Notes on Umbracogs
What is an umbracog?
Put simply, an umbracog molds enervate in their brain. Its antumbra reacts with neurotransmitters and itself, augmenting cognition. Every sapient bug in the heartlands is an umbrcog of some development, because nouform cognition is what allows for intelligence.
Given that, why is an umbracog, in the colloquial sense, meant as something strange and rare? Why does every bug not boast their mental gifts, why are they not all masters of the psychic arts?
There are three principle reasons.
First is the danger: umbracognition requires more enervate, thus increasing the concentration of enervate greatly increases the risk: no tissue is safe from deliquescence, least of all the delicate fat of the brain.
Second is vulnerability. Danger comes not only from within, but without. There are virulent thoughts, hazardous moods, and vast, remote entities beyond flesh whose only limb is psychic manipulation. More enervate almost as a rule means more susceptibility to umbracognitive assaults.
These two reasons account for why one is not already an umbracog; that is, why the principles of mutation and persistence would not lead powerful umbracogs to proliferate. But there’s a reason why one cannot simply become an umbracog by wishing it so.
Third is mere resource scarcity. Bugs naturally utilize about as much enervate as they can get, and metabolizable enervate isn’t naturally abundant.
So how does one become an umbracog?
The safest and most reliable method is the slowest. It entails years of specific meditation, and is all but impossible without an experienced umbracog to monitor one’s progress, ensure that it’s done correctly. Umbracognition requires an excess of psi-nrv, so the method means finding a taxing mental exercise that depletes the brain’s volatile enervate fastest. Hours are spent each day repeating this exercise hundreds, thousands of times. The constant depletion, although physically painful (it’s daily migraines for years) stimulates the body to metabolize more enervate to replenish. When the exercises are stopped, the body’s attempted at homeostasis throws the brain into excess, awash with a slight bit more enervate. The aspiring umbracog must carefully utilize this to forge the mental pathways that will enable their future abilities. Carefully, because any mistake or waste of enervate may set them back weeks or months in their training.
For obvious reasons, this is essentially only an option for monks who spend their lives in simple seclusion.
The second method is similar, but accelerated through the use of drugs. Umbracognition requires enervate, so why not simply directly add more enervate? But not any enervate will do; only specific metabolites can slip past the blood-brain barrier and affect the mind. Psychoactive mushrooms are the tool of choice, but they are remarkably prohibited substance in the heartlands.
This way, an aspirant might become a practicing umbracog in a year or two. Still, the risk is frontloaded: a bad trip can lead to permanent mental damage, if not death. This method is on a spectrum with the previous; one might take a single tripe or two, in order to breakthrough bottlenecks, while otherwise pursuing pure meditation; or another might add more trips or microdoses up to one’s tolerance for risk.
But the easiest method of all to become an umbracog is to already be one. Some individuals happen to be born with a genetic quirk that increases their natural metabolism which may allow them to naturally manifest umbracog abilities.
This is quite rare. Not only does one need the uncommon potential to become a natural umbracog, you need to grow up in an environment that offers the excess of metabolizable enervate needed, and then you neeed the talent and luck to succeed in instinctively using the abilities and thus develop a lasting faculty.
For all that it requires exceptional luck, there’s something very unlucky about being a natural umbracog, too. The trait is misnamed; though it’s innate, there’s nothing natural about umbracognitive techniques, and it’s common for an untrained mind to flail against itself, make grievous mistakes that leave lasting damage to their mind before they find someone to guide them.
All this talk of training, but what are they training for? What do umbracogs do?
This is an paralyzingly broad question. After all, umbracognition arguably encompasses barely anything less than ‘doing stuff with your brain’. There are many umbracognitive arts that do not fit with what is usually understood as such. For this reason, we will not discuss weevil hylocultivation, nor euvespid seal inscription, despite both of these having an inexricable nouform component. Nor will we delve into mantid’s forgotten pineal arts, nor the reaver’s gemsinging — or their affliction of sable-cap cordyceps, which is umbracognitive (if being a foreign agent doesn’t disqualify it). Not the myweft of spinner ants, which has a slight bit of psi-nrv. Even the eyes of the perspective are beyond our scope, for all that the arch-percipients might seem very on-topic.
No, here we only intend to grapple with the basics, the fundamental and universal mechanics.
There are two sides to the umbracognitive coin, at once linked yet competing. They are the principles of nouprojection and noudistortion.
If the nous is thought of as like a image, one can alter the lens through which the image is focused, or alter the image. Thus, put crudely, a projectique can view or alter another’s mind, and a distortique can defend from their ministrations.
Both effects, nonetheless, are achieved their the control of ones own faculties. The parameters involved can be broadly classed into two spectra: first is radiance. A nous may be bright or dark; this can be measured by the amount of enervation it emits. A bright mind’s influence stretches farther, increasing the range of its projection, but also making its presence that much more obvious to the sensitive. A dark mind can hide from them, at the cost of diminishing its own influence, but also grant it a greater sensitivity as well.
The second spectrum is temperature: a hot mind is ever-shifting, flexible and adaptable, learning quickly but forgetting just as easily. A cold mind is one fixed in shape, rigid and slowly shifting, with a long memory.
At what point can an umbracog no longer be a bane because of their vespers' privacy? What happens if they become too good of an umbracog anyway?
There are an additional reasons umbracog banes are so rare, beyond it being a difficult, dangerous art and it being effective enough to fake it with neurobane techniques.
Although one can debate over whether vespers have minds, they definitely do have a *nous*, in the sense that they metabolize psi-nrv.
Umbracog development requires an excess of psi-nrv precursors, and where do those metabolites come from? They enter the body through the digestive system — where, of course, a vesperbane nurses a certain intermediary.
Vespers need more psi-nrv than a mantis does, so when a vesperbane attempts the usual routes of attaining umbracognition, it fails. Their brains never build up the requisite excess of enervate, not before the vespers seize it. This theft is no harm to the host, and well within the terms of the septagrammaton.
(Indeed, it's can be construed as a kindness, not unlike healing wounds or disposing of parasites; for even successful umbracog do some damage to their brains.)
Now, there are spellbinder rituals which can create injunctions against the vespers interfering a bane's attempts to interfere with umbracog development — but those who perform such rituals often go crepuscular. Which way the causality goes, however, is hard to say.
To answer your question, when they bring it upon themselves. Vespers are adept at concealing themselves, and their nous does not resemable a bug's nous; an umbracog could not invade their privacy by accident.
Much in the way you could not examine a dark room without opening the door and shining your flashlight (and thereby revealing yourself), nor break encryption without making an effort to do so, an umbracog could not discern and decipher a vesper's private emissions without meaning to.
And, particularly given that they're in the same body, if the cog is listening, the vespers will know.
(Although... a truly exceptional umbracog might be able to listen carefully and distort their knowledge of such to evade detection... for a time.)