Attunement

Attunement is a fundamental change in a person’s physiology that typically occurs in utero or during infancy, theorized to be caused by exposure to high concentrations of mystic matter. It also appears to be hereditary, as it is exceedingly rare for a person to be the first in their family who has it. Much like mystic matter itself, very little is understood about how attunement works.¹

Effects¶

The only effect of attunement is the unique ability to directly manipulate mystic matter. This begins as an unconscious ability and as such, some people may live their entire lives without ever realizing they have this ability. This was especially common prior to the discovery of mystic matter.

What can be accomplished with this ability seems to depend primarily on the individual and how imaginative they are, due to it being a mostly subconscious ability that defies common logic. Typically it is vastly easier for attuned people to learn and practice their ability if they also have alignment, but particularly curious people do just fine without it.

It is apparently quite difficult to learn how to utilize this ability at all, with most people aware of their attunement never learning how to accomplish more than very simple feats such as boiling small amounts of water, moving small objects, or creating small currents in air or water.

There are, however, virtually no known limitations to this ability, with some fox spirits displaying the ability to transmute a lot of dirt into a little bit of gold, disappear seemingly into thin air, create small trinkets seemingly out of nothing, and other supernatural feats, while the Incarnations display terrifying, godlike amounts of power through attunement. The only known consistent limitation is the creation of living cells, which appears to be practically impossible even for the oldest fox spirits.

Only adding to the great difficulty of learning to utilize this ability is that each individual has their own unique understanding of it, and that understanding is typically very abstract and strange, making it incredibly hard to teach and even harder to learn by being taught.

Affected groups¶

Fox, Deer, and Crow spirits all possess attunement inherently from birth, along with all Incarnations. Other major spirits are by far the most likely to be born with attunement at approximately one per 1,000 births, while minor spirits have a significantly lower rate of approximately one per 3,000 births. Over 85% of these births have at least one parent that also has attunement.

While it is possible for humans to have attunement as well, it is extremely rare at a rate of less than one per 25,000 births in the last 50 years, with virtually all of those births having at least one parent that also has attunement. The rate of humans with attunement has been declining through all of known history, and is currently just under half of what it likely was in the year 500 AO.

Cultural reception¶

Treatment of people affected by attunement has varied greatly throughout history depending on the cultures of the time. Some were treated as divine, others treated as demons, some as monsters, and everything in between. After the discovery of mystic matter, attuned people slowly became idolized and now enjoy great popularity in much of the world, though they still struggle with prejudice in many rural areas, particularly among older generations.

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