Oak has a few questions that form a good world-generator. What power is involved? How many have it (is this a gift of the few or the many?)? Is the world dynamic or static?Vernor Vinge wrote some excellent stories about the Singularity, but he also wrote one SF book, The Witling, about normal humans meeting near humans (with green skin) who had a single psi power--teleportation. And then he developed the combat aspects of this idea.You could teleport rock from the other side of the world, so it would be going in the opposite direction at a thousand miles per hour. (If thats hard for you, take out a ball, and spin it...oh clockwise. The right side of the ball will always be going toward you, and the left side away from you.)Thus you could zap someone with a thousand mile per hour rock, but they could counterzap the rock. Or they could teleport themselves although that took them out of the fight for a longer time, and made them vulnerable.You can see how he took this model of combat and used it in outer space with stasis bubbles and nukes in Marooned in Real Time.In Oak's Questions that would be: Teleportation only. Static. Everyone has it, but in the larger universe, only these aliens have it, and whatever corporation can make a deal with them first is going to be very wealthy. So that is a variant on Many/Few and on Static/Dynamic.Anne McCaffrey has Talents who run interstellar transport by t-porting ships. Thats Static and Few.So let's see....Few, Dynamic, Only Teleportation....Interestingly enough, I hope to watch Jumper on DVD tommorrow...Let's go some place very strange instead...Paratur Belt is far in the future. Its people fled centuries ago from persecution for their House which might have been named Bright Star or Rising Plasma. According to legend, they could see the future, but no one now knows how.No one remembers the direction as data was lost in the great solar storms that shatter computers and anything electronic in the Paratur System.They did not live on a planet in their preceding system, but in a spacehab as did most of that system's population. And most of that system had never heard of Old Earth.And now Paratur Starlines delivered the exiled House for an exorbitant fee to their hideaway. And they dug into the asteroid belt, and began to make their high-tech home.Unfortunately, the ship left, and the storms struck, and the ship died, and so did all their computers. They thought they were going to die in the cold and the dark with oxygen failing and the cold of deep space seeping through the airlock doors which were no longer heated by electrical heat.But, there were other things living in rock. Things that loved radiation, and faint heat. These things crept and crawled and slithered for they had no fixed shape. And that night, they slipped down the throats of the colonists scattered through several dozen asteroids. In dark tunnels, and in the few great gaping grottoes formed by laser ballooning, the Para symbiote moved toward heat.People woke, and found their brains worked differently. After some panic, one young fellow tried out the new possibility he saw in his brain. And he caused rock to melt by force of will.Centuries later, the residents of the Paraturain belt have spread to several hundred rocks. They use telekinesis to move the rocks so that they can spin it, and thus turn the black side to the sun (to gain more heat), or the white side to the sun (to lose heat). The 'paint' is dust from certain asterroids they've turned to powder by crushing them.Pyrokinesis provides heat and light.Teleporting provides a quick means for the 'porter and his passenger to move trade items and people back and forth.Hydroponics feeds the people, and runs the oxygen cycle. Water and more earth come from new asteroids with ice on them. Turning rock into good earth is more complicated than heating ice and straining the water, but it can be done.Their tech has declined. Quill pens, with an artificial hydrocarbon slurry, serve where chalk and a chalkboard don't. Clay tablets are used for long-term storage of data...these are typically stored in space.They do know how to forge hard metals and make poor, but heavy glass with help from pyrokinesis.Most Psi's focus on one skill as the society does not have enough wealth to allow someone to study everything.The society is quite medieval with guilds of different types of espers. This is kept in check by the overriding necessity of survival, however. The Council of Elders can and does override Guildmasters at will, but not at whim.The people tend to be very tall, and very slim.Loose robes (formed from the fur of the gerbils that are their only animals) are their clothing.
They have little records of their past, and not only have forgotten Earth, but have forgotten the word 'planet'. They are mostly happy with their life, although they are aware that it is a hard life.
If you see in your mind a collection of medieval peasants working hard by candleligh...err...melted rock light...inside an asteroid floating in outerspace, then I've gottent the idea across.
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Yes, I'm aware that I changed my specs a lot, but the Paraturians needed a lot of help to survive.