Majery

In historical terms, majery was the greatest evolutionary leap in human warfare, giving birth to the UER, leading humanity to science and allowing it to drive the dragons back to the Dragef Wall.

Today the UER fights with products of the Embed Revolution, and instead of going to war most majin have jobs making people and places pretty, clean, safe and entertaining. Some claim majery has advanced into an era with no need for majin to reproduce the feats of the early wizards, and others call majery a shadow of its past genius.

> "In my rogue opinion, today's majin learn by reading books instead of playing with majic, and so they are better at talking about majery than they are at majing. Regardless of who is correct, to describe the majic in this story I will need to define several standard majery terms."
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## Ment

Majery is based on ment, the fifth primal force of physics, which is often called brainwave energy because the electricity of thought within a brain bends nearby atoms on a fifth dimension. By managing that effect a majin can also affect the four other dimensions, or the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear bonds.

The ment field is that fifth dimension, or the fifth force, or many other names in different fields, but the two most important aspects of ment are that it's part of every atom, so different masses of atoms are also different in the ment, and second, in order to maje there must be a pathway between the majing brain the area of majic effect.

The vibration of the ment between has to match so the brain's signal can travel over the distance. It can done wirelessly, but vitted wires provide a cleaner signal transmission. Known as ment lines or strings, they can be spread into a web for wide majing access.

## Ment Signature

A key facet of the minder art was ment signatures, or the unique ment vibration each majin used to maje. The signature, or sig, or vibe, was ingrained into every majic effect and reflected the majing brain's structure.

Embeds used the same principle, and each had a sig.The minder art contained many skrils that allowed a minder to maje over a wide range of sigs, and since majic commands passed freely through majic effects using the same sig, by matching sigs a minder could reach through another majin's effects, such as a shield.

This power over their fellow majin, combined with the advantages of minder brain alterations like recall and the MOS, enabled mindats to dominate the leadership positions within the majin community.

## Attune

Majing in a city is different from majing outside in barren nature because the activity of every brain adds to the ment's reserve of power and also interferes with its greater fluctuations. Where there are no people the ment field is calmer, and where they are gathered in mass, like in a city, the ment becomes supercharged.

The city ment provides a reservoir of power that can be used, but the ment is so ready to move that majing requires a looser touch with different margins of error. It is a deep and learned familiarity, and after too long in the wild a brain needs time to attune to city ment.

## **MSS**

The greatest danger of majing in a city was Ment Stress Syndrome (MSS), which could manifest while majing anywhere but was most common in a city due to the inherent instability of the ment.

MSS was a result of ment's tendency to equalize, the same bleed effect that washed unshielded majic effects away. As the surrounding ment destablized a majic effect, the effect could become an antenna  that picked up thoughts from the city ment and carried them back to the majing brain in a process known as ment feedback.

Once the external thought was heard, the majing brain was free to act upon it like any internal thought and trigger placebo reactions that could include majery effects, leading to symptoms from subtle brain chemistry shifts to inadvertent violence majing.

The danger of MSS increased with scale, meaning the larger the exposed majic effect the greater the risk of feedback, which was also the case with the reverse, or when majic effects altered the thoughts of nearby minds, which was itself another form of MSS.

## Minder Exaggeration

Majin altered for the minder art are often portrayed as completely divorced from some of the basic sensations in the average human experience, but studies show that tendency is found throughout the human population and experts agree minder alterations augment the brain's existing biology, and only exaggerate common tendencies as a side effect of increasing the brain's built in conscious control.

## Majing Tolerance

The ability to maje through distractions such as illness, pain, and intoxication varied greatly by majin and practice but in general any distraction could be tolerated to a degree before it overwhelmed. In the case of alcohol, there was a rough correlation between the nervous system's ability to control muscle movement and maje. At a certain point alcohol began impairing accuracy then did so increasingly until another point when it became impossible to talk, walk or maje.

## M Note on Sideflash

A sideflash was a symptom of a disorder called Acute Involuntary Mental Construct Simulation Syndrome (AIMCSS). AIMCSS was related to Recallism because in both disorders a simulated reality was confused for reality, but instead of a flashback in AIMCSS the brain's dream system generated a world that started at the present time and then skipped into imagination. There was no warning, and the events usually followed a story the brain had previously imagined, such as a fantasy or daydream. It could last hours and in extreme cases a brain's awake operation was permanently replaced by an AIMCSS coma.

Among the many majin disorders, none were as disturbing as a sideflash. It destroyed trust in perception by demonstrating that all the sights, sounds and every other real world stimuli the nervous system detected were all subject to revision inside the brain, and they could instantly be replaced by a totally convincing simulated reality.

A sideflash was similar to dreaming about starting the day only to wake up in bed late for work or school. Sideflashes granted wishes; like the way I found Doctor Mark sober, happy and alive. When the high-definition daydream ended, a person was often disappointed by reality, sometimes enough to trigger another sideflash.

## MOS and Memory

One result of  MOS functionality is the ability to chose whether or not to remember unpleasant experiences. Opinions on the long-term conquences of Traumatic Memory Revision (TMR) are divided, but despite the occasional side effects its practice is widespread.

> "I find the longer an event is remembered the more difficult it is to remove, so I often practice prevention. For that reason, I limited my memory collection to a minimum while I was trapped in the mountain in the Dragonlands, and so my record of that time is general."
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## Cower

The modern UER's first line of defense against rogues like me were its cowers. Designed originally to amplifier a majin's majic, the arrays of embeds in modern cowers are controlled by vuter systems and reliably maje the UER's communication services, including the Imperial Ment Stream (IMS) over which the data of the C flows.

Cowers also regulate every Agent of Ment Manipulation (AMM), which are either embeds or majin. Since cowers are able to detect when a majin or embed alters the small range of ment where majery is practiced, they are also able to verify that each nearby majic effect is a valid Authorized Use of Majery (AUM).

It is possible to maje undetected near a cower by blending into the ment effect of a nearby authorized embed, a little like timing your footsteps to match ambient noise, but it only works in locations under a single cower's coverage and most areas are also monitored from overhead by the glides, satellites, balloons and High Altitude Cowers (HAC) forming the Dragon Shield's Roof, which is centered over the North Pole and covers the entire planet north of Longitude Dragon.

## Art, Minder

The minder art started with a study that analyzed the structure of exceptional brains like those of savants. This led to experiments on the brains of criminals sentenced to death, which after much trial and error allowed minder majes to enable conscious control of the brain's lower functions such as memory and the dream system.

Soon the minder art enabled an altered brain to run the Mental Operating System (MOS), which gave birth to the vuter logic integral to modern technology. Then the minder art grew out of its focus on the brain to study the physics of ment, the fifth force or dimension.

## Art, Velocit

The velocit art was the study of motion at every scale in physics, from wind to sound to gravity, from insects swarming to the rotations of planets. Like all arts it was began in the Unification War's violence and refined by a continual arms race in which majic was the weapon.

Other arts focused more narrowly on destruction, like arson, vicer, spark and atomis, but they were outgrowths of velocit, which began as experiments with explosions and became the study of how every piece of reality shook, collided, skid, bounced, glided, arced through the sky when launched at a given speed at a given angle, or did anything else to alter its place within space and time.

## Art, Vitter

The best known majic effects are products of the vitter art, which focuses on rearranging the atoms of the air into liquid, gaseous, solid or semi-solid shapes. Vitter is how majin craft shields for defense and one of the ways they can attack, grab, throw, and move.

All majin train in basic vitting as castors, and most arts make use of vitter skrils. The activity is called vitting, and the results are called vitts. They are commonly simple tools like sheets, poles, and cords, but vitts can match any real object and also be shapes only imagined.

## Art, Loom

There is more to hiding than majing on the light, and there is more to light than the small part of it an eye can see. The loom art covers on all facets of light, or electromagnetism, and has subsets for each specialty. The simply named lus art focuses on the light eyes can see.

The act of majing a lusion is called lusing. A skilled lus maje can make any spot nearby look like anything, or not be seen at all, giving lus many defensive applications, but as a general rule anything that can see can also be blinded, giving lus offensive applications as well.

In both areas the primary limitation to lusing is imagination.

## Art, Farsight

The farsight art was developed to help majin see enemy positions from a distance, and was so successful it grew to cover every method of analyzing reality between the microscopic and astronomical.

Sighting could be passive, which was like looking with additional sets of eyes, and there were also active sighting methods, like radar, which was loud and could be tracked back to its source.

## Art, Shift

As part of the extended arms race of the Unification Wars, majes investigated the mechanisms of genetics with less ethics than modern science. After the Unification, the slivers of knowledge gleaned from the industrial scale mutation experiments were compiled into the shift art of majery, which gave rise to widespread genetic engineering.

The amount of shift alteration varies greatly within the UER's population, from the majority who are unaltered to the citizens of the wealthier provits that have funded the elimination of many genetic defects to the majin whose cells have been engineered to edit their genetic code and shift between multiple sets of genetic instructions.

There were regulatory controls on many shift patterns, but once a majin was shift capable the options avaiable were as numerous as life was diverse, making it possible to change appearance, add new senses of perception and grow a set of feathers to fly like a bird.

## Note on Projection

> "My fights in the Maze were usually one-sided thanks to a minder art skril called projection, which gave me a fake body that was a full nervous system replacement. Connected to a brain by a ment line, a projection responded to commands in place of the physical body in the same way as a body in a dream, or a body in a minder MOS IDS."
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> "The hard link to the brain risked a ment crease, but it enabled the projection to move naturally and to the maje it felt like being in a real body except it was lighter, felt no pain and couldn't be hurt or killed."
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> "Usually I had ment lines across DC's underground, so my majing zone was as wide as the city and I could project from anywhere to anywhere. I had many hideouts that I used as projection stations, but usually I kept my real body safe in my deepest underground bunker."
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## Ment Crease

The primary danger of majing a projection or any complex skril was a loss of ment connection between the brain and majic effect, causing a separation of consciousness known as a crease. The results ranged from slight pain to death and due to those dangers most crease studies have focused on recovery instead of the underlying dynamics.

> "I had creased myself both accidentally and intentionally for the purpose of research because creases played a pivotal role in majery combat. In maje duels, ment control was critical, and creases, both the accidental and intentional, often decided the outcome."
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