In Short: Some people can bottle their negative feelings towards others inside their eyeballs by keeping their eyes covered and avoiding doing anything mean while they obsess over hating them. This allows them to use the thusly concentrated malice to manifest their vindictive desires until their face explodes.

It has long been held to be true throughout much of the world – and still in as – that it is possible to cause someone harm by looking at them with enough ill intent. In Mexico and South America it’s the “Mal de Ojo”; in Judaism, it’s the ‘Ayin Ha’ra, in Islam it is simply “Al ‘Ayin”, in Greece it’s the Mati, and in Ethiopia it’s a manifestation of buda. The exact methodology, effects, defenses against and cures for the phenomenon vary, but the fundamental mechanism of imposing one’s acrimony on others through gaze is remarkably ubiquitous. Put enough people together in a community and somebody, at some point will wish they could realize the drive between that little voice in their head when they look at that one person they really dislike that wishes them misfortune.

It doesn’t take being very deep in the Occult Underground to know that, at least some of the time, there’s truth behind these stories. Adepts and Avatars have any number of ways of staring at someone to death, and there’s an endless variety out there of people with uniquely destructive talents, or skill with a broader discipline of folk magic.

And then there’s these fuckers.

Whereas the concept of the Evil Eye might be prehistoric, the specific practice hereinafter described for “properly” harnessing its power for greater effect seems to be a much more recent one (though its originator and how and when and with whom exactly he shared his newly discovered technique are unknown to the Occult Underground at large – like many others, they seem to mostly spread through personal interaction between weirdos on the fringe). Likely originating in the 19^th century – perhaps influenced by the attitudes of the era – it is rooted in the application of an insanely materialistic approach to an insanely ephemeral idea: negative emotions towards another – spite, hatred, jealousy, animosity and so on – are directed at them through the eyes, via the medium of sight. Since people normally look at things all the time, the power of the Evil Eye is constantly radiating out of them, which results in it coming out quite diffuse and its impact on the intended target being weak to the point of circumstantiality. Furthermore: people often do things with their negative feelings towards others besides magickally hurt them. They scream at them, call them bad names, snap at them, write them angry letters, slash their car tires, kidnap their pets, hit them on the head with a beer bottle and so on and forth. God forbid: they sometimes do things like “process them in a healthy manner”, or worse – forget about them. Clearly, this cause dilution of the negative thoughts, discharging them in disorganized bits and pieces through unhelpful, ineffective media that have nothing to do with magickal superstition.

Evil Eye Cultivators do with the Evil Eye what the steam engine does unlike a tea kettle: they deliberately keep it contained under increasing pressure, carefully maintaining the composition concentration of its volatile psychic fuels, so that when force needs applied it can be precisely and vigorously channeled with ear-splitting, eye-watering, deathly-scalding, traincar-pushing might. They’ve heard their parents teachers telling them that one shouldn’t allow envy to boil or hatred to simmer or loathing to bubble and figured that, actually, fuck that shit, if you simmer it long enough, you can get a delicious reduction of bitterness potent enough to knock your figurative socks off while you’re hijacking all of the other metaphors. Why shouldn’t they let the seed of antipathy grow into a mighty, malevolent oak, then go on and nurture it into a grove of burning despite?

In some ways, Evil Eye Cultivators behave like Adepts. They generate minor magickal charges by acting weird, observe something like a taboo to avoid losing them, and they can use them at-will to make their (ill) will manifest. They do not, however, consciously obsess over a specific, symbolic-syntactic paradox, and they do not have a ritualized system of symbolic sacrifices they can practice for power (this is probably for the best, because, considering the types of people they are, one might dread the deeds they could do for to gain – or once they’ve gotten – any power greater than they already have). They do not formulate spells and they can’t make artifacts or imbue magickal effects into objects. Mechanically, “Evil Eye Cultivator” is its own Supernatural Identity (with its own special feature, Cast Rituals and Use Gutter Magick). It is technically compatible both with having an Adept School and being an Avatar, but in practice, trying to manage multiple charging methods and taboos at once would be an enormous pain in the ass. Also, charges gained through Evil Eye Cultivation are useless for most purposes due to their individualized nature (see below), even if one did theoretically have another School to work with. Certainly, if any Cultivator/Adepts exist out there, they’re not common knowledge.

To gain a charge as an Evil Eye Cultivator, three elements are required: hatred, avoidance of hostile behavior, and blocked sight. First, most important and most essential is the negative feelings themselves. Random, everyday irk of the kind one momentarily feels towards the proverbial Asshole Who Cut Them in Traffic does not cut it. To be any good for concentrating into Evil Eye energy, one needs to feel a deep, consumptive, toxic spite towards a specific individual. It takes a very particular mixture of impotent frustration, vindictiveness and violent ideation to produce. You have to be feeling the kind of petty, self-centered, gut-twisting, roiling fury towards a person that doesn’t just makes you idly daydream about killing them, but about killing their loved ones and torturing them first, because death is too good for them, dammit. (un)fortunately, the type of people who become Evil Eye Cultivators tend to be exactly the type who excel at nurturing this kind of extraordinarily unhealthy, revenge-fantasy-fueling, sort-of-pathetic-but-also-terrifying nigh-psychotic hatred towards their fellow man. And “nurturing” is a key word here: simply having a short temper isn’t enough to become an Evil Eye Cultivator, and can actually be detrimental. Someone with too short a fuse and nothing else is far more likely to act on their frustration, and that wouldn’t be any good. To properly hate someone in the way that Evil Eye Cultivators do, hatred must be fully internalized. It has to be the kind that festers. Incidental annoyances don’t usually cut it (although a person who habitually makes themselves an incidental annoyance might well become the subject of a Cultivator’s ire), but neither does righteous anger, because it’s channeled in too emotionally “lofty” a fashion. You can’t feel that your anger is truly justified to the point you’d act on it; you have to understand, on some level, that you’re being bitter in a completely inappropriate way that shouldn’t be expressed, and direct that bitterness fully inwards with so much force that it condenses into a malevolent singularity.

Evil Eye Cultivators hate the coworker who got a promotion instead of them. They hate the girl who turned them down in high school. They hate the cousin who bought a nicer house then them. They hate the editor who rejected their manuscript.

Now, almost as importantly, the hatred must never be outwardly expressed. It needs to be kept within the pressurized confines of the eye to boil and ferment and roast and perhaps some other culinary metaphors, and that obviously can’t happen if shrieking, little jets of it are being let out through externalization. So, even as they harbor their violent hatred, Evil Eye Cultivators who want to generate charge must behave, for all appearances, perfectly placid. It should go without saying that they can’t engage in violence, but neither are they allowed to swear, raise their voice too much, or even express hostility in something like writing or art. This applies to displays of hostility towards anyone, not just the subject of hatred. They must look and sound content and polite.

Thirdly – and this is the part that probably makes them come off as weird in most people’s perspectives (even though it should probably really be the part where they’re stewing themselves in their own virulently toxic psychic juices from the inside) – they can’t have their eyes open. The eyes are constantly emitting Evil. It must not be allowed to leak before it’s collected to the desired extent. Experienced Evil Eye Cultivators have generally trained themselves to simply keep their eyes closed no matter what happens (and it can be trickier than it sounds under some circumstances – people who aren’t blind from birth will generally open them by instinct if they, e.g., momentarily lose their footing, hear a loud noise, feel something brushing by their face quickly, or so on). The less experienced ones put on blindfolds, or wear welding goggles black for opacity. Japanese middle-school-aged practitioners of the discipline (of which there’ve been at least two, neither of them very good at it) have used medical eye bandages.

Every 24 hours throughout which an Evil Eye Cultivator observes all three conditions – they hate someone terribly and pettily, are expressing no hostility and aren’t seeing anything, generate a single, minor charge aimed at that individual. And that’s a thing about Evil Eye Cultivation charges: they’re all target-specific. They can only be used to apply the Evil Eye and its various effects to the one individual from hatred of which they stemmed. Incidentally, this makes Evil Eye Cultivators pretty useless for the purposes of most beings in the Occult Underground who can somehow steal, transfer or trade charges. They produce very low quality product. Now, there’s nothing preventing Evil Eye Cultivators from simultaneously feeling a deep hatred towards a number of people (it is, in fact, depressingly common), in which case each font of hatred will produce one charge against that person every 24 hours. They’d just need to be tracked separately.

The second and third conditions for charging also serve as the discipline’s pseudo-taboos. If the Evil Eye Cultivator behaves in a hostile fashion, or looks at something for any purpose except to employ the Evil Eye, they immediately lose all charges they’ve collected against everyone.

A secondary issue – if you want to call it that – is that, the practice being as gross as it is, it actually concentrates those charges’-worth of malice in the practitioner’s body. Specifically, in their eyes. As charges accrue, the Cultivator’s eyes literally grow swollen. At first they merely ache and look sort of bloodshot, but the more charges one is holding, the bigger and juicier they get, until they look visibly, clearly, very unhealthy (thankfully, they usually don’t for long, because with few exceptions, if they’re uncovered for long enough for someone to medically examine all the charges leak out and they shrink back to normal size in a matter of minutes). When the total amount of charges held by a Cultivator – against any number of targets – passes the tens number of their Evil Eye Cultivator Identity, their eyeballs are all but bursting out of their skull, all dark veins and pinkish, bloody excretions drying near the tear ducts, and the pain and pressure actually cause them a single die’s worth of damage each 24 hours. If this ever brings them to their wound limit, their eyes literally explode (it’s not dramatic insomuch as revolting – kind of like a pair of grape-sized water balloons that’ve been overfilled; there’s a very low, sudden popping sound and they sort of break, spilling bloody gunk down the practitioner’s face while they scream and rip out the shredded, gelatinous remains of their eyeballs). If, by chance, the damage brought them exactly to their wound limit, they can survive – albeit without eyes – if they pass a fitness check. Otherwise, they’re dead and the world is probably better for it.

Anyhow, all that established: what can Evil Eye Cultivators do with their charges? Like Adepts, there seems to be a degree of flexibility with which they can shape the powers they’re projecting. They aren’t (and don’t count as, in case it ever matters) “spells”, either formula or random, but they behave rather similarly. In all cases, except as specified otherwise, they require physically looking at the target. They do not, by default, require eye contact – the target doesn’t even have to know it’s being looked at. The eyes are merely the tool via which evil energies are discharged through the medium of sight.

Some of the most commonly observed manifestations of the cultivated Evil Eye include:

• Causing sum-of-the-dice damage, manifesting as a sudden feeling of exhaustion, nausea, and heat (some people in the Occult Underground have noted that this sounds remarkably similar to the effects of acute radiation poisoning). Any death resulting from this is likely to be chalked down to a stroke, because it can, in fact, cause small blood vessels to rapture throughout the body. One roll against the Evil Eye Cultivator Identity is enough to “trigger” this effect, after which it can be maintained on the target – causing sum-of-the-dice damage per round – for as long as the Cultivator keeps looking at them and can spend one charge per round. Once they’re done, they must cover their eyes again or lose the rest of their charges.
• Hurt their loved ones. Yes: Evil Eye Cultivators are very nasty people, and they will seek to harm somebody’s parents, children, girlfriend, or pets (and this power works on pets) out of spite. However, it’s not as powerful when used on someone who isn’t the subject of hatred themselves – the damage is only equal to the ones result of the successful Evil Eye Cultivator roll. To work, the person must truly be related (or the pet must truly belong) to the subject of the Cultivator’s hatred, and they must know that they are. They can’t just blast random children on the street (thankfully) and hope to hurt someone.
• Whammy them, causing them to take a -10% penalty to all rolls until they fail one specifically because of the penalty. This, again, can be used on a loved one, but for similar reasons, doing that costs 2 charges.
• Scare them into submission. By locking eyes with the target – and this does require direct eye contact – the Evil Eye Cultivator can intimidate with the force of a level 4 Unnatural stress check behind him, as the target looks at those huge, bloody eyes and their guts curl with unholy terror.
• For 2 charges: actually infect them with sickness. The symptoms are similar to those of a flu, but a medical checkup wouldn’t show any biologically feasible causes – the body just “behaves” sick. Symptoms don’t begin showing until a number of hours equal to the sum of the successful Evil Eye Cultivation roll after the sickening gaze, at which point they start causing the target a -10% penalty to all rolls from feeling cruddy. They can make a fitness test each morning, as normal, to get better. Infecting a loved one causes 3 charges.
• For 2 charges: ruin their stuff. The Evil Eye Cultivator looks at an item belonging to the subject of their grudge, and it breaks. If it’s an electronic appliance or gadget, it just borks and stops working. If it’s a plant, it wilts sadly (nowadays this is mostly use to ruin people’s cherished potted friends but in the early days you could wreck someone’s vegetable patch with a couple applications of this power and cause them serious financial harm). If it’s food or drink, it spoils (one use is good on a single fridge or cabinetful). If it’s something whose value is more in its physical structure, it develops cracks, tears, bends, rusts over, mildews or otherwise starts showing signs of the ravages of entropy with unnatural speed – and if it’s something meant to be used, like a knife or a hammer, probably becomes useless for its purpose. The maximum size of an item that can be affected is about that of a briefcase. It must belong to the subject of the Cultivator’s hatred and they have to know that it does. Cultivators can’t destroy random objects. This power requires that the Evil Eye Cultivator stare at the item, not the target – the target doesn’t even need to be present.
• For 2 charges: cover their stuff with shit. While Evil Eye Cultivation isn’t strong enough to outright break someone’s car or house, it can still fuck them up so as to make the owner miserable. Specifically, it causes the object – which can be up to about the size of a minivan, or a single room – show signs of months’ worth of neglect in the form of dust, mold, bird droppings, cobwebs, mud, etc. None of this is enough to make something stop functioning per se, but it’ll probably take several hours of thorough washing to make them pleasant to use again, and it can be quite alarming to leave a clean bedroom in the morning and come back from work to see it looking like someone forgot about a leaky pipe. Again, for this to work the Evil Eye Cultivator needs to look at the thing to be ruined, not the subject, but the thing does have to belong to the subject.
• For 3 charges: set their stuff on fire. It’s quite simple: if what they’re staring at belongs to the target, and it’s reasonably flammable, a magickal spark ignites it. This can be the target’s clothing, in which case they will take damage as normal for having their clothes on fire (1d10 injuries per turn until a turn is spent putting them out, and a level 4 Violence stress check), or it can be, again, their bedroom, in which case whether and to what extent it survives probably depends on whether there are sprinklers, the quality of the local fire department, etc. The fire isn’t by itself unnatural, only the ignition. Anything that would extinguish a normal fire would work.
• For 3 charges: ruin them socially. This power is unusual in that it doesn’t require looking at the target but rather at someone who has a positive personal relationship with them, of which the Cultivator must certainly know. It fills the person’s with an inexplicable sense of mistrust and disdain towards the target, so that they’ll face a level 4 Self stress check the next time they’d have had a positive interaction with them, or until a number of minutes equal to the sum-of-the-dice of the successful Evil Eye Cultivator dice roll passes. This power can be used to make the target’s boss mean to them, their romantic partner fight with them, or their pet attack them.
• For 3 charges: hide from them. This is an extremely limited, extremely narrow form of invisibility in that it works only on the target of the hatred which bred the charge utilized. For a number of minutes equal to the sum-of-the-dice of the successful Evil Eye Cultivator dice roll, the target cannot see the Cultivator.  They can hear them, they can smell them, they can see and hear perfectly fine if they’re picking up objects or something, but they can’t see them themselves. That can result in a level 6 Unnatural stress check if they’re being blatant about it. While the requirement to not behave hostily to avoid losing charges doesn’t apply for the length of the power being used, the need to keep one’s eyes covered does (unless it’s combined with “track them down” – see below – which it often is), which somewhat limits its directly aggressive utility. Also, if the Cultivator touches the target, hits them, shoots them, talks to them or otherwise directly and physically draws attention to themselves, the effect instantaneously ends.  
• For 4 charges: put them to sleep. It’s quite simple: if you succeed on the Evil Eye Cultivator roll with this power, the target needs to roll fitness or they’re suddenly and inexplicably overwhelmed by an awful exhaustion. If they fail, they fall asleep for at least a number of minutes equal to the sum-of-the-dice of the successful dice roll. Even if they succeed, they’re so tired and shaken that they’re at a -20% penalty to all rolls for as many rounds. This doesn’t normally cause any stress checks (everyone’s felt the sudden wave of tiredness now and then) unless the target is in a state where they definitely should be wide awake, and even then it’s not going to be a very tough one (maybe a 3-4, either to Unnatural if it seems totally out of the blue or to Self if the target normally holds themselves to be an alert and wakeful person with good sleep hygiene who doesn’t suddenly doze-off at the wheel).
• For 5 charges: drive them insane. This, once again, requires locking eyes with the target, and what it does is magickally place them in a state of constant anxiety, confusion and terror that’s sort-of-but-not-really similar to what might be diagnosed as a psychotic episode. For a period of hours equal to the sum-of-the-dice of the successful Evil Eye Cultivator dice roll, the character behaves erratically and detachedly; everything and everyone seems horrifying to them and everywhere feels unsafe. Accomplishing anything that requires a dice roll takes a -20% penalty and the whole experience combined is worth a level 6 Unnatural stress check.
• Once again for a single charge: track them down. This is one of the only Evil Eye Cultivation powers that doesn’t require looking at the target. Instead, so long as the Cultivator has their eyes open (and they can keep their eyes open for as long as they’re using the power), they’re intuitively guided towards the target along the shortest path relevant to their current method of transportation. If the target is physically in sight, this power magickally highlights them to the cultivator, giving a +20% bonus to any attempt to find them if they’re hiding in the area, countering penalties to shooting them through smoke, etc. Each charge fuels this ability for a number of minutes equal to the successful Evil Eye Cultivator dice roll. For 2 charges, it can instead be used to track something which belongs to the target, so long as the Cultivator knows for a fact that they own it (e.g. it can lead to their house, their diary, their motorcycle, etc.)

Rumors:

There’s an Evil Eye Cultivator in Glasgow who doesn’t even use her eyes, she uses her ears. She was born blind, so in her case, the malice she collects is transmitted through sound instead of sight. While she’s charging, she keeps a pair of huge-ass headphones on her head blasting death metal into her ears at all times, her ears get hot and red and start bleeding if she overdoes it, and she screams at people to wham them. A very intense piano teacher if there ever was one.

Some Evil Eye Cultivators learn to sidestep the need to stare at their targets to harm them by concentrating their charges into a magickal but nevertheless physical substance – possibly the stuff that leaks out of their fat eyeballs. They put it on the target’s food or drink, where it then becomes magickally undetectable, and it transmits the effects they were looking for even if they’re not directly there at the time.

Those aforementioned Japanese middle-schoolers have experimented with concentrating all of their charges in just one eye rather than two, to allow them to function with just one eye covered while charging. They stopped when the one kids’ eye exploded so violently it actually shot out of his head right through the bandage and covered the face of a fellow train passenger in blood and jelly.