In this introductory textbook, we will discuss the basic techniques of the psychokinetic arts, from the trivial through the trained with a brief reflection on the rarely attained exotic abilities, and then pass on to focus upon each in turn.
We shall discuss, however, only the simplest techniques which form the building blocks of psychokinetic practice. These must be mastered as a precursor to everything else: we will not be examining, for example, the practical use of psychokinesis in industry, or the many specialized techniques found in the martial arts. If you are looking for the secrets of sphere-spinning, Becoming the Hammer, the Blade-Deflecting Palm, or extruding complex gradient-alloy objects with your mind, you must look elsewhere - after achieving an appropriate mastery of the basics.
In the first section, we shall address what we might call the "trivial" techniques: those which everyone achieves even without training. That is not to say that they cannot be improved in all ways by study and practice, but merely that instinct and desire have typically proven sufficient for them to manifest. These are manipulation, force enhancement, illumination, and stilling.
(It is important to note that very few people learn how to tap without at least some training. As such, people's initial, instinctive, capacity with these maneuvers is limited to the power the psychokinetic can generate from their own metabolism.)
Manipulation: The simplest possible psychokinetic maneuver, such that it is almost never referred to by name, manipulation is the ability to reach out and manipulate objects remotely. In use, it feels very much like a "ghost hand", reaching out to grasp, push, and pull, translating and rotating objects at will.
Force enhancement: Another instinctive use of psychokinesis is force enhancement. This is the use of the psychokinetic effect to increase the effective weight of hands, feet, tools, or weapons when striking with them. This has some industrial applications, but its primary use is in combat: a punch with fifty pounds-force of psychokinetic enhancement is capable of launching someone across the room; a kick enhanced with three hundred pounds-force can easily kill or cripple.
While force enhancement itself is largely instinctive, effective use requires a great deal of practice to master proper timing and train the muscle memory, so that the psychokinetic force neither works against the initial blow nor dissipates uselessly.
The only drawback of the technique, when used for combat, is that subtle variations in the photon-discharge glow can telegraph one's moves to an opponent trained in fighting psychokinetic adepts, but if it connects even a glancing blow can stun. It is for this reason that enhanced-force training forms the basis of all psychokinetically-enhanced martial arts.
Illumination: Trivial photokinesis, illumination is typically the first maneuver discovered by children. (Ask your parents to show you the pictures of you in your crib, giggling at the colorful floating sparkles you conjured up.) Producing a glow - a true light of chosen color and brightness, not merely a photon-discharge glow - is a matter of a thought.
It often seems intuitive to students that dampening light, creating shadows, should be as simple a matter as creating it. In this case, the technological implementation of psychokinesis works against you: while dampening light is possible, the waste energy from the process is radiated as a photon-discharge glow, countering the effect - if not in the target location, at least nearby.
Stilling: The first and simplest psychokinetic counter, stilling is the simple, near-instinctive ability to grab an object, energetic phenomenon, or psychokinetic effect - although the practical use of this is obviously limited by one's situational awareness and reflex speed - and deflect it, freeze it in place, or ground it out.
In the next, we shall address those maneuvers taught to everyone in the course of typical childhood education, whether because they form a key foundation for later learning, or because it is better to teach them the fundamentals before they start experimenting. At the beginning, this includes how to tap, followed by barrier, the farfist, body-flying, sparking, and lasing.
Tap: Learning to tap is the key to greater psychokinetic power. Without tapping other sources, a psychokinetic's power is inevitably limited by the bioelectrical generation capacity of their own nervous system and symbiotic nanopicosomes.
Tapping other sources is not, it is important to understand, the art of drawing in energy. Such is possible; such is also the path to a swift death from overheating, or in extreme cases, spontaneous combustion. Flesh is not designed as a high-energy containment system. Rather, it is the art of becoming the gate of the transistor: controlling the movement of large forces from source to sink without passing them through yourself, and thus being the carefully-placed pebble that triggers the avalanche.
In this way, natural or artificial sources of kinetic or electromagnetic energy - waterfalls, flywheels, fires, batteries, and so forth - become fuel for greater exercises of psychokinetic ability than the brain alone can fuel.
Barrier: The barrier is the primary defense of any trained psychokinetic. Essentially a psychokinetic version of a kinetic barrier1, it creates a field of deflective and/or repellent force, pushing impinging masses and psychokinetic effects outward and away from the projector, generating misses and weakening impacts that nonetheless make it through.
Once the kinetic barrier was developed, psychokinetic barriers went through a period in which they would often interfere with mechanical barriers, and either one or the other had to be used. Modern kinetic barriers incorporate sensors and attunement systems which permit them to automatically replace a psychokinetic barrier which fails, and/or to augment one currently being held without interference.
Farfist: The farfist is less a refinement of basic psychokinetic manipulation than an encrudening of it. Rather than grasping and carefully moving an object in the manner that seems instinctive, the farfist uses a momentary direct kinetic transfer to shove a large inertial pseudomass into an object and send it flying. It delivers more basic force at the cost of fine control, requiring only enough to hit what you're aiming at (and is, thus, not suitable for use on small or complex objects). It maintains no control over the object after the initial impetus.
Body-flying: Body-flying is exactly what the name implies: the use of psychokinesis to fly. The trick is not to lift yourself; conservation of momentum requires that that be impossible. Rather, one pushes the ground (or another fixed object) away, or pulls it towards you, on a series of appropriate vectors.
There is no special psychokinetic technique to body-flying. It is merely the application of manipulation and/or the farfist to fixed or heavy objects without holding yourself in place, and Callaneth's Lemma implies the rest. This is easy enough to discover, even by accident. Body-flying with elegance and without either injury or making a complete ass out of yourself, contrariwise, requires some training and a great deal of practice.
Sparking: The simplest application of electrokinesis, sparking simply strips electrons from atmospheric atoms, creating a static imbalance which recombines with an electrical spark.
While in the modern world it has lost its basic application of jump-starting recalcitrant electrical machinery, it remains a convenient firestarter, although its main use is as a gateway to further applications. Some psychokinetics have been able to tame it into a mechanism for charging powercells in the field.
Lasing: Last among the basics, a little training allows the photokinetic to collimate, cohere, and narrow the frequency of the light they generate, allowing a variety of possibilities, from simple beamed lanterns all the way to literal modulated mental lasers.
Once these have been mastered, the student is ready to master inertial mass manipulation, and thus the longstep and rejump, along with the cutting shear.
Inertial mass manipulation: The next step in pure psychokinesis is the manipulation of inertial mass. This is the same mechanism that technology has emulated with the vector-control core: however, it is substantially more limited in this form, since even with a source to tap, it is very draining to maintain for more than moments. Nonetheless, it is possible, for short periods, to manipulate the inertial mass of yourself, or another nearby object.
Longstep: The longstep is a psychokinetic freerunning maneuver, taught for its general applicability as well as for its use as an example of applying the manipulation of inertial mass. Specifically, the longstep is based on momentarily counteracting your inertial mass to allow extremely rapid movement from place to place, effectively "blinking" in a manner which resembles - but, importantly, is not - a short-range teleport.
Rejump: As with the longstep, the rejump is another psychokinetic freerunning maneuver. In the rejump, you bend momentum in mid-air after jumping, effectively jumping again. The rejump can be used to leap to even greater heights, or to make a trajectory adjustment while airborne to reach a target or disorient an opponent.
Similar techniques can be used to break the bonds of gravity and convert a powered jump into a long, smooth, slow gliding arc, suitable for crossing dangerous terrain or floating from perch to perch to keep the high ground.
Shear: While it is possible to pull apart objects using manipulation, the shear is the first true psychokinetic cutting maneuver. It combines electrokinesis to force electrons out of their orbitals and thus snap molecular bonds with a repulsive gravitic plane to push the severed pieces apart, focused along a plane. Shear is effective against almost all unshielded materials based on baryonic matter.
These are considered sufficient for the average student, but those showing particular skill may go on to learn the advanced techniques of the mindblade, lightning, lightweaving, thermokinesis, and the cooperative metaconcert.
Mindblade: A more sophisticated version of shear, the mindblade turns the momentary electrogravitic shear-plane into a continuous field of force in the shape of a cutting blade, which can be wielded or thrown. Far from being only suitable as a sword or dagger, mindblades can be produced in many useful shapes, from sculptor's chisel to surgeon's scalpel. Since the mindblade is not a material object, its effective sharpness can be effectively infinite.
For multiple cuts, the mindblade takes less effort to produce than repeated applications of shear. Moreover, psychokinetic artisans have developed orichalcium-inlaid blades which can be wrapped in a mindblade field, granting its advantages at the cost of some flexibility, and making the field much easier to sustain.
Lightning: Built on top of sparking, lightning invokes the simultaneous laying of ion channels to guide the built-up static charge, and other more complex bulk electron manipulation. With this, the electrokinetic adept may hurl bolts of lightning like a sorcerer of legend.
Or, more practically, may generate and guide electrical potential with enough dexterity to power, and otherwise interact with, simple electrical machinery.
Lightweaving: The advanced discipline of photokinesis, lightweaving trains the mind to envision patterns of light and project them, allowing the production of complex light displays and even trigraphic images, rather than simple illumination.
This particular discipline is sometimes referred to as "illusion", but this is a misnomer; it is hard to disguise that lightweavings are light-emitting rather than reflective, and that they are translucent in themselves. Lightweaving can obviously be a great boon to an illusionist, but in most cases, is not in itself sufficient to the task.
Thermokinesis: The simplest of the nanoscale applications of psychokinesis, thermokinesis is the generation or dampening of molecular vibrations within bulk matter. By increasing or decreasing molecular kinetic energy, the psychokinetic learns to heat and cool objects at will.
Metaconcert: With deep focus and control over the psychokinetic nanopicosomes, it becomes possible to engage in their cooperative operation. With sufficient training, multiple - and potentially arbitrary - numbers of psychokinetics may engage in combined maneuvers, benefiting from not only coordination but also a synergistic increase in total capabilities, and the ability to relay energy across distances, among other things.
Beyond these, there are certain exotic disciplines available to those with exceptional psychokinetic focus and dexterity, paired with the necessary supplementary talents. While this book will not go into any detail on these, they include sonokinesis (the ability to create, alter, and muffle sound by selective psychokinetic manipulation of air molecules), radiokinesis (forcing photon emissions and alterations outside the visible range), electrokinesis (the manipulation of electrons finely enough to control circuitry on a detailed level), and micro- and nanokinesis (based on the intense focusing of deepsight and psychokinesis both to allow the manipulation of individual molecules and atoms).
- Introduction to the Psychokinetic Arts Academician Alder Kamini Ellenith Cerebral Academy
- Kinetic barrier technology was, after all, developed from studies of psychokinetic barriers.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2025/06/17/the-will-is-the-deed