Does "to get at me" mean "to cause me to suffer or change my behavior due to the loss or injury of a loved one", or does it include e.g. enemy attempts which take out high-value assets under my command to cripple my forces, where the high-value asset happens to be one of my loved ones? How does it deal with mixed cases such as an enemy needing to capture any member of a category for sound strategic reasons, but preferentially choosing a member which is one of my loves ones to get at me, as an attack of opportunity?

One way to think about it is that, if you take Safe at Home, your loved ones' personal connection to you and the fact that you would be upset if they got hurt is no longer a factor in whether bad things happen to them. If they work for you or are otherwise putting themselves in high-stakes situations, they can still get hurt that way, but the power makes it difficult for people to find out who you care about if they would use that information to hurt you, and once someone has found out anyway, if upsetting you by hurting someone you care about or coercing you by threatening someone you care about is a significant factor in their choice of plan, they won't be able to hurt your loved one no matter how hard they try. That's where the strange results can come in; since the protection is absolute and the Spirit's powers can override mundane causality, someone trying to come up with a really overdetermined plan to hurt your loved ones can end up causing very weird things to happen.

✔

This may be corrosive for her ability to model good strategy for other people, but... she can't bring herself to deny it on those grounds.

200.

Name: I Can Fix Them - Cost: 5 ☐
Regardless of how morally despicable someone is, your love can and will reform them into a genuinely good, kind, upstanding person who regrets their evil deeds.

Name: I Can Help Them - Cost: 5 ☐
(Replaces I Can Fix Them)
Regardless of how lost to darkness someone is, your love can save them, if they're willing to accept it.
This power will not directly alter someone's mind except to allow them to believe a true thing they couldn't have believed otherwise, or to change something that their pre-alteration and post-alteration selves would hypothetically be able to agree was good if they talked it over honestly with full access to each other's perspectives. In cases where the outcome of the hypothetical is uncertain, it will default to not making the change.

These are objectively very powerful powers if she can manipulate or Master herself into loving people.

She doesn't want to do that. She's already aligned with that notebook that she's not doing that.

Rebecca is vaguely aware, from media osmosis and break room gossip, that there's an archetype who's attracted to flawed characters and imagine fixing them. She doesn't underestand the appeal. I Can Help Them is even more baffling in that regard, because... "with full access to each other's perspectives" must be doing a lot of the load bearing in that sentence. In her experience, most villains either don't want to be fixed, or will go gray- or white-hat if removed from their environments, given the right incentives and assigned a competent therapist—"right incentives and competent therapist", to be fair, is also doing a lot of the load bearing here. There's a gap in there, people caught on path-dependent cognitive deadlocks that need a more deft hand, but she finds it an odd hair to want to split.

Still, it's strictly speaking a good thing to have if she happens to fall in love with someone matching those conditions.

These two are the essentially same if I take Nullified, right? Since I Can Help Them only affects any mind-control effects, and those conditions are similar to the conditions for Nullified to take effect?

Yes, but I Can Help Them has a more refined approach to determining consent than the default with Nullified, and it will still work that way under Nullified whereas I Can Fix Them will go with what Nullified usually does. It's a pretty subtle difference, but it does make I Can Help Them probably the better choice with Nullified depending on how comfortable you are with mind-affecting powers.

Rebecca is honestly still not certain what the difference looks like when implemented, or which she'd prefer, but better to err on the side of not accidentally Mastering your lover than the opposite. She takes the notebook's word for it. She's unlikely to pick this anyway.

She scores You Can Help Them at 70 and You Can Fix Them at 0.

Name: Inspirational - Cost: 5 ☐
Just meeting you makes people want to be better. Those who hurt you, or hurt someone you care about, will always come to understand your point of view and regret what they've done. In trade, you might sometimes come to understand more of their point of view than you'd like.

This... makes no sense.

No, it makes sense, just—

She's not going to take this, but she still needs to ask.

How does this work with Nullified? Do they always regret what they've done because they understand my point of view, or maybe they can understand my point of view and be unmoved about it, but still regret what they've done because of the consequences to them?

I'm struggling to understand how this works on, for example, someone who who fully understands that people have internal experiences and what it's like, but who nonetheless doesn't care and unrepentantly enjoys torturing people; unless it just totally rewrites their values or causes events to happen which rewrite their values?

You're right that taking Nullified will weaken Inspirational a lot, but it can still work by environmentally pushing those people to have personal epiphanies in the direction of regretting harm to others.

So it tries to cause events to happen which totally rewrite their values, go it.

That's an uncharitable frame. Maybe her sample is skewed, given the type of villains she tends to be called in to fight or personally review in either identity. Perhaps people who would take Inspirational also tend to have aesthetic preferences for redeemable villains in their destinations. And she's anchored on Scion and the Endbringers, which she strongly suspects can't have personal epiphanies which don't look like their values being totally rewritten.

She's still not taking it. Not because Nullified makes it weaker, but because she worked to be the most inspirational woman on the planet and three-time Time Person of the Year. She doesn't care for a shortcut after all of that.

She ✔s the notebook's response and puts down "0" for Inspirational.

Name: True Love's Kiss - Cost: 1 ☐
By kissing your true love, you can break any curse, heal any injury, and cure any illness. The same works in reverse.

Name: Eternal Love - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires True Love's Kiss)
Those you love cannot be parted from you by anything short of their own uncoerced decision to leave. Anything else—war, politics, death, interdimensional travel—you will find a way to overcome and be reunited.

This obviates a lot of the utility of Safe At Home. She wasn't thinking of this when scoring that power. And obviously she's going to take it. Questions, though:

I'm thinking this is partially redundant with Safe At Home in the same way of Immunity System with It Gets Better. I might reduce the score of Safe At Home and take this instead. Does that make sense to you?

Does True Love's Kiss work on trauma (if they consent to it)?

I notice Eternal Love says "those you love" instead of "your true love". Should I take that to mean it works on close friends and family as well?

Yes, I think prioritizing Eternal Love over Safe at Home makes a lot of sense. True Love's Kiss can work on trauma under some but not all circumstances. And yes, Eternal Love works on anyone you love, close friends and family included.

✔

She drops Safe At Home to 50, puts 100 on True Love's Kiss and puts 500 on Eternal Love.

Name: The Rescuer - Cost: 5 ☐
(Requires Eternal Love)
If someone is dead who would want to be alive again, and you set your heart on returning them, you will find a way. It may have costs or difficulties or take a long time, but you will find it, and it will work.

This is useful. But she can't find herself to care that much about it, especially since it explicitly disclaims being scalable. If she really needs to resurrect someone, she can just make herself love them.

She should check that that works. As explicitly as possible.

Can I make Eternal Love and other love-related powers work for arbitrary people by mind-controlling myself to love them? Same question for close friends.

It might not work for close friends since that might have to be reciprocated or require some threshold of genuine familiarity.

Using mind control to make yourself love someone isn't necessarily going to work as well as coming to love them naturally. Using mind control to make someone your close friend... might... work for making them count as a close friend for the purposes of powers that care about that? Which powers are you thinking of?

I'm mainly thinking about using Eternal Love to substitute for The Rescuer by making me love the person in question. For the friends case I was thinking of making me consider them as a friend, without necessarily making them consider me a friend; for the use case of The Rescuer the second is obviously not possible. I was guessing that it wouldn't work.

The main difference between Eternal Love and The Rescuer, if you're someone who loves easily, is that Eternal Love has a really hard time resurrecting someone that you didn't know when they were alive (and a moderately hard time resurrecting someone that you didn't love when they were alive but did know and have come to love in retrospect). Adding in the complication of artificial love will tend to make that kind of situation even more difficult.

I think I also want to ask...

...when you think of your best life, do you think it involves a lot of mind-controlling yourself to love people so you can bring them back to life?

On a general level, I don't want to mind control myself to love people.

I didn't mention it explicitly before, but one of the reasons I didn't want to do the plan with I Can Fix Them or other Friendship powers to prevent the apocalypse is that I expected I'd need to mind-control myself into loving them (though I hadn't confirmed if that would work yet). I don't want to do that.

But making myself love someone I want to bring back to life is different from making myself love an enemy. I can imagine losing an important ally, or someone who I don't personally know very well, but whom someone I do love cares about very much, and believing it worth modifying myself to bring them back.

I was hoping it would work even if I reversed the change afterwards, but there are cases where I wouldn't mind continuing loving the person afterwards, especially if it were just platonic love. My model of relationships is that they're highly circumstantial, and often whether someone becomes my friend or not is only partially about personality match and a lot about how events came together? From how you've explained powers like Love Interest, I don't see evidence against it. So as long as a person is somebody I think I could have become friends with, or fallen in love with, in a different world—I don't mind altering myself to like them.

I won't be doing it casually; it would certainly be a last resort. To put it a different way: if I care about bringing back a mostly-stranger enough to spend 5 points on it, then I probably care enough to make myself love them to do it?

Well...

...the main difference between Eternal Love and The Rescuer if you aren't someone who loves easily is that The Rescuer lets you find a way to resurrect someone, and once you've found the way, it's often useful for more than just you and more than just that one person; effectively, every time you use The Rescuer you get better at bringing people back to life, and potentially better at helping other people do it too. So it's not like you're spending five points on bringing back a specific person, or a specific small handful of people. It's more like you're spending five points to become someone who has resurrection as one of your main areas of concern. Which isn't necessarily the life for everyone, but neither is mind-controlling yourself into loving people.

I do think it sounds much less concerning now that you've explained, but it does still sound a little concerning.

...

That sounds like a very significant difference, so thank you for pointing that out.

Generic resurrection sounds like an extraordinarily powerful ability, so it makes sense now why it costs so much. I could certainly do a lot of good with it. But when I think of myself living my best life as my best self, I don't see myself having it as a main area of concern.

That's a diplomatic way of putting it. She feels like she should be giving the option more serious thought, but she's hitting a limit on her ability to care. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, they say, and knowing it doesn't make it not. And she's almost suspecting that taking it doesn't make more people get resurrected, but just samples worlds for her where resurrection is a nearby-accessible thing, making her local reality more resurrection-rich with negligible impact on the statistics of the broader landscape, whatever that even means in her new model of reality that she's been deliberately putting off consolidating.

If you had said that mind-controlling myself wouldn't work, I probably wouldn't have taken The Rescuer for 5 points anyway. I just wanted to ask to cover all of my bases. I will almost certainly not end up doing this any time soon.

But to rephrase what you said about Eternal Love working, you think it'll work, but decreasingly well and taking increasingly more time and effort, the more contrived and insubstantial the love is?

There is definitely a point at which the love becomes so contrived and insubstantial that the power won't work at all, and I'm really not sure where that point is or how to describe it in concrete terms. But yes, the less well you knew someone when they were alive/present, and the more contrived and insubstantial your love for them, the harder it is to find/revive them with Eternal Love, but in many situations it will still work despite those obstacles.

Got it.

She scores it 400.

I feel that the wording of Rescuer, "It may have costs or difficulties or take a long time, but you will find it, and it will work," almost implies that Rescuer is explicitly non-scalable, the opposite of what you said. If you hadn't clarified, I definitely would have taken it as that. I don't know if your relationship with the Spirit is such that you can send client feedback back to them?

Updating phrasings on the standard list turns out to be really, really hard, because the Spirit exists mostly outside of time. I will definitely pass that along, but it's hard to say when it might result in a change or even to define what 'when' means in that sentence.

Speaking of communicating with the Spirit, though, I think I have a power for you!

Name: Soulbound - Cost: 8 ☐
If something feels instinctively like a part of you, then it is. A necklace you always wear will be impossible to lose. A vehicle you care for deeply will be impossible to steal. A tool or power you rely on like part of your body will become as hard to misplace as your own hands. Tools, devices, and powers that you absorb this way will be translated into the form of Spirit-granted powers, granting them the flexibility to Just Work despite pesky details like network protocols, service providers, and laws of physics, and will be fully as well protected as your own mind and body are by all of your potentially applicable powers.

She puts a checkmark on the first reply, then she sees the new power, and reads.

That is not at all what she expected, and simultaneously intensely fascinating. Her phone, unfortunately, will not count, and she will not have a multiversal Internet connection, if that's how "service providers" works. She'd wonder if it would work for her costume, but she's likely to take Dressing Room.

Thank you for coming up with this! It's more elegant than anything I was thinking of.

I'm reading this as: in the future, if anything more comes to feel instinctively like a part of me, it'll be absorbed as well? If I stop feeling like something is a part of me, can it be desorbed? I don't think that's likely, but just for reference.

Yes, anything that you come to see as a part of yourself will be absorbed the same way, and if you truly reject something Soulbound to you—at such a level that, if it were your hand, you would cut it off—then you can sever it from yourself by consciously focusing on that rejection.

She marks it down as worth 1000.

It might not, in reality, be worth that much, as a buy for her existing powers. But she wants them, and she can't imagine her best life as one where she can't fly and can be scratched by blades; there will be ways to remedy that, she expects, but she doesn't want to spend months or years trying to scrape back up to where she is right now. She wants this.

So. 1000.

It's still lower value per unit cost than some of the others on the list because it costs an entire eight points, but she'll get it.

She adds next to the number,

thank you