#It'd absolutely require some recovery time afterwards though and it'd be a gamble on how useful it'd actually be.))

[creepy-crowleys]

skeptic? - - Fortune telling

Everyone's a Skeptic

The real ones are rare, but they do exist. There are a couple on Solomon Island. Of a sort.

Madame Rogêt was the typical cold-reading type of fortune teller for most of her career in Kingsmouth - her abilities only extended as far as being able to analyze people and tell them what they wanted to hear. After the Fog descended on the island, her exposure to it manifested as genuine precognition, nightmares and visions presumably obtained through her link to the Red Sargassum Dream. The ones she described to me were often vague and dark, and she had limited control over when they happened or what they contained.

And I imagine some of the endings she's seen are still on the table.

She still cold-reads most of the time. It's more hopeful than what she actually sees.

The other is a famous writer here, Sam Krieg. I was a big until I actually met the man, haha...! His is a similar case, as I understand it. He was infected early in his writing career by a similar type of entity that spreads through the written word as its preferred medium. It promised him stories that would sell, so long as he immortalized it in writing.

I can't say for certain if his writing is prophetic or if he's making things happen by writing them, but several of his story beats have come to pass. His magnum opus is a doozy too: About a world where every legend and conspiracy is true and secret societies battle for survival against an endless darkness. Ha.

It doesn't have an ending yet, but he's never written a happy one before.

It's... There are useful applications for future-sight, but so often the future has already been written. It just amounts to a lot of struggle for the fortune teller to be able to, essentially, see the train coming but be no more able to diverge from the tracks. Fate is like a groove worn into reality because that path has been traveled so many times simultaneously. It's technically possible to veer from it, but it's difficult to do so and easy to slip back in.

And the visions themselves - even divorced from their contents - are hell on the person experiencing them. Humans were just not designed to fully perceive time as a dimension in the way the Sleeping Ones and the Buzzing do. Reaching out for anything more than vague minute glimpses very quickly turns into permanent psychological and neurological injury.

It's just... generally an unfortunate gift for those that actually possess it.