She has There's Another One (+3), Incomplete (+5), Nullified (+1), They'll Know (+8) and her base 70 points, which is 87 points, which puts the cut line at Immunity System.

She's dropping Disney Princess, Four Star Daydream/Motherlode, Safe At Home, I Can Help Them, Angelic Tones/Emerald Orbs/Like Roses, Friends In Low/High Places, Omniglot, What's In A Name, Personal Space and Captive Audience.

Everything else she actively didn't want or didn't care about.

The borderline powers she did get are Immunity System, Friends In Strange Places, The Princess And The Dragon, Personal Hygiene and You Can Teach Better. Everything above that is just genuinely important.

Anything she wants to reconsider?

Friends In Strange Places she acknowledges as useful, but still mildly offends her personal sensibilities. It's three points.

She could trade it for Disney Princess and Like Roses; she thinks Disney Princess is more useful than the other appearance powers, even if the appearance powers synergize.

Except Like Roses might be inconvenient if she wants to not smell distinctive.

She doesn't actually need Just A Little Longer. Her own powers already have the sleep and fatigue mostly covered, so she was mostly thinking about the injury part, but Battle Angel covers most of that as well. If she discards it she can get Disney Princess and another two-point power. Disney Princess and Emerald Orbs for the vision improvement. Yes, she thinks that makes sense.

Not final confirmation: I think I probably want everything in the rows above and including Immunity System, except I want to drop Friends In Strange Places and Just A Little Longer, and take Disney Princess and Emerald Orbs instead.

Can you check the boxes in the main list so I can look through them in regular order again?

Sure!

She flicks through it. Looks correct. Nothing she suddenly feels like she wants but didn't get, or doesn't need but did.

Any more comments or advice on my selections? Apart from that I asked you to remind me about There's Another One again.

I think I also asked about custom powers for breathing and for an individualized version of The Great Equalizer. Is there any progress on that?

I haven't quite figured those out yet. Do you still want me to work on them? Now that you have a better picture of what all the powers do in general, do you have a clearer idea of what you want the breathing protection to cover or how you want it to work? And the same for the individual Great Equalizer, I guess, but I think that one is much less affected by your other powers.

I think I want the breathing protection to prevent me from ever being impaired by lack of oxygen, which would allow it to replace most use cases of Immunity System for me. A stretch goal would be to resist airborne poisons as well, essentially preventing anything non-benign from from entering my airways. Though I know the Spirit's style isn't like that, something that works out to "the contents of my lungs are always 79% nitrogen 21% oxygen". You can probably think of something more elegant.

For the individual Great Equalizer, I mainly want to avoid being fated to do things or for things to happen to me, except as special-cased by Iron Will permission.

I would appreciate if you could keep working on them, yes.

...well, I managed a power for protecting your breathing, but it was insistent on having Immunity System as a prerequisite, so I'm not sure I helped...

Name: Breathe Easy - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Personal Hygiene and Immunity System)
Eating, breathing, and other forms of environmental exchange are no longer necessary for you. You cannot be harmed by denying your body resources, or by supplying the wrong ones. You can still benefit from positive effects of things you breathe or eat.

I think I'll still take it. Replacing Immunity System would have been good, but this is valuable nonetheless.

She unticks Disney Princess—it's useful, but perhaps not really her aesthetic, now that she thinks about it—and selects Breathe Easy, which gives her an extra point left.

Would it be possible to make the The Great Equalizer variant fit in the 1 point I now have spare? Understandable if you can't, but I'll might take even partial protection or similar.

I don't think so. It's an expensive kind of thing to have even if it's narrowed to a single person. Let me see... ⏳

Name: Star-Straightened - Cost: 8 ☐
(Replaces The Great Equalizer)
By default you are invisible to all forms of future-sight and invincible to all forms of fate- or luck-related curse, prophecy, or doom, including indirect effects such as your enemies' luckiness making your plans go awry. However, whenever such a divination or manipulation is something you would choose to allow if you had full information about its nature, intent, and likely effects, then it works fine. In ambiguous cases, the default holds.

Hm.

I think that may be too expensive, sorry, but thank you for the effort.

Is prophecy immunity or prophecy defiance the type of thing that's reasonably achievable to pick up through other means going through the multiverse?

Often, yes! In many worlds, just being from somewhere else can throw off prophecy, and in worlds where it's a little more robust than that it's often still thrown off by having abilities that work in ways that are very locally strange, and besides all that there are many worlds where you can pick up powers specifically for defying prophecy.

Okay. No prophecy immunity, she has one point left.

You know what—What's In A Name probably defends her against some curses which would be covered by Star-Straightened, and non-physical magic attacks are a significant fraction of her remaining attack surface, with how much she's perfected her physical defense, so it's probably worth a point.

She checks What's In A Name.

I think that's all I have right now.

Do you have anything else you wanted to add? Otherwise I might take another break.

I think taking another break sounds like a fine idea! I can spend the time trying to think of other things you might find helpful. I might not come up with anything, but you never know.

Rebecca gives the notebook a checkmark and gets up to metaphorically stretch her legs.

She dumps her cup in the sink for the cleaners. She goes to the bathroom and spends a while staring at her own face in the mirror, wondering what A Hundred Ships will do to it. Even with her makeup and prosthetic in, she can still make out the damage to her orbit and the seam where filler meets real flesh. There's no feeling when she runs a finger over the top of her left cheek.

She puts on the BBC World Service on the radio and takes a hot shower while the broadcaster drones on about the new coup in Lithuania. She switches the channel twice, trying to find something that catches her attention, but she can't take her mind off the notebook.

Eventually, she gives up, shuts the water off, and gets dry.

She sits down at her desk in a bathrobe and reads There's Another One again.

The phone on her desk rings.

Very few people know her home landline. Not because it's secret; because she doesn't use it for anything.

She looks at the caller ID.

It takes a moment to connect the number to the person.

She picks up.

"Someone from the PRT, identified himself as Acting Chief Director West, asked me if they should send someone after you. In more words."

Of course.

She went down to containment and wrote in a suspected Master-Stranger sapient book which specifically asked to talk to her, and after two minutes pulled a dozen strings to get it checked out against all recommended protocol, and then disappeared completely off the map.

What on Earth was she thinking would happen—

She was thinking this is the most important thing to happen in decades and this is the time to cash in my chips, except she wasn't thinking about the follow-through—

She was thinking I'm the Chief Director of the PRT and I have the authority, except her authority isn't unquestionable these days, that title won't last the month, and a dozen vipers are waiting for the slightest sign of weakness to tear her down and take her place, and even those committed to the common cause don't trust her judgment anymore—

Part of her was thinking none of this matters, none of it is real; she knows it's not true in any meaningful way, but in her gut she was racing to the finish line to tear away this veneer and see the reality the Spirit had waiting for her underneath—

"Why are you telling me this?"

"It improved the numbers."

What does that mean.

It means they're coming, because otherwise this is useless information. Alcott told them they should come; she said "in more words", but in what words? West wouldn't ask Alcott if it improved the end-of-the-world odds; he's been coming around to the prophecy, but he's still scoping his operations for the short term. They must have asked—if she would make a run for it?—she could obviously have done that any time without any notebook—no, they think she's Mastered, so they'll have asked if she'd act against them? Civilian casualties caused by Alexandria?

No, Alcott didn't say they bought one of her questions. She said they asked her if they should come after Rebecca. They wouldn't have thought to call up Alcott to ask for advice on a compromised Alexandria; they'd have called WEDGDG first, or, realistically, just sent a response team. They must have tapped her phone. No, her lines are secure; Tagg's been tapping Alcott's phone all along, because she's still living out of a civilian home under heavy protective custody, not an actual secure location, and Tagg would have kept it quiet because she's the Mayor's niece, and someone must have reported it upwards when they tried to get a voice ID for an unknown caller and found a match for the Chief Director.

And whatever order all of this happened in, the committee put two and two together and started moving. So West called Alcott to ask what the hell Rebecca was doing, so what did Alcott say to him?

It's not important the exact conversation. The outcome is that the combination of actions Alcott took optimized their odds for the end of the world, apparently, and those actions are—

Knock knock.

Why are they knocking and not breaking down her door?

Doesn't matter; it gives her valuable seconds to think. She doesn't want to deal with this. They're going to try to read the notebook, and they're not going to take no for an answer, and she's going to have to explain her thought process, and even if she impossibly manages to talk them around it'll take months to get anywhere if at all.

The outcome Alcott is going for is that she's pressured into—escaping? She can blast through the window and be outside the city in moments. Legend will come after her, if they call him, but one-on-one she can talk him down. She can call for a door. What does that buy her? What does that buy the world?

It's just giving her more pointless balls to juggle, so that can't be the end goal.

Her eyes move to the notebook.

She was planning on spending days, maybe weeks, building her arsenal for Dressing Room. She considered running her selections by the Number Man, though she was leaning against; she doesn't trust him. She has the option, here, to skip all of that and just get out of this universe.