💡🐇 Naughty Thoughts

꩜ Order of Supremacy

This is more of a worldbuilding idea. The Order has shown up in one of my stories, The Baby Makers, but there's still plenty of other stories that could be told about them.

These days, they call themselves the Order of Supremacy. Some like to call themselves the Olmec Order, or various other names hinting at ancient cultures. But though they know the Order is ancient, there's no real record connecting them to a particular origin. There are records of the Founders, and the First City, and their exploits. But those are records of what the Founders did, and the laws they passed down. Nobody thought to record where or when these events occurred. Some people say six millennia is a good estimate, while others would say twenty. Some members even say that the Travelling Craftsman mentioned in the texts could have been a prophet or messiah from a major religion, dating the text as recently as sixteen centuries ago.

But in any case, the Order of Supremacy is kind of a secret society, kind of a religion, and kind of a global police force. Seen as a religion, they worship an entity they call 'Supremacy', or the Supreme Will. This isn't an external thing, though, but the emergent will of the collective unconscious. A gestalt composed of all the human minds on the planet.

The Order aren't just worshipping a hypothetical being. They know that Supremacy exists. They can hear the call of the Supreme Will, and they do their best to interpret its desires. But being able to sense the collective unconscious also gives them a few other abilities. Most notably, they can sense the 'ripples' in the collective unconscious when one person's mind is altered. Mostly, small things like hypnosis or subliminal advertising are just like ripples in the collective unconscious, they're background noise. But a member of the Order, after they've done their basic training, will still be able to sense if a person they're paying attention to is acting according to some kind of mental programming.

When it comes to large numbers of people, or drastic changes in someone's worldview, that's when the Order starts to take notice. Because they don't want someone to be able to influence the Supreme Will itself simply by using hypnosis, or subliminal messages, or any kind of mind control power. So they act against any person or organisation who is relying on mind control too much. Like a kind of unofficial MC police, shutting down any group that has too much ambition or gets too big.

Members of the Order all have a certain set of basic powers. If they've been taking the relevant classes (which most children of Order members do), they'll manifest these abilities during puberty. It's not unheard of for an outsider to learn the sense, but it is rare and difficult.

The basic Sense abilities are:

* To recognise (when watching someone's behaviour) if a person is acting under mind control.

* To sense when someone is being subjected to mind control or mind alteration in your area.

* To sense and (unless caught off guard) reject attempts at mind control or alteration.

* The ability to sense when a person nearby is communicating telepathically.

* To identify the perpetrator of any direct mind control (telepathy, magic, etc). This doesn't work for most technological forms.

Some members of the Order gain additional senses at the same time. This seems to depend on a child's life experience, and their attitude during their training classes. But because they take the classes as children and then manifest sense powers at puberty, the Order hasn't yet been able to do enough research into what might cause a certain ability. Common ones include:

* More information when sensing telepathy. One of more of:

- Identifying the kind of data (surface thoughts, voluntary messages, see through someone's eyes, memories, etc)

- Recognising whether or not the person you see is aware of the communication, or who initiated it

- Identifying whether the person you see is the sender or recipient of data

- Finding the identity or location of the person someone is communicating with

* Being able to identify the type, intent, or dominant emotion of some mind control (extremely rare to have more than one of these)

* Ability to shield other people from telepathy

* Ability to release someone from mind control (usually by some time consuming process)

* Ability to sense the majority mood of people in an area

* Ability to sense the presence of sentient minds around you (so you could know whether or not a house is empty)

* When talking to a person whose worldview has been altered, gaining knowledge of when, where, how, and/or by whom.

These are pretty limited powers, but I think they could be interesting. For example, it's possible for an order member to outright reject hypnotic suggestion or direct mind control. But if they 'play along' with the orders they've been given, they might end up affected anyway. Or with a telepathic hypnotist as a cult leader, it might be impossible to infiltrate the group without letting him into your mind enough to hear what he's saying. Plenty of room for Order agents to lose their footing on a slippery slope.

I think the Order has, in the past, come up against a lot of evil hypnotists. Cults, harems, hives. Also maybe aliens, supernatural powers, brainwave-control helmets and rayguns, and a whole range of other things. Even (according to rumours) an actual deity appearing to take his followers away ("Don't ask about Atlantis").

One story that popped into my mind was a group who sensed a growing disturbance in one city; first a few people, and then a growing wave, having the same small change made in their worldview. They narrow it down to a particular hotel, and they suspect it's the beginning of something big, so they do their best to infiltrate. Turns out it's an erotic hypnosis convention/conference; and the reason so many people had the same suggestion was because some particular kink (shifting erogenous zones?) is trending, and everybody wants to try it.