Author Kay Hooper

Psychic Terms and Abilities: (As Classified/Defined by Bishop’s Special Crimes Unit and by Haven)

Adept: The general term used to label any functional psychic; the specific ability is much more specialized.

Latent: The term used to describe a person with inactive psychic abilities; these people rarely even know about those dormant extra senses.

Clairvoyance: The ability to know things, to pick up bits of information, seemingly out of thin air. Often requires touching an object, but stronger clairvoyants often simply have the knowledge or information come to them unbidden.

Telepathy (touch and non-touch or open): The ability to pick up thoughts from others. Some telepaths only receive, while others have the ability to send thoughts. A few are capable of both, usually due to an emotional connection with the other person.

Empathy: An empath experiences the emotions of others, with varying degrees of intensity unique to the individual psychic.

Empathic Healer: For some empaths, their emotional connections to others is so powerful that they are able to share physical pain and injuries, and to heal those injuries. Depending on the seriousness of the injury, an empath-healer can endanger his or her own life in healing someone else. A rare empath can feel and share injuries to the mind and soul as well as the body, and is able to heal devastating emotional and psychological trauma so that a victim of violence can move past that.

Absolute Empath: The rarest of all abilities, this one causes the psychic to literally absorb the pain of another, to the point that the empath physically takes on the same injuries, healing the injured person and then healing themselves. If they have the strength.

Mediumistic: A medium has the ability to communicate with the dead; some see the dead and some hear the dead. Most mediums in the unit are able to do both, though there are of course differences unique to each psychic.

Medium Healer: The ability to heal injuries to self or others, often but not always connected to mediumistic or empathic abilities. For medium-healers, the theory is that since they are sensitive to the electromagnetic energy of death, they are also often able to "tune in" the energy of life as well. And manipulate those energies in order to heal themselves and others. It can be extremely dangerous for the healer, depending on the individual’s strength and how serious the pain or injury they attempt to heal, since it always depletes their own life energy.

Precognition: A seer or precog has the ability to correctly predict future events. The SCU definitions differentiate between predictions and prophesies: A prediction can sometimes be changed, even avoided, but a prophesy will happen no matter what anyone does to try and change the > outcome.

Psychometric: The ability to pick up impressions or information from touching objects.

Regenerative: The ability to heal one’s own injuries/illnesses, even those considered by medical experts to be lethal or fatal. (A classification unique to one SCU operative and considered separate from an empathic or mediumistic healer’s abilities.)

Telekinesis: The ability to move objects with the mind. A very rare ability.

Telepathic mind control: The ability to influence/control others through mental focus and effort; an extremely rare ability. Though some psychics the SCU has encountered have displayed this ability to some degree, and they’ve seen it between blood siblings, Bishop believes it to be a negative ability (taking away control from others), and highly dangerous because of that.

Dream-projecting: The ability to enter another’s dreams. Dream-walking: The ability to invite/draw others into one’s own dreams.

Spider Sense: The ability to enhance one’s normal senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc.) through concentration and the focusing of one’s own mental and physical energy.

UNNAMED ABILITIES INCLUDE:

The ability to absorb and/or channel energy usefully as a defensive or offensive tool or weapon. Extremely rare due to the level of power and control needed, and highly dangerous, especially if the energy being channeled is dark or negative energy.

Actual mind-control, which has very rarely been more than an elusive, tenuous thing encountered by the SCU and Haven, almost always in the evil monsters they hunt. That said, some SCU and Haven operatives have shown flashes of the ability.

The ability to see into time, to view events in the past, present, and future without being or having been there physically while the events transpired. Another rare ability, it seems to be a combination of clairvoyance, precognition, and sometimes mediumistic traits, though the ability is so rare it hasn’t been studied in depth.

The rare ability to cause another person, even another psychic, to sleep with only a touch.

The rare ability to even momentarily freeze another person so they are unable to move.

The ability to see the aura or another person’s energy field, and to interpret those colors and energies.

White = healing, protective, positive

Blue/lavenders = calm

Red/rich yellows = energy/power

Red alone = almost always reflecting rage, negative

Green = unusual, tends to mix with other colors, peaceful

Metallic along the outside edge of an aura = repelling energy from another source or projecting a protective shield.

Metallic within an aura, close to the body = holding in a dangerous amount of sheer power

Black = extremely negative, even evil, especially if it has red streaks of energy and power

More than one color in an aura is common, reflecting the outward sign of human complexities of emotion.