A lesson from an Imperial Sage:

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Nah. See, even when you have two ostensibly-identical Talents, they’ve still got their own unique quirks. Innate skills are a good example there, honestly. It’s pretty typical that, if a skill is more than a freshly Awakened individual could utilize, there’s some form of cost reduction built into it. Sometimes that’s just a flat cost reduction, but other times it’s almost pre-modified. Depending on the culture, and yes we’ll get back to that, it might be particularly well-inclined towards channeling through a focus, or more strongly tied to physical motion than the normal skill would be.

So take three people with innate [Fire Manipulation], all of them freshly awoken. One of them has the entirety of their Talent dedicated to just reducing the cost, and that brings it down to roughly one-third its normal price, letting them cast it an average of six times. But, they have no limitations or specializations, and if they want to later limit it, they can do so just as easily with anyone else who has that skill.

The second person comes from a very martial world, where self-discipline, physical acumen, and personal mastery are all incredibly important. Their [Fire Manipulation] certainly can be utilized even if they’re chained up and hanging from their feet, but it might demand their entire mana pool to do so. But, if they utilize a form of martial arts in conjunction with their skill, their costs may be a tenth of what it is normally, letting them use their skill twenty times before they exhaust their mana.

The third person lives on a volcanic world, where fires are big and dangerous and above all, terrifying. They’re accustomed to heat, and the idea of manipulating small amounts of fire isn’t really a concern for them at all. So, their [Fire Manipulation] is twice as expensive than it would be even for the base skill, and they have far less control over it, but in exchange they can control a hundred times as much fire as that base skill could with that mana. They’ll throw a fireball the size of a house and utterly exhaust themselves, but for that moment they were either pacifying or channeling the wrath of the volcano.

And that’s just the most basic overview. Every innate skill has that form of nuance. And yes, usually innate skills will warp themselves in a way wherein their holders can utilize them from the moment they’re obtained. I knew one gal who received an innate [Meteor Storm], but with the curious adaptation that let her put as little mana as she wanted into it, and still have it work. Last I heard of her, she’d pushed that even further into manifesting her projectiles as stone arrows, then firing those off with a bow as a sniper.

So yes, every Talent is unique. Especially the first Talent, as that does a good job of establishing the theme for the entire set. And yes, everyone always likes to think that they can absolutely predict what someone’s Talent will be because their grandfather was a dragon, or because they have such a strong pull to travel, they grew up on a mountain peak, whatever. Well, the first rule to predicting Talents is that there is no predicting a Talent. The second rule is that all further rules have an exception. Yes, a bloodline will affect a Talent. So will personality, culture, birth location, desires, childhood friends, siblings, exposure to powerful magic, what your parents did for a living, what you had for breakfast that morning, what your skills are like, what your drive is like, all of it.

The problem is, there’s no telling which one will take precedence. I knew one man who awakened a first Talent of ‘Innate understanding of waffles,’ which he attributed to having an absolutely stellar breakfast that morning, and awakened while hungry. It’s really common if you Trigger- that is, Awaken yourself through insight, you’ll get a Talent relating to your Trigger. But of course, a good ninety percent of people with a bloodline Awaken a Talent relating to that bloodline in some form. And sometimes, a Talent comes completely out of nowhere, defying every prediction and is in complete defiance of their bloodline, personality, desires, practice, all of it. Because of how complex people are, you can always explain a person’s Talent as indicative or representative of some part of a person’s personality, but the simple truth of the matter is that it’s just not true.

No, the boy who grew eyes in the back of his head didn’t get those because he looked over his shoulder a few times. No, the girl awakening with an innate [Raise Dead] didn’t do so because she was sad her goldfish died when she was eight. Sometimes, weird things just happen, and that’s just how Talents work. Trying to divine someone’s “true personality” based off of their Talent is pointless, because there are countless reasons that you might argue “why” someone awakened their Talent. Maybe the [Raise Dead] girl really was sad her fish died, or maybe she is afraid of death, or perhaps she harbors the desire to kill and reanimate her bullies. Maybe she was enamored by a story of a friendly necromancer, maybe it was because she saw an undead at one point, maybe it’s because she didn’t sleep well the night before she awakened, and she felt like a zombie the day of. It’s pointless.

Now, there are certainly interesting trends to follow with cultural awakening trends. It’s less common in further reaches of the Empire, where the lack of truly powerful people tends to result in a relatively weak cultural identity, splintered between continents, counties, even cities. But closer to the core? It’s far, far more common. Be it innate skills tied to physical motion, a skew towards Talents which grant innate understanding of a subject, a specific mana type that shows up with unusual frequency, or Talents which enact physical change on their recipients.

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Speaking of Innate Understanding Talents, those are actually one of the most interesting categories of Talents I’ve found. It’s difficult to properly describe how they work, as they certainly blur the line between what is simply due to a Talent and that which can be accomplished through mundane work. One way to understand how they work is that they feed a consistent, low-level divination directly into the mind of their holder, imparting them with a bit more understanding than they had before. This manifests as a level of intuition for what must be done to accomplish a given task, though almost never the how. An archer need not understand the way in which winds whip their arrows, the drag their feathers impart to stay stable, or the kinematics behind projectile motion for their Talent to nudge them into holding their bow just so.

It’s an effect which can be difficult to even notice, if unprepared for its effects. But it’s certainly potent over time, if given the chance to flourish. Because, simply put, it is always informing the user of just a little bit more than they know right now, without the influence of their Talent. If they aren’t careful, that innate understanding can stifle their ability to further hone their skills. That is, ultimately, where most people with innate understanding end up, moderately skilled in their area of expertise and unable to teach anyone what they instinctively know.

But at the same time, innate understanding also is far and away the initial Talent which has the most potential for expansion. Because it always provides just a little bit more knowledge than what the user already has, if they put in the effort and the time to expand their knowledge the way a non-Talented individual might, they can learn faster and always be a step ahead of their peers. Truly pushed to their limits, those with innate understanding of a subject can do things which utterly defy comprehension. Talented swordsmen may fight blindfolded, Talented enchanters can invent new runes with a day’s work, Talented alchemists can create potions perfectly tailored for an individual without taking a single measurement, Talented scribes may flick their wrist and cause their splatters of ink to land in beautiful calligraphic shapes.

The downside remains the same, even at this highest level, and such is where the debate lies. The runes which a Talented enchanter makes on instinct can only be made on instinct, and they might have no insight into why a given rune works one way in some contexts and in a different way in others, they only know that it does so. This has led some people to believe Innate Understanding is more akin to very specific reality warping, where existence itself bends its own laws to support what is impossible for anyone else to accomplish. Even despite my own belief that innate understanding is merely divination, and theoretically replicable by anyone, I certainly have seen wondrous feats which call into question that certainty.

Now, that can certainly be muddled by the individual’s other Talents. After all, by the time any smith, or enchanter, or even warrior is doing anything which defies easy explanation, they certainly have earned their second Talent if not their third, and those rarely provide nothing of value to their work.

It is somewhat interesting that Innate Understanding so rarely appears within the ‘growth’ Talent, given its infinitely scalable nature, and seems to lend credence to the divination theory. That instead of ever-stronger changes to reality, it is a static ‘one step more’ for those who hold it.

But I digress. The second Talent one gets is one of the most wildly contentious topics, as unlike the first Talent, there appears to be absolutely no limit to the ‘growth’ it can provide. Whereas a first Talent can at best double a given attribute (without enacting a penalty somewhere else), the so-called ‘growth’ Talents may vary so wildly in scope it’s positively laughable. A portion of that is inherent to their growing nature- as one grows stronger, so too does their Talent. What may have once been an ability to make fire burn a few degrees hotter would grow into an empowerment strong enough to allow a candle to burn stone. It can occasionally be lost as they grow stronger for other reasons, but the boost from the second Talent does grow.

Of course, not all growth Talents grow equally, and that, I have noticed, often depends on the effort required to grow the talent. Most automatically grow slightly stronger alongside their user, no further effort required. Others require time to reach their full potential, to a maximum determined by their subject’s strength. Others still require active practice, or learning applications for the Talent, and a scarce few do nothing on their own unless the user actively seeks it out.

For instance, I know of one young man who received a Talent which could permanently increase his resistance to certain sources of damage, but only when exposed to that type of damage. Another lady I once met had her sword strikes grow in potency the more often she had performed that exact maneuver, and one lad gained a permanent boost to his magic every time he drank a certain type of potion. Broadly speaking, the more difficult a Talent is to grow, disregarding the difficulty of growing stronger itself, the stronger its maximum effect (relative to the overall strength of the user) is.

There even exists a certain category of growth Talents which require their users to be driven, for if they grow in strength too quickly, they forevermore lose whatever potential power they may have gotten. The young man whose magic grew with each potion he drank, could only benefit from a finite (but exceedingly large) number of potions at each stage of his growth, but if a potion was missed, the number of potions he could drink during his next stage would not increase accordingly. Those can appear in any form of growth Talent, be it growth from time, study, practice, or exposure, and are once again stronger than their normal counterparts.

It is somewhat fitting, overall, that there still exists a sense of fairness within Talents. It is very, very rare that a Talent could be said to be strictly superior to another. Overall superior, certainly, but not in every sense. A higher boost requires a greater sacrifice, more effort, while the weaker Talents are often the easiest to use.

It’s a part of why they’re just so fascinating, finding the peculiarities that make even seemingly-identical Talents distinct.