Aeon Student Guide: Pollard’s Scale of Mental Agility

Note: 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.