Dual Mind
Two minds in one skull, and only one of them has hands
Dual Mind saves a mind whose body is finished. The Psychic opens their own brain and gives the mind somewhere to live. The guest keeps their memories, intelligence, and will. They keep nothing else.
The Psychic must reach the mind while it still exists: in a dying body, a body dead only minutes, or an object or demiplane the Psychic has entered. Once the mind is gone, the power cannot recover it.
A Psychic can host one guest.
The Cost
The host takes −2 INT while the guest remains. This is not fatigue; the missing Intelligence is the room the guest occupies.
Caster level and spell slots do not change. Everything else governed by Intelligence does, including Dominate targets, Transmit Knowledge speed, and Spell Trap watches. The loss matters whenever it crosses one of those spells' thresholds.
The guest's Intelligence is never added to the host's. Their knowledge must be asked for in words.
The Guest's Life
The guest lives in a small illusory space like the white room of Transmit Knowledge, furnishing it over the years.
They can advance their knowledge, skills, and mental statistics, but nothing physical. An inventor can keep inventing and never touch a workbench.
The guest can see through the host's eyes, hear through their ears, and speak to them at any time. The host can close the channel; the guest cannot. The brain belongs to one of them.
The guest offers counsel, a second lifetime of training, and a view of the fight from behind the host's eyes. A GM should play them as a whole character, not as a bonus.
Borrowing the Body
With the host's permission, the guest can take the body for a fixed duration agreed before the handover. Neither can end it early. The host sees, hears, and feels everything but can do nothing until the term expires.
The guest uses the body's physical statistics and their own mental statistics, skills, and knowledge. They cannot use the host's powers or cast their own; cerebriles answer only to the mind that trained them. A handover grants expertise, hands, and a voice—not a second spell list.
Taking the Blow
When a mental attack reaches the host—a Hold, a Dominate, or anything else that seizes a mind—the guest may take it instead.
There is no roll. The attack affects the guest, the host remains untouched, and from outside it appears to have failed.
A held or dominated guest cannot intercept again. The host loses their counsel for the duration, and a dominated guest obeys the enemy. They cannot move the body, but they can lie and ask for a handover. A host with a standing agreement has handed the enemy the keys.
The guest chooses whether to intervene; the host cannot demand it. Unlike Guard Their Mind, the interception cannot fail because the guest is already inside.
Ejection
The host can eject the guest by concentrating for 1 round. The guest sees it coming and gets no roll.
An ejected guest is permanently dead. Undead Resurrection or a comparable power can restore them only from the original corpse. A resurrection diamond also needs a body, and the guest has none.
The guest also dies with the host. If a diamond restores the host, it restores the guest with them: both lived in the same brain.
The guest's life depends on the host keeping control of their mind—and the guest is the one defending it.
Origin
Frolix created Dual Mind in Bork's medallion, facing Vidock's disembodied mind with nothing to test it on. Psychometry had taught him how to enter such a space; he had to discover how to carry someone out.
Vidock has remained there ever since: a second intelligence, an adviser, and an inventor with no hands.