[Suzerain of Sheol]

1. One cannot learn to sword-fight with a tree as one's opponent. I'm pretty sure one can't even learn to cut down trees effectively that way. Oh, and slashing at solid wood is a really great way to ruin a sword. Not to mention, no matter how much she practices, someone her weight cannot biologically have the endurance needed for protracted violent combat. And finally, watch some of this and tell me how many techniques you managed to pick up. Bearing in mind that even these guys are holding back compared to the speed she'd be seeing these techniques executed with.

2. Claws of translucent light? What are those exactly? Telekinesis could do what she did, but there'd be no visual component. It isn't just straight up magic, psyke here is a manipulation of the world around the psychic, not D&D Evocation spells. The amount of effort and practice it'd take to create the visual of a huge claw to go along with a telekinetic attack is... both beyond what someone without specific training should be able to do, and a prohibitively dangerous waste of ability when all that power and effort could go into something... actually useful. And I feel like I need to stress here, psychics cannot just conjure effects out of the ether -- any physical manifestation is an application of telekinesis: pyro- or cryo-kinesis involves vibrating or slowing molecules in a specific way and requires a working knowledge of the physical properties of matter to execute with any degree of reliability. Tornado blasts are telekinetically manipulating the surrounding air to behave in a specific pattern with a specific force. Cain could do it effortlessly because he's had aeons of practice to hone his ability to multitask and fire off powers without even consciously concentrating on them. There's no way she shouldn't have to focus intensely to do something like that, even assuming she's powerful enough to stir up cyclones to begin with.

3. On that note, why, again, is she so so powerful? Cain literally had Adam's (the most powerful psychic ever) undiluted DNA running through him. Tearing apart buildings was par for the course for him. Where do these amazing talents of Ei's come from? If Zach even has psychics of that ability in his forces, they're probably his prized shock troops and have been snatched up and put through extreme training, not allowed to just wander the streets on their own. People notice these outbursts of power.

4. Being schizophrenic should hamper her ability to manifest rather severely. This stuff requires focus and discipline, which... in my experience, people suffering from crippling mental illnesses don't tend to have.

5. Speaking of that, stuff should not just be happening by accident. The psychic impulse is a natural property of the brain. This is more like "My fingers turned into hot dogs all the sudden for no reason!" (in a real-world context) than "My fist punched him in the face of its own volition."


I really, really hate to give anyone a hard time about playing their character, and again, I do not care if we have powerful characters, all I want is justification for why they can do what they do. I'm going to point this out again.

Cain: 8,000 year-old son of Adam whose powers have been augmented by undeath. Can fire off tornado blasts with his mind.

Ei: Teenage waif street-rat with a disease of the mind. Can also for some reason fire off tornado blasts with her mind.

Do you see what the problem is? If you're positing this level of power for someone so low, I have to raise the bar on everyone else who has both more innate ability and far more experience than her, to the point where any psychic we run into is just going to go "I dominate you all, no save" rather than have any kind of meaningful encounter.

And for the group dynamic: This sort of thing worked in Firefly with River being an insane out-of-control psychic prodigy, because that crew was a bunch of thieves-with-hearts-of-gold. Ei is literally signing on with a bunch of hyperparanoid psychopaths here. At this point, there's no way they'd even let her come along rather than have her hauled off to an asylum. At best.

Finally, I'm getting the sense she's apparently amazing at all things psychic, not any particular branch, which is.... not how it works, at all. People have talents in different areas, and most choose to focus training on the things they're good at and the disparity between that and the things they're *not* good at gets even wider. To reference, Diogenes is flat-out amazing at buffing up his own physical abilities -- it is what he does. He is also horrible at telekinesis, telepathy, chirurgery, and only okay at foresight. You can expect any human psychic to fall along similar lines. Adam's blood is too diluted to even be an impact at this stage, but there's a reason a lot of his progeny are still around. *They're* the guys who are awesome at everything.

I'm getting the sense of those stories where everyone around the hero is incompetent and the hero is just naturally better at everything than everyone else, because, well, they're the hero! That is not what we're doing here. Anyone who can survive in this setting is a badass, and there is always someone more badass than any of our characters waiting right around the corner. There is no "institutional incompetence". Humanity survives by mass-production and constantly refining their methods of war. Not by special snowflakes. I guess what I'm saying is that none of us have any right to be heroes, just other fish in the pond.

I'm sorry for how long this was, I would just really prefer to get this taken care of before we get too much farther.


Edit: And not needing sleep? What? No. THAT is the sort of thing that would require rigorous training to be able to do. I will point out once again, Diogenes (who as mentioned, is very good at this sort of thing) has trained for exactly that sort of ability for thirty years and can go without eating or sleeping for maybe a week at a time. It is a constant drain on the psychic's mental resources and requires skill at multitasking (something else that needs to be taught) to be able to do it while functioning at anything like normal capacity. Shealtiel was able to ignore sleeping and eating because he was not a psychic, and was literally eating away at his own cellular structure and turning himself into a wraith the entire time for forcing himself through that kind of privation.