The Psychic Project

Cerberus Psychics are not born; they are made. There are six.

It began with a journey to improve Perennus Albion's language skills. Visiting a dwarven friend at the Kal'dach mine in Askenon, he found unnaturally productive, docile workers and an oddly courteous host. After six months, they drugged him and hung him naked by the ankles in Valerium shackles. A voice spoke from an underground lake: an Aboleth controlled the entire mine and could not understand why this human resisted. The fight was brief. Perennus touched the creature and told it to become stone.

He brought it to Cerberus. The council of mages assigned Marcin Sobiesansky to study and exploit its powers, and the Stonehearts to imprison it once restored to flesh.

Aboleths are immortal Psychic fish-aberrations of extreme intelligence with perfect, hereditary memory. Each descendant inherits every ancestor's memories. Every second is known; every conversation has already been lived. They favor order, hierarchy, and dominion over a territory. Cerberus keeps its captive weakened with drugs perpetually circulating through its blood.

The process implants Aboleth cerebriles into robust young children. It eventually worked on children born in Brazzant. Perennus collected them, not always by asking: one child's clan was massacred to obtain him.

Another, faster method pitted a Psychic's mind against the creature to force its growth. Sobiesansky abandoned it after his finest subject went mad. Perennus remains the person who held his mind against the Aboleth longest.

This is the known world's third source of Psychic magic after drows and monsters, and the only one manufactured by humans. Sobiesansky guards his Psychics as he guards his verchoix: each carries a vial of poison near the brain that he can open at will.