"Aww, that's really sweet of you! ...does this mean you've been going around offering to turn people into girls, but you can only turn them into a specific list of girls?"

"At first, yeah! I'm still disappointed I can't offer my help to trans boys, or enbies, but the risk of taking the time with my biomancy isn't safe. I did figure out how to tweak subtler details within the broad 'type' of a given set-point after the first three or four, though, things like little face shape details, or variation in hair or eye color, minor adjustments to the overall build, so that helped. Managed to avoid a huge wave of carbon copies of the same five girls running around everywhere."

"None of these girls have died yet, but I've got a village way out on an outlying island they'll land in when they do."

"Of course, I couldn't do all this and learn all this without taking some time to question gender for myself, could I? So I spent some time thinking. I tried carefully shifting to a masculine body. Hated it. So I was pretty solidly on the femme side of things. But I kept thinking. And I realized I vibed a bit better with 'girlthing' than simply 'girl', and after a lot of thought started mixing it/its in with she/her for my pronouns."

"And that felt pretty great! So here I am, inky demonic girlthing, trying to meddle, saving occasional trans girls from lifetimes of dysphoria, using wish contracts to stretch my powers, and trying to figure out a way to safely reveal myself a tiny bit more and not break anything."

"'Girlthing' is an extremely adorable word," she says, writing it down and then drawing a little heart next to it.

It giggles happily. "Glad you like it. I don't mind 'girl' or 'woman' or other femme nouns or titles, just feel 'girlthing' is more accurate if we're trying to get specific.

"So, any questions?"

"Hmm... how closely can you track the effects of your interventions? I guess I'm not used to operating with the power of minor prophecy - in your position I'd want to know everything about how my dream visions turned out, so I could carefully experiment to nudge things in better directions, maybe try things more subtle than just averting major catastrophes, and notice if any of those aversions of major catastrophes had side effects I wasn't expecting. On the other hand I'd also be wary of overspecializing in mind control just because it happens to be the biggest available hammer. If you do want to build toward going public eventually - and if you're constructing an afterlife, going public eventually is kind of inevitable - there's something to be said for structuring your major interventions to be things people will be glad to hear about. Sending people dream visions warning them away from doing bad things is definitely better than some possible interventions on that front, but, I don't know, I feel like it'd be pretty easy for someone who didn't start out trusting you to get the wrong idea, you know?"

"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I don't have a lot of angles for surveillance of outcomes and problems other than data taps I've put into the computer networks of major corporations and governments, parsing the news, mind reading, or observation through discreet portals. The minor prophecy is unfortunately pretty vague a lot of the time. It doesn't really give me a detailed look I can use to track which plan gives me a better outcome on which variables. And portal observation and mind reading mostly don't scale very well."

"I notice that I am once again tempted to solve a problem by duplicating myself. I bet five of me working together could do so much data analysis."

Sable giggles. "Cute. You probably could. Direct analysis isn't so much the bottleneck, though, unless we scale you up to a few million. We can do some pretty impressive pattern recognition with enchantment, and parsing and processing of those recognized patterns is easy with computers, but really the hard part is figuring out additional viable data sources, or additional patterns to watch for. I've got checks for things like bribery, hired espionage, assassination, a variety of dangerous policies that could be proposed, lots of measures of public well-being, but more data would absolutely let us navigate better."

"I'll definitely give that some thought!" she says, writing it down.

"Thoughtful, helpful girl," it replies, stepping close and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. 

"So that's a pretty sprawling summary of my capabilities, and now we get to the question of wishes. Wishes give me a bit more finesse and power to accomplish the request, so there's definitely value to be extracted there by picking things that are currently not possible but could be with practice. Not as much value to be had in terms of things I can already do reliably, because you can have any of that just by asking, as long as it doesn't harm a bunch of people or something."

It creates a little illusory chart, broken into five categories, each with a symbol at the top of the column.

"So my powers fit into five loose thematic groups. First, being inky goop." It puts a tipped-over inkbottle at the top of the first column. "This mostly covers some very low-level shapeshifting, and my ink being a healing substance to consume."

The next column gets a stylized inky outline of a shield. "Next we've got magic tattoos. These I've mostly figured out, though many of the capabilities would be nice to share if I could. One grants a shield, one grants healing, one grants recovery of things like stamina, one aids mental clarity, one gives levitation, and there are three really fancy ones I haven't figured out how to share yet that are kind of dangerous. Wings and curses, a magic sword and reflexes, or a bunch of little mind control tricks."

Then they get to a crescent moon icon. "Lunar powers are the easiest to work out how to share. This is where the transformation set-points come from, and I could also grant some things like luck, social grace, transformation magic, illusion magic, or mind magic. Probably going to avoid sharing that last one."

The next icon is a curling tentacle. "On the tentacular horror side of things are a lot of powerful options that are middle of the road in difficulty: harder than lunar stuff and tattoos, easier than everything else. This set is where I get the eldritch madness aura, though there are other things a person could end up with on all elements of it, and it's where my ease of learning things or manipulating biology or altering landscapes fit. This is also the theme that the portals fit under."

Lastly, a silhouette of a girl with horns. "Finally, and harder than everything except the goop nature itself, is the demonic side of things. This includes a lot of resistances, all the sex magic, the wish contracts, conjuration, enchanting, the dream manipulation, and the accelerated time. Technically it's also where my realm fits, but I don't think I'll be able to grant that one."

She nods to Esme. "Your idea of wishing for empowerments in three of the themes is a good one. Probably the best value there is the lunar things, the tentacle things, and the demon things. All three of those have angles on maintaining an appearance of humanity when out in public, through different methods."

"I consider maintaining a human appearance strictly optional, though it does open up some possibilities that would otherwise be closed to me. I'd be happy to wish for lunar, tentacular, and demonic empowerment if you think those are the best areas to focus on developing right now, and the best capabilities to focus on giving me."

"It's mostly that the empowerments are the biggest power stretch, the tattoos are pretty thoroughly handled, and I don't think you'd get a lot of upgrade out of being goop unless the goop life really calls to you. Absolutely open to other ideas, though. I think it might be possible to frame the lunar stuff so you'd keep your current appearance, even."

"The goop life does not especially call to me, no. Keeping my current appearance is also strictly optional, unless you're fond of it, in which case of course it's mandatory." Also it would be really hot if Sable had final say on what all of her forms should look like.

She giggles. "I am mostly fond of it both being quite pretty and containing you, and consider the latter strictly more important than any other fact about it. Especially given that all of the empowerments have some degree of pull toward attractive results, as long as you're even minimally thoughtful about selections."

And then it processes Esme's thought about deciding what her forms look like and blushes.

"Oh. Um. That is a thought."

Blush.

"Ooh," she says, grinning. "A fun thought?"

It grins blushily. "A fun thought that comes with some attendant worry of picking something you might not like, so you'd have to be involved in the process just to soothe my nerves a bit, but yes."

"Well, yes. I won't deny there's some appeal to having things like that imposed on me unilaterally, but obviously you should be able to make an informed decision about what I should look like, and my preferences and comfort are definitely information."

"Oh good. Glad we agree on that. So, given that the biggest value to point your wishes at is power growth, can you see anything better than aiming for the eventual empowerments?"

"Well, hmm. Are there any areas you've noticed your power growing in besides empowering others, that you might want to accelerate?"

She hums. "Speed of biomancy, size of this world, ease of maintaining temporal acceleration for longer. The world should be fine, though, it grows with other methods too, and there isn't really a shortage of space."