Meta Essence CYOA 51

Essence of Domain

This ██████ is full of U. It『』and tastes of Ø.

●You possess a Estate, a coherent concept of a finite and defined concept space (though what you're defining doesn't have to be finite; "The Infinite" is a legitimate Estate, though maybe not a useful one). It will have up to seven short phrases that express the true nature or heart of the Estate.

●Your Estate speaks to you about threats to it and the state of it's health. This isn't specific to an instant of your Estate; Cats won't speak up about the fate of a cat, but rather when the Estate itself is in danger.

●You can invoke phantasmal manifestations of your Estate; ghosts of it's presence. These ghost miracles have little presence, nothing more than a nudge, though sometimes a nudge can be enough.

●You can call upon your Estate, using it to find out information about your Estate. You can find out anything your Estate knows about; with Fire, you could ask about anything that happened near a fire, for instance.

●You can talk to your Estate, or instances of it. You can ask it to do things it might have done anyways; talk a gun into misfiring, or a river into flowing faster or slower.

●You can preserve, strengthen, or fuel manifestations of your Estate in broad, profound, or world changing ways.

●You can create your Estate, call it, and grant it animation. To be, to come to you, or to act.

●You can destroy your Estate, even going so far as to 'create' a negative of it; a fire that eats heat and turns ashes into wood, for example.

●You can redefine how a piece of your Estate fits into the world, or giving it a new fate. The world tends to rearrange itself, to pretend that your changes made sense, and were in fact always the case.

●You can also don The Divine Mantle. The manifest presence of your divine authority, it grants a massive edge to all of your actions, but it shines in contests of power. People directly opposing your acts find their opposition... lessened. Not in general, just at the point of contention. The price of this is simple; that you have donned divinity, and can not hide it so long as you wear the Mantle.

●With a source of miraculous power, there are even greater feats you might achieve.

Essence of the Pseudo-Estate

There is no bottle. Nothing does not slosh inside it's container as you shift it back and forth, studying what is within.

It is full of Stars.

○You define something in relation to yourself. It is not real, but it is more than real.

○This something becomes your tool.

○You manipulate it most naturally by manipulating it's boundaries, though it tends to move to help you or your cause regardless.

○Define it with a general reflexive name that invokes how it is OF you, and seven traits that define how it twists the logic of the world.

○You may freely see the relationship between things and your something, may bless or curse things with it's nature, may exist through it (even on great scales), may take on it's properties, may bring things into it, or cast things from it, and may change how things relate to it without any real effort but attention. You may perform greater feats, if you have some well of divine power to bolster yourself with.

○With such a well of divine power, you may also manipulate your something in more concrete ways, though with this essence alone such efforts will always be hard, when it costs even to achieve the ghost of a miracle.

○You are in some way founded without yourself, self defining. If all the world changes, you may remain yourself. While you aren't immune to more focused efforts, you resist many abstract forms of assault.

○What 'harm' is and how you deal or express it becomes, to some extent, subjective. It is hard to harm you at all with a small injury, unless a great one has left you vulnerable, and you may leverage your own injuries as tools.

Essence of the Red Mage

This steaming sip of crimson seems to give the impression of movement, but it's impossible to tell if it's just the play of shadows and light, or if it's actually moving. Upon drinking it, energy fills your body, like the biggest rush you've ever felt.

○The formless force charges your body, like the biggest sugar rush imaginable, combined with speed. You have more energy than you've ever had before in your life, and it doesn't abate.

○Despite this, it's an undemanding energy. You wake up filled with it, but it never gets in the way of being still, or sleeping. It can let you ignore tiredness indefinitely, but but won't actually remove the need for sleeps. You just aren't tired.

○This surge of energy helps with... pretty much everything. You recover from injuries faster, you build muscle faster, you sleep less (but generally better due to your better physical state).

○You don't get energy from your food, the rush providing all the energy you'll ever need. But all your other nutritional needs are still there. Likewise, your physical condition won't degrade from passivity, though it can suffer for other reason.

○This surge that fills you is the energy of action, and it further surges when you're performing dynamic actions, and rises in response to assaults upon you.

■You will quickly come to understand how to harness these surges, and call them forth as externalized action. You can use it to bolster yourself or others in a more direct fashion, casting 'buffs' and 'heals', or to lash out with twisted version of the same, 'debuffing' others or damaging their 'buffs.' and wielding other.

■Alternatively, you can pour your action into the world, manifest forces that dynamically act in place of your body. Fire, lighting, and bitter cold will come instantly, but with practice you'll find many more ways of effecting the world.

○Smarts and Will will empower your magic, and this is a broad kind of magic that can work towards constructive or destructive purposes, but it isn't a ritual power or one that builds upon preparation. It is the energy of action, and esoteric, deep, high, and obscure magics and forces... won't be impossible, but with just this, are probably impractical and not worth the effort. It's good for immediate solutions, but outside of basic earth magic or healing struggles to have a lasting impact on the world

Essence of the Blue Mage

This dark spinning drop of liquid seems to form cannibalistic caricatures one moment, and pages the next. It tastes of blood and ink, and after drinking it your thirst seems to momentarily redouble.

○Upon drinking it, a small mental study will form in your mind.

○You gain a second mental thread that is fully focused inside your mind, upon your books and research. It can focus on anything that isn't within the study, and it's memory is no better than yours, but you're always fully aware of it and what it thinks/knows, can direct it, and it know where to find anything recorded within it's books.

○Whenever you experience is automatically systematically recorded in a through fashion. The weight of words will over time form a flow of mystical power.

○In addition to giving you a steady flow, each 'tome' will also act as a battery, able to hold a minute's worth of it's own generation.

○Among the tomes in your study, one will be a bestiarum vocabulum, a recording of everything you learn about beasts and monsters (or anything sufficiently adjacent to those to be included).

○Drawing upon the mystical principle that knowledge is power, the bestiarum will leverage it's influence upon you.

■For example, every observation about cats might add to your strength, a little, and your agility a bit more, and your balance and kinesthesis even more. It would also probably make you naturally move more stealthy.

○It will also using your collected knowledge to form a set of 'pictures' of each 'beast.'

■These pictures will display all the magics and influences of the beast that you have observed.

■It will also included diagrams focusing upon any exceptional traits of the beast.

○Pulling upon your flow of magic, or even your reserves, you can pull these influences into reality. You can pull dragonsfire from your recording of a dragon, or lay the diagram of it's terrible claws upon your own hands to grow them.

○Over time, you can integrate aspects you draw upon regularly, perhaps permanently integrating feature you desire, or otherwise using them to modify yourself.

○You can also further master any powers you've claimed, forming books and grimories about how elements of your bestiarum vocabulum could be leveraged. While you can't do anything not recorded as part of it, with just this essence, you can use them in ways the beast couldn't.

■For example, you could record how a circle of blood fairy blood could bind an oath, and then manifest that oath circle, even though that performance would be beyond the pixiy you recorded fae blood from.

■The more steps you have to go through, the more sophisticated the steps, the 'harder' it is to 'record' such an application.

○For both advanced applications, integrating or recording applications, your 'extra' mind can do it on it's own, or you can help. You might also be able to find things out in the world to speed your progress.

Essence of the Unfaltering Hero

Upon consuming this essence, you awaken the hero inside you, you wish you could have been.

The Heroic Spirit will guide the development of your body, making it slowly move towards the best version of it you could have had. If you had a genetic tendency towards a problem, but it didn't nessessarly have to manifest, it will fade/not appear. You will grow as tall as you would have if you had the best possible diet/nutrition. You lungs will slowly change to what they would have been if you had grown up at a high altitude, your body hardening as if you had gone through specialized training to achieve it. This will go into the slightly impossible - your bones with strength as if they had been repeatedly broken and allowed to heal, without the stiffening and accumulating micro-damage that causes. You will become slightly better than best physical you, you could have ever been. This will slowly move you towards your physical prime, and keep you there.

The Heroic Spirit is always read for action. It's always paying complete attention to through all of your senses, and is always expecting, planning for, and ready to react to danger, violence, fast motion, sudden action, chaos, betrayal, and opportunity from every possible angle in your immediate environment, and from anywhere your senses cover. Therefore, you need do none of these things, as it's awareness is always completely but effortlessly at the back of your mind. This doesn't wear on you or demand your attention, you just have a thoughtless awareness of everything it's thought or focused on.

The Heroic Spirit is talented at all physical pursuits, and the logic of physical pursuits on the personal scale. You will both pick up any physical skill easily, often the first time you see it, but you will get the logic of how it's applied. You won't just learn mountain climbing, you'll instantly understand what are good decision to make while mountain climbing even before you master the technical skills. You won't just learn wrestling, you'll instantly understand the logic of control aggression and the philosophy of a fight on the personal scale level. This might make other skills easier to learn by inference, but it won't give you tactics on it's own, as that's no longer personal scale.

The Heroic Spirit knows your heart. It can always give you the correct moral answer, via your own morals, instantly. You instantly know what moral position you would adopt in any situation where you know all the factors and costs, if you were being honest with yourself and you had unlimited time to ponder it. That doesn't mean it will always give you a complete answer - you might have to spend time figuring out the costs, or the second order implications, and so on. It won't do the logic for you, just the moral calculus. But with whatever logic or data you have, you can instantly know what your final, personal, honest position would be on the subject with that data. Note that this means that if the situation changes, you'll instantly know if your moral convictions would make you take a different position, if you weren't caught up in the heat of the moment.

You gain a mental "map" of fulcrum points, places where the determined actions of a single person could change lives. This isn't a map of direction or distance, but of action and choice, and it doesn't tell you what or when you will find that point, just a "direction" to move in along the decision-axis and a vague sense of what's at stake. Choices you could make, but never would, won't appear on the 'map', while choices you are unlikely to make will be "hard" to "read" or notice.

As an example: An orphaned prince running from his pursuers is moving through the city you're in. Your map won't point to him, because while there are a series of choices you could make that would lead you right too him, those aren't organic choices you would ever make in a vacuum. However, if he might break into you house to steal food provided you're out of the hosue, you might sense a fulcrum point to decide the fate of the kingdom, provided you go out shopping today, and once you were out, you would get a sense of when you should start heading home, as all of these choices are choices you might otherwise make.

Lastly, it can steady your mind and lend you the determination to calmly act on your convictions. It won't force this on you. You never have to use it. But at any time, you can choose to follow through with your moral conviction, and once you do you can hold steady to them, unflinching of the consequences.

Essence of Persona

This『』is full of ██████ It U and tastes of Ø.

●You possess a Estate, a coherent concept of a finite and defined concept space (though what you're defining doesn't have to be finite; "The Infinite" is a legitimate Estate, though maybe not a useful one). It will have up to seven short phrases that express the true nature or heart of the Estate.

●You can see things that have a connection to your Estate; positive or negative, those things that love it, or hate it. Promote it, or weaken it. Forces that are connected to it even at a step removed, and those domains that touch it in some meaningful way.

●You can bless and curse things with the touch of your Estate, give things a bit of destiny from it, for better or for worse.

●You can live through your Estate, passively telling it's story and shaping it's fate. This doesn't let you command it; if you incarnate as the moon, than you can tell the possible stories of the moon, but couldn't set it to do something that isn't in the natural story of the moon, and other forces have a say. You're able to spread yourself wide across your Estate, or incarnate in primal places like Heaven or Hell.

●You can express one one the traits of your Estate; if Love Overcomes, so can you. You don't choose how that works out; you set it in motion, but it's the nature of your Estate that works out the details. You can tune how grand you want this to be, up to the level that gets rather earthshaking.

●You can bring things into your Estate. This can be physically, or abstractly. You can pick and choose what part or parts or your Estate you're being something into. If you had Fire you could make someone burn with passion, turn them into a fire elemental, or a campfire. This doesn't remove or destroy what they already are. If you turned someone into a campfire, that campfire would remind people of that person, and someone could figure it out (if they knew the supernatural was possible, at least). Things of your Estate are not immune to this; you can use it to move and redefine where something is inside your Estate.

●You can remove something from your Estate. With the Estate of Fire, you could exempt a fire for endless hunger, or make it not a fire anymore. You don't exactly control this, as this is literally you removing something from your control, but you can generally sort of choose what direction you eject something from your Estate.

●You can change the relationship something has with your Estate. You can make someone a guardian or your Estate, or guarded by it, declare your Estate's enmity towards them, or friendship, and otherwise change the engine of fate and causality to support such an altered relationship.

●You can wrap yourself in the Auctoritas Magister, the divine authority that teaches the world to heed your presence. Doing so demands that the miraculous only affect you with your own consent, and your mundane actions can't be oppose by the miraculous. This does not stop a miracle; but it suspends it until you pass. Streets uncrack from a miraculous earthquake under your feet, only to crack again as you pass. It is possible to pierce your Authority, but the power to pierce must be stolen from the power to act, and your shield is mighty. It requires some focus to maintain the Auctorias Magister.

●With a source of miraculous power, there are even greater feats you might achieve.

Essence of the Divine Well

The strange fruit seem to practically glow with heath. Biting into it spills golden liquid that tastes of playful days and nights around around a fire telling stories.

●You have a well of divine power, a battery that can fuel rites.

●You also have the ability to use various rites, any of them fed from that well; from ones that allow them to speak all tongues, to guising themselves to make themselves belong to an environment or culture, to identify a mystical link, to even claiming more divine energy by nettling your enemies. These are only some of the strange tricks and rituals you can command; further, if you have other abilities, they may open up more options.

●This divine power soaks into you, giving you a strange protection against broad reality shifting forces.

●You can regain energy when your own flaws punish you, when the world refuses and frustrates your efforts, and it will renew itself entirely when the cycle of event brings begins you into a new story.

●If you have other powers beyond this, this well of divine power will fuel such abilities with incredible divine potency.

●This well starts out deep enough to fuel a single great act of divine power, to speak one of the words of creation. Though with this alone, you wouldn't have any such words to speak.

●Over time, the well may deepen as you overcome adversity and shape the world.

Essence of the Gift

Upon consuming the Essence of the Gift, you find yourself blessed by a mysterious patron.

Pick up to six Gift, from up to that many different Gift of Favs

Alternatively, you may spend 3 gifts on one Gift of Favs, to access the normal number of gifts that Fav offers, as well as any other special bonus attached to it.

You may gain two more gifts, if you take a 'cursed' CYOA at the same time - one where the theme is something ""bad"" or ""cursed"" happening to you.

Like all Essences, you may obviously use this as a 'meta' with another CYOA.

If you don't, feel free to take a one time trip to another world of your choice. If you use this option though, you'll only find your way 'back' to earth if you have an appropriate power.

You may insert how you wish - portal, getting summoned, simply waking up into a new life in your new world, being reincarnated from the start, etcetera.

Essence of the Greater [X]

This small vial contains a quicksliver like liquid. When added to another drink, it seem to intensify that drink in both appearance and taste.

○This essence must be taken with another source of power, one that makes you make an limiting choices. For example, an CYOA where you can choose to be a lesser god over a single concept - you become a deity over dreams.

○Upon taking this essence, you may make an addition choice. You could be a deity over dreams AND fate.

○If there are multiple choices from your source of power (You choose your Domain you rule over and an Alignment that you draw power from) you may make an extra choice on as many or as few of these things as you wish.

○All your choices explicitly work together. If you gained the power to summon a giant robot, then for example this essence would mean all your robots could combine into a super-robot.

○You may take this essence multiple times, each time adding an additional choice.

Essence of the Isekai Survivor

 This flask if filled with an oddly iridescent liquid. When gagged down, it has an oddly dry taste that leaves you more thirsty than before. It has a tastes of sweat and road dust.

•Drinking this Essence invests you with what's needed to be the kind of person who could survive an otherworldly adventure.

•First, any and all physical issues you have are erased. Whether congenital, genetic, acquired, whether from injury, environment, or exposure... however they happened, they're wiped away. This can include ones with mental consequences - depression, and schizophrenia will be be fixed. They will also continue to be wiped away - any curse that would ruin you, parasite that corrupt you, or just mundane injury or similar, will be opposed and will face a steady force trying to return you to a pristine state. This will not stop a transformation you seek, though it will oppose the parts you dislike. This isn't omnipotent, or even hugely strong - no guarantees are being offered for bathing in phyrexian oil.

•Second, you find yourself needing less. You can divide your requirements by a third - no just food and water, but also things like rest or light.

•Third, the quality of what you need - and tolerate - goes down. If you have to drink from mud puddles or eat spoiled or poison food... you might not enjoy it, but your tolerance is extended.

•Forth, your physical development is enhanced three times over. You're more likely to build up callouses than blisters. You'll lose unneeded weight, or put on muscle. This even helps with skills, so long as they're physical skills. You'll pick up three days of practice with the sword in one.

•Fifth, you are granted a degree of clarity. It helps you deal with any mental issues you may have, keep calm under stress, and not freeze in front of danger.

•Finally knowledge and skills. You find yourself able to speak and read all tongues, and will spontaneously 'remember' basic survival skills for any environment you find yourself.

Essence of the Miraculous Gift

This strange amber flask feel oddly unreal. It appear to be crystalline, and opaque enough that whatever fills it is only a detailless shadow. But you can't feel it - it feels like you hold nothing. If you try and grip it harder, your fingers refuse to close, and there's a feeling of greater weight in your arm, but the flask itself feels like nothing, and the liquid within tastes like nothing.

○Pick an essence that gives you access to a broad 'thing.' This essence gives you access to a specific expression or product of that 'thing.' For example, an essence that gives you access to mad science could be used to give you access to a specific limited expression of mad science - maybe you can do a specific thing with mad science, or you have access to a specific mad science device. This is your Gift.

○You cannot normally be denied your Gift. While miraculous force may temporally disable it, lock it down, or oppose it, it will reassert itself/return to you even before transcendent power. If the essence you're invoking has stronger protections, your Gift has those in addition/instead.

○Your Gift may be stronger than you could normally reach with that essence - if your gift is a spell, than it could reach the level of legend that you would only be able to achieve through pain and sacrifice. It could be an unnaturally broad, or extremely focused expression of that 'thing.'

○You may choose how hard it is to use. It could be utterly draining to the point where you injure yourself, or as easy as using a tool, or a limb, or maybe you don't even use it at all - it may simple be a 'passive' trait of yours, it may assert itself, have its own alien intelligence, or it may simply 'happen' when appropriate.

○You may choose where it manifest, whether it just affects your, nearby, up to affecting the entire local section of the multiverse.

○You may choose it's level of 'precedent', and how strongly 'strikes' through 'contesting' affects, from not at all, to absolutely overwhelmingly.

Essence of the Reality Warping, Time Transcending Supervillain A.I.

The flask looks like a hologram, a low pixel image of a vial of a test tube from some early 90s videogame. You find that you can touch it, and it has real weight. Pinpricks of static stab into your hand where you hold it. Whatever is inside sloshes unnaturally, like whoever was rendering it didn't quite understand liquid motion. When you drink it, it tastes like pink and the sound of dial-up modems.

•Your mind expands in scale, no longer being restricted to your physical body. You now exist also inside any technology around you. Any insufficiently secured computational devices may be subverted to 'run' you. If you wish, you may move along these axes instead of physical ones, abandoning your physical body. If you do so, your body will enter a kind of coma, until you return.◦Your range starts out a couple meters, but will grow with intelligence with diminishing returns.

•You become unnaturally talented with developing technology, with a focus on computers and robotics. You could easy write sophisticated viruses to subvert systems and create botnets.◦You are also good at using that technology to support the above. You could use those botnets to prototype robots, and code 'smart' programs to run on those robots.

◦Such technology is bound by the laws of physics. You can make improbably leaps and design improbably refined specs, not make impossible mad science.

◦These abilities grow with your intelligence, with diminishing returns.

•You generate a 'charge' every twenty-four hours. Such Charges may be used in a number of ways.◦You may spend a charge to double your intelligence along a limited, focused axis. For example, you may double the size of your minds eye, or how fast you think, or your raw ability to do brute force calculations, or your ability to track abstractions, or any other focused, limited mental attribute that falls under 'intelligence.'

◦You may spend a charge to grant yourself a 'power.' Such powers start out very limited at first. A force-field might start out a plane of force a foot in radius that could take a couple punches (or gunshots) before breaking, that either can't move once created or exists fixed to your location. As you spend more charges, you may further empower an ability (making it bigger and/or stronger in a straightforward way), or make it more sophisticated and refined (most other changes).◾Such abilities will start out looking like crude CGI inserted into reality. As they grow stronger, they will look more 'solid', and as they grow more sophisticated, they will become more detailed and/or 'natural.' This can, but does not have to result in them looking more real.

◾You may develop abilities to 'work together.' For example, if you develop a power that creates a kind of hunter drone, you might be able to add your force-field to that hunter-drone for a low cost in charges rather than having to develop that ability again.

◾As your intelligence increases, the initial strength of new powers, and how much a power gains with each charge spent, increases with diminishing returns.

◦You may spend a charge to warp reality in a broad unstructured way. You could move an entire city a couple feet to the right, or more drastically rearrange a smaller area like a neighborhood. You might cure sickness (or mitigate harder issue), or take a couple a couple months off someones age. Or you might warp a factory into producing new components of your own design, and inserting automation so no human is needed.◾Your reality warping may incorporate any powers you've developed. A robot factory might use your forcefields to maintain cleanrooms with less infrastructure. Or maybe the robots it build have such forcefields. The more you develop a power, the more 'efficient' and 'easier' it is to incorporate it into a change.

◾You may use such reality warping to change or improve your physical form. Or with more effort create a new one if your original is lost.

◾Minds tend to be the hardest and most expensive thing to change in a lasting way. While some simple forms of possession (of people you have access to) isn't hard, it also isn't hard to break usually. More extensive and harder to reverse changes are possible, but not simple.

◾As you grow more intelligent, you'll find that you can stretch this further in ways related to how you have increased your intelligence, with diminishing returns.

◦Finally, you may spend a charge to reverse time 24 hours. You will do this automatically if you are killed and you possess any charges.

•The machine force that has possessed and enhanced you is antagonistic towards life, and you may harness this antagonism to generate additional charges.◦You may grant living beings who are enemies of yours (even if they are unaware of the fact), whose actions have undermined you or who you have gravely harmed a mirror of your own ability to generate charges. You may choose to do this around any 'crisis' point, where you have harmed them, or they have undermined you. This will only work on people who are truly opposed to you, and will not 'take' on the weak or meek.

◦Such people gain the ability to generate a 'charge' every five days.◾They may use a charge to grant themselves powers.◾Such powers tend to be 'broader' or 'more complete' than your version. A single charge could create Sentai-style armor, for example. They also are somewhat (but not greatly) more powerful than your initial powers.

◾They may spend charges to upgrade a power, with diminishing returns. Their powers are less modular than yours, and don't combine as easily or cleanly as yours do.

◾They may only have a limited number of powers 'ready,' based on their intelligence. An average person could have three powers 'ready', with another for each standard deviation above average. They may switch out an active power for an archived one with a few hours of focus. They may be able to increase the number of powers they have active with long practice and hard work, but it will be a slow, soul-draining effort, and will take a minimum of a year for the first 'extra', which each additional one taking even longer

◾They may also use their power to warp reality, but only to restore 'recent' 'damage'. They might heal a crowds injuries, but they couldn't cure a disease (though they might wipe an exposure that 'just happened' if they wanted to gamble a charge that way). Recent counts as 12 hours. Your reality warping almost always counts as 'damage', so they might turn a robot factory back into a car factory. Their reality warping starts out bigger than yours, but doesn't really grow (they may be able to refine it somewhat over time).◾Any time their reality warping undoes your work, you gain progress towards a charge. If they just directly restored a robot factory to a car factory, for example, you would get the charge back. But if they started undoing things your robots did - for example if your robots had started converting the surrounding areas into more factories, than you would get a charge for each factory they 'undid', even though you only spent a charge on the first one. Injures and deaths undone tend to be worth a relatively large numbers of charges.

◾Lastly, they may reverse time by twenty-four hours. They will do this automatically if they die and have any remaining charges. When they do this, only the person who reversed time will retain memories. Other people you've empowered won't remember the 'lost' time, with the only evidence they will see being any charges they spent on reality warping or time reversal are still gone. You will gain at least five charges every time one of them does this, plus more if they undid any accomplishments of yours.◾You will also remember the time that was not. There may be other beings who remember. Don't expect a god of time to miss anything, for example.