Praelitis

Psychics

Psychics are humans that have abilities that are natural to them for some reason or another. Most often, they were born with this ability. Other times, traumatic events such as accidents, or violent situations can trigger an ability to life.

Telepathy
Lv 1) You are more in tune to other people's thoughts. You seem to guess really well about what others might be thinking.
Lv 2) You actually pick up on stray thoughts from people around you. This is not always voluntary, such as when someone crosses your path in the grip of a powerful emotion.
Lv 3) You can read people's surface thoughts. With more concentration, you can delve deeper into their subconscious, however it takes meditation and is a slow process.
Lv 4) You can send your thoughts and implant suggestions to others.
Lv 5) You can establish continuous connections between yourself and others, or several people.

Drawbacks

Telepathy can leave users feeling exhausted, particularly when just learning to use the ability. Its users are also far more prone to migraines than your average person. When learning control, particularly in the early stages, Telepaths have been known to be driven mad, because they don't know that the voices they are hearing aren't just in their heads.

Telekinesis
Lv 1) You utilize small, uncontrolled movement of mind. Things you need will be a little closer than they had been a moment before, doors close behind you, or if you reach for your car keys, they may just come to you instead of the other way around.
Lv 2) You have controlled movement of mind over small objects.
Lv 3) You have controlled movement of mind over medium sized objects.

Lv 4) Levitation of yourself and other objects(including several) is possible.
Lv 5) Large objects, heavy ones, other people, etc is possible.

Drawbacks
Those with Telekinesis have been known to experience vertigo more often than others, often times after using their ability excessively. Like most abilities, it can also leave people feeling tired, particularly after prolonged use. Total physical exhaustion is not uncommon.

Teleportation
Lv 1) You always know where you are. You are able to orient yourself to familiar places no matter your location. If you were dropped in the middle of the woods on another continent, you could find your way home.
Lv 2) You can teleport to places within your line of sight. You can also teleport small objects to or from you.
Lv 3) You can teleport to place you know well. The limitation on this is generally within town. Not huge long distances.

Lv 4) You can teleport long distances. One hemisphere to another? No problem. You can also open up a gateway for others to follow you through.
Lv 5) You can teleport anywhere, and the gateways are much more stable.

Drawbacks
For one, Teleportation is flashy. People notice. If the ability is up high enough that you can open up gateways, then that's even more obvious. It's like holding up a neon sign that says 'I'M WEIRD! ASK ME HOW!' Another drawback is teleporting blind? Isn't advisable. There are many a failed teleportation cases in the world, where people have wound up dead and fused with rocks or walls, etc. It might not be wise to teleport into someplace you know has been remodeled, or if mom likes to change the living room around a whole lot. If it messes up, there is no reversing it. However, a nice satellite hookup and coordinates could give you a very good way of navigating.

Clairvoyance
Lv 1) You're a great guesser. You get Bad Feelings or Good Feelings often, and they're usually accurate.
Lv 2) You receive visions or sensory perceptions of events that are happening currently.
Lv 3) You can receive visions voluntarily through meditation, a short time before they happen.

Lv 4) You can induce detailed visions of events days before they occur.
Lv 5) You can hold an item and know it's history.

Drawbacks
Clairvoyants often have sleep disorders. Whether it's sleepwalking, insomnia, night terrors, what have you, they have something that makes sleeping difficult for them. They, like telepaths, have also been known to be lost to insanity if they don't understand what might be happening to them early in the development of their gift. Others have been known to be driven to obsession with editing events, and often succumb to loops of extreme meditation followed by bizarre behavior in efforts to effect the future.

Empathy
Lv 1) People tend to go to you with their troubles.
Lv 2) You can be around someone and know their general emotions.
Lv 3) You can pick up on other's emotions even when they're not present.
Lv 4) You can manipulate your own mood structure, giving those around you what they need most at the time. You also have the ability to truly feel what others are feeling.
Lv 5) You can now manipulate the emotions of others, changing their moods.

Drawbacks
Empaths have a tendency to crack later in life. After spending years literally feeling everyone's pain, mental breakdowns are common. They tend to be stable early in life, and terribly unstable later. Unfortunately, if they become unstable, often times they project their own emotions onto others without realizing it. An unstable Empath can be a walking mental breakdown machine, cracking anyone in their path.

The following abilities are 'single abilities'. That is, if your character is something mentioned below, they cannot have any other abilities. No mixing and matching!

Medium
You can see, hear, and speak to the dead as easily as you can to the living.

Drawbacks
They can tell. And often times the dead are hanging around because they have unfinished business. Which they may just pester you into finishing for them. Another is you are much more susceptible to spirits and their abilities. They can touch you much easier than they can anyone else. Which of course also means that they can mess you up easier as well.

Readers
Readers are psychics with very little control over their abilities. They are the people who often are labeled as 'fortune tellers' who read palms, bones, cards, tea leaves, aura flows, innards, you name it. They're the eerily accurate people, but they have no control over what information they get about you from the cosmos or wherever the hell they get it from. It can be past lives(and often is) current conflicts in your life, etc. They can try to focus their ability more with the tools of the trade, whatever may specifically call to them as their own device, or otherwise.
If they choose a specific form of focus, they are much more likely to be able to get information they want rather than random things, but they're quite often bombarded with information they neither want nor asked for.

Drawbacks

Have you ever tried to talk to someone while you're getting Civil War flashbacks from their point of view? How about holding a conversation with someone you've just met and you continually get little bits of information popping into your brain about inane details of their life? Because their gift is so uncontrolled most of the time, Readers often are doomed to come off as terribly weird people. They often have a lot of trouble in crowds and other areas or situations where there are many people. They have a higher rate than normal people to turn to drugs or alcohol to try to dull out the flashes and other things.

Faith Healer
These rare individuals can heal people by laying their hands on them. How they choose to focus their healing energy is up to you, to be chosen at character creation. It is often through religious themes, and most view their gift as a touch from God. It takes a great deal out of the person, meaning no, you can't walk through a hospital ward and start curing people left and right. Terminal diseases are not cureable.

Drawbacks
Faith healers are aware of the fact that when they heal someone, the sickness has to go somewhere, and the health has to come from some other source. They do not have control over this, however, so many healers only do it when necessary. For instance, say they heal a friend of theirs who was severely injured. That may cause someone else nearby crippling illness, kill the plant life around you for miles, or make animals in the vicinity lay down dying. It's not always pretty, and most learn quite quickly not to push it.

Psychic Amplifier
Psychic amplifiers are rare individuals, and often, unfortunately, highly short lived. They are often sought out and exploited for their ability. Essentially, what they do is amp up any supernatural abilities around them. This is not an instantaneous process, it is slow. The longer they are around, the higher up the ability can rise. This is not, however, permanent. It starts fading the moment the amplifier is no longer in the immediate vicinity, eventually fading back down to whatever level was normal.

It is thought that every person in the world (excluding dead zones) has some level of psychic ability. For most people this is such a low level that they cannot sense it, or use it in any way. But this means that a psychic amplifier has an effect on near enough everyone around them. Obviously, this tends to scupper their chances of a social life!

Drawbacks
Psychic amplifiers aren't long lived individuals even if they weren't being exploited by demonic groups or otherwise. Their ability physically exhausts them, and if overused results in a coma. They also don't have the ability to turn it off. It is believed that no psychic amplifier ever survived past thirty, which is a generous number. The other trouble with amplifiers is that they aren't strictly a natural ability. While other psychic powers are inborn, psychic amplifiers only occur out of trauma, most specifically brain damage. It should also be noted that psychic amplifiers have no abilities of their own. They can only amplify others'.

Psychic Dead Zones
The counterpart and just as rare as psychic amplifiers, psychic dead zones are the exact opposite. They immediately shut down any kind of supernatural ability in their vicinity. They can't turn it off either, and most of them will profess to not believe in any of that mumbo jumbo (because they've never seen any evidence). They're generally longer lived, because demons or other supernatural forces will avoid them like the plague. They're occasionally sought out to combat opposing supernatural forces, but are largely ignorant of their purposes in those cases.

Dead zone’s affect the area around themselves to a radius of around 30ft. For some reason nobody has ever been able to determine, this radius decreases in enclosed spaces. So if a dead zone is in a room of around 12ft long, the area affected will only be that room, not the other side of the wall. If a dead zone is in a large room (more than 30ft radius), then they will only affect that 30ft around them as normal.

That said, as far as the dead zone themselves is concerned, the radius is far greater, because their brain will interpret information received in a way which is most ‘normal’. So, for instance, a ghost 50ft away will still exist, but whilst most people would see a ghost, the dead zone’s brain would interpret the sight as a shadow, or a patch of mist, or something ‘normal’. The same goes for other supernatural encounters. Where possible, the dead zone’s mind will interpret them in a ‘normal’ way. A werewolf may become a large animal etc.

Anyone within a dead zone’s radius who has a supernatural ability will not be able to use that supernatural ability. As such, a psychic will not be able to do anything at all with their psychic ability as it is them who are affected by the dead zone, not whatever they are trying to use their psychic ability on. So, for example, a telekinetic who tried to move something would be unable to do so, no matter where the object they were trying to move was – because the dead zone does not affect the object per se, but rather the psychic themselves.

In the inverse, a psychic outside a dead zone’s area of effect would not be able to transmit their ability inside the zone. So, for example, a telepath would not be able to communicate with a dead zone; or a telekinetic would ‘drop’ whatever they were moving the moment it entered the sphere of influence (though they could move it up to the edge of the zone). Likewise, a disruptor would never be able to harm a dead zone.

Lycanthropes cannot shift whilst in the area of influence for dead zone. At all. So, they have to stay in the form they were in when they entered that sphere. So, if they’re in animal form, they stay in animal form until they leave the dead zone’s presence. And vice versa.

Drawbacks
Psychic Dead Zones often are cursed with a massively dull existence. There is no magic for these sorts. No mysteries for life they can discover, because all they can experience is the physical here and now. Even with supernatural ability directed at them from elsewhere shuts down before it can have any effect. (Such as a telepath tries to send one a message from afar--it would not be received.)

The Flicker Effect
If a Psychic Dead Zone and a Psychic Amplifier are ever together for some reason, a strange thing occurs. Any supernatural abilities around them would go insane. It would flicker on and off, and amplify as it was turning on and off, creating quite possibly catastrophic events around them.

Disruption
Disruptors are people who have the ability to channel negative energy to achieve certain ends. Disruptors are a 'magnet' for negative energy and are surrounded by more or less of the stuff at all times. They use this 'well' of energy to disrupt electrical systems. Any being or thing that has an electrical system can be affected by disruption, but disruptors can have no effects at all over inanimate objects with no moving parts. Likewise, disruptors do not have the ability to affect things in a positive way (ie, they cannot mend electrical systems. If it's broken, there's no fixing it with disruption). What disruption can do is anything from bowling out a lightbulb to killing someone. In its simplest terms, disruption is the ability to throw a wrench in the works and make everything come crashing to a halt.

Lv 1) You cannot actually do any real disruption, but with a little concentration, you can make TVs flicker and buzz, and make other electronic devices behave a little strange. You also have a knack for finding flaws and weak points in things.
Lv 2) Minor electronic devices can be disrupted. You can blow out street lamps with a little force, or burn out your friend's toasty electric heater.
Lv 3) Greater electronic devices can be disrupted. Complex things like computers can be fried, cars can be stalled or worse, security systems can be crashed. You're beginning to get more control now as well and can determine the amount of damage you do to a system (ie, whether you simply switch something off, or whether you break it beyond repair).
Lv 4) You can begin to affect biological systems (more on this below). You can't hold the disruption on biological systems for very long, five minutes at most, even on the most trivial of biological disruptions. You can affect nerve impulses to the limbs with some accuracy, but impulses to major organs is difficult for you and you can only manage this for, at the very most, a minute. You have complete control over disruption of non-biological systems though. You can pinpoint your abilities with ease.
Lv 5) You are much more adept at affecting biological systems. You have an understanding of how nerve impulses move round the body and the best way to disrupt these. You can hold off the impulses for longer.

Drawbacks:
Everyone experiences negative energy from time to time - it's caused by bad moods and by areas such as graveyards, but though most people experience the effects of negative energy intermittently, disruptors are constantly surrounded by it, albeit at a fairly low level (for those such as fades who can see negative energy, disruptors ho are in even a good mood appear to be surrounded by a faint black cloud. Disruptors in a bad mood? Have been known to disappear behind a black cloud to a fade's eyes...) and that's not good for the body. Disruptors have health problems as a result and they're also more susceptible to illness. If there's flu going round, for example? A disruptor is going to catch that and they'll be ill for longer than a 'normal' person.

If just being surrounded by negative energy is bad for a disruptor's health, then actively channelling it is worse. The human body just wasn't built for it. The more or faster the ability is used, the more energy is being channeled at once, and the more sickly the psychic makes themselves. Wise disruptors know their limit and take breaks from using their ability, lest they set themselves up for an early grave.

Whenever a disruptor uses their power, they risk backlash. With low level disruption, this doesn't always occur, though it can hit at seemingly random times and isn't always related to the difficulty of what the disruptor is doing. Biological disruption always has some kind of backlash. Backlash is generally something such as migraines, headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, vomiting, unconsciousness etc.

Overuse of the power (either by trying something big, or a series of minor disruptions in a shortened space of time) always causes backlash. At its worst, the backlash is longer lasting and the only way of stopping the symptoms is a complete stop on using any disruption for a time (minor symptoms fade within 2-3 days, more severe ones may take a couple of weeks).

Disruptors also tend to make things around them malfunction unintentionally as well, though this never relates to biological systems. An emotionally charged disruptor is more likely to unintentionally disrupt something (for example, it's not uncommon for a stressed disruptor to break the TV...). It doesn't happen all the time, but enough to be an annoyance.

Biological Disruption

Whilst low level disruptors can only affect non-biological electrical systems (such as computers, modern cars etc), higher level disruptors can actually have an affect on biological systems - i.e. people, animals etc.

The human (and any other animal) body works by a series of electrical impulses travelling throughout the nerve pathways of the body, from the brain to everywhere else. These nerve impulses are what tells your heart to beat, what tells your lungs to inflate and deflate, tells your legs to walk, or sit, your fingers to type, your stomach etc etc. Biological disruption works by disrupting the flow of energy around the body, though there are certain limitations to this.

To become a higher level disruptor, therefore, one must have an understanding of how the body works, how nerves impulses move around the body. Without this understanding, a disruptor may be able to produce some effect purely on instinct, but they will never be able to work to their true potential.

Even at master level, though, a disruptor will never be able to, for example, paralyse a person's entire nervous sytem. That level of impact would kill a disruptor outright due to the amount of negative energy which would be required for them to achieve this feat.

What they are able to do, depending upon ghteir skill, is smaller things. For example, it would be possible for a disruptor (assuming they are incredibly quick off the mark!) to paralyse someone's finger to stop them pulling the trigger of a gun. Such a minor piece of biological disruption (though incredibly effective at the right moment!) doesn't take a great deal of energy, therefore can be done without risking too much of a backlash.

The body fights against disruption. This is an instinctive, unconscious reaction and will happen for all victims. The body will never willingly submit to disruption, which is what makes it harder for the disruptor. Whereas with a non-biological system any break in the flow of electricity will have a lasting effect (for example, turn off a light), this is not the case with biological systems. For example, if you disrupt the flow of nerve impulses to someone's finger, their brain will keep trying to send the same impulses to that finger until that finger moves. In fact, if the victim realises that they cannot move their finger when they want to, the resulting panic will increase the strength and frequency of the nerve impulses to the digit, thus making the job of the disruptor all the harder, requiring them to channel more negative energy and increasing the likelihood that they will (a) exhaust themselves and (b) suffer a negative impact as a result of backlash.

What quantifies what is major or minor (or on a sliding scale in between) biological disruption is the effect on the body itself. A person is less likely to have a panicked reaction to being unable to move a finger, than they are, for example, to being unable to breath because a disruptor have stopped nerve impulses to the lungs. Any kind of disruption to major organs takes much more energy and is therefore harder to do and harder to sustain for any length of time. A disruptor is never going to be able, for example, to just stop someone's heart. Well, they could - but the inevitable backlash would kill them instantly.

A high level disruptor could, however, for example block the nerve impulses to someone's lungs - not for long enough to kill them, but for long enough to bring on unconsciousness. Once the stream of negative energy that was causing the block was ceased by the disruptor, the person would be able to immediately being breathing again, consciousness would return at the natural interval and the victim would require the normal time to get over the effects of attempted suffocation.

The effects of increased levels of Negative Energy

A disruptor is a 'battery' for negative energy, in that they always have a constant level of negative energy with them. When they use it, it is automatically replenished. It is this base level that allows them to use their abilities. However, if there is more negative energy around, a disruptor can more easily use their abilities and use them more effectively. For example, a disruptor in a bad mood will find their abilities easier to use.

The downside to this, though, is that their body will be channeling more energy, therefore the chance of backlash will be greater - it's just not good for them.

If a disruptor can find a naturally occurring source of negative energy (that's not them) then there is a possibility that they may be able to push their limits, or even achieve things which they should not be able to achieve at their skill level. However, if a disruptor attempts to punch above their weight like this, they will always suffer severe backlash and they risk death or major injury. There is also a high likelihood that their efforts will fail.

Vampires and Disruptors
For some reason, a disruptor is unable to use their abilities on vampires. It's not entirely clear why this is, though the current theory is because vampires are not 'living'. There are doubts on this theory, but nobody seems willing to do any further research on the subject, so it remains the leading theory.