes, was derailed. "What? Why? What."
"Tax benefits." She clicked her fingers in front of Ophelia, who turned lazily to her adoptive mother. Tamia waved her hands through a sequence of signs, and Ophelia nodded, rising to her feet and drifting aimlessly out the door to a lounging Mittens. "No Child Unguarded was passed to support multi-family households, but the financials work out a lot better with the new bylaws even if you aren't a clanshare." She raised an eyebrow. "I didn't think you'd care so much."
"I don't," said Xavier quickly. "Just, you know, would have liked a heads-up."
"In case you wanted to marry someone else?"
"…Yes. That is a thing that could happen."
"Only, I don't think you've ever dated anyone in the entire time I've known you—"
"Have too," Xavier muttered.
"—So then I asked Jericho, and he said 'the day Gerry gets his magazine oiled Sarge promised us a free round at Kerrigan's,' only Kerrigan's burnt down forty years ago and so did your chances of ever touching—"
"Hahaaah!" Xavier laughed loudly. "Oh that Jericho's such a kidder." I'm going to roast him alive, he thought.
~~~
AN: So many years and Xavier still can't get inside that head. That shiny blonde head.
Tamia spent the day before her Sanctioning recording all the music she'd never get the chance to perfect so that she'd leave something of Tamia the Musician if she died.
All the Phase-Tigers are pretty much 80s action heroes in my mind. Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAAAKE!
Coming soon: The House of Jameson, with 100% more Ophelia! ETA: idunno lol
the past
~~~
The House of Xavier
~~~
Many years ago…
When Xavier bought his apartment, he'd first thoroughly researched the area, diving into the stockpile of favours he had accumulated with Henry to find the statistically least disaster-prone sections of Avernus. Of course, after he had the reports, he then rolled the Emperor's Tarot (whatever Ridcully said, you could Tarot with five sticks and a shiny rock if you were twenty-five and up to your armpits in psychic power) to find the best one, eventually settling on a fortified block in Mirkwood's West-19B Habitation Tower. A bit expensive, and a dicey prospect to go from bunking with the Phase-Tigers (who were all six foot tall, four foot wide supermen) to going it alone but for the grace of your best tiger friend, but Xavier was made of tough stuff, and the years had only made it tougher. So he had squared his shoulders, made a volume purchase, and moved into where he was likely to spend the rest of his days in cozy comfort.
And it worked. Praise be to the Tarot! Xavier only had to rebuild his small three-bedroom hab-space fourteen times over the last century, got to sleep in all he liked because he was precognitive, and hadn't used the front door ever since he figured out how to phase through his own wards. For cleaning, every few hours he simply activated the plague quarantine and raised the temperature to a toasty two hundred degrees to cook out any spiders, and eventually they'd learned.
It was comfy. It was nice. It was home. He'd unwillingly moved into University quarters just to get ahead of the paperwork, but he still spent as much time in this secret nook of Avernus that was wholly his. Sometimes you had to be alone on your own terms.
Until now.
Tamia wrinkled her nose, adjusting the cargo bag on her shoulder. At twenty-three, she was already a promising candidate in the University, traveling down Xavier's own disciplinary road. "This place is a garbage chute."
"Hey. Hey." Xavier opened one of the storage cubbies, pulling out a disused set of linens and a deflated pillow. "I don't come into your place and rag on its many posters of boys and— and make-up. And flowers." He unrolled the blanket in a smooth motion, perfectly covering the couch in one go. Ah, psychic powers.
Tamia gave him a weird look, dropping her bag. "Is that really all you know about girls?"
Xavier, instead of answering her question, did not. Absolute genius.
"Now," he said, unfolding the couch into the bed configuration with creaking protest, "I'll sleep here. You can take my bed. Bathroom's over there, you can have the red closets."
"Who takes first watch?" asked Tamia, already looking through the fridge and scowling. "And when was the last time you went shopping?" She squinted. "Are these scorch marks?"
"I'll take first, Mittens takes second." The tiger in question was already conked out, snoring tiger snores. Such a big baby. "Anything else?"
"It's just us?" said Tamia, wide-eyed.
Xavier gasped, and covered his modesty. "I understand you may be tempted by this red hot bod, but no peeking."
Tamia scowled. "Whatever." She stalked off into Xavier's bedroom, slamming the door. Within half a minute, the shower was running.
Well, thought Xavier, at least Mittens thought he was funny. On the floor, the tiger sniffed and rolled over.
~~~
Contrary to popular opinion, recording Mittens trying to hunt a blink spider was not a waste of time, but an important study in animal behaviour. The Magos Biologis waited with bated breathmasks every week for Xavier's weekly update on the "What Mittens did today" datafeed. He was contributing singlehandedly to the advance of mankind.
Mittens pounced, two hundred kilograms of tiger scrambling around to snatch the spider in its paws. The pest Blinked up, and Mittens squashed it with a paw. The spider Blinked again, sticking to the wall, and Mittens ran around himself in a circle, overshooting and knocking over the bookshelf.
"Silly tiger," cooed Xavier, as if talking at a foolish toddler, the holocorder hanging in the air. "You can't eat that! It's a spider. It'll poison you and you'll be sick everywhere."
Mittens growled, an apex predator on a mighty hunt! Never mind that the last time he actually managed to catch the spider, Xavier had to get his stomach pumped; he was the king of the urban jungle.
"So do you just do this every day?" asked Tamia, sipping on hot cocoa in her pajamas. There were tiny music notes hand-sewn into the white silk.
Xavier shrieked, in a manly way. Mittens yowled, his stealthy approach blown by his human's primitive monkeigh yelling. The spider, thoroughly spooked, Blinked, and did not reappear.
Mittens gave Tamia a foul tiger look, and skulked through the wall. Xavier also gave her a terrible frown.
"What did I do?" asked Tamia, unheeding of the way her feminine mojo was messing up the delicate balance between a boy and his tiger.
Ugh. Girls.
~~~
Well, girls aside, Xavier was familiar with the prettier gender.
Vaguely. Like, from a distance.
He was a war-hero, after all; the finer aspects of idolatrous obsession made themselves clearer after every victory over the forces of Chaos. Unfortunately, women who found incinerating heretics an attractive thing for a man to do were also, as Lincoln and Cutter would say, faulty bolts.
Unfortunately, suddenly having a female bunkmate was not as easy as he expected. Tamia was basically an entire different species to Xavier, seeming to exist only tangentially to his own reality. Things that made sense simply didn't around her, like mirage distorting the image beyond.
Of course it was fine to eat in your pajamas! Once a week was fine for laundry, right? Seriously, let's be honest, brushing your teeth once a day was plenty. It's not like bacteria can survive an incalcination cycle anyway.
It's fiiiiine.
Apparently, according to Tamia, it was not. His solution to this problem was to ignore it, and hoped it went away and died while he wasn't looking.
~~~
"Okay, now you're just messing with me!" Tamia shouted, tossing aside the mechanical widget. "This is groxshit!"
Xavier steepled his fingers, expression grim. "Tamia, if you cannot repair a chrono, how can you repair… yourself?"
"Oh yeah?" Tamia hefted a small pot. "And why am I domesticating a cactus?" The cactus quivered, spines emerging from its skin in a threat display.
Xavier blinked. "I didn't ask you to do that."
"You did! You said it would help with my biomancy!"
"No, that one's on you." A ferroprotein spine bounced off Xavier's eyeball, which swiveled down to behold the plant in full.
"Um," said Tamia, when the staring stretched awkwardly.
Xavier reached out, ignoring the plink of needles deflecting against his palm, and plucked the solitary pink flower blooming on the spiky summit, before jamming it in his mouth and swallowing it whole. The cactus retracted its spines, cowed by a superior predator.
That's right, you dumb plant, Xavier thought. Don't fuck with me. I'm the Xavier.
(Everyone called him Xavier. Even Xavier called himself Xavier. The "X" made it sound cool. Ooh, yeah!)
~~~
"Most technological principles cannot easily be mimicked by warp powers," said Xavier. In his left hand was a smoothly burning orange flame, his right coated with a layer of lucid ice. "We can mimic the effects as we perceive them, but it takes especial effort to act through the same mechanisms of action."
Tamia poked at the flame, hissing as it burned her. "Ah, it's hot," she muttered, licking the finger.
Xavier stared, somewhat boggled. Why would you— an open flame? What?
Okay, focus. "The reason for this is that most sentients do not intuitively grasp the fundamental physics of reality, and so do not reflect these intuitions into the Warp. This flame is hot. It emits light and radiates heat, but does not consume oxygen, for the reason that the properties of flame that are immediately apparent to an observer do not include oxygen consumption. For this reason, once instantiated into physical reality, warpfire does not conform to the nature of a true carbon-hydrogen-oxygen flame, at least until its presence causes actual fires to spring up."
With a twitch, the flame brightened before guttering out. Xavier rubbed away the embers, before igniting a new flame. Unlike before, this one flickered and swayed with the currents, wisps of smoke teasing the air. "With greater understanding of physical phenomenon, one's image hews closer to reality, and it takes conscious effort to reproduce the inaccuracies of your initial attempts. This is because you have a notion of what is 'correct' for reality, and what is 'aesthetically pleasing.' However, when these are opposed…"
Tamia stared, entranced by the flicking colours. With mild curiosity, Xavier waved his hands slowly, watching her head track the flame. He snuffed the flame, and Tamia blinked back, shaking herself awake.
"Lesson over," he said, before excusing himself.
~~~
There have been moments where Xavier felt he was going to die. It wasn't as cool as the stories made them sound; facing down a Chaos Marine that had hacked his way to the top of the warp in single combat had sounded great in the vids afterward, but at the time it was mostly a stream of oh shit oh shit oh shit and fuuuuuck Mittens just got disemboweled shit shit shit and ow ow ow OW OW. Which just went to show: they cut out the bit afterward where Xavier had to burn off and regrow half his dang skin to purge corruption, because apparently that affected morale.
You know what affects morale, Governor Rotbart? Being stalked by a small lady all hours of the day so her head won't explode into daemons. It was harrowing on a level Xavier was not prepared to meet.
"Tamia," Xavier called out to the door, "I personally guarantee there is nothing you can learn from my pee."
"How would you know, Gerald?" Tamia sing-songed back through the door. "The difference between me passing or failing could be how many squares of paper I use, or how hot my shower is. Didn't you say that every bit counts?"
Okay, she was definitely fucking with him. There were many things that could change the nature of a psyker, and Xavier believed with all his heart that this was not one of them.
For the arbitrator's consideration, we would like to admit Exhibit A: A stable, sane Beta-level psyker. Exhibit B: A less stable, less sane Beta-level psyker. How does one take B, and turn it into A?
The court of arbitrators admits Exhibit C: A method of psychologically stabilizing the human mind in harnessing the unbound swirling maelstrom of the Warp. Would the court of arbitrators please note that Exhibit C is my empty hand, because we know absolutely dang fuck all about psykers?
The court of arbitrators notes so. Proceed, Primaris Xavier.
Okay, so. Theoretically, there must be some surefire method to take an unstable psyker, and make them stable. Yes, humanity was probably seventy billion years from figuring it out if the Eldar didn't kill them all first by accident again somehow, but if you took all the traits and variables of recorded psykers arranged in order of how likely their heads were to explode, mushed it into a single shape, and looked at what came out, you'd have a very rough model for a sane, uneverted psyker and what was relevant to keeping them that way.
~~~
"Is this—hng—really necessary?"
From his vantage point, Xavier did another ceiling push-up in the reversed gravity. Tamia had crashed onto the floor, defeated by the dread onus of physical exercise. "Absolutely. Fifty more reps, Tammy."
"Uggggghh."
~~~
"And part of me will always stay / through the warp and far away—"
Xavier poked his head through the closed door, eyes squinted. "Tamia."
Tamia paused in her hairbrushing. "Gerald."
Xavier blinked, very deliberately. "Your voice is very nice."
"Oh. Thank you."
"But it is three in the dang morning. Please let me sleep." Beneath his phased head, Mittens also poked his tiger face through, yowling sleepily.
"Oh, of course. Sorry."
Xavier nodded, and there was a thud against the door before he managed to phase a thumbs-up through.
~~~
Tamia stared at the door, hand hovering in front of the beacon. She jerked as Xavier swung an arm over her shoulder, looking at the nameplate.
"So this is where you went," he said, tracing the letters in JAMESON, before bopping the beacon.
Tamia flung his arm off her. "Gerald! What are you—"
The door slid open, the woman behind glancing only once before crying out, "Oh, Tamia!" She reached out, embracing Tamia in a tight hug.
Tamia squeezed back, patting the shorter woman awkwardly. "Hi, Mom."
Tamia's mother grabbed her shoulders, looking her over, eyes crinkling with the beginnings of wrinkles. "It's been so long! Couldn't the University let you free once in a while?"
"I—"
"Her schedule opened up," interjected Xavier, leaning over. "She's just been aching to visit. Couldn't stop her!"
Tamia shook herself free, and turned to Xavier. "Mom, this is Gerald Xavier. He's my tutor. Gerald, this is my mother."
"Hello," said Xavier, nodding politely and bouncing his head off the top of the doorway.
The woman's eyes widened. "My goodness. Master Xavier, of course, it's an honour! Come in, come in!" She bustled across the small hab-space, pushing away clutter. "Sorry about the mess, I wasn't expecting visitors."
"Of course, Mrs Jameson."
"Please, call me Elly. I haven't been Mrs Jameson for years." She checked over a cookpot, which was bubbling noisily. "Your father's in the shrine, honey."
"Right." In the corner stood a small podium, where a simple ash-box was hidden beneath several ribbons. "Hey, wait. Mom, where'd you put my pianoboard?"
"That old thing? I sold it years ago."
"Mom!"
"What? It was taking up space." Elly took the pot off the heat, stirring occasionally. "Are you staying for lunch? It's meat stew."
"Always up for free food," said Xavier, who had the culinary skills of a tenacious sponge.
"Gerald! Don't mooch off my mom!" Tamia hissed.
"Oh, of course you're welcome to stay as well, Master Xavier. I hope Tammy hasn't been a burden on you."
"She's been a delight." Xavier picked up a holo-disc, examining the image of a gap-toothed five-year-old Tamia with undisguised interest. "Mittens loves her. Probably because she keeps sneaking him chicken."
"Tammy's always been a people pleaser."
"Indeed? Tell me everything."
And so they had lunch.
~~~
"What a nice woman your mother is," said Xavier, fed and fattened. "She must be terribly lonely; you should visit more often!"
"You didn't have to do this," Tamia muttered, hands in pockets. A circle of personal space had opened up around her as civilians avoided the Betas by instinct. "I could have done it myself."
"And then what?" Xavier wriggled his tongue, cleaning his teeth of leftover grox. "'Hey, Mom, fifty-fifty chance I'm going to be dead by next week.' When was the last time you even talked to her, Tamia? Were you just going to walk into the Sanction Hall without even saying bye?"
"Yes," Tamia ground out. "Better than giving her false hope."
Xavier's eyebrows soared. "Wow, Tammy. That's some confidence you got there."
Tamia was silent, a shroud of static buzzing whenever Xavier strayed too close.
"Besides," Xavier added. "Now you have to pass. Otherwise you'll miss next week's bacon roast."
Tami whirled on him, furious. With the keen of tearing reality, she Blinked, vanishing from the hive.
~~~
"You think it was something I said?" murmured Xavier as he lay on Mittens. Tamia hadn't returned to the apartment, and when he asked Ridcully he'd just waved him off with 'she's alive, don't worry.'
Mittens purred, snoozing and dreaming tiger dreams.
Xavier could have just scryed for her, but peeking without warning never ended well. And he realized after several embarrassing minutes that he didn't actually know where she'd go in cases like this.
Frankly, as a psyker, not knowing the inside of someone's head when he'd been living with them for a year was shameful. Even if the first thing he'd taught her was decent shields and mind labyrinths, Xavier had a reputation to uphold.
"I mean, seriously," he said to Mittens, "she's acting like she's a dead girl walking. After a year with me! That's hella depressing, Mittens."
Fool, Mittens snuffed. Wiser.
"I guess. Have no idea what's going on in there, though."
Singing Lady. Heart. Maiden, Mittens continued, a font of sage wisdom. Best Lady. Wise. Hungry, Fish.
Xavier frowned. "But she just had a whole bowl of stew."
Mittens snuffed.
~~~
Fortunately, two days later on her birthday, Tamia was at the Sanction Hall. She looked weary, and her voice croaked when she said, "Hey, Gerald."
Xavier opened his mouth. Mittens shoulder-slammed his hip enough to send him rocking, and growled.
"Break a leg," Xavier said instead. Mittens meowed.
A small smirk blossomed on Tamia's face, and she leaned down to scratch Mittens' ear. "Make sure he doesn't go fruity. For me," she said to the feline.
Still the best, Mittens purred.
Tamia nodded, and straightened her back. With quiet dignity, she walked into the darkened chamber, and the Sanction tolled, the doors slamming shut.
~~~
What goes on inside the Sanction Hall? Different for everyone. Everybody's a little broken in different ways, and the Sanction pries open those cracks with the patient inevitability of the freeze cycle. On other planets with sensible rates of psykers per capita, the Sanctioning process was drawn out over a long period of hypno-indoctrination, surgical adjustments, psychological assessments, and training. But Avernus in the early days had implemented the accelerated Sanction system to handle the deluge of psykers, and never really felt the need to change back.
Good news! No need for compliancy testing or psycho-engram modeling! Just walk into the Hall, and if you walk (or crawl) out again under your own power, you're home free. Easy peasy, we can fit ten appointments a day, half an hour at lunchtime for the janitors to clean up the mess, with spare time for walk-ins.
What's in the Hall, exactly?
Well.
Good people shouldn't think too hard about that.
~~~
For reasons of morale, teachers weren't there to greet fresh Sanctionites, in case it turned out they weren't Sanctionites after all and needed a bolt to the head, pronto.
So the first thing Tamia saw upon waking up in the infirmary was Mittens sniffing her face.
You have awoken! he purred. How sweetly does the scent of freedom cloy in your whiskers?
Tamia blinked. Last thing she recalled with any concrete sense of reality was walking into the Hall. If she was alive now, then she passed.
--blind luck and foolish hearts you will show them the true worth of you--
She passed.
"It's pretty good, Mittens," Tamia said. "Where's Gerald?"
Master is feeding his pitiful human stomach with pitiful human biscuits. Mittens' eyes were wide and watery, a devastating effect were he not a quarter-tonne in size. He has neglected the feeding of this august self. A terrible dereliction of duty.
"Of course it is." Tamia sat up, steadying herself on Mittens as a wave of dizziness struck her. "Let's see if the welcome hamper is ready."
Singing Lady is the best.
Really, with a companion like Mittens, Tamia could face the world.
By the entryway was an ammunition box with a fat yellow ribbon wrapped around it. Inside were six bars of chocolate, a pallet of caramel drops, a colourful packet of preserved fruits, a bottle of distilled tincture, and not the robes of a Sanctionite. Instead, as Mittens sniffed for spiders, Tamia pulled out the gilt rune-sewn velvet of a Primaris psyker.
"You walked out, apparently."
Tamia turned around and kicked the ironskin shin of Xavier. "Stop fucking doing that! Oh my god."
Xavier shrugged, beaming happily. As Mittens sniffed around in his pockets, Xavier idly scratched his fur. He was also using his ridiculous height to hide something behind his back.
"'Worthy of further training,' is what Ridcully said. Tamia Jameson, Elite Primaris. How's that sound?"
Bleh, Mittens huffed. Pitiful human sugar droppings. A shameful display.
"It sounds great," said Tamia, stunned. Oh, merciful God-Emperor, another year with Gerald, her hair would fall out by Saint's Day.
Xavier beamed wider. "I got you something." He held out a long box, and Tamia draped her robes over an obedient Mittens before opening it.
She stared, before carefully pulling out the glitter-ridden and technicolour pianoboard. On the side were scrawled letters proclaiming the device belonged to tAmIA.
"Turns out your mom actually kept it," said Xavier blithely. "You know, in case you died and it was the only thing she had to remember you by. Same old, same old."
Tamia shook, gripping the pianoboard to her chest.
"So I peeked my head in, got it off her hands along with a promise to move in with someone—you know, I think Dutch and Snake have a free bunk, and—" Xavier let out a deflated breath as Tamia hugged him. "Ow, ow, the corners, Tamia, the corners—"
"I made it," Tamia murmured, eyes hot. She buried her face into Xavier's shoulder, moistening the mantle. "I made it to here."
"Um," said Xavier, looking helplessly to Mittens, who was as surprised as anyone else.
"You don't know what it's like having this—" Tamia sniffed noisily— "This voice always telling you you're not meant to be here, and you'll never be good enough, you'll never fit like you were supposed to."
Xavier patted her head with mechanical awkwardness, as if he wasn't sure how his arms worked. He raised a pleading eyebrow at Mittens in a secret code they invented years ago, begging for assistance.
Mittens, eyes very wide, walked through the table to slip Tamia's robes back in the box, before phasing through the floor like a tremendous coward.
"Well, that's… nice," said Xavier, who was bad at this. He wriggled, and Tamia squeezed tighter.
"This is happening," she muttered quietly. "Deal with it."
"'Kay," said Xavier.
~~~
…If we are to understand what truly makes a psychic individual, we must look to the beginning: at the first manifestation of a psyker's power*. In the technical form, it is known as the "initial expression," but to the common practitioner, it is given the name of "talent."** For most of the psychic populace, it heralded the coming of the indigo-robed Witchfinders to whisk them away from their friends and family to a world behind the barred bulkheads of the University, where it was the guiding sign that decided their life for the next two decades.
But what is a talent? Why is it that some children come to us breathing fire, yet others have skin of needles and bones of iron? Why one boy can see through walls, and another sees the future? What decides for these children their first touch of the beyond?
The answer is, as always, complicated.
To perform a psychic act requires three*** components: personal proximity, willful intent, and logical mechanism. Personal proximity does not refer only to corporeal distance, but personal significance; that is, meaningful connection to the psyker as a person that shortens astral remoteness and metaphysical separation. Willful intent, far easier to muster, must be ruthlessly controlled at higher grades of power; what may take a day's work of concentrated focus for a Zeta may be the product of an errant musing for a Gamma, let alone a Beta. And logical mechanism is certainly not the same as a rational, reasonable mechanism; the rules that govern their action need not even glimpse at the material truth.
With this in mind, the mystery of the talent unravels. It is simply the critical accumulation of conceptual frameworks and observed veil interactions that form a theorem of sufficient fidelity to act upon, and overcome, the Materium. What a mouthful!
How does the psyker gain this knowledge? Unconsciously, for the most part, just as you are not cognizant of your digestion, or the growing of hairs, or the stretching of your veins. Do you look at a cherry and consciously choose to perceive its redness, its glossiness of skin? Do you yourself curve the shadows cast by the light of the luxbar onto its form? Or do you look and see the fruit, as swiftly and easily envisioned as reading its name? So too, does the psyker learn. Though the mind may sleep, the soul does not, crafting and fashioning new tools even as they corrode and fail beneath the onset of time and shifting circumstances that outpace their delicate mechanisms of action.
So the nascent psyker, coming into his or her power, has by the efforts of their soul generated a modicum of lore, maintained and repaired against the degradation of entropy. When intent and need rear up and cry havoc, the theorem is put to the test. The psyker musters their will, utilizes whatever mindfulness and focus they have attained in their short time in the world, and acts. Or perhaps, in a flush of tumultuous emotion or overcome by immediate and uncompromising peril, they grasp out for something, anything to happen. And so the talent comes into being, crude and incomplete and raw, the first step on a road of many miles.
Or it does not. Initial attempts may fail, models too inaccurate, tools too blunt, power applied too inefficiently. Intent is leveraged where it is not needed, sparse where it is crucial. The desired effect, if there is one, instead manifests in a malformed or unexpected manner, if the framework does not simply collapse upon its own contradictory foundations. And without being bound within an effect framework, or partially contained by an incomplete one, energy and thought leaks and perturbs the veil of the Immaterium in a way detectable by the trained psy-senses of the Witch Finder.
Under a more sophisticated craft, less energy is wasted, bottled fully within a complete container. With greater knowledge and understanding, more efficient mechanisms and levers of action are discovered or created, synergies emerging to magnify effects that outstrip their predecessors twice over with one tenth the power. With the intellect and multi-threaded attention of full Sanction, the full model is refined and grasped holistically, a phantasm imagined not with the apparent fidelity of the human eye, but the true fidelity of the mechanical.
Much of the University's training focuses on the academic side of things, once considerations of sanity and stability are assured. Exercising the mind exercises the soul, and we teach methods of self-hypnosis to apply otherwise scattered thought into a controlled instrument, and assign research essays to teach a student how to assemble and connect disparate data in the way they will assemble and join psychic concepts into schemas.
As formula and craft reach a pinnacle, the consumption of energy needed to alter the Material veil approaches zero. Theoretically, there exists a critical point of consolidated knowledge, an edifice composed of sheer knowledge, skilful mastery, and sophisticated conceptual foundation, that even a soul of Rho-level, the median strength of the human population, can produce enough psychic weight to act upon reality, achieving a narrow effect through uncountable pathways of force working in concert. But if the point exists, reaching such a mark is an incredible effort; for example, if it takes a day for a Beta to learn how to produce a plasma flame with the full force of his soul, it would take a week to reduce its psychic demand to a level sustainable by a Gamma while preserving identical levels of destructive potential and accuracy, and it would be an effort of months to craft a ritual for a Delta wishing to mimic his feat.
While on the subject, a ritual is merely a formalized examination of effect frameworks of higher power for lower grades of psykers, incorporating corrective heuristics and compensatory factors normally attended unconsciously by a more powerful soul. As scope and specificity increase, most rituals balloon in kind; the Holocaust Sunderbolt, a Pyromantic technique requiring five minutes of directed effort across seven stages of mental imagination for a trained Beta, takes approximately nineteen straight days and over four hundred thousand visualisations for an Epsilon on his lonesome, as he must perform sequentially what occurs in simultaneous parallel in the more appointed soul of his senior, much as a mathematical equation conceals the immense volume of its proof. Most rituals are exercises in formally explicating a psyker's internal calculations for conscious improvement, and are usually published without the intent of actual use by a practitioner.
Not that it is without use to the poor Epsilon, as even an incompletely performed ritual provides tools created in its study. Though a majority percentage of such frameworks are bespoke fabrications for the ritual objective, even one hundredth of, say, the Holocaust Sunderbolt's customized conceptual networks being repurposed for general action provides a qualitative increase in an Epsilon psyker's skill. So it is that the advances of one become the improvements of many.
In the reverse, choirs pool the power and understanding of many psykers beneath the auspice of a singular soul. With the coordination of many different sets of psychic identities and toolsets, deficiencies in a singular soul may be compensated by the developments in another. However, given that many people often hold contradictory or adversarial natures, an uncontrolled bridging of spirits will often simply self-neutralise. It is for this reason that choirs must be lead by a trained "conductor" (typically the most skilled psyker in the choir), whose self-consistent core of knowledge serves as the primary lens of interpretation and theoretic evaluation according to which the contributions of the choir are managed and integrated.
Goodness! There sure is a lot that goes into a psyker. In the following chapter, we'll take a deeper look at the more common meta-psychic foundational safeguards practiced by the University…
*Though in truth the lines are quite blurred, for the sake of this text I refer to psychic "power" as the term encompassing the psyker's body of knowledge, trained abilities, scope of unconscious management and procession, and physical capacity to thin the veil between the Materium and Immaterium, and thus magnify the effects of psychic arts. Psychic "control" has been relegated to describing purely metapsychic and mental tools that divide and muster attention, regulate spiritual functionality, and control (obviously).
**Far more positive than the pre-Trust moniker of "curse" and in no small part spearheaded by social euphemism initiatives.
***Why three? A triangle is the simplest polygon that is structurally sound.
-- Codex Astralis: A Humble Guide for Psykers
Many years later…
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, Gerald Xavier barged into Frederick's office. Given that he usually commuted by explosive inferno teleport, this was a sign of the deep respect he held for the Governor.
"Frederick!" he yelled, stomping forward. "What the hell is— are you watching kitten videos?"
Frederick did not deign to pause the footage of cute animals. "It's the latest surveillance from Greengrass Reserve. They've finally reached their population threshold." As a buff Catachan soldier was quickly overwhelmed by a pile of adorable fluffy phase-cubs and writhed in faux-agony, Frederick looked up. "What is it, Gerald?"
Xavier shook his head, and slammed down a printout, which you couldn't do with a dataslate. "You married me and Tamia together?"
Frederick took the paper in hand, examining it closely. "Yes, this all seems to be correct. Common law, Gerald."
"You married me and Tammy!"
"You are cohabitating, you are raising a child together, if you're going to claim dependents on your tax forms you'd best be prepared for the consequences." Frederick steepled his fingers. "You can't cheat the taxman, Gerald."
"Yes, I can," Xavier immediately replied.
Frederick raised an eyebrow. "You claimed grox steaks for Mittens as 'weapon maintenance.'"
"Okay, maybe not," the psyker amended. "Fix this."
"Certainly," said Frederick, sliding over a dataslate. "As it was your authorization, I merely need your thumbprint and verbal signature to rescind the contract."
Xavier pressed his thumb to the dataslate, which immediately beeped red and zapped him. "Ow! What the hell?"
"Oh, goodness. Looks like it wasn't you who approved the contract. So sorry, have a nice day." Frederick leaned back into his squishy throne. "Oh, yeah. Bureaucracy, bitches."
Xavier squinted, sucking his thumb. "I remember when I used to look up to you, Frederick. I thought you were cool."
"When I was your age I was leading a planet through the fall of human civilization as we knew it." Frederick reclined, suffused with the lazy confidence of unquestioned kung fu strength. "And I found the time to get married and have children."
Xavier gave him a flat stare.
~~~
"Oh, that," said Tamia. "That was me."
Xavier's entire apologetic rant, which he had trailed on and off for five minutes, was derailed. "What? Why? What."
"Tax benefits." She clicked her fingers in front of Ophelia, who turned lazily to her adoptive mother. Tamia waved her hands through a sequence of signs, and Ophelia nodded, rising to her feet and drifting aimlessly out the door to a lounging Mittens. "No Child Unguarded was passed to support multi-family households, but the financials work out a lot better with the new bylaws even if you aren't a clanshare." She raised an eyebrow. "I didn't think you'd care so much."
"I don't," said Xavier quickly. "Just, you know, would have liked a heads-up."
"In case you wanted to marry someone else?"
"…Yes. That is a thing that could happen."
"Only, I don't think you've ever dated anyone in the entire time I've known you—"
"Have too," Xavier muttered.
"—So then I asked Jericho, and he said 'the day Gerry gets his magazine oiled Sarge promised us a free round at Kerrigan's,' only Kerrigan's burnt down forty years ago and so did your chances of ever touching—"
"Hahaaah!" Xavier laughed loudly. "Oh that Jericho's such a kidder." I'm going to roast him alive, he thought.
~~~
AN: So many years and Xavier still can't get inside that head. That shiny blonde head.
Tamia spent the day before her Sanctioning recording all the music she'd never get the chance to perfect so that she'd leave something of Tamia the Musician if she died.
All the Phase-Tigers are pretty much 80s action heroes in my mind. Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAAAKE!
Coming soon: The House of Jameson, with 100% more Ophelia! ETA: idunno lol
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Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Excepting a 1 the lowest we can get is 19. If we could only roll to 100 it would be much lower, but we've got Ridcully's bonuses
Expidite is used on building actions we pay more and it finishes a year quicker dd is for rolls it adds a flat +20.
Also @Addio strikes again.
- Location
- Northern Ireland, UK
No. The actual COST mechanics. Double Down adds a certain percent and Expedite adds even more.
I know about the Chance mechanic for DD and the Time mechanic for EX but I can't remember what the Cost Mechanic for both of them is.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
- Location
- Asia
I knew it. It's all an Eldar conspiracy. Those knife eared assholes are spying on us !
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Assuming a success on the Cheating, the DD will provide an additional 20 to the action, improving the result by 5*.
Using a DD on the action itself outright improves it by 20.
*Absent crits.
- Location
- United states
Should point out that compared to everyone else the Sirens are actually pretty much one of the more friendlier xenos. Sure they may have the soul eating thing going on but they can actually be reason with and we did come to an agreement where they stop attacking humans as a whole and they have kept this agreement. From what I recall they even interact with some of our citizens in a way that isn't actually hostile.
Us being enemies would be a really bad thing considering that they aren't actively hostile to us and us being enemies would likely be us starting shit with them for no reason just because and screwing them over after taking everyone of value making us look even more untrustworthy. It would also just lead to the loss of lives by starting up aggresions with the sirens again. Which would also be bad in that it would likely be an eternal thing considering that trying to wipe them out would lead to Avernus kicking our shit in and likely deciding to genocide us for trying to wipe out another species.
Not saying that the Sirens and us have what people would exactly call a 'friendly' relationship but us being enemies is just not worth the trouble.
I honestly like the Sirens better than the Quartock. They have certainly been more useful. So far the Quartock have been what feels like a bottomless diplo action sink for no tangible gain.
- Location
- A Place Miserably Bereft of Cats
You mean except for the times they've given us elite troops to use? And that Aryz at least kind of sort of likes us, and is basically a one-man squadron? Give them time to grow, and expend some actions improving our relations. Keep in mind that their life cycle is way longer than most human's, so it'll take a long while for them to start properly growing in population.
When have those elite troops or their comander made any sort of tangible difference? Hell did they even fight the orks beyond defending themselves? Because I can;'t remember them doing so.
- Location
- Germany
The troops haven't mattered much, but Aryz himself is an impressive commander and has good influence on our side's moral and a bad one on the foes.
I think he has taken the field with us a few times and that should make a noticable difference.
Since he has never actually commanded anything meaningful (humans will not take his orders) he is precisely as useful as a block of wood right now. Just because something looks shinny in the abstract does not mean it cannot be worthless and so far the Quartok have been a net waste of actions.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Round 3 with Garkill, they kept an entire hoard of hundreds of millions occupied at Mallee.
One that other wise might have damaged one of our cities if it had joined up with the other hoards in the area.
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OK, I'll take your word for it. They are not entirely worthless, just not worth what was invested in them.