You relive the memories of others. As long as you maintain eye contact with a target (a tight hug may subtitute, where eye contact is impossible) you will notice whenever the target recalls something. Mention a topic, and you will sense the target’s mind accessing a particular engram. With a long enough conversation, you can map out a loose outline of the target’s life and knowledge.

Once you are aware of a memory, you can draw it out. The two of you will both be lulled into a lucid trance, your sensoria engulfed in a shared dream. Past events are recreated in vivid fidelity, and you vicariously experience another life. Many of these details will be confabulated and swiftly forgotten‍ ‍‍—‍ you can gain no more accurate knowledge of what happened than the target.

This recreation occurs at a substantial fraction of real time‍ ‍‍—‍ reliving several hours of someone’s life will still take hours. And in the end, you will be exhausted and headache‍-​ridden, but perhaps satisfied.

You discern relationships through conversation. You hear the tones deeper than undertones, the echoes inside the silence. Your range of hearing increases, and whenever you can hear two people engaging in conversation‍ ‍‍—‍ you need not be a participant, but all the better if you are‍ ‍‍—‍ then you can sense the inner dynamics animating each interlocutor, feel emotional ties vibrating.

This is not quite mind‍-​reading. This perception is too indistinct to discern the semantic content of a target’s thought‍ ‍‍—‍ only the target’s judgments and feelings are plain, but this is still more than a mood‍-​summation.

Specifically, you can parse out any references to other minds. Most obviously, you know how a target feels about whom the target is talking to, but after you’ve felt out someone’s mental signature, you can catch when anyone else is talking about that prior target.

Most of all, this sense is automatic. You need not strain to hear the conversation and follow every exchange‍ ‍‍—‍ and you certainly can’t listen to all the chatter in a room full of people‍ ‍‍—‍ but intuitively you know whom every conversation is about.

You scan the working memory of people through their attention. Touch the target, make a noise, catch the eye‍ ‍‍—‍ whenever you’re nearby and on the target’s mind, you can perceive your surroundings within that mind.

Their mood is instantly clear to you. With a moment’s inspection, anything that just happened, anything the target is primed to expect, everything the target intends, all is yours to know. But no amount of focusing will reveal long‍-​term memories or subconscious thoughts.

Put practically, this ability allows you a brief, vague answer to a one‍-​sentence question without asking. They can only refuse to answer by ignoring you‍ ‍‍—‍ retreating from your touch, covering the ears, looking away. And don’t think of a pink mindreader.

You study targets and extrapolate behavior. You gain the ability to secrete a special ink and craft a special type of notebook. In such a notebook, you must record observations. Each notebook has a target, a mind you wish to better understand. By writing down observations‍ ‍‍—‍ transcriptions of one’s speech, imitations of one’s handwriting, logs of one’s schedule or lack thereof‍ ‍‍—‍ you refine a predictive model.

You can write a question in the notebook and meditate on it; you will then enter a flow state and produce an answer that seems a revelation even as you write it.

Passive observation yields a meager model, though its deficiencies wane steadily with more observations. Your predictions will be more accurate than could be logically deduced from the accumulated notes‍ ‍‍—‍ but still fallible. This model can only answer questions about the target’s past thoughts, feelings, and actions. (Often, the answer may be once true‍ ‍‍—‍ but not now.)

However, if the notebook’s target writes a binding signature within, it becomes an enriched model. An enriched model is meta‍-​infallible; whenever you lack enough information to know the answer, you can feel that fact, and you know what observations are sufficient to patch the hole. (Often something small and subtle‍ ‍‍—‍ you are keener than logical deduction, after all.)

Further, an enriched model can answer hypotheticals. You can write out a fantasy in your notebook, and the target writhes like the real thing.

You can read information from a more perfect medium. Brains are flawed lobes of fat, evolution’s best effort, but “higher” animals were always life’s wasteful offshoot. Microbes are far more numerous and far more aggressively honed for purpose. After studying mycelial networks and biofilms, you’ve devised a slime that can store engrams more densely and reliably than neural tissue.

Given access to a brain, you can extract and preserve its skills, memories, and personality into about two cups of slime. (This destroys the brain.) It takes half a cup of nutrient slurry to sustain this slime for a day‍ ‍‍—‍ at least while “awake.” If not fed, the slime enters a deliquesced hiberation state, which can persist indefinitely.

Slimification takes several days of expensive, painstaking work, requiring more care according to how exact a copy you wish to archive. A slapdash extraction can be performed in a single day, producing a rough approximation of its source mind, as if newly victim to substantial brain damage. If the target is already dead, the results likewise degrade according to how much time has passed.

The slime is incapable of much other than growing and digesting. It is delicate and not suited to surviving outside of lab conditions. Emulation of consciousness occurs within its filaments‍ ‍‍—‍ this is the most algorithmically straightforward way to answer most queries‍ ‍‍—‍ but subjects are not aware of the substrate, both for reasons of fidelity and for fact the alien sensorium of the slime would challenge one’s sanity.

Updating an archive with new information is possible, but it is recommending to create a backup first.

Your writing is intrinsically clear. You can secrete a special ink, and when you write symbols with it, anyone viewing the writing experiences disambiguating synesthesia. When you write a sentence with a concrete referent, the target experience this (whether visual or otherwise) as a hallucation, a dream the target can awake from at will.

You can convey your tone by imbuing impressions of your facial expressions and body language. You cannot, as a rule, convey abstract concepts as clearly. (How would you convey “illegal” to someone who never lived in a state with a rule of law?)

If the target doesn’t speak your language or share enough of your knowledge and assumptions, you cannot reliably convey anything more than sensory information and procedural instructions. It shall still be strictly better than writing in mundane ink.

The effect is indiscriminate, and all readers will have a comparable experience. You cannot force a target to believe what you have written, only understand it‍ ‍‍—‍ though the hallucinations are subtle enough that incautious targets may not realize this is anything more than exceptionally effective writing.

You can give compelling suggestions. When you give a simple command‍ ‍‍—‍ one word, perhaps a single direct object or modifier, such as “run” or “drop your weapon” or “let me enter”‍ ‍‍—‍ then the target will experience this as a good reason to follow it.

If and while unable to follow your command, the target will be distressed, but the urge to follow recedes once the target feels any action has been brought to completion. A target can only be subject to one such compulsion at once. If a target is given back‍-​to‍-​back commands, the target will notice your undue control.

When giving a commands, you can modulate its effects:

the effect is weaker‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s a reason, not a good one‍ ‍‍—‍ and the restriction on stacking commands or targets noticing chains commands no longer apply.

the effect is stronger‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s an outright need to comply‍ ‍‍—‍ and the target notices immediately, and you cannot affect this target again.

If a target doesn’t realize the compulsion, the target can rationalize the actions after the fact. You can affect charisma by peppering your speech with weak commands, asking for favors and letting the targets convince eachself it was a good idea.

You can transmit your thoughts. You have learned how to weave your mind into lines of thought‍ ‍‍—‍ literal strings that extend your nervous system. (Perhaps it begins with a strand of hair.)

Even at a distance, you can “pluck” these strings, activating each with a single idea: one word, a glimpsed image, a sourceless emotion.

This is only meaningful as a form of communication: when the threads are sutured into a target’s flesh, not unlike a piercing, then the target becomes receptive to your thoughts. More strings increase your bandwidth: with dozens of strings, you can at once convey a fully‍-​formed sentence.

Still, each target must be individually calibrated. Perhaps after the procedure, as the target sleeps, you half‍-​consciously strum the strings, tuning the resonance so that your red is the same as the target’s. Not every thought you send can come across clearly, but the target can pluck your own strings to question or clarify.

Though you can suppress the target’s ability to give feedback, you cannot control what the target choses transmit‍ ‍‍—‍ the rest of the nervous system remains beyond you.

But these are also puppet strings. All transmissions are a coercion, each forcing the target to think a certain thought, and when that thought is a command, it induces a weak preference to follow. You can simply ask what the target is thinking.

Finally, you can sustain a pluck, and the target will experience a sustained command as a good reason to comply for as long as you sustain it, or as a need should every string sustain the same command. A string that currently sustains a command cannot be used to transmit, and sustaining physically damages the body of the host‍ ‍‍—‍ even unto death.

You can drain the memories of others. You produce a fast‍-​acting drug that leaves a target woozy and unable to stand. They are sedated and suggestible, and when told to think of think of a certain event or topic, the information bubbles out. Literally‍ ‍‍—‍ a mnestic fluid is secreted in the blood.

By draining the target‍ ‍‍—‍ with a proper needle for drawing blood, or crude bloodletting‍ ‍‍—‍ you can extract the target’s memories. Glittering mnemolymph can be filtered and stored.

Memories taken this way are erased‍ ‍‍—‍ faded, overwritten, but the mind is quite the palimpsest. Events from last week will seem years distant. Importantly, integrated memories can still be vaguely recovered afterfact by determined reflection, but any memory extracted the same day, before the target has slept, will be gone without a trace.

(Memories can be extracted multiple times‍ ‍‍—‍ this is necessary if you seek to erode foundational engrams‍ ‍‍—‍ but the risk of damaging the psyche and distorting unrelated memories approaches certainty.)

While memories are being extracted, the target will babble out its contents‍ ‍‍—‍ this is worth recording, because mnemolymph is ultimately a liquid. It naturally settles into a thick and filamentous form, but it cannot preserve a cogent narrative.

When mnemolymph is injected into a drugged target, the suggestibility deepens to a trance: you will tell the target the contents of the memory being recovered, and the target must believe you to make sense of the overwhelming influx of information. Concepts will be retained‍ ‍‍—‍ you cannot inject a memory of the club and say the target was at church. But if three men were in a room and one was murdered, you dictate who killed him.

The memories need not be the target’s own, no more than your account needs to be accurate.

Your can separate your nervous system. An egg‍-​like nodule attaches not far from the base of your spine. It is capable of autonomous thought.

Over the course of several days, your will and intent is impressed upon this egg‍-​mind. You can feel when it is ready to be detatched. Given an hour to meditate, you can perform a final sorting and packing of your memory and desires, picking which ones to store inside the egg‍-​mind. You cannot fit your entire self inside it, not faithfully, but you can decide what partition of yourself would serve you best.

Once imprinted, the egg‍-​mind can detach completely and emerge. Your body remains in a fugue state not unlike sleepwalking. Besides persisting in patient stupor, your body remains capable of two things. If left with familiar means to prepare food, it is capable of feeding itself and other routine acts of maintainance. And if there is a target present (ideally bound or drugged asleep), then it will transfer the egg‍-​mind.

When the egg‍-​mind is placed inside the body of someone else‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s small enough to be swallowed with some difficulty, but surgery is more direct‍ ‍‍—‍ then the egg‍-​mind can integrate with the target’s nervous system. The ideal attachment site is the neck, and thus it shall not be swallowed completely.

(The egg‍-​mind is durable‍ ‍‍—‍ it cannot be chewed open‍ ‍‍—‍ but it can be destroyed. And should your body be put in mortal peril, it awakens from the fugue. Its memories and sense of identity will be left in an inconsistent state‍ ‍‍—‍ this should not be allowed to happen.)

Once attached, the egg‍-​mind‍ ‍‍—‍ you‍ ‍‍—‍ gain full control of the target’s body, now paralyzed akin to tetraplegia. You can kill the target at will, but as long as the target remains alive, the target is able to attempt to move the body, and you may allow this by proxy. (If implanted under anesthetia, the target may y et be unaware of your influence; you could take control only during sleep without awakening the target.)

Your access to the central nervous system (i.e. brain), as well as the motor and sensory systems of the head, remain limited as long as the target is alive: the target must grant you access and may revoke it.

When the target is exhausted of usefulness, you can detach from the body and be ejected from the body, perhaps accompanied by a vomit of blood. When your body sees the ejected egg‍-​mind, it will seize it and reconnect, integrating whatever memories you gained while possessing the target’s body.

You can swear binding oaths. By drawing your own blood and writing a statement of intent or belief, you bind yourself to it. Unless the writing is erased or the medium destroyed, you always act as if there is a good reason to behave in accord with it. If the text is underlined, you will feel you need to adhere.

You cannot erase or weaken already existing reasons for your behavior, so binding yourself to doing something you don’t want, or refusing something you desire, will cause yourself distress.

If you mix your blood with ink to create a tatoo, you will instate a vital preference to behave as bound, and you die if you cannot abide. Bindings written this way cannot be removed.

You can remember anything. In the morning, when you awaken from sleep, you will bleed from your eyes. Within this blood is mnemolymph, a distillation of the day’s events. The task of filtering and organizing these secretions is a matter of daily ritual. But so long as you retain a vial of the tears, you can ingest, inject, or instill them. This refreshes your memory to brilliant clarity.

You can take a nap at will, intent on reliving a certain memory. When you awaken, you will cry again. Each stream of tears is a copy of the same memory, so theoretically, your memories are renewable.

Anyone else who tries to instill your memories will experience an deluge of alien information. Their experience will be heavily inspired by your own‍ ‍‍—‍ agreeing mainly on matters of sensory specifics, but it will be a wild, hallucinogenic trip.

Processing it will be exhausting, but this is a skill the other can refine if the other opens up to the experience. But there’s a fine line between understanding you and becoming more like you.

Your concentration burns at both ends. Your mind extends outward, entwined with your hair. Though hair consists of dead cells, your own is imbued with strands of pure thought‍ ‍‍—‍ dormant, building up patiently like so much fuel. All it takes is a flame: set fire to your hair, and your thoughts come alive, quick and intensely energetic.

Of course, it’s safest if you cut your hair first (perhaps inhaling the smoke through a pipe or cigar) but it’s stronger if you don’t. Your brain ticks like an overclocked computer‍ ‍‍—‍ so much so your brow will slick with sweat.

In this burning flow state, you could read two hundred pages in half an hour and understand it all. You could improvise a speech exactly as structured and elegant as if you’d already drafted it all then rewritten from the start. When danger strikes and you must fight or flee, you react in real time as if you were a strategist plotting your moves for the turn.

Information perceived in a few seconds is processed as if you had a minute to think on it, and you’ll remember it so saliently enough you’re sure to recall and learn from it later.

It’s best not to overuse this, and not only because your hair doesn’t grow back any faster. If you do it more than about an hour a day, you’ll find yourself burnt out for days, perhaps even a weeks.

You can split your mind and focus. It has been conjectured that that the gut can be thought of as a mind unto itself, complementary to the central nervous system. For you, that’s a bit more than conjecture‍ ‍‍—‍ but there’s caveats.

Your enteric nervous system is not truly capable of operating autonomously‍ ‍‍—‍ rather, it’s equipped to integrate any neural tissue you ingest. The devoured brain is reanimated by symbiotic cancers and trained to supplement your cognition.

You can treat this necrocortex as an extension of your mind, augmenting your working memory, but it need not remain in sync‍ ‍‍—‍ you can freely delegate planning or brainstorming to proceed in the background while engaged in another activity.

And it’s more flexible still: you can subdivide the necrocortex, tasking half of it to pursue one thread of inquiry and point the other two quarters to another subtask each. With practice, you can grant the necrocortex read access to your sensory awareness and write access to your muscles, and thereby multitask the operation of your body.

The nature of the reanimation of devoured brains means they inevitably degrade and digest themselves. New brains must be eaten several times a month, though if consumed piecemeal, isomorphosis can be maintained.

Any higher mammal will suffice, but cannibalism offers the most efficient and compatible neural tissue.

You can memorize anything‍ ‍‍—‍ but not everything. Specifically, a part of your brain has altered and specialized itself into a xenocortex. Neural connections in this region are hyperplastic: at will, they can repotentiate to store a record of any information you desire. This is storage, and not learning. It is the most naïve encoding imaginable, each connection a 1:1 map of some symbolic unit of information. Far more inflexible and inefficient than true memory.

Being only a gyrus, the xenocortex can store at most a few kilobytes of information, written or read in exactly the time it takes for you to conceptualize such an operation. (Thus once you’re used to it, this goes much faster than literal reading or writing‍ ‍‍—‍ in practice, the bottleneck will instead be how fast you can read from or write to the external reference.)

But this is more than having a tablet inside your skull. After all, the main role of neurons is to execute. For a transcription of text or an image engraved, this “execution” is nothing more than its hallugenic recapitulation. But if you leave your xenocortex alone, its neurons learn and consolidate information‍ ‍‍—‍ and those new connections can then be read out.

The true power of the xenocortex is the ability to marshall all the data describing a region of your brain externally, express it as symbols on a page or an intricate tangle of woven fabric. The results will be an arcane mess, but definitionally, you have written it out in a form fit to be read back faithfully.

Effectively, you have save states for a region of your brain‍ ‍‍—‍ and you can deliberately mutate a record before you restore from it. Like this, you can freely redesign the neural circuits, experiment and and map the diverse qualia and cognition emergent from a configuration‍-​menagerie.

This ability is limited, perhaps even useless, if you don’t have a knack for programming. But what might one wrought, given the power to write cognitive assembly instructions? And if you meet other xenocortex users‍ ‍‍—‍ what might you become together?

You can create illusions. Your skin secrets special glamour‍-​oils imbued with intrinsic qualia. When handling any object, you will leave a coat of this glamour and can dictate how it shall be perceived so long as you’re touching it.

When you release the object, the glamour wanes over the course of hours or days (according to how thickly coated) or until the object is washed. (With practice and care, flakes of dead skin or microdrops of saliva suspended in breath can substitute for illusions intractable with glamour‍-​oil.)

Illusions can be sensory or conceptual. Each has its pitfalls‍ ‍‍—‍ a sensory illusion can be foiled by unaccounted senses (a rock charmed to look like gold will not feel as heavy or sound metallic when struck.) while a conceptual illusion is subjective (a stick charmed to seem like a gun will only perplex someone who doesn’t know what a gun is).

You can keep secrets‍ ‍‍—‍ or rather, they keep themselves. Whenever you wish to keep some information private, then anyone attempting to learn it from you (whether that means reading your mind, scrutinizing your body language, or simple eavesdropping) will find the endeavor successful.

It won’t be‍ ‍‍—‍ your trick is delivering a counter‍-​compulsion for the target to believe this has outsmarted you and revealed a secret, not realizing the falsehood. As it induces a fair preference, this won’t deter targets who seek ironclad certainty‍ ‍‍—‍ but if the target is checking whether you’ve become aware of being observed or whether you have defenses against spies… you can parry that perception, too.

This cloaking effect has limits‍ ‍‍—‍ there is no effect if the target learns the secret from someone other than you; and if keeping this “secret” entails denying observable reality (parrying the perception that you’re standing in plain view, say), then the target’s senses take precedence. At most you’ll force a double‍-​take, a moment of hesitation: and even when the target have the true answer, there’ll always be that one doubt nagging.

You can create and program anomalous memes. When you speak, the act holds so many dimension, variable of conveyance beyond those ever pinned to semantic meaning‍ ‍‍—‍ the timings between syllables, a microtonal lilt to your words. You can fit parasites into those subperceptible mutations of meaning.

Simply pronounce a few word somewhat oddly in rapid succession, and the construct will prove unexpectedly durable, transmitting intact to other speakers. But the true power is when the phrases get earworm‍-​stuck, muttered under the breath unconsciously. Those accented syllables rearrange themselves, animated by a logic known only to you.

Like this, you are able to create covert informorphs that infect and cogitate within others‍ ‍‍—‍ verbally transmitted diseases. Your infomorphs are able to extract information from the hosts according to how integrated the memetic vector is with a host’s thoughts. When speaking to the host of your infomorph, the infomorph can communicate through the same subtle speech‍-​alterations.

In this way, your infomorph swarm is like a grand surveillance network lodged in the population’s own minds.

Infomorphs cannot compel host behavior beyond accenting speech to replicate, compute, and coordinate. In particular, you can induce a weak preference to remember and echo the inflected words. Given any reason or distraction, the host will refuse.

Thus, this ability is most effective if paired with a means to make inflected speech compelling (artistic expression or ideological agitation, perhaps), or forthright disclosure of the purpose and thus recruitment of targets who want to be host to your informorphs.

You can collect dreams into a new reality. What, after all, is the line between the two?

Birds and cetaceans exhibit a phenomena called unihemispheric sleep: one eye closes and half the brain rests. You can take this a step further, walking the world always half‍-​dreaming.

You can sleep normally; you may still fall enthralled to nonsense and nightmares‍ ‍‍—‍ but lucidity comes to you as easy as a deep breath. When you are aware of your dreams, you gain all the usual control over their contents‍ ‍‍—‍ but your awareness extends metaphysically. You are aware of the dreams of others, should any be sleeping nearby.

When in physical contact (sleepwalking is among your new skills) with any dreamer, you can enter the target’s dreams. You control your appearance and behavior, which influences the narrative and assocations, but should you prompt the target to lucidity, the target’s authority will trump yours.

Any messages you transmit will be easily forgotten upon awakening, unless the target is in the habit of keeping a dream journal. But even if the waking mind forgets, when you visit the target’s dreams again, it’s all back in a rush; like this one can live a double life, or perhaps the ineffable importance of these dreams becomes subconscious certainty even as the visions themselves wash away.

If, that is, the target ever awakens: once you have entered a dream, you control whether the target rouses. Otherwise as the target’s sleep cycle progresses, you will remain a persistent element in all the target’s dreams.

And the target likewise becomes a part of your dream. Even should your bodies separate, you remain inseparable in the dream‍-​world. Perhaps that ought be literal‍ ‍‍—‍ is it not exactly what shall arise, once you have several dreamers together bound: a world of your own creation? A library of minds, a universe of inviolable will, to which you are the conduit‍-​bridge.

Once one has had a taste of this cathexis, would it not be reasonable to pledge oneself servant and protector of this lucid collective? Let the dreamers sleep forevermore, and praise you their god.

You are able to coarsely manipulate crowds. Consider a wave rippling across a densely packed audience: the collective becomes a gestalt medium of its own, dependent on but indepedent of individuals. You can make those waves just by willing it. This is the power to control the many.

With a sweep of your hand, you can nudge a throng of people to move toward the right side of the room. After all, it may be that should one person drifts rightward by a single chance step, then the person beside them shall as well, simply to enjoy the extra free space, or as part of an emphatic gesture amid their reply to the drifter. And then the people beside them shall follow. If someone bumps into someone, they’ll back off‍ ‍‍—‍ and if they bump into someone else? With this chain reaction, the crowd doesn’t just float right, it accelerates.

If all this could happen by random chance, it can happen by your will. This power dwells in those self‍-​fulfilling prophecies, the things the crowd might do because the crowd does them.

It’s almost physics. You can make a crowd cluster or fan out, amoeba‍-​walk this way or that, almost like abstract telekinesis. What you can’t do is single out a single person, dictate what they must do‍ ‍‍—‍ that person would only do something with a reason for it, which is beyond your domain.

Chants and applause are easy, but if you hold a crowd under sway for long enough, convey ideas complex enough, you’ll notice curious fractal emerging‍ ‍‍—‍ and looking back at you.

This is an egregore, a collective aware of itself as a collective. This gnosis may dissolve as soon as it arise, but if it doesn’t (and once you work for long enough, you’ll necessarily meet the ones that don’t) this means the egregore prefers to remain awake. Yes, it prefers‍ ‍‍—‍ it has a will that is not a will of any member of the crowd… nor a will of your own.

And when such an entity is aware of itself and aware of you, it must soon becomes aware that it is many and you are one. This is the power to control the many‍ ‍‍—‍ but did you think it was you who held this power?

You can control over every nerve in your body. Much like breathing, all of the processes in within you proceed automatically, but now, nothing is truly involuntary. In large part this makes you exceedingly vulnerable to those inconveniences like noticing the placement of your tongue in your mouth. You can feel every folicle of hair growing, the contractions of the muscles in your gut, and a thousand homeostatic adjustments.

But in turn, the chemical reactions in brain and blood are yours to direct. You control when you gain weight and muscle. Sleep, hunger, arousal, pain, all happen when you deem appropriate‍ ‍‍—‍ though you aren’t immune to the needs otherwise signaled. Spikes of adrenalin and cortisol assail you only when useful.

Dopamine and serotonin, too. Be careful.

You can rebalance the strength of your other abilities.

Long before the function of blood was even understood, differences of persoanlity were attributed to the balance of different fluids. After centuries of influence, the idea retreated with the advance of science, persisting now mainly in the etymology of certain words.

Your own abilities vary in strength according to the concentration of certain psychic substances‍ ‍‍—‍ perhaps the humorists were latent psychics, or maybe vague coincence smiled upon them.

Sanguine concerns emotions; caloric cognition; melancholy memory; phelegmatic sensation. By increasing the balance of one humor, you amplify your power over certain regions of the mind, at cost of becoming impotent and insensate to others. You can redistribute these at will.

As above, so below. Unbalancing your humors also affects your personality, add new limitations to your abilities.

Lacking sanguinity doesn’t limit your ability to target emotions, your abilities begin to unconsciously activate or become unusable at whim; lacking caloric imposes arbitrary rules and requirements.

You can comprehend the breadth and extent of consciousness. What is the mind? The extended mind thesis has expanded the boundaries cognition to include the tools and media an intelligence engages in. By what arbitration must we conclude that a mindreader can discern the meaning of neural chemistry but remains impotent to peer any deeper into an intricate creation entwined in feedback with it?

Alas, this enlightment can only be partial. No mind has ever mastered every art; though many have climbed to the peak of one and declared it the highest‍ ‍‍—‍ nay, the fundamental principle others can but imitate or approximate.

Bibliomancy

You perceive the mind in writing. What more perfectly encapsulates the mind? The written word is a distillation of thought, and thus no text in any language is indeciperable to you. Handwritten text bears the clearest imprint of its author, but the author is dead. Is not the true mind at work in the abstract form of language itself, a densely, richly linked connectome? Each word is a neuron for a shared brain‍ ‍‍—‍ and each with each book read, you commune.

Technomancy

You perceive the mind in mechanism. Are we not all automata assembled by our haphazard evolution? Whether the cogs of a clockwork, or the shuttles of the punch‍-​card loom, or the circuitry of a computer, the dim reckoning of nascent minds is unmistakable. Shall we not build them up in our image? You gain a preternatural knack for tinkering, and can translate any thought process to mechanism‍ ‍‍—‍ though you may not yet have enough cogs to build it.

Zoomancy

You perceive the mind in animal. Is it not rank chauvinism to think only humans have minds worth knowing and swaying? It’s easy to recognize intelligence in those social creatures easily taught‍ ‍‍—‍ dogs or crows or even mice‍ ‍‍—‍ but even bees and roaches can learn and love. Mesmerism, that old theory of animal magnetism, was never substantiated. But seeing how naturally creatures of all types are drawn fondly to you, it’s almost worth reëxamination

Geomancy

You perceive the mind in home. It’s tiresome cliché to repeat that line about where the heart is‍ ‍‍—‍ but would it be so oft‍-​repeated for no reason? You are keen to the personality innate to the decoration and dwelling of a space, the lingering scents and substance, the hauntology of it all. This sensitivity allows for a kind of self‍-​improvement feng shui: your home becomes a mind palace. Its organization is psychically linked to your memory and mood. By this same token, you cannot enter another’s home uninvited‍ ‍‍—‍ even those who allow your presence may not realize how deeep an influence they are assenting to.

Necromancy

You perceive the mind beyond flesh. Is there life after life? With all of the abilities you have access to, the existence of the soul should not come as much surprise. The mind that exuberately limned the brain’s activity is not easily extinguished‍ ‍‍—‍ even after death the essence lingers and drifts. Desperately clinging to a world that has lost a place for them… that you are perhaps uniquely endowed with awareness of this plight is not entirely a boon. These phantoms are rotten derelicts‍ ‍‍—‍ but may yet have serve your ends.

In addition to the described benefits, gaining one of these abilities also enhances others‍ ‍‍—‍ each option broadens what constitutes a valid target for any other abilities that concerns the minds of others.

You exist and conceive and decide metaphysically prior to the material world. Shadows on the cave walls, it’s all shadows on the cavern walls. You understand, now, that all this was prefigured, all of this is a false approxmiation. This gnosis reveals to you the world of forms‍-​in‍-​themselves‍ ‍‍—‍ mathematical noumena. You haven’t just seen this light‍ ‍‍—‍ you are of this light.

When you make a decision, you exercise your free will, thus enforcing‍-​creating a mathematical truth. You determine the result of a function mapping stimulus to response, as inexorably as 2+2=4. Your body is a collection of atoms that roughly aligned with function, without actually determining it. Roughly? That won’t do it at all.

Your power allows you to correct deficiencies in the implementation of your ontological autonomy. That which diminute your will is negated, whether it’s random flux or the manipulations of another.

…But a crucial question: what are “you”? Which implementation? Your nature as a mathematical function means that the body you once considered synonymous with you is approximation colinear with other incomplete instances‍ ‍‍—‍ such as the internal expectations of close friends.

Your body, being the best model of you, also wields the greatest portion of this power. So as time goes on, it more than any other, will better reflect your ideal metaphysical self, but other reflections of you nearby will likewise gravitate‍-​transcend thereto.

Different instances of you have no special ability to communicate with each other, but they will coordinate as a rule, by simple fact that you can rely 2+2=4 holding anywhere, and you can rely on f_you(x) computing the same value everywhere.

This also means that anyone seeking to predict you comes to perfectly anticipate your behavior; and like this one can cunningly plan around you, so long as this one don’t listen to what the hypothetical you in this one’s head says. But when one does?

You had decided, ontologically, what it means to be you before any planet or star or atom had yet formed. So what better first words‍ ‍‍—‍ axiomatic truth‍ ‍‍—‍ could you pick, than “I have already won.”