Consensus

Resistance is futile.

Manifestation

Under ordinary conditions, the Collective Knowledge functions much more closely to a small town gossip network, allowing all members to know the business of all other members. However, in vanishingly rare circumstances, all minds within the collective will act in harmony or outright unison. Although it has not been studied appropriately in order to be formally named, many call this phenomenon "a consensus".
Consensuses override the individual faculties so completely that no singular individual can remember what occurred. (The last consensus, almost a thousand years prior to Unification, resulted in every single Stenza alive at the time losing track of approximately thirty days, which was so alarming at the time that most conflicts prior to the instance were suspended while everyone processed the trauma.) As such, there is a lot of speculation about what causes them. Some speculate that all Stenza minds must come to an agreement of their own volition, while others worry that the collective itself is capable of periodically generating ideas and hijacking the species in order to process them. Historians, scientists, and folklorists have routinely trudged through mountains of oral and written history in an effort to find any hint of connective tissue between instances of consensus that would shed any kind of light on the mystery, but with only the before and after to go on, these matters are subject to furious debate.
The Sandibari have documented the only case of a consensus occurring during Migration, and they record it as an immensely unsettling experience. The normally talkative Stenza, who would tell stories and chant to pass the time, suddenly went quiet, and almost all individuals became unresponsive to most stimuli and any direct inquiry. When they asked again after order appeared to be restored, no one seemed to recall what had happened, and many had no clue how they got to where they were. The Sandibari explained what they witnessed to Stenza ambassadors, but no one seemed able to provide an explanation.

Type

Natural