za3k > archive > lexicon1 > Institute for Psykologikal Masterie

The Institute for Psykologikal Masterie was an establishment on Mizar-5 dedicated to the study of the pseudoscience of Psychic Attunement. The building was partially destroyed by the impact of the New Moon (See Descent of the New Moon, The) although the foundation and a few artifacts were found intact enough to be recovered, including Manuscript Collection 47b. The inspection of the ruin indicates that the building was constructed around ESDTF May 7, 4429, and the building covered 87,000 square feet of ground. The institute was comprised of three large lecture halls, a dozen smaller classrooms and labs, offices, and dormitories for up to 100 staff and students, with the majority of space being dedicated to classroom facilities.

The lecture halls, each capable of seating about forty students in a semicircular configuration around a central stage, were primarily used for instructor and student demonstrations of so-called "psychic aptitude," with journal entries outlining a typical lecture procedure as an instructor getting up to demonstrate some nonsense ability, and students coming up in turn to attempt to duplicate the feat, almost wholly without success, and where success was found, probably attributable to happenstance. Some instructor accounts outline a sincere (if completely misguided) belief in their psychic aptitude, but a number also admit to misleading and defrauding students with cold reading and staged incidents.

The classrooms and labs were divided up into several different aspects of what the instructors believed to encompass psychic ability - clairvoyance, telepathy, thought manipulation, to name a few - and bizarre apparatuses that instructors purported to increase psychic capabilities if used for long periods of time. Instructors would hold smaller sessions here, hoping to both reinforce any material presented in larger lectures among students, and to gauge the students' aptitude (and to an equal extent, their ability and willingness to continue to pay tuition to the institute.)

The student dormitories were spartan in decoration and poorly constructed compared to the rest of the building - student accounts detail the brutality of the hot and cold seasons, often resorting to makeshift fires and rudimentary cooling systems to keep the rooms within livable temperatures. Most of the instructor dormitories fared slightly better, although senior staff always had the budget for renovation of personal offices and private studies, among other creature comforts.

The destruction of the institute resulted in the near-overnight collapse of beliefs in psychic ability, though there are some modern-day holdouts that still claim to be psychically attuned. Thankfully, any individuals bold enough to make such claims are barred from Sanity Certification and accessing any artifacts with the potential to cause a lapse in sanity (like as not because they're already crazy enough.)

-Ken