So I'm creating a science fiction game and setting and kind of desire to include 'reality warpers' in the setting...

No, it's not magic. It's not supernatural in any way. It's a yet unknown or unknownable power that courses through the veins of certain people.

like magic?

Listen to this, then understand the implications
youtu.be/02OfZVyd6bE

If it's unknowable, how do you know it's "not supernatural in any way"? How do you define supernatural?
I don't think it's logically valid to conceive of any "reality warping" ability that's not somehow above natural causes. You're asking for a square circle here.

Okay, Ima do you a favor.

Go watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiyah. Its all about reality warping and similar weirdness.

The premise is that you follow the story as narrated by a guy everyone calls Kyon. We never know his real name, it never comes up, and there is a very real chance that he spontaneously came into existence only three years ago. He is an everyday normal guy with a snarky attitude until, due more to accident than anything else, he comes to the attention of a new girl in his class and ends up becoming her sidekick against his will.

This new girl, Haruhi, is increasingly frustrated because she wants life to be exciting and it just isn't. She wants to meet space aliens, time travelers, people with magic powers. You know, all the fun stuff. But life is still just aggravatingly boring instead.

As we find out, Haruhi is a reality warper of immense power. Has been for some time. She wants to meet a time traveler, so one of the girls in her class is a junior time agent sent back to keep an eye on her. Maybe the girl always was a time traveller, maybe she used to be a perfectly normal person until Haruhi overwrote her life. Its hard to tell. The time travellers are really worried about Haruhi, because some kind of temporal quake happened 3 years ago and now no one can travel further back in time than that, the timeline just... ends. And Haruhi was in the middle of it.

She wants to meet an alien, so one of the other students is an alien robot sent to keep an eye on her. I'll get to the aliens in more detail later, because they are the ones most relevant to your post. But suffice to say they want to understand how Haruhi does what she does.

She wants to meet a person with powers, so the new transfer student is part of a shadowy cabal of psychics. Three years ago, they all woke up one morning and just KNEW they had powers which only activate in certain situations, and in the same way they KNOW that Haruhi is why they have them.

So because Haruhi wants all this stuff to be real, it is. She makes it true.

But the thing is, Haruhi knows on some level this is all childish fantasy. She doesn't actually EXPECT any of this to be real, so none of these fantastical elements actually reveal themselves to her.

The various fantastical factions are all abuzz around Haruhi and want to study her for their own purposes, but they all agree on one thing: Haruhi can't be allowed to know that they exist.

Haruhi his still ignorant of her own powers. Active awareness that she controls reality could be disastrous. Likewise, her getting evidence that these fantastical things are real with skew her perceptions of reality even further, and the world will change accordingly.

In short, if she actually meets a time travelers? She will believe that time travel is real and we will be up to our ass in time travelers. She can remake the world at basically any time, and there is no promise that if she does anyone who exists in this world will continue to exist in the new one.

Kyon, despite being perfectly normal, gets caught up in this conspiracy to keep Haruhi happy enough to not change the world further without letting her know she has powers/that these things exist. Because for whatever reason she likes him and wants him around, and that gives him leverage the other factions need to exploit.

Now, lets go back to the aliens. They are the ones most relevant to your question.

The alien interested in Haruhi is something called the Data Integration Thought Entity. Put simply, its some kind of higher-plane of existence being that consists purely of information, and views our plane of existence as nothing more than data to be manipulated. It runs our galaxy, and its implied that similar beings have claims to other parts of our universe.

Everything in our universe is just a representation of data. Somewhere is a collection of data that tells each rock what kind of rock it is, and where it exists. Every person is a walking datafile of variables and patterns. Information defines energy is what makes up matter is what makes up everything else.

The alien in the classroom, Yuki, calls herself a 'terminal' for the DITE. She is just an independent interface to carry out tasks for the DITE on Earth and observe. She has no power herself, but she can send requests at instant-speed to the DITE, like pinging a server. If she needs it to rain, she tells the DITE to make it rain. If she needs to know what will happen next, the DITE spits out predictions. If she she needs a weapon, the DITE will turn a nearby brick into a gun by changing by copy/pasting the data for a gun over that of the brick.

So she is both technically powerless and incredibly powerful. All because of Intrinsic Data Manipulation.

From the aliens perspective, Haruhi is an anomaly because she generates what the DITE sees as 'unconditional data', which comes from nowhere and changes anything it touches. The DITE always considered unconditional data to be purely theoretical, and they desperately want to understand it because they consider doing so to be their version of the speed of light: its that one physical law that is holding them back from all of the cool shit.

Hopefully something in all of that gives you an idea.

Okay, it's not magic, it's witchcraft. Sorcery. Thaumaturgy. Alchemy. Mysticism. Hoodoo. Call it whatever you want.

Spaceship cannons so powerful that they tear white holes in the space-time continuum, which in turn barf out weird shit into the "real" world.

...the hell kind of show is this?

I like this idea. What's a good name for the powered people?

>Warpers
>Aspirants
>Potent (As in, they are potent)

>No, it's not magic. It's not supernatural in any way. It's a yet unknown or unknownable power that courses through the veins of certain people.

So mass effect fields?

Yes, just like that. Something not so science and not so mystic.

Jedi.
The Force.

Yeah but that's copying.

>newfag

Super Science, how has this not already been said yet?

There is a group of people who, via subtle reality warping, can create functional technology that is vastly more high tech then the rest of the setting, or even violates the laws of physics.

just use really advanced forms of psionics.

telepathy + mind control could alter a persons perception of reality and make it an absolute fact in their minds, but nothing has actually changed except for their neurochemical balance.

That's, like, 100% science, my man.

Science is based on learning to use and abuse physical rules and laws for your benefit.
Magic (Or psionics, or whatever) is when you break those rules for specific purposes.

You can't have an 'ability' that isn't either physically based, magically based, or both. To want otherwise is stupid.

I call it Michael.

...

Slice of life, weirdly enough.

How horrible. I would hate to be a person with an incredible power or talent that people intentionally tried to hide from me. Fucking bullshit.

To be fair, the concern is that if she knew the truth their entire world would cease to exist.

The faction of psychics largely wants to keep her unaware until she grows up, so that she can learn the truth when she has her shit together instead of as an emotionally whimsical teenager.

And they probably know what they are doing. The reason they have psychic powers that only work in certain situations?
Whenever Haruhi has a bad day, she creates a pocket dimension that's a copy of a section of her home city, and giants of light grow out of the ground and start smashing everything godzilla style. Its her way of venting stress. The psychics can sense this happening and go to clean up the mess, killing the giants and closing up the pocket dimension before things have a chance to get worse... all because of the powers and knowledge that Haruhi gave them in the first place.

She does all of this and still isn't aware that she has powers.

It's not that she has incredible power. It's that her subconscious has an incredible power. Even if she was aware of her power, nobody knows if she can actually control it in any way, and if she becomes aware of it then who knows what might happen in the end

What if the person hiding your power from you... is you?

There is a theory with a surprising amount of backing that that Kyon is, himself, the reality warping god. But he can't deal with it, so he create Haruhi to project it on to.

That's why despite Kyon being 'perfectly normal' he is the main character and everything weirdly revolves around him. He is always the one constant, he is the one that goes on adventurers, he is the one that solves a lot of the problems. And a lot of important and powerful entities give him leeway he doesn't deserve. Because he is the one that is really in control.

Haruhi is even described, more than once, as being both a lot like Kyon used to be when he was younger, as well as having a lot in common with a weird girlfriend that Kyon once had. She is a mashup of his crush and his confused mental state. She is the part of him that still believes in all the stuff he claims to have given up on.

Can you give examples of things you want them to be able to do?

Is there something that they're specifically not supposed to be able to do?

>Can you give examples of things you want them to be able to do?
Warp reality.
>Is there something that they're specifically not supposed to be able to do?
Magic.