Since ancient times, the peoples of the world have possessed myths and legends of strange powers at the hands of a select few sages and prophets. The most knowledgeable amongst us know it to be true, but the issue was never taken seriously by the global scientific community owing to the priviness and seclusion of those who know how to wield them, with one exception: The Oceanykan Federation.
It would seem as if Oceanyka has a closer relation with sorcery than any other nation in Earth. Indeed, it wouldn't even be the most surprising thing about it. However, it is undeniable that sorcery was far more developed and powerful in this continent than anywhere else, and its importance did not wane until the introduction of steel plate and firearms. And yet, mainstream historians and anthropologists continue to cast doubt into Oceanyka's sorcerous traditions, unknowingly aided by the secrecy that its practitioners follow as dogma.
With technology came change, and the Magocrats that ruled much of the continent with an iron fist, either openly or from the shadows, had their realms razed and their heads cut, a centuries-long war of extermination culminating with the Asterist Crusades. The survivors were hunted down like dogs. For the next 400 years, sorcery would become one of Oceanyka's strongest taboos, inspiring countless witch-hunts and persecutions, though only Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies possessed the acumen and skills to actually track and kill sorcerers. The art of primitive sorcery, then known as magic, was only kept alive by spoken word, and its practitioners never amounted to more than triple digit numbers at any given time.
This changed with the rise of Adolf Hitler, whose right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, was a prominent member of the Thule Society, dedicated to the study of the Aryans' mythical past. Himmler funded a number of global expeditions, most of them ending in failure. The Oceanykan expedition, however, successfully recruited a few sorcerers. Himmler later incorporated the Thule Society to the Schutzstaffel (SS) as the Ahnenerbe Institute, dedicated towards paranormal research. Late in the war, the SS was successful in employing sorcery against the Soviet Red Army, and when the NSDAP rebelled, against Allied forces. The few scientists with access to this information realised that a new field of science was in the horizon. However, their concept of sorcery was still primitive, still in the realm of magic.
Almost twenty years later, the Oceanykan government began Project LIBERTY. One of its most groundbreaking discoveries was that Uranium-259, better known as Warpstone, emits a strange type of reality-altering radiation. Further research revealed that these high-energy particles, identified as Psions, were closely intertwined with sorcery, with Oceanyka's ancient past, and with the bizarre lifeforms that dot the continent. It was around this time that The Dreamspace was first accessed by technological means. Psionic Theory was formulated, and with it, the field of psionics was born. A scientific understanding of the otherworldly allowed sorcerers with a formal education in the sciences to develop a new, far more powerful type of sorcery, thaumaturgy, based in the manipulation of reality as it exists.
Despite the collapse of Project LIBERTY following the Oceanykan Revolution and the defection of the Australian Emergency Committee, psionic theory remains alive in the minds and private works of a few select academics, some sanctioned by the State's Federal Special Research Division, others clandestinely. Psionic theory may prove to be the key to humanity's salvation, or the harbinger of its ultimate doom.