The established paths of the flow include areas of entertainment. Those that are flow-aware can partition off portions of their memory and allow free access to all. Things such as glorious adventures of heros, operas that they have viewed, books they have read, as well as the shady areas of essentially 1-900 services of one flavor or another. I will leave these up to your wild imagination. Other areas are set up as areas where one can talk with others connected in. The danger of using the flow goggles is that once one joins the flow, their thoughts fall prey to those in the flow whose intentions are anything but benign. When the connection is made, a thread of sorts is spun back to its owner. That strand is mindbogglingly complex and unique to the being that it belongs to, as accurate an identification as genetic printing of today. Once the thread has been identified, one who is flow aware, with the use of certain spells, can "tune" into the mind of the one to whom that thread belongs, even when they are not connected to the flow.

Tuning to someone that has never been in the flow is MUCH more difficult, requiring only the most skilled psychic to perform the act. Most of the punks do not have this level of skill or the discipline required to attain it. For this reason, they developed the flow goggles so that they can spread their adgenda, often with messages that are revolutionary or even illegal in many areas of JERA.

It is through the flow that the punks can work efficiently, each one working on a project that fits into the whole like a puzzle piece makes up just a small bit of a picture. The gnomes were naturals to the flow with the amount of magic that is inherent in their natures. Once flow aware, the gnomes' work transformed from the wide-eyed admiration of gears and "things that go" to a vision of what their combined efforts can accomplish. The gnomes, together with the magipunks have become a force to be reckoned with indeed. With the development of some of their new armor and iron golems, they never need fear what mankind can do to them again, or so they think.

For a punker to master the flow, they go through various learning stages. In the first, they learn to see into the flow and to project their voice into the whirling maze of thought. They learn to navigate connected paths and of the dangers inherent with the flow. One must learn to find ones way, never losing one's way back to the main train of thought or risking being lost forever in the web of ideas and concept bubbles of the flow. Because the flow can be very risky, one usually travels with a guide at their side to show them the way back and how to avoid the perils of voids and hostiles that also access the collective thoughts of all with the intent to do harm.

Most spells of the type that influence others deals with the flow, though on a very limited scale. Because of the way that a mage deals with the symptoms rather than the actual cause of charms of many varieties, they often never suspect how the spells actually take effect. A charm spell in essence creates a short circuit between the victim and instigator, sending a thought to the victim's conscious thought level. It is much more difficult to plant a thought in the subconscious of a victim's mind. Only the most powerful flowmasters know the secrets of doing this unless the victim makes contact in the flow. It is for this purpose that the punkers have allowed others access to that which was thier most guarded secret. They don't see the danger in it, for the "runs" that they don't want others to know about, the ones that they use for their own purposes, they simply don't "landmark."

To those that access the flow through the use of flow goggles, with no real knowledge of the flow, they can only get from place to place by following a sort of landmarking system that creates roadmarks for them to follow to get from place to place. Many good minds have perished through straying too far from the well-marked paths established for the public at large. Still others have fallen victim to those that lead them off intentionally with false roadsigns. For the lost, the only way for others to help is to find them themselves or have another lead them back. A whole new service industry has evolved around both guiding through the flow and in search and rescue of the lost. The collective mind is a huge place to explore, an easy place to get lost.

With the first uses of the flow goggles, the danger of getting lost in the flow was well known. The press blew the dangers all out of proportion, or so the goggle manufacturers had said. The few that did go mad from the use of the goggles were brought back with the aid of powerful psychers, but the connection with danger that the goggles still have scared off many perspective users of the glasses.

The first goggles were big and bulky, while the newer ones are like treny sunglasses, the best of which allow one to be aware both of things in the real world as well as things in the flow, so that one can in essence live two lives at once. The connection with reality also seems to reduce the number of those that get lost in the flow, rooting them to reality so that they don't stray too far from what they know.

Once a mage has learned the fundamentals of navigating the flow and projecting their voice, the next level is to learn to project thoughts along established paths or threads of thought. To do so is difficult for the novice until they learn to more or less turn off the left side of the brain, which controls logic and reason, for those disciplines find sharp contrast between the flow and all else that they know.

The next level of learning involves creating new threads, or a series of links from one thought bubble to the next. There are innumerable threads, or "runs" in the collective conscious, a relative few set up by flowmasters. These "backroads" are the "id underground," the playground of the punks. They tire of the mainstream, and have for the most part abandoned these runs to the general public, whom they see as penned sheep for their use and disposal. It is as if the spider and the fly story had a different ending, where the fly not only entered the spider's parlor, but brought more and more friends and relatives with him all the time. Patiently these flies wait, but not forever.

Men are by no means the only being to access the flow, therefore our thoughts are certainly not the only ones that float in the abyss that is the flow. From the canine to the illithid, and everything inbetween, every thought, emotion, and experience that is, was, and some say ever will be is all part of the matrixes of the flow. Among the more dangerous in the matrix are many creatures that to those not flow-aware are not large threats. For example, the intellect devourer is much more dangerous to one that attracts their attention than to one that is a less appealing victim. For those creatures that feed upon psychic energy, those emitting little interest them but little.

Theologians have conjectured that the flow is of God, the ultimate master of the flow. Among these, the "Illuminated" can claim more fame than any others. They believe that the flow is the stuff of spirit, and all we need to do to grow spiritually is to integrate more of the positive flow into our being. In essence, to become righteous is a physical process of forcing out of the collective set of thoughts that is our consciousness that which is negative and inviting in those thought bubbles made up of positive energy. It is well known that the flow is made of positive as well as negative energy. The most well-travelled flowmasters claim that the two ends of the flow are heaven and hell. To integrate more of the positive energy is to move oneself closer to the light. To integrate more negative energy is to add weight to our spirits, which pulls them down, hell being the destination for those that remove all light from their souls. The Illuminated claim that only through understanding the flow and seeing ourselves in it can we see the impurities in ourselves and root out the negative energy that brings us down. As one might guess, the punks flock to this way of thinking in droves. Few have travelled far enough in one direction to verify or dispute their story, but it seems that the more time that one spends in study of the flow the more one believes that there is something out there, though this only leads one to a religion in about half of these cases. For others, they are led to simply question their part in a grander scheme of things than they ever thought possible.

As a mage begins training in magic, the punks will court them. They send them visions of the flow in their sleep, when a person connects most solidly to the collective conscious. They show them things that they can have only in the flow, including the living of their fantasies, from the most glorious doings of good to the most base sexual adventures. This is the courting period when more and more is shown until the mage is confronted by one of the punks with an offer to become one of them. It is no coincidence that the punks' numbers have increased a hunderdfold in a matter of a few years. The punks believe that they truly are helping the mage to learn of higher things, and it would be hard to argue the point. The flow is of itself not inherently good or evil; it just IS. It is the way that the punks use it to furthur their ends that is.

A new addition to the groups that master the matrix are the "Ego Enforcers," or the "mind police" as the punks call them. They are very powerful mages that have devoted their study to the flow. Many are former punks, taking with them the secrets that they learned while amongst them. They have developed offensive spells and made themselves a force to be reckoned with. Their organization was formed by the Asterland government mere months after the punks went public with their flow goggles. Where the enforcers differ from the punks is in their firm devotion to good and the lawful use of the flow, or "the lifetree" as they refer to it. Unknown to most, the Ego Enforcers are underwritten by the freedom society, probably the group with the largest body of knowledge involving the mind and body and the modification thereof. The Ego Enforcers are given potion boosts that give them power to crack down on illegals in the flow with force that the punks cannot combat. It is like facing an ememy with a slingshot when he has nukes on his side. You just won't win. This inbalance in power caused the punks to flee to the underground of their private runs and to the development of thoughtmines , bubbles of concentrated negative thoughts so powerful as to stun one wandering into unknown territory. The visions are so shocking as to make one almost completely unable to defend themselves. The only problem with this is that the thought capsules are stationary, so they can only be used defensively unless one can lure another into the bubble. The game of cat and mouse goes on and on between the punks, eager to reclaim their turf and the Ego Enforcers with their agenda to clean up the flow. A few of them are connected to the Illuminated, who seek to illiminate negative thought energy in hopes that it will make the world a more pleasant place to live. In their way of thinking, heaven is simply where no negative energy can remain without being immediately forced out as if by the repulsion of a magnet to another. If we in the neutral ground could force the negative energy out of our portion of the flow, would not heaven be right here. For now, we leave that to the theologians.