Hearing Pasiap's Whispers

[b]Hearing Pasiap's Whispers[/b]
[b]Cost:[/b] 10m 2wp;  [b]Mins:[/b] Awareness 5, Essence 5;
[b]Type: Simple (1 long tick))[/b]
[b]Keywords: Combo-OK[/b]
[b]Duration: Indefinite[/b]
[b]Prerequisite Charms: Distant March Intuition, Sense Riding Technique[/b]

Every step taken echoes down into the earth, and the earth hears it all. As they grow in power, so do the Children of Pasiap.

To activate this charm, the character must be in direct skin-to-earth/rock contact with the ground, and it deactivates if they lose contact with the ground for longer than 5 ticks. There is some flexibility; the character can walk through a grassy field, or along a stone-paved road, but climbing a tree, balancing on a log or standing on a wooden floor (even on the ground floor of a building) will all end the charm if not contact is not quickly returned.

Whilst the charm is active, all creatures touching the ground within (Essence) miles are valid targets for the Terrestrial's Awareness rolls, but only information based that can be determined from those beings' touch on the ground — their weight, footfall/pace of movement, feet size, etc. With practice a fair amount of information may be gaine — it's possible to have a pretty good guess whether a group is armoured, bodies on the ground are distinct from people standing around, and so forth, but beastmen are indistingushable from normal humans unless they are running on all fours or something similar.

The character is not overwhelmed by this information; it is akin to standing on a tall tower and having a telescope (or Dragonfly's Ranging Eye) to let you zoom in on anyone walking in the area around. The character may spend a miscelaneous action to concentrate on a particular area, group, or to try and find anyone of a particular size/weight category or similar within the area, getting additional information about their position, composition, movement.

The character may maintain attention on up to (Essence) specific groups (which can include conditionals 'anyone turning up in this specific area'). Beyond that, they can feel a general idea of the movement within and entry/exit from the area and notice dramatic changes; in the middle of a busy city with many people leaving and entering the radius, they will just get a general sense of the flows - they'll notice a lot of people entering together, or people scattering away from a specific location, but not every arrival and departure. In more desolate areas, if there are fewer creatures coming and going, the character can more pay attention to every change.

This charm does not detect anyone not standing on the ground; buildings with wooden or otherwise raised floors, as well as the first story and above are all invisible to these senses. Obviously anyone floating, flying, or otherwise avoiding walking on the ground is not detected. Charms that lighten a characters tread or otherwise make them harder to detect in an applicable fashion (purely visual stealth wouldn't be applicable, for instance) go to a roll-off.

A repurchase of this charm allows the character to count anyone they can detect with this charm as being within their line of sight for the charm Sense Riding Technique.