Oh, gosh! That's a lot.

In the background, parts of her self-tree split up all the options between them to consider their various implications. The parts of her self-tree that aren't occupied with that, with multiverse speculation, with updating their emergency contingencies, with writing news summaries, or with overseeing and organizing all that work, begin to idly look over their own copies of the list and think about what they would pick.

I'm definitely doing Isekai Roulette, although I'll want more time to think about conditions to ask the spirit about.

She turns on her forb's handwriting correction for the words "Isekai Roulette" and writes it in a style that matches the printed text instead of her normal handwriting.

She flips through the rest of the pages.

The Power of Friendship options -- what, exactly, does it mean to affect people on a metanarrative level? Like, does that guarantee that I will only meet people who would react in that way via constraining my choice of worlds?

(Oh, that handwriting trick is really neat! How did you do that?)

Anyway, it can mean that, or it can mean lots of other possible things. Something being guaranteed on the metanarrative level means that it will definitely happen, and if there are reasonable ways to make it happen by selecting which world you end up in and managing a lot of coincidences, then that works, and if managing coincidences isn't enough but directly changing what's going on around you is, then that can happen, and if all else fails, the thing that's guaranteed will just happen even without any setup. Some people don't like that sort of thing, so their power will try pretty hard to make sure that the world around them only gets changed in ways they're okay with, and if they want to be even more sure than that, I can adjust the powers ahead of time so the guarantee is less strong but the methods are more constrained.

She stares for a moment at "the thing that's guaranteed will just happen even without any setup", trying to figure out what that means.

I don't

She pauses and takes a moment to think, and then scribbles through that.

I did the writing trick using my forb -- it's a device I invented that can track and change the locations of everything within its range. I run a lot of assistive software on it to tweak things about my environment. That one is called 'handwriting correction', and it just looks at the shape your pen is making and makes the ink from the pen end up where it would be if you were printing what you wrote instead of writing it.

She stares out at the stars and pulls up the flash poll that happened while she was explaining that. More than 99% of her self-tree agrees with her that powers messing with what worlds she'll be able to reach is a bad idea. Everyone is more split about whether changing things in the worlds she visits is a problem or not. 'Not' seems to be winning, but the confidence interval is still pretty wide.

I definitely don't want any powers that work by making me end up in a different world, because that constrains the Spirit's ability to pick the best world. And I also definitely don't want any powers that would alter people, unless both that person would think that the alteration was to their advantage if they fully understood the change and had the time, intelligence, and knowledge to think about it.

Changing incidental details of the world around me is probably fine.

I'll take a look through that section and let you know what specific powers I would want to ask for a changed version of.

A prompt intrudes on her vision, and she adds an addendum after a moment of thought.

The powers should also avoid changing people if the change is only to their advantage because it would change how I would react to them or treat them. I don't want to go around accidentally coercing people into making changes by making my help conditional or even biased by people being willing to accept only because of what I'd do.

 

Does that all make sense? I guess I'm not even sure if I want any of those powers yet, but I feel pretty strongly about getting powerful in a way that makes me more able to help people, rather than less.

It sounds like you probably want to make the Powers of Friendship not mind-affecting, then! That's a pretty popular change so I already have a way to do it; if you take the Incomplete drawback, which makes the mind-affecting parts of Powers of Friendship less effective, I can use that to alter your Powers of Friendship to just work a little less well and not affect people's minds, instead of working on some people and not others but affecting the minds of people they do work on.

As for selecting which worlds you encounter, it makes sense that you care a lot about making sure you're not selecting on anything comparatively frivolous! I think that's the sort of preference that ends up strongly reflected in the way your powers function. But if you want, I can try to adjust the powers to make even more sure they'll prefer coincidence management and changing incidental details over nudging where you end up.

I think it's really good of you to care so much about using your power to help others, and I want to help you with that! I think I'm not sure I understand what you mean about making your help biased, though. Do you mean that if you used mind-affecting powers on someone, and they were okay with being affected but only because being affected made you more likely to help them, you'd be upset about that?

She flips to the Drawbacks section and then back to say

Oh, yes, I'd definitely like to take Incomplete for that then!

 

And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I try really hard to help everyone, and if my powers implicitly made my help a bribe instead of something I choose to give freely, I would feel awful.

To be clear, I'm not 100% against mind-affecting powers if they can be made to act ethically. But there is a certain benefit to being able to draw a bright line and say "my powers never alter another person", so I probably want to think about that.

She pauses for a moment, before continuing

Actually, I'm not even sure if I want any of the powers this is relevant to. Let me do a quick first pass through that section to see if this is even relevant.

She quickly skims the Power of Friendship section, and someone drops an overlay into her HUD showing what the rest of her self-tree thinks of each option so far. Most of the options don't particularly appeal to her, but the ones that do are really nice.

She occasionally flips back to note things down.

Best Friend, Bestest Friend, and Time Enough For Love all look possibly interesting.

Planned Parenthood through The Princess and The Dragon are also maybes.

The socialization skills from Friends in ___ Places could be nice, but I wouldn't want those to affect people at all.

 

Of the others, I guess the only person-affecting ones are Planned Parenthood and Two Become One. Is that right? Could I get versions of those that just don't affect other people at all?

 

I think I want to set these aside for a while, though, and come back to them, because I'm getting the impression that I probably want more powers that make me better, instead of powers that put me in a better situation, if that makes sense? And I guess those are probably in the Yourself section.

The Friends In Places powers normally don't affect other people's minds hardly at all, so it's very easy to change them so they really don't ever. Taking the mind-affecting parts out of Planned Parenthood is also really easy. Two Become One is a little trickier and I might want to ask you what you'd want a non-mind-affecting version of Two Become One to look like, but yes, if you want to focus first on powers that are primarily about making you personally stronger, the Yourself section is where to look! ♡

(Having to open things to pages to read them is for people who cannot directly perceive all ink molecules in a book simultaneously. The rest of her self-tree notices the update, although she hasn't yet)

Thank you, you're being very helpful. Let me know if you need a break at any point, okay?

She flips to the Yourself section and starts going through the options there more carefully.

Oh, I already have questions again.

These options that affect beauty -- do they use the Spirit's idea of beauty, my idea, the idea of each person who sees or hears me, or what? And can they change over time? So, like, if my aesthetic sense evolved would I continue to be beautiful by my new standards even if they conflicted with my current standards?

What's In a Name is definitely getting picked, though. Protections against hostile magic are a must.

Don't worry about me needing breaks! I'm a notebook. Sometimes it takes me a little while to think through something (I'm still working on that power for communicating with yourself), but I don't get tired or bored!

The way the appearance powers work is based mostly on your own preferences, somewhat on the Spirit's preferences, and only a little bit on the preferences of people around you. If your aesthetic sense changes, so will your face! If you take A Thousand Ships, that is.

Not all worlds have magic that cares about names, but some of them do, and it's hard to predict whether you're going to find yourself in one, so it makes sense to want to be prepared!

I'm glad you don't get tired or bored -- we're still trying to figure out how to do that safely.

 

Okay, if the powers go off of my aesthetics, that makes things easier.

She continues looking through the options. She gets as far as Size Difference before coming up with more questions.

All of these things are somewhat things I can already do. Like, I can use my forb to put up visual and tactile illusions, or to change my underlying biology, or things like that. The underlying biology modification isn't perfect, but it does pretty well for simple cosmetic changes.

What would be new would be the ... I guess self-awareness and narrative awareness to know what the right hair or the right eyes are, moment to moment. Is there a chance that I could get a power that provides the information content of these (A Thousand Ships through Size Difference, excepting What's In A Name), but leaves actually implementing the change up to me? And would that be cheaper than getting these as is, I guess?

I'm imagining something that would make it so that I could just know what overall shape would be best, and then I could have my forb do that for me if I wanted to.

I'm not sure if it would be cheaper, actually! Sometimes doing more things can be cheaper than doing fewer things, if they're the right things. Do you want that because it might be cheaper, or because you would like it better than something where you changed automatically, or for another reason?

She nibbles the end of her pen a bit as she thinks.

For both of those reasons, really?

Like, I do like having control over what I look like, and something else changing me is not very comfortable, even if it magically picks what would look best. Plus, I might want to deliberately not be beautiful sometimes, like if I'm sneaking into an enemy castle. And also, separately, the limited number of points makes me want to be economical.

I think if you told me that it wasn't possible to get a modified power, I probably wouldn't take any of these except maybe Angelic Tones. If you told me that I could have the modified version for the same price, I might get all of these, although it would depend on how the points added up.

This isn't how

She starts to write something and then starts over.

Sorry, I just remembered you can't see me. I was going to say that how I look now isn't how I always looked. Do you want me to draw a picture of what I look like now for context?

I would like that!

So she sits up and adjusts her forb's selfie view until she gets a good shot, and then flips to a fresh page of the notebook and prints the picture onto it.

The picture shows a pale girl with dark brown hair with forest green underlayers. Her hair is wavy and shoulder-length, framing her face nicely. Her eyes are a brown that complements her hair and turns to green and gold where the sunlight strikes them right. Her skin has no blemishes, but it does have a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her face is almost perfectly symmetrical -- her nose angled just enough to make her appear human, and not uncannily perfect. Her eyebrows are dense and precise. Her face is somewhat angular, perhaps elfin. She is smiling at the viewer, laugh lines near her eyes crinkling.

Her ears aren't pierced, but two green teardrop shaped earrings with gold filigree hang suspended in the air below them anyway. She is wearing a light silvery-white dress with a tasteful décolletage and long sleeves.

There are lots of ways to look pretty,

She writes under the picture.

which is good because my self-tree likes to look different enough to be distinguishable from one another. So this isn't the first way I've looked and it probably won't be the last, but I quite like it.

Oh, how did you print the picture like that? That's so neat! It feels really different from most ways people put ink in me!

I think that it's pretty important to the appearance powers that they aren't limited to a single narrow way of doing things. The way you described using your forb to change your appearance, it sounded kind of narrow and limited to me! I might be able to get you an extra power that makes changing your appearance more voluntary, though, or tweak the powers themselves to be more voluntary than usual; if I were tweaking the powers themselves, I think it would end up that changing your appearance was automatic like breathing, but you could suppress it just as easily, and of course suppressing it wouldn't hurt. If I made an extra power you could end up with a lot more deliberate control over your appearance but of course it would cost extra points. Or you could decide that you'd rather not use the appearance powers! It's up to you.

Weeping Cherry smiles at the ink comment, vanishing her lying-down writing-desk and switching to a sitting-upright beanbag chair and a floating desk.

I printed it the same way my handwriting correction works -- I just had my forb put ink in the right places.

The elements in that ink either came from waste elements being recycled somewhere else in range of the solar logistics manager, or were synthesized from lighter elements or directly from energy. When I say that my forb lets me sense and control the location of everything in its radius, I mean everything. If it can be described by an algorithm I know how to write and accomplished by changing the location of things, forbs can do it.

 

... which is why if my forb-based appearance alteration came off as limited, I'm concerned that I either described it badly or the powers you offer are a lot stronger than I was thinking. So, like, for surface level things, my forb can just change how light interacts with me to make me look like any design. And adjust the velocities of particles near me to make things behave as though I am that shape. For deeper changes, my forb has my stem cells on file, and it can move my existing cells around and grow new cells to insert between them, or add bits of DNA to me to change the protein expression in existing cells, or just directly insert and control proteins, etc.

And it accomplishes all this by reading my mind -- my visual cortex specifically. So if I picture how I should look in enough detail, my forb can just make me look like that. Sometimes I get a mirror and move my freckles around. That's also how I can create and manipulate objects -- I just imagine them appearing in front of me in a particular way, and the forb makes it happen.

But this system can't, for example, make me into a centaur, because I don't know how to safely change my brain to handle extra limbs. There's a certain amount of neuroplasticity, so I could grow a tail if I wanted to, and some people add extra arms that they switch back and forth on controlling, and we're working on removing the limits, but there are still some limits for now.

 

I hope that gives you a better idea of what I can already do, although looking at how much I just wrote I think I might have rambled a bit. So, with that context, how do the appearance powers make their changes? Can they do things other than altering my biology and how I interact with the environment? Or do they just do those things but better?

It didn't sound from the description like they permitted me to become a centaur or anything. I guess maybe there are more appearance powers I haven't gotten to. Is there a power for full-on morphological freedom?

There's a power later on that lets you gain heritage from any being you meet, which would let you be a centaur if you wanted, but more to the point... using your forb to do all those things seems like it relies on you being made of particles, and stuff? If you really start moving between worlds a lot, you'll probably find some where things being made of particles isn't how the world works, and it seems to me that it's convenient to be able to go to places like that without losing a lot of your ways of expressing yourself. I guess for someone who's so used to being able to freely alter the world around you, it would still be pretty scary to go to one of those places even if you had all the appearance powers! But I don't know, I just think it sounds sad to only be able to visit places that are similar enough to where you started, and only be able to express yourself in ways that rely on reality being a certain shape.

Oh! I see what you mean now. Wow.

 

Do you know, it didn't even occur to me that I might end up somewhere not made out of particles? I feel a little silly for overlooking that, actually. Thank you for explaining; I'm really glad you're here to help me not make mistakes.

Weeping Cherry leans her head back against the beanbag for a moment, and reads the summary someone sends her of the alternate-world-physics speculation that's happened so far, before sitting up again.

In that case I probably will end up getting some of these unaltered. Definitely Angelic Tones and maybe Perfect Hair.

She flips back to the perks section to continue reading. With the background assumption that her forb might stop working, a number of these are a lot more appealing. She absentmindedly puts a thoughtful squiggle next to Dressing Room before realizing that she's doodling on a person and erasing it. She gets to Immunity System and flips back.

I'm definitely getting Just a Little Longer and Immunity System -- those both look great.

For Dressing Room -- how expansive is 'a new look'? Like, is this limited to clothing that exists? Clothing that I've seen? Clothing that is physically possible?

The usual rule for Dressing Room is that you can't summon any items out of nowhere that have special properties for reasons besides their materials and design. So nothing that's magic, but anything that you might make out of normal matter, as long as you understand its design and composition well enough. I bet you'd be really good at using Dressing Room, if you spend a lot of time designing things out of particles! (Dressing Room can resummon any item you've worn before, too, which helps when you're going places that have lots of magic clothes and you want to change in and out of your magic clothes easily. And you can also use it to adjust how things fit even if it couldn't summon them from scratch!)

Ooh! That's a lot more useful than it sounds. I think that's a must-have too.

She stands and continues writing at a standing desk while the tailors and fold crystal designers put her in a series of quickly designed and fabricated outfits cunningly decorated with every conceivable specialization of fold crystal. Forbs are normally orbs for efficiency reasons, but there's no particular reason that they wouldn't work as a series of decorative inset stones connected by patches of cloth imbued with very tiny fold crystals to generate overlapping fixity fields.

She ends up wearing a skin-tight full-body suit with a cotton/silk underlayer and a synthetic polymer overlayer, with fold crystal inserts over key vital areas. The suit ends at her throat with built in choker sporting six large ovoid fold crystals that coordinate to project a fixity field over her head. Over the full body suit goes a series of more traditional outfits, usually modified to include a significant number of inset gems, some fold crystal and some decoy.

Someone has a clever thought and lengthens her hair, putting it up in a bun pinned with a shifting collection of different daggers, utensils, and simple tools. Various hairpins made of exotic materials blink into and out of existence above her temples.

As they do that, Weeping Cherry looks at the next batch of powers before flipping back to her conversation.

Well Endowed through Inner Strength all look quite useful -- I'm definitely putting those down.

For My Ears Are Burning -- would it be possible to get a version of the power that only applies to things that people want me to know they're thinking about me? Like, for example, this could be one half of the power to keep me in touch with my self-tree, by letting them send messages to me by thinking about me. Or it could be used as a way for someone to call for help, by thinking about whether or not I would be able to save them.

But I don't want to invade anybody's privacy -- people should be allowed to think about me without worrying about whether I'll judge them or anything like that.

My Ears Are Burning is one of the harder powers to modify, actually! Most things that someone wants to do by taking a slightly different version of My Ears Are Burning are easier to do by building a new power from scratch. I'm not sure why that is.

Huh! That's really interesting. In that case, I'll skip it and we can talk about custom powers that do something similar if I end up having the slack.

She looks through the next few entries, and then hits a mental brick wall again.

All the Battle ____ powers are probably a good idea. I don't intend to fight anyone, but if I do I want to be able to do it well.

Making Ends Meet through Four Star Daydream -- how do those ... work? Like, right now there is no amount of money that you could use in the fabrication auctions to instantly construct a star, because we don't have the instantaneous manufacturing capacity. So what would it mean for me to be able to afford that with Four Star Daydream? Would it give me enough to endow a trust that would get a star purchased as soon as possible? Or does it guarantee that my surroundings happen to have enough capacity to produce anything I wanted to buy?

Maybe that was a bad way to phrase it. What I'm trying to get at is the difference between money and wealth. Does Four Star Daydream give you unlimited amounts of money, which would crash the economy around you and decrease your effective wealth if you used it wrong, or does it give you unlimited wealth?

And how does it deal with, like, variable availability? What about things that are only sold in a particular place or to a particular set of clientele?

She startles a little bit as her outfit is replaced by a dress made of folded origami. There's a slight susseration as the papers shift to include and discard new elements. She squints at her arm and realizes that she's now wearing English Wikipedia.

Oh goodness, I'm really not an economics expert, but I'll try.

The important things about the money powers are: messing up the whole economy would be a downside, so they don't do that. They find ways to not do that, instead. And being able to afford something doesn't change whether it's being sold. You can't buy magic anywhere in this world because it doesn't have any, and if having lots of money won't make stars be built faster, then you can only buy stars as fast as they're normally built. But if you took Four Star Daydream and really wanted stars to be built faster, you could pay people to figure out better ways to build stars quickly.

If something is only sold in a particular place then you can only buy it there, and if something is only sold to particular people then you can only buy it if you count as one—though the Friends In Places powers can make it a lot easier to become part of social groups, and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch can give you the right heritage, so counting as the right kind of person might be easier than you think. And some people who say they will only sell things to the right people actually mean that they will only sell things to the right people unless you give them a whole lot of money, so in that case Four Star Daydream won't need any help.

Does that all make sense?

So most of that makes perfect sense!

She pauses for a moment to think.

Actually, yeah, I think that all makes sense. But let me check my understanding, if that's alright.

 

There are things which, if you bought them, would absolutely ruin the economy and other people's lives. If I had a literally infinite amount of money, I could outbid everyone at every fabrication auction, and nobody else would be able to get anything made other than teleports and food.

But that would be a downside, so Four Star Daydream wouldn't do that. Instead, it will give me (the purchasing power of, not necessarily all at once) the largest finite amount that wouldn't harm other people enough for me to consider it a downside. Is that right? Or maybe it wouldn't mitigate downsides in that exact way, maybe it would change the world around me like other powers do such that what I want to buy is affordable under those constraints?

I think the usual thing the money powers do, when there's little enough resources that buying a lot of something would cause problems, is find ways for your buying things to add resources to the situation. I think the usual thing, when someone wants to buy a society's whole ability to build things and have it all building them stuff they want, is that they find themselves with a source of money that helps society get along anyway—maybe a big pile of the things people want built, or maybe a way to make building things much easier so the amount of building capacity they were trying to buy isn't all of the building capacity anymore. I guess you could keep trying to buy all of it even after that, and at some point things would start getting silly, or ruining people's lives would be the thing you were trying to do on purpose and so not a downside anymore.

I see.

She wrestles with her emotions for a bit. The live poll in her HUD isn't doing much better, with 93% of participants undecided.

I'm really torn about this one. Because money ...

Money means a lot of things to different people. In some times and places, it's nothing I would feel bad about making. I think making gold coins from scratch and using them to buy something is a perfectly valid thing to do.

But in places where a democratic valid fair

In places where a government deliberately controls the money supply, money is somewhat an extension of public policy. It's a way of deciding what resource allocations a society values. And in that context, having more money than you earn by participating in the economy is ... distorting the choices that society made. It's saying that your wants are more important than other people's.

 

And I guess maybe that's okay. But I feel weird about it.

And at the same time, if the power can sometimes make the world as a whole richer ... it feels like I really have to take it, because making places wealthy is one of the best ways to help people.

She trails off for a moment, looking out at the stars.

I feel like I'm asking about a lot of custom powers. I won't apologize, because I'm currently modeling you as not bothered by that. But I recognize that it's asking you to do a lot of work, to think about and formulate powers that depart from your standard list.

 

Would it be possible to get a power like this that functioned with resources other than money? Like, a version of this power that guaranteed that I always had access to enough locally-valuable resources to be able to sell them for enough money to buy things, or something?

Not that exact thing, I would have to think more about it, but is that the general kind of thing that a power could provide?