Emotional manipulation via electromagnetic hue control. Luxomancers modulate light frequencies to influence neurochemical responses, dampening or amplifying emotions, altering moods, and creating psychological states in themselves or others.

Luxomancy resonates with the intersection of electromagnetic wavelengths and consciousness within the Weave. Practitioners perceive emotions as colors and frequencies, understanding that specific hues can trigger predictable neurological responses.

Luxomancy was discovered alongside Corpus during the desperate post-collapse years when surviving carriers sought to heal both body and mind. Early practitioners noticed that physical healing often failed when patients remained emotionally traumatized—the quantum connection between emotional state and biological health was undeniable.

Why Luxomancy Came Early

Post-collapse trauma was universal. Survivors needed:

• Fear management (constant danger from collapse aftermath)
• Grief processing (massive population loss)
• Hope restoration (combating despair and suicide)
• Social cohesion (rebuilding communities required trust)

Cultural Significance

In Weaver culture, Luxomancers are called "Heartseers" (respectful) or "Pushers" (pejorative, implying manipulation).

Traditional sayings:

• "The heart has frequencies the mind cannot hear."
• "To change the light is to change the soul."
• "Feel all, hold none." (warning against empathic absorption)

The Luxomancy Paradox: The discipline requires simultaneous Empathy and Detachment—practitioners must feel target emotions intensely while remaining untouched by them. This contradiction creates the highest burnout rate among all disciplines.

• Thread Color: Amber, gold, or shifting emotional hues (red for anger, blue for calm, yellow for joy, etc.)
• Glyph Patterns: Wavelike hand movements, color spectrum gestures, chromatic circuits
• Manifestation: Colored light streams, emotional auras, hue-based energy fields
• Emblem Style: Wavelengths and frequency patterns

• Emotion Dampening: Reducing fear, anger, panic, or pain responses
• Mood Enhancement: Inducing calm, joy, courage, or focus
• Crowd Control: Broadcasting emotional states to groups
• Interrogation: Breaking down emotional defenses or creating trust
• Therapy: Treating trauma, anxiety, or depression through frequency modulation
• Combat Psychology: Instilling terror or confusion in opponents

Luxomancy exploits the quantum basis of neurochemistry and biophotons—ultra-weak photon emissions from biological systems. Threads create plasmonic cavities tuned to specific wavelengths that couple with neural tissue, influencing neurotransmitter production and ion channel states through light-activated quantum processes.

Different emotional states correspond to different photochemical signatures in the brain. By modulating the electromagnetic field at these characteristic frequencies, Luxomancers can bias quantum transitions in neurochemical pathways, effectively "pushing" the brain toward target emotional states.

Function: Detects and identifies the emotional state of a subject within visual range. Reveals primary emotion, emotional intensity, and underlying secondary feelings.

Duration: Instantaneous reading (can be sustained for ongoing monitoring)

Thread Cost: Very Low (3-5% reserves for quick read)

Applications:

• Therapy/counseling (understanding patient state)
• Negotiation (reading true intentions behind words)
• Security (detecting hostile intent, deception)
• Social navigation (knowing how others truly feel)

Function: Reduces fear, panic, or anxiety in a subject by modulating their neural electromagnetic field to favor calm neurotransmitter states. Creates sense of safety and emotional groundedness.

Duration: Temporary (15 seconds to 2 minutes; subject awareness builds resistance)

Thread Cost: Moderate (10-15% reserves for 30-60 seconds of sustained dampening)

Applications:

• Emergency calming (panic attacks, trauma response)
• Medical procedures (reducing patient fear before surgery/treatment)
• Animal handling (calming frightened creatures)
• Combat psychology (reducing allies' fear, maintaining morale)

Function: Temporarily increases confidence, courage, and emotional resilience by enhancing dopamine/norepinephrine production and reducing inhibition.

Duration: Temporary (5-30 minutes depending on power investment)

Thread Cost: Moderate (12-18% reserves)

Applications:

• Pre-battle encouragement (soldiers entering combat)
• Performance enhancement (public speaking, competitions)
• Therapy (treating low self-esteem, learned helplessness)
• Leadership (inspiring followers, maintaining morale)

Risks: Overuse can lead to emotional dependency or trigger manic episodes.

Function: Reduces emotional suffering and pain perception by modulating psychological pain processing centers. Does not block pain signals physically, but reduces the distress they cause.

Duration: Temporary (10 minutes to 1 hour)

Thread Cost: Moderate (15-20% reserves for significant pain relief)

Applications:

• Chronic pain management
• Childbirth (labor pain reduction)
• Dying patient comfort (hospice/palliative care)
• Trauma processing (emotional pain from memories)

Function: Creates sense of connection, trust, and rapport between practitioner and subject. Reduces social anxiety, suspicion, and defensiveness.

Duration: Temporary (20-60 minutes)

Thread Cost: Low-Moderate (8-15% reserves)

Applications:

• Therapy (building therapeutic alliance)
• Diplomacy (creating trust in negotiations)
• Team building (accelerating group cohesion)

Ethical Minefield: Creating false trust violates consent and autonomy. Most societies require explicit permission before use.

Function: Creates protective barrier against emotional manipulation, empathic intrusion, or emotional "infection" from others. Essential self-protection for Luxomancers.

Duration: Temporary (30 minutes to 2 hours; can be maintained indefinitely with thread cost)

Thread Cost: Low for basic shield (5-8% reserves for 1 hour)

Applications:

• Luxomancer self-protection (preventing burnout)
• Protection from hostile emotional manipulation
• Grounding in emotionally chaotic environments

Training Emphasis: Restoration Academy teaches Shield in the first week of Luxomancy training.

Function: Detects emotional incongruence that indicates deception, hidden feelings, or internal conflict. Reveals when someone's emotional state doesn't match their words/actions.

Duration: Active scanning (can sustain for duration of conversation)

Thread Cost: Low (5-10% reserves for 15-30 minute conversation)

Applications:

• Interrogation (detecting lies during questioning)
• Negotiation (knowing when counterpart is bluffing)
• Therapy (revealing hidden emotions patient won't acknowledge)

Limitations: Cannot determine what the truth is, only that deception exists. Cannot detect omission or skilled liars.

Function: Projects emotional state to everyone within area of effect (3-10 meter radius). All subjects experience the broadcast emotion simultaneously.

Duration: Temporary (30 seconds to 5 minutes; extremely draining)

Thread Cost: Very High (30-50% reserves for 1-2 minute broadcast)

Applications:

• Crowd calming (riots, panic, mass hysteria)
• Military morale (broadcasting courage before battle)
• Psychological warfare (broadcasting fear to enemy troops)

Ethical & Legal Status: Heavily regulated or outright illegal in most societies as mass manipulation.

Function: Reduces anxiety, fear, anger, or panic in target(s). Creates emotional tranquility, lowers stress response, induces rational state of mind. Can affect individuals or groups. Advanced version of Calm I with broader emotional range and group effect capability.

Duration: Effects last 10-30 minutes, gradually fading

Thread Cost: Moderate (20-30% for group, less for individual)

Applications: Crowd control, medical (panic attacks, pre-surgery), conflict de-escalation, therapy, hostage situations

Ethical Concerns: Manipulating emotions without consent raises questions, can enable coercion

Limitations: Strong emotions resist, some individuals immune, doesn't address underlying causes

Function: Increases confidence, courage, determination, and enthusiasm. Targets feel energized, capable, ready to face challenges.

Duration: Effects last 15-60 minutes

Thread Cost: Moderate (20-35%)

Applications: Military (before battle), leadership, sports, performances, emergency situations.

Function: Induces overwhelming fear, dread, or panic in targets. Can cause paralysis, flight response, or complete psychological breakdown.

Duration: Acute terror lasts minutes, psychological impact can persist hours to days

Thread Cost: Moderate-High (25-40%)

Ethical/Legal: Considered torture by many jurisdictions, war crime if used on civilians.

Cultural Status: Regarded as "dark Luxomancy," forbidden by Restoration Academy.

Function: Creates bidirectional emotional connection between caster and target(s). Both parties feel each other's emotions in real-time.

Duration: Active link (5-30 minutes, emotionally exhausting)

Thread Cost: Moderate (25-35%)

Applications: Therapy, conflict resolution, building trust, deep communication.

Ethical Concerns: Extremely intimate, requires enthusiastic consent.

Function: Numbs or eliminates emotional response in target. Creates emotional detachment, rational objectivity, or complete affective flatness.

Duration: Effects last 30 minutes to several hours

Thread Cost: Moderate (20-30%)

Applications: Medical (PTSD crisis intervention), allowing rational decision under stress.

Ethical/Legal: Highly controversial, can be used to suppress appropriate emotional responses.

Function: Changes target's emotional state from one to another—turn anger to calm, sadness to joy, love to indifference.

Duration: Shifted emotion lasts 20-60 minutes before natural state reasserts

Thread Cost: Moderate-High (30-45%)

Ethical/Legal: Extremely ethically problematic, tantamount to mind control, illegal in most jurisdictions.

Cultural Status: Forbidden technique in Restoration Academy, regulated as psychological weapon.

Function: Permanently alters target's emotional baseline, personality traits, or affective responses by rewriting neural pathways at quantum level. Can eliminate PTSD, cure depression, remove phobias, or fundamentally change who someone is emotionally.

Thread Cost: Extreme (70-90% depending on depth of rewrite)

Applications: Treating severe mental illness (PTSD, major depression, personality disorders), rehabilitation (reforming violent offenders), enhancing emotional resilience, removing traumatic memories' emotional charge.

Ethical Catastrophe: Changes identity (personality is emotions—rewriting them creates different person), consent impossible (cannot consent to becoming someone else), weaponizable (forced personality modification = mind control), creates "emotional designer babies" (parents rewriting children's temperament), enables authoritarianism (governments creating compliant populations).

Legal Status: Heavily restricted—therapeutic use requires extensive oversight, informed consent, ethical review. Coercive use classified as crime against humanity. Some jurisdictions ban completely.

Limitation: Permanent changes risky (cannot easily reverse), affects identity (therapeutic question: is cured person same person?), extreme thread cost, requires deep understanding of neuroscience, success rate ~60-70%, side effects common (emotional flatness, unexpected personality shifts).

Function: Broadcasts single powerful emotion to everyone within kilometer radius simultaneously. All affected experience same intense feeling—joy, terror, grief, love—creating temporary emotional unification. Deeper and wider than regular Broadcast.

Thread Cost: Extreme (80-95% reserves for full-power nova affecting thousands)

Applications: Ending riots (broadcasting calm to angry mob), military morale (courage to entire army before battle), disaster response (hope to despairing survivors), political rallies (enthusiasm to supporters), religious experiences (ecstasy to congregation).

Famous Uses: The Grief Wave (entire city mourned together after massacre, 15,000 affected), The Joy Cascade (celebration broadcast reached 8,000 people), The Terror Rout (enemy army fled from broadcasted fear, 2,000 soldiers affected).

Ethical/Legal: Classified as weapon of mass manipulation. Banned for political use, heavily restricted for crowd control, requires emergency authorization, forbidden by most ethical codes.

Limitation: Indiscriminate (affects everyone in radius including allies), practitioner often caught in own broadcast (emotional feedback), massive thread depletion, duration brief (1-5 minutes), lingering psychological effects, creates false emotional memories, forbidden except extreme emergencies.

Function: Creates artificial romantic/familial love in target toward caster or designated person. Not mere attraction—deep emotional bond including attachment, loyalty, desire to please, grief at separation. Indistinguishable from natural love to target.

Thread Cost: Very High (65-80% for lasting binding)

Why Forbidden: Violates autonomy completely (love = fundamental choice, cannot ethically be forced), creates slavery (bound person will do anything for beloved), destroys authentic relationships (all interactions built on lie), psychologically devastating when discovered (shatters reality), weaponizable (diplomats binding enemy leaders, spies creating devoted assets), enables abuse (abusers binding victims to prevent escape).

Legal Status: Absolutely Forbidden—attempting Love Binding illegal globally, classified as crime against humanity equivalent to rape/slavery, immediate execution order for practitioners, knowledge of technique suppressed, teaching it forbidden.

Limitation: Morally unconscionable (universally condemned), psychologically unstable (bound person's subconscious recognizes artificiality—cognitive dissonance creates mental breakdown), cannot create authentic emotion (only simulate it), if discovered creates extreme trauma, caster often develops guilt/psychological damage, Shadow Syndicate reportedly uses technique (evidence of ongoing abuses).

Function: Amplifies target's pain perception by 10-100x—minor discomfort becomes agony, mild pain becomes unbearable torture. Does not cause tissue damage but makes existing sensations overwhelmingly intense. Pure suffering without physical harm.

Thread Cost: Moderate (30-50% depending on amplification intensity)

Applications (All Unethical): Interrogation (torture without evidence), psychological warfare (demoralizing enemies), punishment (inflicting suffering without injury), control (threatening pain to enforce compliance).

Ethical/Legal: Classified as torture, war crime, crime against humanity. Absolutely forbidden in all contexts. Use triggers immediate kill order. Restoration Academy forbids teaching.

Psychological Damage: Victims develop PTSD, chronic pain disorders (brain rewires pain pathways), fear of sensation, sometimes psychotic breaks. Permanent psychological scarring common.

Limitation: Leaves no physical evidence (perfect torture technique—horrifying), morally reprehensible, caster experiences emotional backlash (empathic feedback from victim's suffering), forbidden globally, practitioners hunted by law enforcement, Shadow Syndicate known users (evidence of systematic torture).

Function: Creates self-spreading emotional state that jumps from person to person like infectious disease. Affected individual unconsciously broadcasts emotion to nearby people, who then broadcast to others, creating exponential cascade. Can affect entire cities.

Thread Cost: High initial (55-70%), zero ongoing (becomes self-sustaining)

Mechanism: Target becomes "patient zero"—broadcasts emotion via quantum field resonance. Anyone nearby catches emotion, becomes broadcaster themselves. Spreads through populations following social networks, eventually burning out after affecting thousands.

Applications: Warfare (spreading terror/despair through enemy population), social manipulation (creating mass enthusiasm for political cause), disaster response (spreading hope to affected region—ethical use), psychological warfare (demoralizing entire cities).

Historical Examples: The Despair Plague (spread through 40,000 people, 300 suicides), The Joy Outbreak (accidentally created, affected 12,000), The Rage Epidemic (led to riots, 89 deaths).

Legal Status: Forbidden—classified as biological weapon (emotional equivalent), attempting Emotional Plague = terrorism, kill on sight order, knowledge suppressed.

Limitation: Cannot be controlled once started (self-sustaining cascade), unpredictable spread (follows social networks chaotically), duration uncertain (hours to days before burnout), collateral damage massive (affects innocents), practitioner often caught in own plague, morally catastrophic, forbidden globally.

Function: Temporarily fuses two or more consciousnesses into single unified mind sharing all thoughts, memories, emotions, and perspectives. Creates temporary collective consciousness—multiple people experiencing reality as one entity.

Thread Cost: Extreme (75-90% for two-person merge, increases with participants)

Applications: Ultimate collaboration (artists, scientists, engineers thinking as one), conflict resolution (experiencing opponent's perspective completely), romantic intimacy (lovers becoming one), therapy (understanding mental illness from inside), research (studying consciousness itself).

Experience: Participants lose individual boundaries—"I" becomes "we", all thoughts shared simultaneously, access all merged memories/skills/knowledge, experience multiple emotions simultaneously, perceive reality through multiple viewpoints. Profound but disorienting.

Psychological Effects: Identity confusion (who am I after merge?), boundary dissolution (difficulty re-establishing self), memory bleed (retaining partner's memories), skill transfer (sometimes retain merged abilities), grief at separation (losing part of self), addiction potential (some seek repeated merges).

Limitation: Duration limited (15-60 minutes maximum), separation traumatic (tearing apart unified consciousness), identity risks (sometimes merge doesn't fully separate—permanent bleed), requires absolute trust (total vulnerability), cannot merge hostile individuals (resistance prevents fusion), forbidden without informed consent.

Function: Completely eliminates all emotional capacity in target—no fear, joy, love, anger, sadness, anything. Creates perfect emotional flatness. Subject becomes purely rational entity without affective experience. Can be self-targeted for ultimate detachment.

Thread Cost: Very High (60-80% for complete nullification lasting hours to days)

Applications: Emergency decision-making (removing panic/fear for critical choices), torture resistance (cannot be emotionally manipulated), depression treatment (temporary relief from suffering), combat (fearless soldiers), surgery (doctors operating without stress).

Psychological Effects: Total emotional absence (neither pleasant nor unpleasant—simply nothing), decision paralysis (values require emotion—without it, cannot prefer anything), social disconnection (cannot emotionally relate to others), existential emptiness (meaning requires feeling), sometimes relief (for those suffering emotional pain), often horror (upon restoration—realizing what was lost).

Medical Uses: Sometimes used for suicidal patients (temporary relief from unbearable emotional pain), severe PTSD (emotional break from triggers), terminal patients (reducing fear/grief at end of life).

Limitation: Psychologically dangerous (extended void creates permanent emotional damage), removes motivation (emotion drives action), value judgments impossible (cannot prefer anything without affect), social relationships destroyed (cannot love, empathize, connect), some never fully recover emotional capacity, forbidden for coercive use.

• Emotional Feedback: The Weaver experiencing the emotions they're trying to induce
• Resonance Collapse: Emotional manipulation failing suddenly, causing target rebound
• Hue Corruption: Wrong frequencies causing unexpected or opposite emotional states
• Empathic Overload: Absorbing too many emotional patterns and losing personal equilibrium
• Chemical Cascade: Neurochemical manipulation spiraling out of control

• Understanding of psychology and neurochemistry
• Emotional intelligence and empathic sensitivity
• Color theory and light frequency knowledge
• Ethical grounding (given the manipulation potential)
• Personal emotional stability (unstable practitioners risk projecting their own states)

Thread Economy

Luxomancy is moderately thread-intensive, particularly for maintaining emotional states over time. Simple emotional nudges are efficient, but complete psychological control or long-duration effects can rapidly deplete reserves.

Regulation

Luxomancy is the most regulated discipline due to consent concerns. Most societies require:

• Explicit permission before emotional manipulation (except emergencies)
• Registration of Luxomancy practitioners
• Prohibition on coercive applications
• Mandatory ethics training

Relationship to Other Schools

Complements: Corpus (emotional states affect healing), Infomancy (emotions as data patterns), Spectra (both manipulate electromagnetic phenomena)