Welcome to the bonus chapter. This chapter aims to expand upon the basics of Psychic powers in the world of Punchdrive, as the level of power and skill the protagonist and those directly close to them will not allow for this information to come up naturally, generally speaking.
This bonus chapter provides a list of basic psychic terminology, brief explanations of the terms, and a brief summary of the three main types of psychic techniques.
Psychic: Someone with the ability to comprehend and influence their own psychic energy, regardless of how much or how little they have.
Blank: Someone with untraceably low amounts of psychic energy.
Psychic Energy: A form of energy stored in all living creatures, with few exceptions. It could be likened to an MP bar or a self-recharging battery.
Technique: Techniques are any method of using psychic energy, and are required to utilize it safely and properly.
Aura: A catch-all term used to describe the general feeling of another powerful psychic’s power. Can also refer to literal auras of psychic energy or techniques with similar effects.
Psitech: A specific branch of technology aimed to function with, for, or against psychics.
Neural Heat: The side-effects of ignition technique usage.
Frostbite: The side-effects of freezing technique usage.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Latent Technique: A technique someone was born with an intrinsic understanding of using.
Ultimate Technique: A technique so advanced or complicated that it is more practical to refer to it on its own terms, not in terms of the main three schools.
The Three Main Schools:
Psychic energy needs specific techniques to be utilized effectively, and every technique is sorted into one of these three categories based on certain parameters.
Ignition: Ignition is the catch-all school for any technique that requires a one time expenditure of psychic energy and that places the calculative burden of the technique on the wielder. It can be likened to anaerobic exercise, both in its intensity and its side effects. Using ignition techniques not only expands psychic energy, but also accumulates ‘neural heat’, making the user more sluggish mentally in general and causing headache-like pain. The greater the calculative burden of a technique and the more psychic energy consumed, the more neural heat it accumulates.
The archetypal Ignition technique is to impart velocity upon a vector, such as launching a touched object across a room.
Freezing: Freezing is the catch-all school for any technique with the specific side-effect of ‘Frostbite’, or the dulling of the senses. While this might at first seem a broad category, Frostbite only occurs when a psychic takes the specific action of imbuing their own psychic energy into an inanimate object. The amount of ‘frostbite’ the user accumulates doing so is exactly equal to the portion of the user’s maximum psychic energy spent. Frostbite is considered a rather insidious killer, since the very acquisition of frostbite makes it hard to notice the side effects.
The simplest possible usage of freezing is to imbue psychic energy into a simple object like a stick for no tactical benefit beyond proving how much psychic energy you have.
Buffer: Buffer techniques simply refer to the process of putting a portion of the user’s psychic energy and calculative ability into a ‘buffer’ that will automatically perform a specific function, like a computer program using a portion of the computer’s RAM and processing power. The downsiders of buffer techniques are not obvious like Neural Heat, nor are they subtle like Frostbite. Instead, 100% of any buffer technique’s errors are all human errors, easily likened to bugs in code. Buffer techniques also tend to be vastly more difficult to learn and unlearn, making skilled practitioners rare.
The best example of a buffer technique is a shield technique, wherein the user defines an area, parameters for what they do and do not want the shield to block, and the way the shield will block those things, and how much psychic energy to devote to the shield. After doing so, the technique will function automatically until dismissed.
This concludes the bonus chapter. I don’t know if I’ll be doing more of these, but this stuff felt like critical information to the story that I couldn’t fit into an actual chapter.