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Aeon Student Guide: Pollard’s Scale of Mental Agility
🕑 Added 2021-05-19 17:11:06 +0000 UTCNote: The "Aeon Student Guide" will be included in Mind Blind's stat pages upon final release. There will also be a glossary of terms. The reason these aren't part of the demo is two-fold: first, because I wanted to make sure that the story still makes sense even if readers skip the lore-building material; and second, because I'm not done writing it all. That being said, I'm going to start posting pages from the Aeon Student Guide on Patreon since I think some of the entries will answer a lot of questions (and maybe give rise to new ones).
This is from the handbook that Valero didn't read. (It also mainly discusses the USA since Aeon is Unity's American branch. Different countries would get different manuals.)
Pollard’s Scale of Mental Agility
Pollard’s Scale of Mental Agility, created by Maximus Pollard in 1952, measures of the strength of extrasensory abilities (“Pollard Score”) with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest. This score is calculated using Maximus Pollard’s own technology, which measures the amount of “Z-waves” produced by an individual’s brain.
First recorded by James Achebe in 1920, Z-waves are responsible for both psychic powers and mental resiliency. Pollard quantified people’s Z-waves, with those scoring 6 and above on his Pollard Scale classifying as Ments. Levels 1-5 do not possess enough Z-waves to manifest powers, but rather indicate increasing levels of mental resilience (the amount of Z-waves “shielding” a brain and thus making it more difficult for telepaths and empaths to influence).
A Ment’s score on the Pollard Scale originally took only two factors into account: the strength of a Ment’s Z-waves (how powerful their abilities were), and the distance which those Z-waves travelled (the range that their abilities affected, known as “brainrange”). In 1987, several Ments were born who demonstrated multiple psychic abilities. This required the Pollard Scale to adopt one more metric; any Ment with more than two abilities qualifies as a 10. For reasons still unknown, scientists have registered a direct correlation between number of psychic powers and the strength of their Z-waves.
Pollard’s Scale of Mental Agility ushered in a new age of Ment acceptance. Although people had already begun to speculate that Ments’ powers were dwindling as early as the eighteenth century, Maximus Pollard confirmed the opposite: Ments showed a generational increase in Z-wave production, but powerless people were now producing limited amounts of Z-waves that dampened Ments’ psychic hold. By the mid-1960’s, legislation passed allowing Ments to vote in the USA. In 2002, following the end of the Korean Reunification and the United Nation’s establishment of Unity, the Supreme Court rescinded prior restrictions which prevented Ments from running for political office and taking jobs working with children, who were erroneously considered by many to possess “more malleable” minds.
Comments
"In 1987, several Ments were born who demonstrated multiple psychic abilities."- this line in particular is interesting. It seems to imply that 1) Nick isn't the only Ment with more than one ability and 2) there either weren't any cases of Ments with multiple powers before 1987, or there were and they weren't being documented. So what changed in 1987? Or am I just reading too much into it?
Jo O'Connor
Hope was allowed to be a diplomat because she was a telemetrist and not an empagh/telepath (which were usually more prejudiced against due to fear that they'd manipulate people), but she was banned from holding a position with decision making power and most people she worked with assumed that she was sent to spy. Precogs weren't allowed to legally work in the stock market (and many still aren't allowed into privately owned casinos, since people don't understand how their power works).
Alex T.
This makes a lot of sense! So since the current metric for measuring ment powers is strength and distance of Z waves, it's possible that there are other factors that are currently unaccounted for. You're right, this will definitely help answer a lot of questions!! But also 2002 for ments to work with kids? That's pretty crazy. And it makes you appreciate just how much of an impact Hope and John were able to make by being the face of a movement. Were there any other jobs they were generally barred from? Hope was a diplomat back in the 90s so they obviously weren't barred from everything. Another question for the student guide!
