Meta Essence CYOA 28

Essence of Based and Cringe

 By consuming this essence, you gain the following benefits:

•You gain the power to control the conceptual boundaries of Based and Cringe, which then forces reality (possibly retroactively) to restructure to accommodate this change. This power can probably be best compared to Persona from Nobilis.◦By moving your argument into the concept of "Based" in a debate, everyone will know deep down that you are correct and speaking potentially harsh truths. Even if opponents are socially required to disagree in public, everyone will know you won the argument.

◦By further moving your opponent into "Cringe", instead of simply being incorrect or someone trapped having to maintain a polite fiction, they are clearly a deceitful and evil grifter purposely calling for things that are plainly insane to everyone who sees it.

◦By being Based, you will find that you always have sufficient receipts and evidence to prove your point. This could be solid evidence in itself, of you could simply make a statement by you of "I made it the fuck up" Based. For the former, there will be official studies that truly and unmistakably demonstrate your point, possibly changing reality itself to make it correct.

◦If you truly push your statements incredibly deeply into Based, then they simply become clearly evident to anyone with an above room temperature IQ and has ever been offline. Similarly to statements like "people tend to not like being violently mugged in the streets", someone demanding you cite studies for them would actually be sabotaging their credibility.

◦You can destroy a powerful cult of personality by cursing the leader with so much Cringe the entire movement falls apart.

•This extends past just debates, allowing you to bless and curse things with the conceptual/archetypical/metaphorical properties of Based and Cringe, as viewed by you.◦A property of Based might be that it cuts to the heart of the problem. A sword blessed by that property might be able to effortlessly penetrate any mortal armour and even reverse causality to always lethally pierce the heart. Cursing someone's bullets to not have that property will mean they might harmlessly bounce off anything solid without being able to punch through.

◦A property of Cringe might be that is oblivious and unaware. Someone cursed by this might be physically unable to perceive whatever events of your choosing. Someone selectively blessed by this might have trauma erased from their mind. They might still remember the inciting events if you want, but it would still stop them from experiencing the subjective trauma.

•You are also able to incarnate yourself into things conceptually tied to the ideas of Based and Cringe. You may teleport to people who are Based or troll people who are Cringe, even becoming those things if you wish. This goes beyond simple physical movement or self-transformation though. You might be able to visit the worlds of incredibly Based or Cringe works of fiction, living there or even bringing back treasures from there.

Essence of Becoming The MacGuffin

By imbibing this essence, you gain the following:

○Wherever you go, you may choose to be a game changing deus ex machina. Not quite from being able to personally take on the world yourself, but by having some function that everyone will fight over. People will not automatically know about your power when you enter, but will likely realize the worth immediately upon seeing it.

○What exactly this does can gradually change depending on the context, though it will take time for you to figure out how to direct it yourself. Whether you create your current MacGuffin power or you allow this Essence to decide, it will never innately endanger you. Nonetheless, it will largely be a support-type ability rather than direct applications of force.

○For instance:

■Are you trapped in a place like Desert Punk or Alice in Hell, a cruel post-apocalyptic desert where fortunes rise and fall based on wars for clean water supplies? You now have the ability to magically make an oasis appear wherever you stay, with bottomless reserves of drinkable water and lush vegetation. Great for survival out in the wastes, but you might want to be careful who you tell about it.

■Are you in the Scarlet Empire from Exalted instead? You might have the ability to force a potential Terrestrial to exalt, bypassing all the worries and random chance that plague modern Dragon-Blooded dynasties. Or you might find that any children you have there somehow pop out with Legendary Breeding like the mythical first generations of Terrestrials.

■Are you stuck on Planetos from A Song of Ice and Fire? Perhaps when presented with anyone with even a drop of Valyrian blood you can spontaneously materialize a fully grown dragon and imprint it upon them.

■Can the Big Bad of a setting only be properly killed by a specific artifact? Well it turns out that you have the ability to craft other items that can somehow do the job just fine, assuming its wielder gets a clean hit in.

Essence of Chip Damage

 By imbibing this essence you gain the following benefits:

•Instead of doing damage normally, you can imbue your attacks with the ability to deal 1% of the target's maximum health that bypasses all resistances.

•What "current health" means can be ambiguous and you have some leeway to interpret what that means for specific targets. A slime without any distinct organs might lose 1% of its total mass, a hive mind might lose a random one-hundredth of its members (calculated at when you activate this power), and a normal person might get a bruise. While most worlds do not work under strict game mechanics, the basic idea is that successfully using this on them 100 times will put them down regardless of anything other than particularly fast healing (or equivalent).

•These must be clean hits, so this does not apply if the target successfully dodges or parries your attack. This will likely be horrifically inefficient for weaker or peer opponents, but does allow you to punch above your normal weight class so you at least always have a way to damage your enemy.

Essence of Dating Your Right Hand

 By imbibing this essence (based on God gave me this awkward superpower, what is it for? and that one similar movie), you gain the following:

•You can use the following power once per day. After activation, the first thing you drop from your right hand will turn into a waifu/husbando. They are completely in love with and loyal to you, while also being attractive to you physically and mentally. Features may be vaguely based on the object used to create them, but otherwise randomized within your strike range.

•Partners remain until they are de-summoned back into their original form. If summoned again they will essentially just have been in stasis, though they will be aware of the time they were inactive.

•You can have multiple partners active at once.

•For the most part, they are basic humans. At most they will have a few minor powers based on their original form unless empowered by some outside method.

Essence of Death By A Thousand Cuts

 By imbibing this essence you gain the following benefits:

•After successfully delivering one thousand blows to something, it soon will be destroyed. How this happens is flexible. It might explode, get run over by a car, or just spontaneously have all life signs cease for no reason. Whatever it is, fate will bend the universe in half to make it happen.

•There might be a bit of time before it really sticks, but never really enough for the target to do anything meaningful. It is just to allow the events to play out, such as taking a few seconds for the cliff they are standing on to fall into a chasm below with almost comedic timing.

•This does not need to be a living thing. This could be a statue, an organization, or even an ecosystem. What matters is that you successfully assault that entity in some way. You must genuinely believe whatever you are going against is truly at least a component representative of the whole (e.g. a franchise location in place of an overall corporation) and have the attack land.

•The attack does not need to do any damage, just that you can recognize in some way that a slight was attempted. These can be as minuscule as a series of chronic non-innocent pranks (i.e. annoying or mean-spirited enough to be considered at least mild harassment) or particularly disrespectful cases of littering.

•Note that you must have what you are targeting in mind when acting, and can only designate one per strike. For instance, you can either add one to the "cut" count for an assassin in front of you, or the overall team they are part of. If you are targeting something more abstract like an organization, then "death" probably means it disbands (never to truly reform again) rather than all members dying. You would still need to deal with anyone who is still after you personally though.

•You must be able to imagine what the target's "death" might mean or look like. A living thing or a group is easy to do, but it would be much harder if you tried to destroy some concept with this.

Essence of Divekick

 By imbibing this essence (based on Divekick), you gain the following benefits:

○You are able to perform sudden standing leaps of several times your height without any effort. You can also move laterally using this, as long as there is an upward component to the movement. You do not strictly need a solid platform. You can gain upward momentum just by kicking off the air even while falling at terminal velocity, allowing for a makeshift form of flight.

○At any point while airborne you are able to spontaneously dive towards the ground. Your foot becomes infinitely durable and lethal while performing this move, able to kill anything it successfully strikes in a single blow regardless of durability, size/HP, or conceptual invulnerability. You do not need to even perform a physical movement first like the previous point, simply setting your momentum to anything with a downward component (even if you are still moving in the upward half of a jump).

○The sudden acceleration and impacts with the ground while performing these moves will never harm you. These things can still hurt you otherwise while not using this Essence though.

Essence of Normalizing Telling Your Homies That You Love Them

 By imbibing this essence (based on The S-Classes That I Raised), you gain the following:

•By telling someone "I love you" you forge an invisible link with them. Their innate talent and growth rate shoot through the roof to the very top of what is considered theoretically possible, making them an emerging "S-Class" of wherever they are from. You can disguise the phrase, but you have to actually say those words in that order in an audible way. For instance, you can pretend to be drunk and tell someone "this guy, he's the best, I love you man!".

•You have an innate sense of who would be most naturally compatible with this enhancement.

•If someone you are bonded to dies, you briefly gain double their power at the time for about an hour, along with their memories.

•You cannot directly tell anyone the exact mechanics of this Essence or else it will stop working. So you cannot say your love confessions are because of a power. Hopefully you can manage to not look like a weirdo.

Essence of Eden's Twin Legacies

 By imbibing this essence (loosely based on certain parts of Nobilis/Glitch), you gain the following:

•The power of the diametrically opposed forces centred on Humanity from the time of the Garden of Eden, The Rules and The Game. You are like a quasi-Imperator rather than simply a Noble under those factions, with the elevated authority that entails.

•You possess versions of all eight Divine Attributes of The Rules and The Game. Anything stemming from these Divine Attributes is Miraculous and thus cannot be directly opposed by any non-Miraculous actions, not even super advanced science or magic. Use your discretion in deciding what is and not Miraculous. If it does not feel like bizarre conceptual no-limits fallacies that rely on narrative logic and the idea that physical reality is not the "real" basis of reality, then it probably does not have the vocabulary to oppose Miracles. If a Miracles lapses, then mundane action can do something about it. For instance, if you have a Miracle to "grow to giant size" then there is nothing a non-Miraculous person can do other than deal with it, but since the Miracle did not specify "and stay like that" they can then bring you back down with a shrink ray. Remember that when you word a miracle.

•You can treat the world as if everything is alive. You see the spirits that underly all instances of objects and concepts. You can use your authority to ask a door to fulfill its function and open for you despite its lock, or make attacks on you like bullets or insults turn on their former masters with a mean look.

•The Rules are the divinity that was once part of Humanity when it still lived in the Garden. We were born to be gods, but made into mere animals. That skein of divinity became its own creatures and was given rulership over us. They wish to raise us up and ensure Humanity's survival at all costs (in their convenient telling of things), but how can something so far removed from the human element truly do that? You have grasped that lost divinity and gained the following Divine Attributes while still being able to act as a human:◦Holy: You are intense, more an experience than a person. A guard's attention might naturally falter for a second, but a Holy being assigning themselves that role would not. Being more of a plot point than a character, lower level mundane actions are effortless and graceful. You can know when something threatens human interests in some abstract way, always appear where you are needed (even multiple places), get into people's heads, inspire them to greatness, and even throw up a ward which passively makes enemy Miracles harder.

◦Gardener: Anywhere settled by humans or are suitable for human habitation are now putty in your hands. You can reshape it to your will and even grow supernatural wonders from it like a gardener with the earth. Make entire self-sufficient cities sprout up from nothing and even retroactively integrate it into the world economy. You can even manipulate fate and dharma, declaring how things must now function in relation to those places. Do your cities now host the world's only openly supernatural citizens, like Academy City from A Certain Magical Index? Does it have rain that reverses aging? Does it have impossibly stable conditions despite sitting right on a fault line or tornado alley next to places that regularly get destroyed by natural disaster?

◦Deepness: You become an abstract being (e.g. an idea, a story, a math equation) who is merely projecting an avatar to act on physical reality. At any time you can dissolve into nothing (from the perspective of mortals), bring physical things into the world of your "true" self (offensively or for storage), bring thematically appropriate wonders from your true world, or otherwise still act on the physical world from the safety of another world. You can even mess with things in your abstract world and have thematically appropriate things resolve in physical space as if by sympathetic magic, This abstract nature means you are also immortal, simply reforming when harmed...if anything but the greatest of forces can even scratch you.

◦Architect: You can grasp the grand design of existence and finely manipulate it to your will. You can communicate with anything and nothing is hostile against you by default. A mad scientist seeing you messing with his doomsday device might innocently ask what you are doing and wave you off if you do not outright say you are seeking to undermine him. More impressively, you gain a vast prescience, being nigh clairvoyant (spatially and temporally) for all places applicable to Gardener and possible threats to Humanity. You have the intellect to form absurd schemes from all that that look like the Path to Victory to mortals.

•The Game is what we played as wretched mortal flesh once our birthright was taken from us and we were thrown out of the Garden. Do not be so naive to think it is simply "evil", but rather the "human condition" rooted in our temporary animal nature. Our folly, our temptation, our weakness, our instinct. If you ever stand at a cliff and have a sudden thought of what it would be like to jump off..that is the Game. Despite this self-destructive nature, it is also "freedom", the right to self-determination, and the will to power. Whether it is self-destruction from over extending or self-determination, it is Humanity's right alone to destroy itself, no one else's. They are sort of emo, but we can ignore that part for how grandiose and glorious they can be. In the end, they "love" you all, laughing in an ambiguous way when you find your own voice. You gain the following Divine Attributes:◦Wanderer: You can be call yourself away to distant lands. You care not for normal routes or requirements for entry, you may enter through any appropriately symbolic way. Take others with you on a fantastical transformative journey, or return with impossible treasures from impossible places. Interactions with you become so intense you can conceptually implant things in people, retroactively declaring it was always inside them. Is it a "seed of evil", "actually being the long lost heir to a magical kingdom", or "the Innate Dao of the Ultimate Kung Fu Master"? Time with you is never boring at least. Once you have attuned yourself to an otherworld, they become yours and you can shape them much like you do with the Rules' Gardener trait.

◦Monstrous: There is something indomitable about you, something that will never give in no matter the odds. Not only does one of your specific traits (e.g. strength, speed, intellect) become limitlessly potent to the point you always have enough to pass any mundane "test" of it, but you also have many powers out of nightmare. You can assume inconspicuous forms, paralyze even seemingly emotionless things with fear, touch even intangible conceptual things, curse others with terrible fortune, and paradoxically even purify things or "make them right" with powers that are troubling in origin. Finally, if you suddenly find yourself in some eldritch landscape where nothing makes sense and nothing even "exists", you are still able to perceive and nominally "swim" back to safety even if those actions have no meaning in a place with nothing to see of kick off of.

◦Prophet: You become empowered by various concepts, such as "justice", "love", "sin", and "fire" by your own interpretation of them. You gain inspiration and evocative arts thematically based on those. Enact instances of those things onto the world, manipulate the conceptual boundaries of what those things mean, and embody them to solve problems as they would. Use "knives" to cut to the front of a line without anyone thinking anything of it, or "famine" to make credit card debt wither away as if properly paid.

◦Hunter: The cruelest of their traits, you are now manifest your gnawing hunger or commitment to hunt some conceptual "prey". Mimic the appearance, mannerisms, and voice of anyone you have interacted with. Force others to feel whatever emotion you want. Twist fate to simply declare your prey was lured to you. "Free" someone to truly express what they feel in their heart. Cut their soul to deny them (potentially permanently) of a sense, talent, or power. Retroactively declare that something of a situation advantageous to you was hidden all that time, possibly by partially blocking a sense. Your enemy did not stab you, their friend took the hit instead! That was not the off switch, you just telepathically switched "hit off switch" and "turn up the power knob" in their mind!

•As a human who reclaimed their divinity, you are uniquely suited to rapidly respond to situations better than a normal Imperator. More like a Noble, you can finely act on the human scale and within a human framework. If you are familiar with Nobilis, ignore any stated issues of Imperators and keep any things you consider good.

Essence of Enhancing Your Stick

 By imbibing this Essence (loosely based on +99 Wooden Stick), you gain the following:

•You have the power to enhance any object up to 99 times. Each time the effectiveness of any of its inherent characteristics you want are doubled. A simple stick you conceptualize as a "weapon" might have its durability and striking force buffed, while a computer's target qualities might be its processing speed and energy efficiency. The other aspects stay the same, as much as can be while still accommodating the buffs.

•You can target any set of qualities each time you enhance something, but it is set at the time of buffing. So if you enhance the speed and durability for a car separately, you will have wasted 2 uses while only doubling each quality. If you had chosen both qualities each time, two uses would have quadrupled (2^2) the speed and durability instead. You cannot "shift" what is enhanced after the fact.

•You can do this to multiple objects, but you cannot apply it more than 99 times to the same one. If it has been transformed or destroyed enough to count as a completely different thing, then any buffs stop working. This is based on your subconscious recognition, so you cannot try to argue technicalities if it goes against that.

•Pieces removed from the main body of the enhanced object may or may not also retain their buffs, depending on what you want at the time. You must still recognize that the overall "object" it was taken from still "exists" at the time of removal. Buffs still carry over even if the main body is later destroyed.

•The enhancement is conceptual in nature, reinforcing the purpose of existence you imagine for it rather than literally affecting its physical structure. Its operation will seem anomalous (acting via fiat) to anyone putting it under enough scientific scrutiny.

•You can rescind any number of buffs for any qualities you want with a though. This does not refund an enhancement use.

Essence of Not Getting Eaten

 By imbibing this Essence (very loosely based on Only I Am Not Attacked in a World Overflowing With Zombies), you gain the following:

•You will never be targeted by any predatory beings, whether that be human, monster, or something else even stranger. This will not save you from someone properly enforcing the law on you or something like that though. Basically, if you can imagine it being the threat in a horror or action-thriller series then this Essence will apply.

•For the most part, it will be as if you are not even there to the predators. You could make a bunch of noise right behind them and they will not even turn around to confirm the source. You could slowly lead them around by hand to move them about, though creatures with intelligence might wander off after you let go. Intelligent predators might selectively be able to converse with you, but will never become hostile to you and will not find this odd.

•If they find valid prey, they will subconsciously maneuver around you and prevent their actions from harming you. Still, watch out for the predators' momentum if they are especially motivated to pursue their targets and you are already holding onto the former. Furthermore, while this does not provided any benefits to others per se, predators will also always avoid area of effect actions that would negatively impact you. This manifests as an inexplicable overpowering urge even if they could not possibly know you were there.

Essence of Sexy Mad Libs

 By imbibing this essence, you gain the following:

•When you encounter a label on something, you may magically substitute one word with something vulgar, fetishistic, or otherwise sexual. That will become the new recognized name for the thing, either for that one instance or for all things of that type, depending on what you want. The labelled thing will then change to fit the description. It will still retain elements of its original form and even work with at least the same level of performance despite all the changes, but it will also fulfill the new label's role as well. No one will find this too strange if you do not want it.

•You cannot add the original label yourself, unless you also made the thing labelled. Neither can you order or strongly imply to an ally to do it for you, unless they made it as well. In those cases, any changes will only apply to instances that you or your allies directly created. You can subtly influence others or trick enemies into adding a useful label for editing though. Meme warfare could be very useful here.

•As an example, you could take a copy of "My Hero Academia" and turn it into "My Ero Academia". Then, all copies of the original series will be retroactively changed into a much more erotic version that would seem like a porn parody done by the original author. It will still somehow be enthusiastically allowed on shelves despite its content and be just as popular as before. It may even have much of the same themes and major plot points, albeit sometimes passed through a porn filter.

Essence of the Living Meme

 By imbibing this essence (based on I Beg You All, Please Shut Up), you gain the following:

•You can choose to gain abilities based on anything used to compliment you, even if it is exaggerated or done jokingly. The change is instant, though it is never so outwardly extreme to be obvious to an outside observer. It can be delayed if it would be too obvious in the moment. This could be physical enhancements, finely honed and updating skills, or information that no one should know at the time bordering on prescience. While the acquisition of these are basically by narrative fiat, all the results have to be theoretically physically possible within whatever settings they occur in.◦Being called "an expert hacker" for fixing a computer will make you the world's greatest hacker. You can break into any system without anyone noticing and basically do anything you want. You could flawlessly hack secure government servers or banking records without anyone tracking you down, if they can ever detect anything happened at all. While this will look like BS-tier instant Hollywood hacking to the uninitiated, you have a full and comprehensive understanding of what you are doing. You could teach a class on computer science, or fill out a full report on how you pulled off each nonsensical hack and how to defend against it.

◦Being called a "big strong man" by a girl you like will make you grow several inches in height, gain a muscular toned physique that does not need to be maintained, and a handsome face (that is still recognizable as you). No one will find this change too odd.

◦Being complimented on your cooking will make you easily the equal of the best culinary experts in the world. You will also get a bunch of highly marketable and delicious new recipes downloaded into your head. This could be anything, such as an instant milk tea mix that costs pennies to make and will have customers lining up out the door for over a twenty dollars a cup even though that is the only product sold there.

◦Being told you always seem to be ahead of the curve might dump a bunch of random information of the near future into your mind. This is random, but always vaguely relevant to what you are doing. For instance, you will know that a store owner nearby is thinking about selling their lease and would be give you a good price if you ask now, which you should do because it is the perfect place for the milk tea shop mentioned above. You might also instantly know the phone number for someone looking for a new job who would be perfect as the manager and public face for your new businesses.

Essence of the Horny Virus

 By imbibing this essence (based on Libidors), you gain the following:

•You are now infected with a non-contagious version of the libidors virus. You are also a "perfect carrier", so do not worry about it ever going out of control or needing to be castrated.

•By becoming sexually aroused or thinking thoughts related to genuine intimacy (e.g. thinking about someone you romantically love) you can activate your libidors powers.◦Firstly, this involves a general boost to all physical abilities proportional to your subjective feelings. At base you are a little superhuman (comic book "peak human"). This scales up to sprinting down a car on the highway, attacking faster than the human eye can register, and shattering concrete with casual strikes. At that level of horniness you can also take attacks like that in kind and can keep up your stamina as long as you are aroused, and like a horny Hulk you can keep pushing this further as you work yourself up.

◦Secondly, this creates thematically (i.e. based on your fetishes) appropriate powers to provide natural weapons and further enhance your abilities. This could be things like extending prehensile rope/whip-like tentacles to tie up enemies, shaping an arm into a sword, or shooting bolts of electricity. You get one power that is your default based on your strongest set of fetishes and can activate others by participating in acts related to peripheral fetishes. For instance, smelling latex to gain a protective NBC outer coating, or binding yourself to enhance durability in exchange for mobility.