Meta Essence CYOA 32

Essence of Competence

By drinking this abstract bottle, you have gained inspiration, enlightenment and power in one.

 You gain a pool of ever-flowing inspiration, which increases with time but also your accomplishments, flowing faster and faster while also growing more and more potent in its nature. This pool initially may be distributed amongst ten subjects and modifiers per day, but within a year of doing even absolutely nothing, will double in flow and potency. These will all mix together in accordance with your desires. These may draw from reality, fiction or may be entirely original, but require some level of quantification and qualification, even if you may draw from counterfactual or incomprehensible sources.

 Subjects are 'bodies of knowledge, skill, training, and/or experience', which may include but is not strictly limited to: the arts, humanities and sciences, direct technological designs and spells, careers such as 'lawyer' or 'secret agent', counters for opponents, or literally just asking for direct personal information on a person. These subjects will update in real-time in regards to your level of investment as well as the broadness of the subject.

 Modifiers affect everything you are capable of doing, which may include but is not strictly limited to: direct effects such as 'speed', 'efficiency' and 'adaptability', methodologies such as 'modular design' or 'security engineering', aesthetics which may affect its design and offer more knowledge in certain subjects such as 'solarpunk' offering much in the way of sustainability for technology while also presenting as more 'green', or anomalous properties such as 'anti-gravitation' or 'negentropy'.

 Anomalous effects may be garnered from the reaching your limits in a subject/modifier and bypassing it or be specifically requested. These anomalous effects may be simply direct improvements to an aspect or overall usage, entire new paradigms, and more. A section of reality or the entirety of it may reap the benefit from this, if you wish, allowing others to capitalize on it. These anomalous effects will never endanger your reality, beyond what you consciously desire it to.

 You are in complete control of the blackboxing of your knowledge and effects, ranging from total non-understanding to instant enlightenment. But not only that, you are capable of spreading your knowledge and ability to develop to others, whether only for specific items and/or fields to all of your knowledge and ability. Anything they build upon may be copied for your own usage. This may be retracted at any time and any additional knowledge built on it, may be stolen for your own usage.

 You are immune to any cognitohazards, memetics or any hazardous effects that may be present in anything you may enlighten yourself about, as well as unable to infect others with it unless you wish to do so.

 You may control the level of effects within your usage as well as how your subjects and modifiers affect it. You may for instance wish to enjoy the act of creation, and slow down your speed from 'one-man manufacturing machine' to 'normal human'.

 Your baseline is a peak human physique and mentality, with every aspect of you optimized, unless it would be against your wishes. Your form is idealized to your desire and you may control your aging, whether to age cosmetically, slowly, in reverse or not at all. You will eventually recover from anything that does not immediately kill you and are immune to diseases and toxins.

 You are a single repetition learner and may extrapolate entire fields with simply basic knowledge, albeit more will aid you in this endeavour as well as going further beyond. You also gain a perfect memory with infinite storage, instant recall, perfect indexing, tamper-proofing, and protection from harmful memories. You may improve on your own in any subject or modifier, albeit it will require practice.

Essence of Divine Augmentation

 By drinking this bottle of divine light, you have been augmented to your fullest divine potential.

 Your body is reforged into a divinely-inspired work of art, developed by a team of angels and divine servitors that worked to create something in line with your tastes, desires and idealized vision, as well as one that represents the holy eminence that you are, even through the metatextual meaning that drips into the minds of those who look at you. This is known as your Forma, one of the most obvious tools of your divine might, which radiates a sense of awe and a need to worship or believe, whether at your altar or what you preach.

 You are more than just a priest, but a divine warrior that has access to Fortitudo, an empowering force that allow you to smite those who would oppose your crusade. This grants you varying levels of strength, but it grows stronger as you act virtuously, justly and honestly while acting against those who sin, commit injustice and engage in deception. Against the average human, who has done good and bad things, you would still find enough strength to literally tear them limb from limb with speed to do so in a blink of an eye, and it only scales up from there. Against a serial killer, you would be capable of simply touching them and burning them from the inside out with divine light. This must be true sin not that of arbitrary dietary restriction or prejudice, because while you may easily punish those who rape, you will not find additional strength in fighting those who have sex with many consensually (unless they break their hearts) or love those of the same gender.

 You are a living lie detector capable of detecting corruption and deception wherever it lies, and know the truth instantly, but more than that, your Veritas allows you to force those who would omit or deceive to act with honor and speak honestly. Even if you were watching from a television, as long as if it was a live broadcast, you could force those speaking to tell the most relevant and important truth in that situation (unable to simply not speak or ramble about something irrelevant but true). More than that, your presence acts as a general ward against dishonorable actions, with any organization that you are a part of reducing its corruption to absolutely zero, with only the most outward of fringes being able to have any sort of corruption. Moreover, those who would oppose you must act with honor and honesty, with betrayal and subterfuge unable to hold against your gaze.

 You act in the name of that which is good and orderly, giving you the benefits of Justitia, allowing you to detect sin and injustice wherever it is done, as well as know the instant moral calculus of any action and system. This is more than just the base crimes of theft and murder, but that of corrupt politicians, ruthless business and tyranny. From the moment you know just a name or even a rumor of a society, you will be able to tell what its biggest problems are as well as how to solve them. If you actually interact with it in any meaningful way, you know its biggest offenders and how they may be brought down, as well as the structures that they weave around themselves like armor. But you aren't just limited to knowing it, as every action you take snowballs into something bigger and better, while even the general direction of society takes a just shape.

 You hold a deep compassion for everything, but this compassion does the opposite of blinds you, and instead enlightens you to a greater purpose of Humanitas. You are intimately attuned to the gestalt consciousness of humanity, capable of seeing how people will act, but moreover knowing intimately its pains and joys wherever they may be. You will know how to alleviate those pains with your divine healing and forgiveness, capable of bringing back those who wish to come back to the flock with kindness in your heart. This will set them on a path of righteousness, changing their ways from evil and chaos to that of good and order.

 Finally, you are the favored of any divine entity, even those who would normally never take champions, with your gift of Precatio granting you their love, adoration and care. They will certainly bless you and gift you divine artifacts, which will be able to take on a far greater height than any before them, even if they are only from a small god. They will also not hold to the typical prejudices they may have, for even an elven or dwarven god can love a human champion like you. If you act in their name and truly do them justice, you will find that their faith in you shall skyrocket, granting you powers that they could never have normally granted you whether due to restrictions, limits or rules.

Essence of the God-Machine

 By drinking this strange concoction of oil, gears and metaphysical engineering, you become the God Machine, an overarching occult architecture for any reality you inhabit.

 This does not mean you are necessarily omnipotent and you do require proper Infrastructure and Angels in order to serve your purposes. However, you have access to a baseline of all Embeds and Exploits from the Demon: The Descent line along with the Angelic versions of these powers, but these tools may be expanded with your own developments. You by fiat have unlimited Aetheric energy, allowing you to power all of this, and more.

 Your true form has been remade into an idealized state that is fundamentally post-human and perfected. You are capable of retooling and shapeshifting this into anything necessary for your purposes within an instant, but are initially limited to what is available from the Demon: The Descent line. If your form is destroyed, rendered inoperable or simply damaged, you may reform and regenerate it, with the time involved relating to the level of damage, the Infrastructure available, and your overall metaphysical power. You may form additional bodies that you directly control as well, with the same limiting factors. This isn't your human form though it may naturally look human and you won't beep on metal detectors, but it will thus read as inhuman in some way.

 This is solved by your ability to form Covers, lives and backstories that ingrain themselves into reality itself, that can stand any test that tries to disprove your humanity besides actions that go against what people would normally think your Cover would do. You gain an initial Cover of your choice, whether it be your original life or an idealized one in reality, replacing a character or making your own original character in a reality based on fiction, or something else. You may form multiple Covers which act in accordance with your will and in perfect synchronicity with the identity, even if you ignore it, thus your Cover will show up for their job and work without you having to go through the trouble of actually doing so.

 Your mental faculties are optimized along the lines of a computer, with your perfect memory, natural ability to communicate and understand in all languages, immense multitasking capabilities, and near-instantaneous calculative ability being exemplary. Your mind gains perfect control over your body, capable of displaying any necessary body language, brain activity, thought patterns and more. It is impossible for someone to know if you are being deceptive unless they have evidence to the contrary and they will be very much inclined to thinking that you believe in what you are saying or doing.

 You may form Angels to carry out your will which are unable to fall or go against your will, unless you allow it. These Angels are subordinate intelligences which you may analyze and know the content of every thought and possibly feeling, but they may be optionally non-sentient yet capable of acting with intelligence. Your Angel construction capacity is in line with how powerful the Angel you are creating is and the Infrastructure you have available as well as your metaphysical power.

 You may establish reality-warping Pacts, whereby establishing a contract with another, you and the other party may receive benefits as well as terms. This scales with your metaphysical power, but initially you may grant someone riches beyond compare or immense beauty in exchange for a favor (which may be kept deliberately vague in order to gain far more). If the contract is broken by either side, then you or the other party will suffer a comparable punishment for doing so, depending on how serious it is and how much reality-warping was done. This usually will inflict itself as damage to Infrastructure or their body, which bypasses immunities and resistances

Essence of the Investigator

By drinking this Essence, you have been infused with the knowledge, skills and experience of a great detective, private investigator, mystery solver, meddling kid, and more.

 You gain a highly varied set of skills and knowledge base which dips into everything that one might need to know in order to properly investigate anything. This works best for the most relevant fields, such as being the best in the world at criminology, forensics, law, psychology and more, but it does extend somewhat outside of it, such as being highly trained in using weapons in order to take down suspects or being knowledgeable enough in engineering principles to point out distinct points of failure that might have occurred in order to explain an unfortunate accident. These update in response to any changes to the physics package that you might be operating under, such as going to another world with magic, and becoming knowledgeable in what curses one might use in order to kill someone as well as how they would cover them up.

 You gain a high-level boost to your general intelligence, but you gain a highly specialized mind that is most adept at figuring out mysteries. This is a level of intelligence generally reserved for the highest level of fictional detectives and investigators, but more than that, you also gain a high level sensory boost that could substitute for a forensic laboratory. This intelligence may extend outside of investigative work such as your perfected memory, but it seemingly works best when trying to figure out something, whether it be a puzzle, murder or insurance fraud.

 You have a highly functional mind palace that allows for the simulation of any number of scenarios, albeit limited by your knowledge and skill. When using this mind palace, you may have time outside of it be paused or dilated (whether faster or slower), so that you may do this in peace. This allows for you to come up with insights into your investigation, but it cannot train your skills or knowledge without an outside presence within it. You may actually do so, connecting your mind with anyone in close range and is willing to do so, but they may similarly leave at any time they wish to do so, regardless of how you might game this.

 You gain access to an organization which is willing to fund and aid your investigative adventures, regardless of their purpose, morality or ethics. They provide judicial and legal assistance, backup for when you need to go guns blazing, additional investigators (which are great, but not on par with you), warrants for anything you might need, safehouses, bodyguards and secure transportation when you get in trouble, and more. They adapt to wherever you go, acting as an extradimensional agency backed by fiat with influence and contacts in every group or place.

Essence of the Wondertainment

You are now the founder and owner of the Wondertainment™ brand in your reality, destined to bring terrific wonder and joy to all, both children and adults alike.

 You gain great skill, knowledge and experience in every field known and occasionally unknown to mankind, allowing you to truly represent the Wondertainment™ brand. Ranging from classical toymaking (possibly diving into necromancy in order to infuse souls into your toys) and confectioneering (which would benefit from your insight into genetically engineering plants to produce literal candy) to advanced physics knowledge on the applicability of wormholes as well as summoning and making deals with eldritch beings to bring the joy of Wondertainment™ products to the outer reaches of reality.

 These work even on boring mundane applications, but those will only work up to the normal constraints of your reality's physics package. But using your abilities to create wonder and joy will see your abilities dip into the supernatural, extending both vertically and horizontally in terms of potential. Of course, you could simply use your abilities to create a wondrous product and use it for a mundane purpose, but that is liable to destabilize such usage.

 You gain a highly adaptable organization dedicated to bringing wonder to your reality, at first limited to your local businesses, but this will extend with time and bringing enough wonder. They may take any form, though they do operate well under a corporate or cooperative framework, but may just as easily form themselves into a public service, non-profit organization, guild of wonder-bringers, or something else. Those employed by this organization come from a variety of backgrounds, with many coming into existence simply by drinking this essence, but they will all be completely loyal to the company unless said company stops bringing wonder to reality, mistreats them too much, or engages in highly unethical acts that aren't for the purpose of bringing wonder (sponsoring a death game involving children would require some heavy product placement). They will likely publicly protest such decisions, sabotage actions that would run counter to the goal of bringing wonder, and if push comes to shove, they may likely strike out on their own and bring wonder on their own terms.

 You gain your very own Wonder World!™ which is self-contained within its own pocket dimension, starting at the size of Earth with a similar amount of usable land-mass. This Wonder World!™ may soon become a Wonder System!™, Wonder Galaxy!™, Wonder Universe!™, and even Wonder Multiverse!, as long as it brings wonder. This Wonder World!™ has a variety of unique and wondrous resources that are exclusive to it, ranging from its wonderful inhabitants of gnomes, elves and more that are so amenable to (slave) labor, varieties of wondrous fauna and flora such as noble dragons and flowers that sing lullabies, magical minerals like diamonds that provide the equivalent of clean, cold fusion in a beautiful and shining package or coal that keeps places at the perfect temperature to ensure warm homes that never burn while trains can run forever on an initial amount, and much more.

Essence of the Media Creation System

 By choosing to drink from this bottle of alphabets, images and sounds, you have gained access to the media creation system.

 A highly capable yet non-sophont servitor is bound to your soul, acting as a 'system' which allows you to create any form of media you wish. To clarify, this isn't skill-based, allowing you to create works of art far beyond your ability. At first, generating this wholesale will lead to mediocre and sometimes strange or illogical works, so you will have to make individual decisions for each aspect of what you wish to create, such as the contents of each panel in a comic, the style and theme of the novel as well as what is happening, or directing the actors within your film as well as the camera angle. But as your works are more widely known and the emotional and intellectual resonance of them grows, you will be capable of assigning mental directors which take care of aspects for you with the requisite skill and style.

 You gain access to the media palace, a mental thoughtscape which is a repository for the entirety of the omniverse's media, but you only unlock publicly available media at first, but this may even include episodes that weren't aired or deleted scenes which stayed deleted. As you consume this media as well as share it with others, your thoughts and desires as well as those you share it with, will direct the unlocking of primarily public media from alternate worlds, such as additional episodes of cancelled shows, modern remakes or even modern creation of old movies, comics which showcase alternate takes or creators, originally SFW content into NSFW content, and even media from alternate universes where history is wildly different.

 The difference between the media palace and the creation system is that the latter is specifically for you while the former is from actual realities with varying quality as well as various forces being imposed on it (such as production difficulties). They are still adapted to your tastes and those you share it with, but they may be targeting general demographics or trying to achieve certain influences. As your resonance grows, they will slowly adapt to what you need, changing to your desires. You may also simply use them as bases for your works, directly ripping them off. The media creation system is excellent at the metaphorical ripping the serial numbers off of works as well as converting between mediums (albeit there may be some difficulties that you may have to intervene in, if your resonance can't handle it), and this also comes with a translation function, with perfect dubbing/subbing according to your tastes, as well being fully accurate or adapting it to specific cultural contexts.

 This mental thoughtscape does include snacks (which may sustain you, but are coincidentally a perfect diet), comfortable furniture and any viewing apparatus required. You may choose whether you wish to enter the media palace mentally or physically disappearing from reality. You may also decide the level of time-dilation, which grows as you get more invested in the media. You may take others into this media palace, but you may not use it to harm them physically or mentally. This protection from physical and mental damage is extended to you as well, with the latter working in the real world.

 As a convenient side-effect, this includes a fully retroactive perfect memory with infinite storage, perfect indexing, instant recall, tamper-proofing, protection from harmful memories, and the ability to move memories into hidden storage, replacing them with a mental note that you have done so and with the ability to restore them at will. This conveniently lets you view media with fresh eyes, including your own.

 You may project and distribute media (whether it be your own or from the media palace) within any place that you are aware of, even if you are not there. The more general this knowledge is, the more general this projection occurs. A baseline of 'being able to point to it on a map' allowing you to take advantage of the normal means of distribution such as your comics coincidentally appearing in comics stores or your films suddenly appearing in theatres, which may hamper you if there is a lack of means for distribution. A baseline of 'having visited it and it is mostly the same' allows you to project the apparatus for distribution, such as creating a small theatre wholesale which may put on a play with realistic simulacrums for actors or hardlight screens which showcase your films, which will disappear once you dismiss it. This scales with your level of resonance and as you gain popularity, your distribution will reach farther, possibly even placing itself in private domiciles or in warzones.

 This may bypass certain technological restrictions that may impact on the quality or the enjoyment of your works. Your comics may be glossy and well-made in a time before printing is around. You are capable of forcing black and white televisions and projectors to show color for your works. Your games may run perfectly on a difference engine when normally they would need a modern or even futuristic supercomputer.

 You may also update and retcon this media, if you wish, as well as have it disappear from the world entirely. You may even remove the memories of those who have experienced it, but the effects may linger on and subconsciously lead them to similar works. If you have enough resonance, you may do this to other works, being able to take them wholesale for you own.

 As your works gain resonance, you may use this resonance to enact effects that may affect your work or the world at large, which may become anomalous and supernatural. This is influenced by the type of resonance, such as gaining a notorious reputation for subversive works may let you infuse them with a memetic quality that does cause such subversion. Another example is being able to create a theme park over time, based on the enjoyment and popularity of your works, possibly allowing it to organically change as your works wax and wane in the public mind. You may even cause trends in media with your work, even beyond what they would normally do, reforming the mainstream to something comparable to your stream of work.

Essence of the Iterative Dungeon

By drinking this essence of swirling pixels, you gain access to the ability to create dungeons and ethical quandaries that spiral out into infinity.

You may with a simple act of will unleash the dungeon-making process which you have little control over beyond choosing to turn it on and off, though naturally you have no limit to how many dungeons you have access to. These will have a degree of randomness but will always be something you or somebody else might find interesting as well as making sense with your reality's socio-cultural context at least somewhat (even if only to provide an alien perspective to it), though it will naturally iterate on it ad infinitum as the name of this essence suggests, while keeping to the themes. While the name dungeon brings to mind dangerous, closed, tight spaces, your power is also capable of creating entire open worlds. These dungeons have an infinite number of levels that scale in power and difficulty accordingly, even if the purpose is for non-combat. They are not just vertically infinite, but also horizontally and diagonally infinite, thus you may forever explore the tutorial level and find new things or find different ways to the top.

You may enter these dungeons with a similar act of will, capable of bringing any number of people with you regardless of willingness or proximity, including entire multiverses and more. Though of course, you may wish to create more traditional entrances and thus you also have the ability to seed them throughout places, though you do not have any control beyond the general area of where you want them to be initially placed. These seeds will naturally grow and will likely begin to spread, though naturally if you have already spread them widely, this may be slower.

Everything in these worlds is real and truly alive, constantly evolving and iterating on itself, even the very laws of reality that govern it. Thus, nothing is ever truly set in stone, as everything influences everything else, the dungeons taking into mind every meaningful action you take or interesting stray thoughts. These changes are not instant, consistent or too exploitable, but rather the grooves that you and others carve into the very fundamental reality of these dungeons. Dungeons may take inspiration from each other naturally, though they will iterate on this inspiration as a good author and artist does. Dungeons may split off and may in fact produce many identical copies, though these copies will all develop differently but may develop further copies of their own. The dungeon's inhabitants generally don't question its reality unless you get meta or the dungeon is thematically meta, and even then it will still evolve organically.

These dungeons will always have interesting things to do and are naturally inclined to being as enticing as possible to potential delvers while providing meaningful challenges, thus they cannot be entirely traps but nor can they be entire pushovers. They will also not self-destruct without your intervention or having the chance to stop it, as fortune entices delvers into its quests with honey and vinegar. These dungeons may be peaceful or dangerous, but they will have their own challenges to face, though naturally the prizes they offer in return may work better in the situations that the dungeon contains. You are unlikely to find things that are at odds with the dungeon's themes, unless you truly stretch the infinite iteration to its very limits, but naturally you may find some oddballs or even joke content. You may also have a mixture of danger such as combat as well as peaceful challenges like puzzles.

Dungeons always have a form of progression that they offer visitors, though obviously this may not give you omnipotence at level 1. These range from a generic gamer system, a setting-specific form of magic that may or may not have its serial numbers shaved off and certain things tweaked, or it might be some other esoteric form of progression using beanie babies. This progression is based off the themes of the dungeon but it will at the very least not be inapplicable or useless outside of it, though naturally within the dungeon it will see the greatest use and growth.