Emerald Orbs can definitely improve your vision in lots of ways, night vision included, and protect you against problems your eyes might otherwise experience; it also enhances any eye-related powers you pick up with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch or by other means. As for using Perfect Hair in those ways, many people can do that, but it's harder for some people than others; you'll have trouble with it if you feel like having prehensile hair is at odds with your self-image, and you'll find it easier if having prehensile hair feels natural and reasonable and like a good way for you to be.

The big thing about all the appearance and body powers, though, is that they make each other stronger. Like Roses won't do much by itself, but having Like Roses will add more power and flexibility to all of the other powers you have that affect your appearance and body.

Dressing Room protects your hair from a lot of things, but it's not as comprehensive or powerful as Perfect Hair.

Prehensile hair. She wasn't even thinking that far; she was just imaging re-manifesting her hair in different configurations.

So it's more about the synergies than the powers themselves. The problem with that is all of the appearance powers cost a lot, and taking them together would be steep.

Would Dressing Room prevent my hair from whipping around distractingly and getting tangled when I move around too fast in a fight or when travelling? Or getting caked with dirt and sand, and so on.

She's learned how to stop it from doing that when flying, but in combat it can still get in the way sometimes.

Dressing Room would go a long way toward preventing that sort of thing, but wouldn't be able to fully protect you against hair trouble in fights or other situations where a lot is happening and your hair is involved. It's best at preventing small problems from accumulating, like making sure your hair doesn't tangle or get dirty while moving around normally or sleeping, or making sure it stays tidy and dries quickly when rained on; it's not as good at keeping your hair out of your way in harsher situations.

Alright. Checkmark.

She bumps Perfect Hair to 40, say. It's an indulgence, but one she's been extending herself for 25 years, so she doesn't feel that bad about it. She doesn't think she cares enough about getting the other appearance synergies.

Drawbacks, then. She flips back to where they're listed.

Name: Decorative - Grants: +1 ☐
You are unfailingly cute and pretty and feminine at all times, in all circumstances. You cannot wear insufficiently pretty clothes. You cannot make insufficiently pretty noises. You cannot ugly cry.

Name: Beauty Is A Curse - Grants: +1 ☐
(Requires A Thousand Ships)
No, you don't understand. Beauty IS a curse. People will NOT stop bringing it up. Everyone you meet just has to point out how pretty you are. This will never stop happening. Even the most tactful people find it slipping out subtly, as remarks about the luster of your hair or the depth of your eyes.

Name: Plain Jane - Grants: +2 ☐
No matter what you look like, nor how many times people tell you you're beautiful, when you look in the mirror all you see is imperfections. You will never be fully satisfied with your appearance on an instinctive level.

Name: Style of Sisyphus - Grants: +1 ☐
Anytime you settle on a personal style that works well for you, soon afterward you'll encounter inspiration for another style that you like even better. You might end up cycling between different fashions, or trying to incorporate them all into a single outfit (and then finding another inspiration and having to start all over again).

These seem like they might be tolerable—Plain Jane might be annoying—but they provide so little value she's not really tempted. She thinks her approach to this section is—and she writes below—

Drawbacks are subject to the same metanarrative guarantees as powers, right?

It feels like while I can always get my own substitute for a Spirit power in the future with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, Anything You Can Do or just learning something the hard way, though it might not work as well as the Spirit version, if I take a drawback then I can never get rid of it no matter what I do.

So taking an indelible drawback to get a power which I could have gotten through other means sounds like a bad idea, even if in the moment the power seems to give more benefit than the drawback takes away.

There are some Spirit powers which would be worth taking a drawback for, the ones whose whole point is the metanarrative guarantee and can't be replicated with mundane means—like Eternal Love—but it looks like I have enough points to get all of those, and on the margin I'm looking at powers which are mostly nice-to-have and replaceable.

So my approach to this section might be that I only take drawbacks whose effects I actually actively want and don't view as "real" drawbacks.

Does that make sense?

Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense!

✔

Name: There's Another One - Grants: +3 ☐
You are not the only vessel of the Spirit. You might meet someone else with similar powers to yours; you might even meet more than one. Your susceptibility to one another's powers will be governed by the narrative.

She's at the same time tempted and uneasy about this one.

Ticking this feels like it makes her—more real, in a sense—less bubbled into her own personal universe, which is a notion she's profoundly unnerved by and have been building against with her powers. At the same time, she's remembering the powers she's been looking at, and the target audience they might appeal to, and unsure if she feels secure meeting the median chosen of the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed.

She's unsure if they feel secure meeting her

Does this mean their powers can override even Iron Will?

The only power that can never be overridden by the powers of another vessel of the Spirit is I Can Fix Them and its derivatives.

...

She's a tiny bit curious what I Can Help Them does to her.

She does not at all want to find out what I Can Fix Them does to her.

What metrics does "genuinely good, kind, upstanding person who regrets their evil deeds" work by?

That's a sort of complicated subject and the description oversimplifies it a lot.

I think the best way I can describe it goes something like... the Spirit thinks it's sad when people find happiness by hurting each other, and good when people find happiness by helping each other, and really good when people who have been living in ways that hurt other people discover that they can live happier lives without hurting anyone, especially if the process of learning that involves a close friend or romantic partner showing them how. But without the Spirit's intervention, most of the time, someone who becomes close friends or romantic partners with a person who hurts people a lot will just have a really hard time and not fix anything and probably get hurt themselves, and the Spirit thinks that's really sad, so it made I Can Fix Them so that any vessel of the Spirit who wants to reach out and help people that way will be able to do it and know they'll succeed at it. But every person is different, so it's hard to say exactly what being Fixed usually looks like, except that it's important to the Spirit both that they really are better people than they were before (where "better" means things like "cares more about not hurting people", though not just exactly that), and that they're not different people than they were before, they're the same person who's grown and changed. When it's very hard to have both those things be true at the same time, then things get tricky.

Rebecca works for the cause of humanity.

Many people would, and do, reject that she is "good". She would argue, but it's a matter of interpretation of morality, and moral philosophy arguments never come to any good end. Kind? Upstanding? She's not going to fool herself. Those ships are long sailed. Even simply her work as the Chief Director required choices that threatened to have her deposed multiple times.

She does not regret her deeds. Regret who they hurt, yes, but not what they were required for, and the two cannot be separated.

people who have been living in ways that hurt other people discover that they can live happier lives without hurting anyone

She imagines a different version of her which is everything Alexandria stands for. Heroic, good, righteous; sometimes having to make hard choices, but always transparent where possible, always accountable, always striving for better, the light to the shadow of the Chief Director pulling strings in the back. Someone who has ideals and will stand by them even when the world burns; who will bend and barter but not fold, and who would doom the world one day for that stubbornness, and still walk with head held high to that end.

Rebecca refuses to be someone who loses. It's the core of everything she's done. Destroying the world out of squeamishness is unconscionable.

Except she's going to have It Gets Better, and Eternal Love, and maybe The Rescuer, and every power under the sun eventually, and the Spirit on her side; the notebook said—

the Spirit makes it so that living your best life as your best self is at least as good a way to fix your problems as the best way you could manage by not doing that

She imagines becoming that version of her without that edge of must-win-at-any-cost honed by failure after failure, the her who shies back from the executioner's blade. Say she's not afraid she'll lose, because living up to the herself she once dreamed of being is at least as good as retreading her proven patterns.

What is wrong with that picture?

Alexandria, the one she brings to the Protectorate and speaks to her Wards with, isn't a mask she wears. Alexandria is her, just with different facets turned outwards than when she's in the Director's office or down in Côte d'Ivoire. Becoming that woman isn't killing her true self and inflating a daylight persona into her place. It's closer to pruning her: cutting away the ugly appendages and behavioral modes that served her well for two decades, but which the Spirit may soon—intentionally, even—render obsolete.

When she first imagined her grand plan lying in her old quarters at Cauldron, there was a certain guilty thrill thinking of puppetting both sides of the game at once. Who doesn't dream of playing hidden mastermind of the world? It's not a vice she was ever proud of, but circumstances conspired to make it strategic, and though this life has long devolved into a crushing weight on her shoulders, she can't deny it was a good game at the beginning. But she never once imagined loosing Manton on the world just to tick up their numbers. She never imagined her hands on the scales trapping the lords of Africa in perpetual, bloody war. She never thought she would snap the neck of one of her most trusted subordinates with her own hands, toss him through a door, and jog downstairs to catch her 17:00 meeting.

She doesn't regret her works, but she cannot pretend that she today embodies her best self.

If I have a preference for how I would want to be affected by a power such as I Can Fix Them, and that preference resolves in a way that satisfies the required outcome of the power, would that be taken into account by how the power works, above the other chosen's aesthetic preferences for how they want to fix people?

She's not even going to pretend that she isn't talking about herself.

That's a complicated question that can sometimes depend on the relative strength of your preferences and whether the other person has thought of something you haven't that you might feel differently about if you had, but the essential answer, if I understand correctly what you're asking, is yes.

Why is she even thinking about this.

If she wants to change the way she is, she can obviously do it herself. She doesn't need to delegate it to someone she doesn't even know or trust and the whims of a Spirit.

It's three points.

She just explained to the notebook that she shouldn't be taking drawbacks for the points—

She does, in fact, want to meet other people. She likes meeting interesting people, and the other chosen of the Spirit must be the most interesting people, if perhaps not perfectly aligned with Rebecca on average. They can trade Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. She wants access to a greater multiverse, not her own untouchable bubble. If the notebook had said that Iron Will still works fine against other chosen, she would have taken the drawback in a heartbeat.

Stop thinking for a second. Knowing everything she knows, emptying her mind:

Does she want There's Another One?

She puts a tickmark in the box.

She puts a note next to it,

Remind me to come back and think about this again before I finalize my build?

Moving on:

Name: Incomplete - Grants: +5 ☐
About half of people you encounter will be immune to all mind-affecting aspects of your powers, and about half of those who remain will see reduced effects. You can do nothing to change this.

Name: Nullified - Grants: +1 ☐
(Requires Incomplete)
Any aspects of your powers that would affect the minds of others in ways they might not like will instead not do that.

She already decided to take these, so she wouldn't be indiscriminately Mastering everyone around her. And she doesn't think she's even took any mind-affecting powers since Captive Audience she rated too low to get on the list, and Backchannel is a read-only power, which sounds like it won't count? You Can Teach Better might count.

That might be bad, actually.

Is You Can Teach Better mind-affecting, and will half the people I encounter be immune to it?

Do read-only mind powers not count as "mind-affecting", so e.g. Backchannel will work fine both ways?

Nullified overrides the more indiscriminate aspects of Incomplete, so it makes You Can Teach Better work even on people who would have been locked out of it by Incomplete. Backchannel isn't mind-affecting and would work fine even with just Incomplete.

Tick on the response, and two ticks in the selection boxes for Incomplete and Nullified.

Name: Great Responsibility - Grants: +4 ☐
When someone calls out to you for help, you can hear it no matter how far away you are, and you know exactly how they feel.

This sounds horrible.

Name: Very Distinctive - Grants: +3 ☐
(Requires at least three of: A Thousand Ships, Angelic Tones, Emerald Orbs, Perfect Hair, Size Difference, Dressing Room, Like Roses, Well Endowed)
You cannot successfully disguise yourself to anyone who has met you in your normal identity. Even someone who has only seen you at a distance or heard about your style might notice similarities.

She feels vaguely singled out by this drawback, but the notebook basically said this is a standardized list, so she just ignores it and moves on.

Name: Flashy - Grants: +2 ☐
(Requires Very Distinctive and at least five of: A Thousand Ships, Angelic Tones, Emerald Orbs, Perfect Hair, Size Difference, Dressing Room, Like Roses, Well Endowed, Mysterious Allure)
Stealth just doesn't work for you. If someone has any opportunity to notice your presence, they will.

Name: Secret Identity - Grants: +2 ☐
When you're at home, in your world of origin, your powers are fully concealed. Unfair advantages are withdrawn and inhuman features are hidden. Powers of safety and convenience still work, as long as they can remain plausibly deniable, but to all outward appearances you're back to being your ordinary self with no magic to speak of. (If you take this with They'll Know, thresholds for plausible deniability get much higher, but safety powers will still work and still conceal themselves.)

She does wonder how Secret Identity interacts with her local powers and superhero identity in Earth Bet. Maybe as Alexandria she can still use her Alexandria powers but not her Spirit and otherworldly powers, and she can use neither as Rebecca Costa-Brown? But she's not going to take it so she's not going to bother asking.

Name: Dramatic Damsel - Grants: +3 ☐
When (and only when) an opportunity for a really great story arises, powers that ordinarily protect you from things like getting hurt, being drugged, or losing fights will slip just enough to facilitate someone getting the better of you. The power may reassert itself right away for a dramatic escape, or keep a loophole open or a handicap in place long enough to make your escape more difficult and elaborate. (Combining this with Realism is not recommended.)

Name: Green With Envy - Grants: +6 ☐
People are so eager to be your friend that they become bitter and vindictive when denied the opportunity. You can tear apart long-established friend groups if you aren't careful to give everyone equal attention, and sometimes even then. This effect is particularly harsh around people you're dating.

Name: You Ruin Them - Grants: +3 ☐
Once someone has dated, slept with, or even shared a deep and longing glance across a room with you, their heart is never fully satisfied with anyone else. Other relationships pale in comparison to what they could have, or imagine they could have, with you.

Name: Jilted Lovers - Grants: +4 ☐
When you break up with someone, they become monomaniacally obsessed with getting back together. If you take Realism, this will absolutely escalate to violent stalking.

Name: The Crazy Train - Grants: +6 ☐
Powers that you should be able to control directly or influence by your mood and preferences (like Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, Emerald Orbs, or What's In A Name) instead answer only to the narrative, which is still using your aesthetics but might not necessarily have your best interests in mind. Combines... interestingly... with Realism.

No.

Name: They'll Know - Grants: +8 ☐
This drawback lifts the veil that discourages people from realizing how your powers affect the world around them and their own minds. Warning: this knowledge can cause a lot of trouble.

She has to think about this for a second now she expects she's not taking Captive Audience. Why doesn't she want people to realize how her powers affect the world around them? It sounds like it would make it difficult to strategize effectively with allies. It's probably meant for people who do take the mind-affecting powers, or who want to keep a low profile? She asks the notebook.

Given my current build, which looks like it'll include very few mind-affecting powers and will include Incomplete and Nullified, and given my plans to not particularly keep a low profile or conceal my powers where I go, does the warning "this knowledge can cause a lot of trouble" still apply? I'm not seeing particular downsides but I might be missing something.

Yes, given all that, I think the trouble caused by They'll Know is mostly not anything you need to worry about. The people who need that warning are usually either people who want to take a lot of mind-affecting powers and don't realize that many people dislike having their minds affected, or people who do want to keep a low profile and who don't realize how much work their powers would ordinarily be doing to help keep that option open. (It's still possible to keep a low profile even with They'll Know, but it sort of requires being very thoroughly on the same page with yourself about whether you do or do not want your Perfect Hair to blow dramatically in nonexistent winds, and so on and so forth for all of your powers and the things they can do and the implications of those things.)

She never thought about Perfect Hair causing her hair to blow dramatically in nonexistent winds, but once the image is in her head, it is abruptly appealing.

Maybe she does want to score Perfect Hair higher.

For now, she acknowledges the notebook's response and checks They'll Know.

And then she flips back to the table and asks the notebook,

Can you sort this for me again by Score/Cost, please?

Of course!