Biata Mental Abilities - Ifs and Maybes

[Idiosyncronizer]

I have a few questions concerning Biata mental abilities. Having recently reached a high enough level to start playing around with advanced abilities some questions have come to mind for both functional and RP uses; I figured it would be good to get verification before I start using skills in certain ways IG.

1. Can a Biata recognize whether there is a damaged part of the mind, an area affected by a mental ability that may require Restore or some like skill or is the work of other Biata invisible?

2. With the skills Mind Reading or Mind Meld is there a transfer of physical sensation at all, say the feeling of being knocked over the head or being stabbed through the chest? Similarly, in order to craft stronger memories using Twist, would such sensations be able to be planted as a part of the memory? I know emotion is for Stone Elves but the physical sensation itself would not be emotional in nature.

3. Is it possible to use two of the skills at the same time, such as using Mind Reading while using Cause Pain (dependent upon #2 above) in order to know just how much pain I am applying so that I may fine tune my use creating different levels of pain? And if so can the pain be focused into a particular area, such as where I am touching, leaving all other areas unaffected?

 

[Sage of Legaia]

1. Can a Biata recognize whether there is a damaged part of the mind, an area affected by a mental ability that may require Restore or some like skill or is the work of other Biata invisible?

I would say yes, they can tell if a memory has been altered, otherwise abilities like Repair and Restore would be... Difficult to use at best, and outright impossible to use at worst. Since both Repair and Restore (and Restore Blast) specify that to undo Alterations and Twists you must have a higher Racial Skill level than the Biata who put them there, I would imagine that having either of those skills allows you to see whether or not a memory has been altered; I don't think they'd show you what part of the memory was altered, though, only that it was changed in some way, unless Repair was used previously on the same memory (as Repair specifically notes it "leaves 'visible' scars" to others).

2. With the skills Mind Reading or Mind Meld is there a transfer of physical sensation at all, say the feeling of being knocked over the head or being stabbed through the chest? Similarly, in order to craft stronger memories using Twist, would such sensations be able to be planted as a part of the memory? I know emotion is for Stone Elves but the physical sensation itself would not be emotional in nature.

Reading the description of Mind Reading, I would say there's no transfer of physical sensation; it only specifically notes there's no emotional transfer, but based on the rest of the wording it seems like the memory is viewed more as like... A first-person movie, like when you watch a Go-Pro video. However, sympathy pains are a very real thing, and some people experience them more vividly than others; if you ended up watching someone's POV as they got stabbed in the chest, acting out sympathy pain would be entirely reasonable to do.

Mind Meld seems to only be about having a mental conversation of sorts (it doesn't specify it has to be words, just that it's an exchange of thoughts), but I would say you would certainly be well within the rules of it to act out sympathy pain as appropriate here, too.

Concerning Twist... I'm not sure. Personally, I would say that you couldn't implant physical sensations, but here again the mind does some pretty cool stuff where memory is concerned; remembering times when you were in pain can sometimes trigger phantom pain in the same spot and same intensity, so a sufficiently gruesome or torturous memory might do all the work for you, with the person using that phantom pain as proof it really happened.

This question in general seems to be more up to the people involved than a strict ruling one way or the other, simply because of how complex the interaction between memory and physical sensation can be.

3. Is it possible to use two of the skills at the same time, such as using Mind Reading while using Cause Pain (dependent upon #2 above) in order to know just how much pain I am applying so that I may fine tune my use creating different levels of pain? And if so can the pain be focused into a particular area, such as where I am touching, leaving all other areas unaffected?

I would personally say that yes, you could use two different abilities at the same time, but based on my interpretation noted my previous answer, the specific interaction between Mind Reading and Cause Pain would fail; however, I can easily see Mind Reading and Alteration being used in tandem to make sure the changes fit smoothly into the memory.

On that specific use of Cause Pain, it just says the target "suffers tremendous pain", without specifying whether it's a general all-over sense of pain or if it's more like a really bad migraine and localised to one spot in particular; I would say in this particular case you could certainly roleplay it either way you wanted, but if you did go the "only hurts where I touch you" route then you should be prepared for them to make every attempt to avoid you touching them (I would say up to and including (gently) smacking your hand away or attacking you, but more likely just attempting to debilitate you and run away).