018 - Magic 6
Divination
Good | Life | Mind
This magic can also have no affinity, and be taken by human Alphazon agents with observers.
Also known as tactical magic, Divination is magic of knowledge, information, data. This school of magic presents data to the caster in a manner adapted to their sensibilities and expectations. Past witches used to rely on acquiring data through stargazing, runecasting, smoke, reflections, or crystal balls, but conceptual refinement of modern witches (At your option) allows direct data interpretation within your own minds eye in your field of view. Divination has a RANK 0 effect: Sending. A witch can telepathically attempt to link with any intelligent being they have met to attempt to message them via text, voice, live image, or with r5: telepresence, as though you were face to face, even seeing their local surroundings. Sending can be rejected or the sender blocked.
Rank 1
Divination begins with the spell Identify: A quick spell needing only a single word chant, it will provide basic public details about a target you can see. Such as publicly recognized names and 1 popular detail. As simple as identifying a rock, followed by an obvious observation about it. Can give you the name of a public figure and a factoid about why they're a public figure, and their most known title. Such as - "Alyssia, Queen of X, known to have stolen the crown from her sister by subversion."
Rank 2
Identify: Can now reveal magical qualities of items or active magical effects, the type of magic, affinities involved, and expected effects. You also now gain the Status spell, which reveals any ongoing effects that alter the normal function of the target, up to the caster's ranks in Divination. For example: Burned, Poisoned, Diseased, Cursed.
You have the spell Augury, which can give you a Positive, Negative, or Neutral response to a question regarding events in the next 30 minutes.
Rank 3
Identify: Can now passively toggle effects, with things such as seeing names over peoples heads, or in your preferred display method, and priority relevant information.
Status: Now reveals more specific information, and can passively nest information along side Identify. Example: Burned: Hellfire, 4 minutes. Diseased: Viral, PX320, 2 weeks.
You now learn the spell Map. By using this spell you map out the area with a line of sight pulse to produce map data you can review in whatever display method your divination manifests. You can view this information top-down in blueprint or aerial mode, or as a full 3D view. You can place custom markers and use Identify retroactively later on on your mapped information, which can identify Friend or Foe. With passive focus you can leave Map active to continue to generate your map data. You also have the spell Archive, which allows you to store information you see, like taking a photo, or scanning the visible contents of a page of information you can see and can keep track of items in your witchery Pocketspace, or owned properties. Augury can apply to the next 12 hours.
Gain the spell Foresight, with a quick ritual chant you can enter a precognitive battle meditation allowing you to see .5 second into the future, with visual shadows leading events.
Rank 4
Identify: Unless masked by wards or countermeasures, Identify now reveals private information like your private name (Not True Name), main place of residence, factions, and your ranks in magic specializations, perks, owned relics, and major relations (Companions, Family, Romantic entanglements, etc).
Status: Now reveals the source of the status effect, how long it has been applied, and predicted results (ie; Death in 2 minutes), and suggestions on counteracting the status.
Map: Mapping can now work retroactively through your memories to generate map data of places you've already been and it now requires no focus to keep active, and it automatically applies Identify information to map data. You now learn the spell Lock-On, which can bind another spell effect to targets or locations you mark with active mapping, within sight, your spell will gain 20x normal range and will home in on the marked target with the maneuverability of a basic paper airplane, if guided and propelled.
Archive no longer needs to see the information, so long as you can touch, say a book, it you can scan the contents of information. You can then do searches through its contents.
Augury can apply to the next 48 hours, and you can feel rough Bad Omens of significantly harmful events within the next month. By holding someone's hand you can fish for omens specific to them. Foresight extends 1.5 seconds ahead. With focused concentration you can actively play out a predicted series of events for up to 1 hour ahead, only a few seconds would have passed in your mind. However, it cannot incorporate unknown factors. If an unknown factor would alter events, those events appear distorted proportionally to how badly something is interfering.
Rank 5
Identify: Identify now reveals True Names. Identifying a magic effect identifies the original caster. Identifies Complications and similar weaknesses. It Identifies a person's Disposition, their favorability towards you (Hostile, disliked, neutral, amicable, ally, low level love, high level love, etc), or to others relevant to you or nearby.
Status: Now reveals subversive statuses on enemies or allies. For example: "Casting Fireball, Doing homework, Walking to door, Contemplating murder", and works with Map.
Map: Any location you have previously mapped now remains as a Live feed map you can observe through your map interface, unless the influence is wiped by some means such as dispelling magics, or the new spell Masking. Your mapping can also generate an intangible spirit body through which you can observe and map new terrain remotely, placed anywhere you have mapped before. Archive can now archive the contents of documents like books remotely through map data, and record full sensory experiences that can be shared as a mote of light to playback information on contact. Lock-On can now be applied from remote map viewing, and your locked on spells gain indefinite range or can manifest from somewhere in the sky over the mapped area, and you can line up a sequence of actions to take all at once, such as locking onto an arbitrary number of targets to target with a series of spells in order or at once. Masking can purge local map data of any live feeds, and actively block it in mapping radius around you, or cast to alter or manipulate data that could be displayed to Identify or Status. You could instead alter map data to show things that aren't there, or subtract something specific. Augury can apply to the next week. You can feel bad omens of significantly harmful events within the next year. Catastrophic events within 5 years. Apocalyptic within 100, and you feel a rough idea of the broad strokes of what will happen without detail. You can use Augury on omens to try to narrow in on a sharper picture of the truth of what happens. You can now fish for Good Omens roughly correlated to a subject held in mind, such as "Will I find love?" or "Will I get the job?", etc, generally limited to yes/no/maybe impressions. Foresight can extent to 3 seconds ahead and includes tactile information, such as feeling an echo of a surprise attack yet to come from behind. You can predictively skim ahead up to a 24 hour period. Unknown factors now appear as local distortions around silhouetes of the unknown elements themselves, but you can roughly see what happens such that "A humanoid figure will appear the window in 3 hours", however missing information can also be presented this way, such as a known figure being treated as an unknown because they wont be there as expected. Your Foresight can also now be anchored to a bad omen to observe a 24 hour window of events centered on that omen. Actions taken can of course alter events, or reveal unknown factors on repeat viewings.
Aethernautics
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Aethernautics is the magical studies of cosmological principles, planar physics, and spatial geometries. It's a field of magic used to safely explore the aether as well as long employed by astrologists and astronomers since ancient times to better gleen insights from the stars above. It's utility in exploring space rather than the aether is a relatively more recent phenominon, as space proves more difficult to navigate than the aether.
Rank 1
You learn the ability to receive the true name of cosmic bodies. If you see a star, planet, asteroid, etc, you can instinctively recognize its true name. You can name a cosmic body to instinctively sense its position in the sky and its distance to you. You gain a sharper mind for intuitively comprehending spatial geometry and distances.
Rank 2
You can now passively maintain the awareness of 3 cosmic body in your minds eye at once to have an accurate understanding of your position on a cosmic scale. Through meditation, you can isolate your body from the effects of the vaccuum of space, from temperature and pressure, to radiation, and particle impact of mundane matter moving at over mach 8 up to light speed. By focusing in a direction when free floating, you can move in that direction at walking pace.
Rank 3
You can passively maintain awareness of up to 100 cosmic bodies at once for a sharper understanding of your position with ample room for tracking bodies for curiosity's sake or any reason, which can now include any object you can see or are sufficiently aware of that is not fixed to a superior body (ie: A satellite in space, but not a building on the ground, or a flying plane. A moon, but not an astronaut or rover. etc.), unless it has some means of shielding itself from detection. Your freefloating movement is now up to the speed of your witchery broom, or you could of course simply use your broom itself. You now have spatial comprehension and magical connection sufficient that you can harmlessly create folds in space to link two points of space you can see, which lasts until you lose focus. If you have portals, this can be used for permanent fixed folds in space as a gateway. A fold is the size of a doorway and has no effect on the area that might conceptually be within the folded area itself. From the vantage of the fold, you can see space magnify or twist to the intended destination on the other side of the fold as though bringing that point in space closer to yourself.
Rank 4
You can maintain awareness of thousands of cosmic bodies. You gain the ability to exit an aetheric sphere, including the boundary of a pocketspace such as in witchery 5, to view a colorful space-like void of cosmic constructs, clouds, and crystal spheres- aetheric spheres. You can learn their true name the way you learn the name of cosmic bodies, allowing you to maintain relativity in this space beyond classical spatial awareness, to find your way in the infinite expanse of conceptual realities. Each sphere is another reality, or rogue demiplane, pocketspace, plane, or realm. If you know the true name of one such body or the creator entity who made one, you can comprehend it's position to you allowing you to arbitrarily move through the aether to find that sphere, and unless protected, you can enter it. Moving dimensions is easier than moving in space, planar vs space travel, the difference between a dot moving across the page, vs bleeding up or down to other pages in a stack. Travel in the aether is easy as space does not truly exist here, your floating movement alone would be sufficient to travel great distances in its infinite expanse, as movement is based on intention, belief, and knowledge. You could now survive in the void with your meditation, but the void is not the aether, it is nonexistence, nothingness.
The aethernaut's space folding can now fold areas the size of a football field, creating large wall-like folds of space leading elsewhere, or creating geometries that can cover that area, such as pinching or twisting off that space entirely to fold the surroundings in on itself and hiding that football field sized area. Any aethernaut can percieve these twists and unfold them. This may also create areas of expanding space, such that a hallway could be twisted in a way that attempted movement continuously appears to elongate the space, or create repeating patterns. This can do shenaniganry such as turning around to see a continuation of what's in front of you, where one came from lost. These twists can still be anchored as gates. Twisted areas interfere with teleportation and planar magics, preventing use within, putting an area on planar lockdown.
Additionally, you can alter the relationship with gravity of yourself or another being or object you touch, redirecting it into a new direction relative to a new surface or point, which can be incorporated into twisted areas allowing relative gravity to any given surface, or static surfaces within the area.
Rank 5
Awareness of millions of cosmic bodies. If you know the true name of a witch of the same rank as you or less, you can breach the spheres containing their pocketspaces to force entry if otherwise protected. Once in, you can create normal portals to let others in. You can also lockdown pocketspaces, or demiplanes that are smaller than the size of Texas, or any Domain (including a Combat Zone), to prevent dimensional travel or teleportation effects until released. If another effect would dispell it or another aethernaut of equal rank to you tries to dismiss this lockdown, it is a contest of wills until one loses focus.
The aethernaut's folding can encompass the space of a large village or small town, and can include distortions in time- the area can be locked into a loop or paradox of repeating events, not effecting aethernauts with their meditation or warded witches. The aethernaut can now project a "spotlight" of starry ripples that visibly distort space, they can project their influence to alter gravitational relationships at a distance from themselves up to 60m in a narrow cone of influence, as though touching targets to alter their subjective gravity. Alternatively, they can effect local gravity to a surface by effecting that surface itself instead of a specific target's own experience, turning a wall or ceiling into the floor, so to speak, up to a 1km area of influence.
The aethernaut can now cause harmful sheers in space, these manifest as black distortions warping space around them, and must start from the aethernaut's location, traveling like a tear up to the speed of an arrow, and within line of sight of the aethernaut, leaving a the sheer behind as it travels. This will leave scars on space that aethernauts can detect. This sheering can be a Line like a thick cable, or a wall up to 1ft wide and 20ft tall. The length is abitrary, growing until the aethernaut stops tearing. This bypasses any physical resistance, but will make you lots of enemies for its use equivalent to causing a radioactive spill, including causing actual radiation comparable to an X-Ray per 15 seconds of proximity.
The aethernaut at this rank is disjointed from coherent time, their body will not age and they can slide their body up or down to age themselves, this does not undo harm or illness, as though they were always that age to begin with prior to said harm. Should time be stopped by powers up to rank 10 equivalent, the aethernaut will remain active as normal, unaffected.