Psyches Personae

Although less than twenty espers occupy the highest echelons of authority, many others carve out their own niches in the psychic landscape – many of them quite powerful in their own ways. Below are a handful of the people you might meet walking the streets of the special district.

Shesha

A group mind of six children, who telepathically form a single conscious identity. Product of a clandestine genetic engineering program intended to birth someone with the predicted genotype ideal for reaching transcendence. Ultimately successful, but the final batch chose to fuse their minds together through gamma wave synchrony, giving them the combined psychic power necessary to escape their captors and establish their self-determined identity as “Shesha”, self-named for a many-headed divine serpent from Indian mythology.

Shesha never leaves a low-grade access state, in order to maintain its telepathic link. They appear as a group of identically dressed children (three boys and three girls), all twelve years old. Their personality is alien due to alienation from their fellow humans, giving them a cold demeanor and distrust for authorities that might attempt to recapture them. They wish to be taken seriously as peers of the adults around them, and react with hostility if talked down to.

Jorge

A middle-aged university professor of distinguished features and austerely tailored sense of fashion. Holds dual degrees in logic and psychology. In the former field, he is a subjective idealist who takes the heterodox view of dialetheism, believing that a statement can be both true and false at the same time. In the latter field, he applies a neo-Jungian form of psychoanalysis that pays particular attention to the interpretation of dreams.

Jorge uses his psychic abilities almost solely to serve his psychological practice. A master of both delta and theta waves, he puts subjects into deep hypnotic trances and peers into the contents of their unconscious minds. Once he finds the crux of a complex, he edits the offending impulse to relieve the emotional tension it causes the patient. Although this fact has never been brought to light, he has occasionally broken the sacred trust of his patients by furtively stealing key pieces of information from their minds to sell to rival esper factions.

Saito

A polymath par excellence. Upon breakthrough he showed immediate talent for the induction of oscillations within his own brain, but little facility or interest in affecting the minds of others. What he has always valued, since a young age, is personal arete above all else. As such, he near-constantly amplifies his theta waves (to learn faster by stimulating his memory) and his beta waves (to sharpen his focus) as the two engines driving him toward his ultimate goal: mastering every skill a human might possess. He achieves mastery (equivalent to a post-doctoral degree, although he rarely seeks credentials) of a new field every few months.

Saito possesses, among other things, Olympic-level athletic conditioning for several sports, a veteran’s dexterity with blade, fist, and firearm, deep knowledge of multiple hard sciences, high technical proficiency with a paintbrush as well as multiple musical instruments, and fluency in around twenty languages. His true fear remains boredom catching up to him: what purpose will remain in life once he wields every skill civilization might furnish his ravenous mind? Even greater, what meaning is there in learning them purely for their own sake?

Bell

A mystic infamous for founding an esper-led organization generally regarded as a cult. Said cult applies neuro-linguistic programming techniques to cure (they claim) various disorders of the mind and body while unlocking the true potential of the former: it tends to take in vulnerable people with low or no psychic potential who desperately wish for mental powers, and promise them a path to their dream. Their leader, then, uses his own (substantial) abilities to push their minds into blossoming – sometimes breaking them in the process.

Bell’s psychic abilities are real, but he himself began as an esper of little talent, grasping at any means of advancement. An opportunity presented itself in the form of a sapient noosphere entity that, in traditional demonic fashion, offered a deal: partial ownership of his body in exchange for power. It’s not clear how much of Bell’s speech and behavior is him anymore, and how much of it serves the goals of an inhuman intelligence.

Zeta

An occultist who strives to meld the disciplines of magick (with a k, she insists) and psionics into a harmonious whole – an endeavor considered ridiculous by most espers. Makes a living as a stage magician, using both sleight of hand and psychic techniques blended together so subtly that audience members cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Very popular among the average person, despite the low opinion she garners among espers. Wears a flashy signature outfit with a “Z” motif.

In truth, there’s a method to her postmodern chaos magick: she’s actually a serious operator in the psionic underground, with a high win ratio in combat encounters. Her best trick for winning fights is the same one she uses in her shows: her opponents never quite know when she’s actually employing psychic powers or merely doing a magic trick, and her showmanship prevents them from identifying what technique she’s using when she does pull one out, slowing their reflexes for a countermeasure.

Winter

The product of a clandestine project to elevate a mediocre psychic talent into something transcendent – at least, that was the hope. While a willing participant in the experiment, the scientists involved downplayed the extreme nature of the procedures to be carried out on her. The dubiously ethical combination of research chemicals and neurosurgery unlocked Winter’s latent psychic power, to be sure, but in an imperfect manner she struggles to control with precision. Her power spikes to unrivalled levels when provoked to fear or anger, but tends to shred anything in her nearby environment whether or not she wants to.

While easily one of the most powerful espers in the world by raw amplitude numbers, the project leads felt forced to install a psionic dampening prosthetic to prevent Winter from injuring herself and others by accident. This sense of enslavement salted the emotional wounds inflicted by the painful and disfiguring medical experimentation, making her even more of a danger. Any day now she might decide she’s had enough.