The Gifted had begun to flourish, members of several families tracing their heritage back to some wandering priest whose children began showing unusual talents.
Some families killed their children, believing them possessed. One did not, and sent their child to be exorcised and the priest who was ready to do it - rather than admit his inability to do so - was struck by the Opportunity. The child, who would go on to become Saint Rafael, took the simple concept that this was a Gift and the purpose of the Gift was to aid his fellows and the faithful around him.
For almost a hundred years Saint Rafael spread the word, and as priests didn't have to be celibate at that point - spread his genes around. The Gift didn't always appear in his progeny, but enough did and met up with others who had some bit of the Gift within them.
It wasn't until 1000 years later that the Gifts were pronounced enough and widespread enough that someone decided to codify them.
The Gift Of Tongues. The Gift Of Foresight. The Gift Of Endurance. The Gift Of The Unseen Hand. The Gift Of Healing. The Gift Of Dowsing.
Magic was classified into Dark Arts and Gifted at first, it wasn't until the Renaissance after the discovery of the cursed rats (it taking a few centuries to learn that the curse was actually the infected bite of a flea carried by those rats), that various thinkers put the Gift as being the same and the typical Dark Arts being a counterculture religious practice that was ineffectual for the most part.
Eventually the terms changed, magic went to becoming a thing of fantasy and myth. Psionics was the new term, coined by a fellow named Benjamin Franklin who apparently disliked the term 'extra-sensory perception' - especially as he pointed out that psi was a sense and only 'extra' to those who didn't have it.
Of course, during all this time there were psi-crimes and psi-hoaxes. There was the first use of psi using troops by Napoleon, who had been quick to seize on the sudden boom in numbers of the trained psi following the establishment of Beauxbatons Academie in France and Hogwarts in England. Other schools followed of course, the resource afforded by having trained and licensed psi in one's nation being one of those concepts that nobody could really figure out why nobody had done this before.
The mundane sciences flourished. Psi flourished. As more psi-users interbred some of their Gifts became much stronger. Then someone, in the early part of the 20th Century, figured out the part of the brain that dealt with psi. It could be silenced, which was regarded with horror by most of the psi and a number of the populace - comparable to putting out someone's eyes or cutting both hands off. In some cases, the non-psi could begin functioning as a psi themselves. To say the effect of this knowledge was electric would understate things.
Since prior to the development of the schools, a ranking system for Gift was given. Each of the Gifts had been codified. Now added to this were two other ranks. Those with no trace of Gift, who could not become psi-active, were referred to as 'muggles' in some places or 'mundane' in others or 'Nulls' in still others. Seventy percent of humanity fell into this category. Ten percent were 'sleepers' - people whose Gift lay dormant but could be awakened. Ten percent (rough figures- depended on where you were in the world) were sensitives - they could do simple things like detect lies or sense illnesses like cancer. Ten percent were actual psi, most tracing their heritage back to some group of barbarians that had been on the borders of the Roman Empire.
Into this setting had come Ranma and his father, who found there were an awful lot of people you just couldn't lie to.
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(Posted Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:01)
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