Meta Essence CYOA 52

Essence of Respawn

●This essence tastes of grave-dirt and stale energy-drinks mixed together with burnt coffee, and shredded paperwork. On consuming it you can hear faint cursing in an unfamiliar eldritch language, someone in possession of a polyglot ability of some sort can make out a bureaucrat complaining about another Hades-Taunter protocol breacher.

●By drinking this essence, you gain the ability to Respawn.

●This ability has three options you can choose from, hanging around your corpse as an intangible ghost unable to move more than 3 feet away, until you make your choice.

●The first option causes you to rise back on your feet, your body healed to a point it can once more sustain life, erasing damage that would render you unable to live, but never more than half-way to the optimal health level you might have had. You will suffer 24 hours of weakened state, nausea, and headaches, unless you receive some medical attention or possess a healing ability that can restore you back to your optimal health, at which point these penalties can be erased early.

●The second option causes you to respawn at a pre-set location that you can declare by stating, whether vocally out loud or mentally in your head, that you set a particular place or piece of furniture as your respawn point. This can be a bed that you will wake up from in event of dying somewhere, a personal study somewhere safe, or inside the lobby of a building you are attempting to conquer.

●The third option will send your spirit on to the void, where you will find yourself face to face with an avatar of the celestial bureaucracy that will rant and rage at you for being a moron and getting yourself killed, before slapping down some hard to hear facts that may still provide you with some useful insights to things that you may have missed. This will always be truthful, even if potentially hurtful.

○You will be given the option to return back in time a bit before you died, experiencing a second long deja-vu as you recall the life that ended poorly, before continuing on, armed with memories of what did happen, and memories of what did just happen, mixing and melding together quickly to avoid confusion.

○You can also request to be returned back notably earlier, if you have screwed things up particularly badly, but if this happens, you will also find yourself slapped with a Geas that you must fulfill, that may take up to 1 year and a day to complete, but will always have a clear end-point and a goal. You will be sent up to 7 years into the past, to right what went wrong, and must complete your Geas prior to being allowed to use this ability again.

■Failing to complete the Geas, such as failing to save someone else's life at a particular point in time, will result this time-rewing ability to be locked for as long as you traveled back in time, and you can expect your next Geas to be even harder. Additionally, you will get an even worse ranting and raging session before you will be able to even consider jumping back.

○If things are screwed up beyond any hope of repair, you can request to be reincarnated in another world, but this option relies entirely on just how much your celestial bureaucrat happens to like you, and can land you in a world of constant agony and repeated deaths, or a slice of life happy to lucky world that will bore you to death, or anything else. You may make requests or offer suggestions, but this depends on your bureaucrat, so you may have to be on your toes.

■Knowledge of laws and contracts may be useful for negotiations, as they will hold onto their side of the bargains, but may very well require additional tasks to be completed for them in exchange for help.

●Additionally, if and when you might decide you want to die for good, you get yourself an internship in the celestial bureaucracy after you die, and may offer a similar package deal for someone else as your Essence granted to you in life, whether allowing all three options, or only offering the last third.

○You can request vacation time to return to life if you happen to find suitably interesting world at one point, but you will only be able to request this after spending at least 10 subjective years as the celestial bureaucrat and death-handler of someone else. Your vacation will be life-long, until you choose to stop respawning.

Essence of the 12 Doors

●This essence looks like yellow, glowing pineapple juice, and has a taste that is so ridiculously sweet most people would expect a massive sugar-high to follow, and potential diabetes in the future, but the taste does not linger, nor does it have any energizing effect similar to sugar, just a brief overly-sweet sensation during consumption.

●You gain the ability to summon a doorway, either free-standing or pressed up against a wall, or even manifesting in an already existing door-frame, leading into a round chamber with twelve doors arranged in a clockwise fashion, with Roman Numerals marked onto each door. The door you pass through to enter bears the mark XII, or twelve.

●This chamber exists outside of time, and no time will pass outside while you stand within it, nor will you feel any effects of time. You will not grow hungry or tired, but neither can you really heal or feel more well rested even if you attempted to sleep. You and the world beyond are on hold, even if you can still move around in this chamber.

●10 of the 12 doors in this chamber lead to different pocket-dimensions, with different boons to offer to you should you pass through. In each such world, you are able to summon the doorway to return to this chamber once more, exiting through the door you entered that pocket-dimension through.

○These boons tend to be something fitting the setting, but certainly useful. Entering a world of Bioshock and Rapture before its fall, with a boon to not have any drawbacks or side-effects from the use of Plasmids and Gene-Tonics. Entering Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhutech, and gaining a strong sanity capable of resisting corrupting effects, and even regaining sanity over time if some of it is ever eroded temporarily by particular powers or acts. Entering an X-Men setting, and gaining an X-Gene and a power of your choice.

■Exact boons can be chosen by you, but should reflect the setting and what would be useful for it in some way, and preferably at a sane level of benefit. Getting greedy with this may result there being some additional hidden dark sides to the pocket-dimension that will persist until the setting is reset, and the granted boons from it discarded.

○These settings in the pocket-dimensions will have access to a variety of goods, that will likely prove useful in various forms. More advanced medicine will work perfectly fine in other settings, as well as your original world. Magical items will function as intended, but may, depending on their original setting, run out of power and require to be brought back to be recharged, or may replenish their charge on their own or through some steps that you will be able to figure out relatively easily when first holding a so depleted magic object outside of its original setting.

○Entering a Post-Scarcity level setting (such as Eclipse Phase, or Star Trek) will allow you to acquire a variety of goods relatively easily as your identity will appear entirely legal and normal, but drawing too much attention by repeatedly requesting large amounts of materials can lead to investigation into your identity and a talk about where you may be spending all those resources, and why.

●While XII leads you back to your original world, XI refuses to budge, and will not open to you no matter what you try. The only way to make use of this door, is through dying.

○Should something kill you, whether in your original world or one of the pocket-dimensions, you will be pushed out through the XI door, after which the door while close behind you once more. You will retain no memories of what happened between your death and being returned to your chamber of doors, but some signs may remain.

■Black lipstick marks on your cheek, collar, or other places.

■Scratch-marks from sharp nails, on your back or on your arms and legs.

■State of serious dehydration, exhaustion, and some chaffing in private places.

■Black business card with a golden ankh on it along with a phone-number tucked into your pocket, with red lipstick mark, and 'see you again' written on it.

■Calling this number will connect your call to a mortuary and a cheerful goth girl who will instruct you that they are busy, and cannot take your call, and that they will be available again in so and so many days. If you call them after this time has ended, the voice will simply inform they're ready to assist you whenever you may need them. They appear to be a recording, since they don't respond to any questions or queries. You can receive both audio, and in case of a video-call, visual image of the cheerful girl wearing goth fashion with a grin on her lips.

■Any resemblance to Death of the Endless is possibly coincidental, and possibly intentional touch of humor from the being.

■Your business card may or may not contain a pun about helping you at 11th hour when you receive a new one following a need to use the XI door.

■This period of time they mention is also the period of time during which you will not be able to return to life again if you die before the time has passed, and it varies based on how bad shape your body was in when you last died, ranging from 1 day to 2 weeks at most. If you die again before this time is up, you best hope you have an alternative means of resurrection if you want to keep living.

●The 10 different pocket-worlds that the doors connect to may be inspired by a variety of worlds you know and like, whether comic books, worlds from books, worlds from video-games, worlds from manga, worlds from television-shows, worlds from movies, almost any media you have come across and enjoyed. The exceptions tend to be few and far between, but generally consist of immediately hostile settings that would kill anyone on entry, and are thus regarded too hazardous to ever explore.

○Entering these pocket-worlds, you will find a maybe city-sized area where a lot of that setting's characters will show up and interact with folks, where a lot of the goods available in that setting may be up for sale, and where laws of nature and physics may be vastly altered and different.

○You will always possess a valid identity, and your currency will be directly converted to whatever currency is available and accepted in this world, along with the means to access it, cybernetic implants or smart-device for futuristic settings with electronic credits, metal coins of valuable metals in some, and paper and coin currency appropriate to the setting in others, all the way to more exotic ones like vials of spice, bottlecaps, or even berries depending on the setting. You retain approximately the same amount of purchasing power as you had on entry.

○You cannot bring anyone with you, but you can move things between the settings, and any changes brought to you by visiting one of these worlds can be retained when traveling to other worlds. These effects can be voluntarily concealed in other worlds, a cybernetic arm may receive real-skin™ covering in a fantasy setting, or be altered to look like magical golem arm if one would be appropriate in the setting.

■This concealment does not work in your original world, you will need to acquire whatever means you want to use to conceal it by yourself, when visiting these worlds.

○You may generally choose the 10 worlds that the pocket-worlds are based upon when you first enter them, but once they are set, they cannot be changed again easily.

■It is possible to 'reset' a door by waiting 10 years since your last visit to open the door again, at which point you have a choice of entering the world you used to visit before, or change it to a new world.

■If you 'abandon' a pocket-world like this, you will be unable to abandon the same door's connected pocket-world again for a century, if you live more than 100 years, the reset counter will start to tick again after your next visit to that pocket-dimension.

■Doing this repeatedly within a millennium may result in a door becoming locked, and denying you access to any place for 1,000 years. Any further abuse of this system beyond that point will see you locked out from the XII door, and lock the XI door permanently as well.

■If you allow the 100 year period to reset, and eventually change worlds but choose a world you previously abandoned, you will receive a 'fresh instance' of such a world, an abandoned pocket-world is gone, that dimension is no longer reachable, and possibly no longer exists at all.

■Your Essence anchors these pocket-worlds and provides them with stability, helping create them from lost time-lines, creating some parts ex-nihilo. It can only hold tethers to anchor down ten of these pocket-worlds at once, and a snapped tether will take some time to heal from having to reattach itself to another such pocket-world in a torn shape, from which its healing period begins.

Essence of the Animal Sidekick

●This essence tastes like fresh cool water under a hot summer sun, with a mild sense of cleverness, curiosity, and amusement mingled in for a few seconds.

●By drinking this essence, you gain a soul-bound Animal Sidekick, who you can summon at your side at any time to offer you help.

●You might have a clever little monkey (Aladdin), a smart-ass talking parrot (Return of Jafar), a loyal and clever horse for a cowboy (Lucky Luke), or something similar. Thematically, they will be animals, but can have human level of intelligence and perception of the world around them, along with understanding.

●This includes animals that aren't native to Earth, or even mythical animals. Examples suggested include Phoenix (Conan), Cringer/Battlecat (He-Man), Dragon such as Toothless (How to Train your Dragon) or Fu Dog (American Dragon). It would include something like Stitch (Lilo and Stitch), or Snarf (Thundercats) as a borderline case, but something like Dobby the House-Elf (Harry Potter) would not fall into this category, being a side-kick, sure, but not meeting the requirement of thematically being an animal. This essence can include all manner of unusual animals. If you could argue in good faith that the creature fits the description of a side-kick and thematically animalistic, it should be alright.

●This happy little sidekick will start with a very strong loyalty and a bond of friendship towards you, which cannot ever be completely broken, but abusive or hurtful treatment will have them leave you for a good while, returning periodically to see if you have changed and willing to treat them better, but still smart enough to care for their own safety the most if you have mistreated them before.

●They will seem to have a surprising amount of luck and ability to help with things, can pull off stunts you wouldn't expect from an animal, and can have a helpful touch of mischief, like stealing an item you really need but couldn't get otherwise, or being able to get you out of jail in a comedic manner like sneaking a nail-file into your jail-cell that somehow is able to rapidly file down any bars in your window or break the lock in your door. Note that such tools only last as long as they are needed for a task, and lose their power if handed over to someone else, or dropped.

●They can't usually solve big issues on their own, but can provide a bit of unusual, unexpected help, and the occasional bit of backup or a surprise distraction that can be helpful.

●They are essentially immortal, and if something does manage to kill them, you can summon them again good as new the next day, though if you are responsible for their death they may very well be very wary of you for a while. On another hand, if they truly feel they are loved and appreciated, then chances are they'll happily take a bullet for you if necessary, though expecting to get rewarded and appreciated for the pain they went through for you on return.

Essence of the Brotherhood of NOD

●You become a commander of the NOD of the Tiberium universe.

●You gain the ability to summon a single Mobile Construction Vehicle which can unfold into a construction yard, which in turn allows you to construct all the other structures that can be produced by NOD. You have access to the full array and archive of NOD technology from Tiberium Dawn onwards. If your last MCV and Construction Yard have been destroyed, you are able to summon a new one after a week.

●Gain a seemingly limitless and stable supply of manpower to make use of the equipment you are able to produce. Where it comes from is up to you, maybe the locals follow you, or maybe you got your hands on cloning technology, or are mixing clones and cybernetic augmentation. Your troops will be devoted and loyal, somewhat disciplined and decently trained at even lower ranks, with higher ranked individuals being well trained, highly disciplined, and fanatically loyal to you.

●Gain your own copy of either Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform, also known as CABAL, or its successor LEGION. They will act as an assistant coordinating communications and data between your forces and yourself. Unlike the original(s), your copy of either CABAL or LEGION will be unquestioningly loyal and follow your orders without any deviation you wouldn't approve of.

●You gain ability to seed Tiberium wherever you are, and the ability to set clear limits to its growth, such as designating an area it can spread to and no further, or let it spread wild and grow free if you so desire, though the latter will come with its own share of consequences.

●You gain access to the NOD superweapon, a Tiberium-enriched Nuclear ICBM, assembled inside a concealed Temple of Nod, which stays under powerful stealth generator's field at all times, as well as spoofing any attempts to track the origin of the missile launch. If the temple is located and destroyed, it will be rebuilt and restored in silence either at the same location or another location of your choosing after a week.

●You gain an ability to escape even certain death that will certainly grow to irritate any enemies you might come to face, because even if they manage to corner you and kill you in one body, another one will emerge in time, and rumours of your demise will be proven greatly exaggerated. Whether this is through cloning and mind-transfer, or some other means at your disposal, it will take rooting out every last bit of your Brotherhood for your enemies to even have a chance of preventing your (eventual) return.

●Optionally, you may be dropped into the Command and Conquer Tiberium universe and either replace Kain, or become one of his Rivals, with your own fanatic following.

Essence of the Cheating Stock Trader

●This essence tastes of caviar, champagne, and gold coins. (Based loosely on GTA V Stock Exchange)

●You gain a smart phone that comes with a strange app that allows you to move money from your normal bank account to an investment account, and invest it to stocks or convert stocks back into cash without having to pay any fees at all for these trades. If you ever lose your phone, you can reapply this app to another smart phone with a touch.

○Optionally, you can also apply this app to any other device that could run such a program with but a touch. Putting it onto a desktop/laptop/tablet computer will grant it a similar program, but slightly altered to better suit the available screen space and capabilities. The ability to move funds without fees and invest remains the same.

●This application or program comes with a positively cheating ability to predict future events (as they relate to the stock market) with complete accuracy barring your own active efforts to change the future, and can give you perfectly accurate information on the way stocks will gain or lose value in the next 3 day period, as well as being able to narrow it down to exact moment when to buy cheapest, and sell at highest level.

○Once a week the app can be used to predict the rough path that 5 selected stocks will behave during the next month or so. These predictions will be still as accurate as before, but remain somewhat vague, going up by roughly 2 % or down by 0.9 % instead of giving you exact values. Likewise, exact timing is muddled in this extended mode.

○Optionally, you can also set this program to conduct these trades automatically at those pre-determined times to avoid a chance of missing out on these opportunities. This may eventually draw attention to it, depending on continued progress. Using long-term predictions rather than the 3 day period predictions may result in sub-optimal results, and the program will not automatically get the 3 day period predictions to adjust the set timing and pricing to act upon.

●Moving the money from the investment account back to your actual account will require you to report and pay any taxes such capital gains could be subject to in your country of residence, and can be automatically deducted and placed into a separate account to be paid forward.

○Optionally, this can be jail-broken to try and bypass the tax-man and apply for any exemptions, tax deductions, and similar means of keeping all of your cash instead, but it runs a non-zero risk of being subjected to an audit, and being forced to pay back any owed money with interest, as well as facing fines and other such issues.

●Tipping off a few friends or allies about investment opportunities doesn't alter future enough to really matter, but posting information about a stock market shift on-line for public viewing by anyone can throw the market into chaos, especially if people have reason to believe you are right, which can alter results. This can be positive, negative, or something entirely unexpected.

○This will almost certainly draw additional attention and may result in trouble with either law, or unsavory individuals.

●The transfers between your own personal bank account and an investment account attached to this application or program cannot be traced directly, but someone suspecting you and finding you receiving a large sum of money following investments being sold by the app just prior to this influx of cash may draw investigators already suspicious of you to starting preparations to detain you, audit you, and interrogate you about your abilities.

●You can erase this application or program from any physical device with a simple mental command, your money on the investment account and any stocks it holds will remain safe there until you apply this app or program to a new device with a touch later, ready to resume operation.

●This essence has no function in a world where Stock Exchange or some equivalent trading platform does not exist in electronic form.

Essence of the Fallout Shelter

●This black essence is fizzy and tastes of soda and a hint of radiation.

●You gain control over an underground bunker meant for long-term habitation in the event of a nuclear disaster, built to be able to remain self-sufficient for a long period of time and to provide a sturdy, reliable shelter for the inhabitants.

●By default this comes with Fallout-verse and in particular the Vault-Tech aesthetics, but this can be changed instantly on first arrival to the shelter, or later on by an overnight shift as long as the vault is emptied for the duration of these changes.

●The fallout shelter is capable of providing sustenance with hydroponic garden holding several grow-beds to allow agricultural production to take place, as well as aquaculture tanks for growing fish, and even lab-grown synthetic meat to serve as food-stuff. The fallout shelter also has large water-reservoirs and purification systems to allow it to purify and recycle water in large amounts, for drinking, farming, and hygiene reasons alike.

●The fallout shelter comes with an advanced fusion reactor at a lower level, with seemingly self-replenishing stock of reactive material and automated means of recycling and disposing of hazardous materials that no longer serve any purpose, without risking any lives handling them in person.

●The shelter will initially have roughly enough room for roughly 100 inhabitants, but its residential levels can be expanded to host up to 1,000 inhabitants safely, the vault having the life-support systems to provide clean air, food, and water for up to 1,200 inhabitants if pushed, but with a strongly recommended cap of 1,000 inhabitants at most to avoid straining the systems, and potentially causing some break-down to occur further down the line.

●The fallout shelter comes with advanced sensors linking it to the ground-level, and around its gate, allowing for monitoring of the surroundings in a discrete manner, as well as being on guard against potential interference with the shelter's functions.

●The shelter does not require maintenance or cleaning efforts if not occupied, the structure seemingly able to solve those needs perfectly fine when empty, but once occupied, these tasks will be left up to the residents, though they will find maintenance and clean-up notably easier than it should be. Replacement parts will always be present when needed, but not in large enough quantities to sell, simply to replace things as needed.

●Optionally, the Fallout Shelter will come with a skeleton crew of 20 inhabitants that meet the Fallout Shelter's overseer's requirements for entry. They will be completely loyal and hard-working, but intentional poor treatment can erode this over time.

○Additional survivors may be requested to arrive, at the rough rate of 10 new inhabitants daily, reaching the gates and requesting entry, which can be granted or denied on individual basis.

■If this fallout shelter has been placed down to manifest in another world, it can either summon these acceptable inhabitants seemingly out of thin air close to the entrance to the shelter and finding their way to its gate to plead their case, or it may send a siren-song attracting Doomsday Preppers and other similar folks wanting to seek safety inside an isolated, self-sufficient community of like-minded folks.

○If left empty other than the vault's overseer, the vault will gain access to a small handful of robotic servitors that will keep the facilities in working order, producing food stocks and placing them in cold storage where they will stay fresh remarkably longer than they should be capable of doing, as well as keeping everything ready for arrivals later on. Once there is at least the minimum crew of 20 inhabitants, in addition to the overseer, these robotic servitors will retreat to a lower level and return to their pods until needed again.

●This fallout shelter can either be kept in a small pocket-dimension with a blasted up irradiated wasteland occupied by a variety of unsavory sorts of creatures and people up top along with some struggling survivors looking for a safe haven to live in, or it can be placed down to manifest in the world the Essence consumer is living in at a designated spot, the entrance forming up first followed by the rest of the structure itself.

○This may take place inside a cavern of some sort for a top-level access directly to the facility, or a partially concealed elevator lowering down to an entrance facility and the gateway to the shelter's interior, where upon any visitors can plead and make their case or attempt to threaten and demand entry, still locked out of the shelter's interior only gaining access to this entrance area.

●The shelter includes a number of work-stations, such as controlling miner-drones burrowing deep underground from parts of the shelter to look for raw ore and similar resources, returning to their stations depositing gained materials for sorting and transportation, and possible disposal.

○Other places such as internal manufacturing space and laboratory space can be crewed and used to produce a variety of goods based on blueprints available, as well as working on creating additional blueprints with some concentrated effort.

○Medical facilities will also be available, and have their own production capabilities, such as creating safe alternatives for any regular medicine available in apothecaries and drug stores, as well as more advanced variations with better performance and less side effects if someone is willing and able to spend time working on the subject with the aid of synthetic intelligence devoted to the process, but taking its cues from residents assigned to said work-station.

●You retain full control over the fallout shelter's systems that cannot be revoked by any means, and any attempts to subvert this control will be met with failure and increasingly hostile countermeasures, culminating with activating a concealed thermo-nuclear exothermic reaction device should you have been thrown out and forcibly escorted off the premises while another faction seeks to claim the place for its own.

○You can deploy a fresh fallout shelter at another location one week after the destruction of the old one in such a case. Additionally, if you simply wish to move locations, or return the vault to the pocket dimension, you may initiate the procedure while within the vault, at which point the residents will need to decide if they wish to stay with the shelter, or evacuate prior to its transfer. Once initiated, the transfer will take place within 6 hours, or once everyone who does want to leave has left the place, whichever comes first. With full support from everyone in the shelter, the process can be initiated in as little as 5 minutes.

●You will find the Overseer's quarters to have a fridge stocked with a number of cold Sodas of a particular post-nuclear wasteland setting's most well known drinks, with a hint of radiation in each sip, but will also find your body highly resistant to said radiation, and capable of passively purging it out of your system. This resilience and resistance applies to any other residents that remain in the fallout shelter for at least one month, and persists for up to 6 years after they have left the shelter if they choose to do so.

●Optionally, for those who want to conduct some experiments in either ethical or unethical manner, the Fallout Shelter can be customized when first entered or deployed, or once fully emptied to allow an overseer to initiate the process unseen by anyone else, to arrange for any additional facilities or machinery necessary to carry out this process.

○This can also directly influence the shelter's starting skeleton crew, or additional arrivals later on, if one wanted to set up an experiment following the canon examples such as 999 women and 1 man, or 999 men and 1 woman, 999 people and 1 wild tiger, or 1 lone man and a box of puppets, for instance. Creating a double-Shelter with an unseen secondary shelter carrying out experiments on another Shelter is possible, but limits the starting size to 50 residents on both sides, and maximum of 500 residents at each side.

■These experiments can result in all manner of horrible incidents, depending on how they play out, so if a fallout shelter is render inoperable and unusable beyond any hope of recovery, the overseer can declare it decommissioned and start fresh with a new Fallout shelter later.

■Optionally, there may be some karmic component attached, resulting in nasty downfall to those conducting their experiments, possibly ironic deaths related to their own fields.

●Optionally, you can gain access to a full database of Vault-Tech's pre-war tech and access to any materials, blueprints, and sample devices that could have theoretically been added to the vault prior to the start of the war. No one of a kind examples will be possible to have as examples, but having full blue-prints just waiting for a thorough analysis by the laboratory before they can be cleared for manufacturing facility might theoretically be available. Other such blueprints might be present in encrypted holo-tapes that might require more extensive time in the laboratory being decrypted for use by the synthetic intelligence.

○This may include weapons, consumables, armor, and various other tech. Note that default recipe of various Fallout pharmaceuticals will carry high risk of addiction, so any ethical person might consider running them through several research-cycles to attempt to alleviate or completely eradicate this problem. Immoral and profit-chasing individuals might desire to enhance addictive qualities or further strengthen such formulas, even if it resulted in some side-effects or a nastier crash following the use of said pharmaceuticals.

○If you choose to change the aesthetics of the Fallout shelter, this database's contents will alter in aesthetics as well, and potentially open some new avenues of research, but the general tech-level will not increase without further research-efforts.

■Making the Fallout Shelter appear like an XCOM 'Ant Box' will grant a more modern, near-future look to things, but it will not grant more powerful lasers or plasma weapons, despite similarities, rather the research cycles to improve the starting materials further would still be necessary to get access to better tech, and might require chasing after some samples or additional information to making more progress in a shorter time period, and to overcome bottlenecks in said research.