senses unified

I closed my eyes, shuddering slightly as I felt the changes sweep through me—and had to pause for a moment when closing my eyes ceased to do anything. I could still see the world around me, but in a way that was hard to truly explain. I could see my house, the street, trees, and also a general dimness that seemed to surround most of my body—

Without bothering to open my eyes, I tapped my status screen to remove my shirt and watched as my perceptions changed again, some of the darkness fading away. It took me a moment to truly wrap my head around it, but if I was seeing with my skin then the odd sensation I was feeling must have been light. Somehow, I could feel the light touching my skin and it made sense in a way that my brain could interpret as an image.

And it wasn’t just light, I realized as I opened my eyes. I focused on a nearby tree and…and felt how course the bark was with my eyes. In a way that was difficult to explain, I switched my senses and tasted it instead, before focusing down the street. At a thought, Vulturnus pointed and a distant tree split with a startling crack—a crack I heard long before the sound reached me, because I could see it and as light carried the image to my brain, the sound seemed to follow it.

Somehow, it seemed my senses had…merge. I could taste, hear, smell, and touch anything I could see—or see what I could feel or see what I heard or any other combination. It took me a moment to focus my attention on my eyes, in fact, because with all five of my senses seemingly one, it took me a moment to separate my eyes from everything else.

And then a thought struck me. Was it just five of my senses? Because I had significantly more than that.

I shifted my sight into the infrared and heard it before snapping back to ultraviolet to feel it on my skin. It wasn’t simply seeing with my skin—I felt it and saw it and everything else at once, hearing and feeling the wavelengths for the first time. If it was like this, then I bet I could even listen to songs on radio waves or watch TV by looking into the sky. It was…at once really, really weird and amazingly cool, so I brought up the skill I suspected to be responsible.

Extrasensory Perception (Active & Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%
The inborn ability to perceive the world through the broad senses of the mind, rather than the limited ones of the body. Takes many forms dependent on the mentality and natural abilities of the user, but can grow with time and training. The power of this skill increases with level, INT, and through related abilities.
Active effects:
Expands Clairvoyance to encompass low levels of Clairaudience, Clairalience, Clairsentience, and Clairgustance. Improve by increasing level and INT.
Low-ranked Clairsentience allows touch-range abilities may be used at a range of 5 meters. Improve by increasing level and INT.
Other abilities will be unlocked with higher levels.

I took a deep breath and considered that, letting my senses open up once more. As the world opened up into patterns of taste and sensation, I let my power flow out of me. As it said, I could feel the world in my immediate vicinity as if I were touching it with my hands, power ready to flow out of me and take shape beyond the reach of my skin, but somehow still contained within me. While I’d long been able to attack at range with Far Strike, this was something different and perhaps even more useful. Even just the ability to heal at range opened up many new options and that was far from the only skill I had that required touch—just taking into account my healing and my buffing skills meant that even a slight range increase opened up a world of possibility, and Longshot may well improve that further.