Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And the options sorted in descending order of score per point cost sounds good. And if you could include the letter gr

She stops mid-word, scans the rest of the list again. She strikes out the "A"s next to both the Ships powers and draws little arrows from them to the side to write an explanation:

On second thought, there are few enough power dependencies that we don't need the letter codes; they're a require-forbid shorthand I use for more complicated projects at work. If you could just write in text in an extra column in the table what each given power excludes and requires should be good. So maybe

Power	Cost	Score	Score/Cost	Dependencies
A Thousand Ships	1	40	40	Excludes: A Hundred Ships
A Hundred Ships	1	50	50	Excludes: A Thousand Ships

(But this example isn't ordered.)

I appreciate your effort.

That makes sense! I can definitely do that. If you like, I can start keeping the table just after the list right now, and keep it updated as you score things?

Sounds good.

And she moves on to the next power.

Name: What's In A Name - Cost: 1 ☐
Magic to divine true names will accept whatever alias you choose to think of as your true name. Magic to use your true name against you will fail.

Based on what people do with true names in mythology, her instinct is to score this high, but she restrains herself. That would be a mistake not knowing what the actual base rates. Or if there are cheaper alternatives to spending a point on it.

How common is true-name magic? Are there usually other accessible ways to defend against hostile magic using true names? Specifically, I'm wondering if I'd be missing important edge cases if I take Iron Will down below but not What's In A Name.

Are there ways to affect the likelihood I interact with worlds or individuals with true-name magic?

After a pause, she adds,

Is there true-name magic in my world? If not, does choosing Stay Put guarantee I'll never encounter true-name magic, making this power useless, or is it still possible for a visitor from another world to bring true-name magic with them?

Her hypothesis, based on the powers immediately preceding it, is that What's In A Name is intended as not a functional defense power, but a comprehensive renaming power for those seeking an opportunity to reinvent themselves; the magic immunity perk is just bolted on as a bonus. In that case, she shouldn't necessarily be making inferences about the strategic relevance of true names from the fact that this power is offered.

Unless she's rounding in the wrong direction, and the powers offered are predictive, and she should be expecting her personal beauty and hairstyle to become suddenly more strategically relevant in the near future, which... is a disconcerting thought.

No, the notebook would have said. And her idea of living her best life as her best self doesn't involve high-stakes beauty pageants.

On a meta level: should I be thinking of these powers in general as reflective of the type of challenges I should expect to face in the wider multiverse I'll have access to?

The likelihood that you'll interact with true-name magic is most strongly affected by how you feel about true-name magic. If the idea of it resonates with you, if it seems like the sort of thing that should or would exist in the kind of world that you'd want to visit, then it's much more likely to come up. If it seems silly or unreasonable, or the kind of scary where you don't think it's interesting and just want to not be near it (as opposed to the kind that's fascinating and compelling), then it's much less likely. If it's just sort of aesthetically and thematically neutral to you, then it's up to chance, and that kind of chance is very hard to predict.

I don't know whether there's true-name magic in your world, but it's very possible for visitors from other parts of the multiverse to bring it with them to places that didn't have it before.

The standard list of powers reflects what the Spirit thinks is a good idea to offer and what's been popular to ask for, but neither of those things necessarily says very much about what your journey through the multiverse will look like. In general, the powers are more tuned toward trying to offer people the kinds of things they want for themselves, rather than trying to prepare them for the sort of trouble they're likely to encounter, partly because the first thing matters more to the Spirit and partly because predicting what people are likely to encounter is pretty difficult and partly because people with the Spirit's power rarely encounter big enough trouble to slow them down.

She doesn't like Master powers. A lot. She's already unusually lucky in being resilient to most of them, but they're still one of the few things which can threaten her. There's nothing fascinating and compelling about them. The answer sounds reasonably conclusive. Protection for a rare edge case isn't worth a lot when she expects to have other defences. She writes down "10", with a note, "Unlikely to need due to selection."

Could you add the extra note in a new "Notes" column on the table, please?

That the powers are more indicative of the target audience than their anticipated journey is good confirmation.

Of course! There, done.

She thanks the notebook and moves on.

Name: Angelic Tones - Cost: 2 ☐
Your voice is supernaturally beautiful and you can sing in any vocal range.

Name: Emerald Orbs - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, your eyes are exactly the right colour. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. Your eyes can be ANY colour this way. Lightless black voids? Brilliant white stars? Limpid pools of endless sapphire? They will look exactly the way you'd want them to look if you were writing a self-insert fanfic about this exact moment of your life.

Name: Perfect Hair - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, you have exactly the right hairstyle. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It is not limited to physically or logistically plausible hairstyles.

Name: Size Difference - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, you are exactly the right height. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It will usually keep any height changes fairly subtle, but at dramatic moments you might discover yourself able to shrink to the size of a bee or grow to the size of a giant.

Again, these feel designed for people who aren't her. Depending on how liberally the Spirit lets her interpret these, some might qualify as minor or moderate superpowers in themselves, but those are clearly not their central use cases. Yet someone, somewhere, some time must be deciding to take the ability to have great hair all the time over the ability to never be injured, or this wouldn't be here.

She's unlikely to find them worth the cost, but she'll ask her questions anyway to rate them properly.

Does Angelic Tones allow me to sing outside normal human range?
Does it affect only pitch, or does it apply to volume, enunciation, timbre and so on? Could it let me should loud enough to shatter glass and deafen people, for example?
Does it apply only to physical audio, or could it provide access to figurative or magical forms of sound?

For Size Difference, what determines "dramatic moments"? Can I at will become the size of a bee to sneak without being seen, or grow to the size of a giant to fight a giant monster? What are cases where I might want to change size like that but wouldn't be able to because they're insufficiently dramatic?

There's no obvious way the power would let her do anything about it, but her mind jumps to the Simurgh's song for Angelic Tones.

Angelic Tones helps a lot with learning magical forms of music in other worlds, and helps somewhat with magic involving the figurative voice. It makes you much better at using your voice in all kinds of ways, including in volume and enunciation and so on, but usually it doesn't let you shout loud enough to deafen people because deafening shouts don't sound very nice and it is mostly a power about sounding nice. It's also a power about using your voice supernaturally well, though, so if you find a form of music or voice magic that involves deafening shouts, Angelic Tones will still help you be better at them.

Size Difference usually picks one specific dramatic moment as the right time for you to develop unsubtle voluntary size-shifting, and then you can use the power however you like after that. If you're the sort of person who prefers to have that kind of power from the start, though, it's likelier to just let you do that without waiting for a dramatic moment to unlock it.

Angelic Tones is more useful than she expected, less powerful than she hoped. She puts down a "20" next to it, and another "Note: assuming taking Isekai Roulette and extraordinary music plausible".

That Size Difference works like that is incredibly surprising to her and makes it much, much more valuable than she was imagining. Especially with the natural synergy with Brute powers and flight. She's already thinking of a dozen applications and there must be more that aren't occurring to her. She puts down "200" next to it, and the only reason it's not higher is that she's expecting to become so saturated with tools that additional superpowers may turn out more redundant than not.

Name: Dressing Room - Cost: 3 ☐
No matter how ridiculous your outfit, it will stay pristine and perfect, unless it would be more dramatic for you to be artfully bedraggled. You can use any quiet moment to yourself to quick-change your clothes, shoes, nails, and hairstyle into a completely new look. (You cannot change your hair length or colour this way without Perfect Hair, but you can braid or style it.)

Name: Personal Hygiene - Cost: 1 ☐
You are always clean and fresh, never needing to use a bath or toilet.

They're tempting.

It's hypocritical, she realizes, when she just ridiculed the vanity powers. She can think of ways to leverage Dressing Room strategically, but it's not why she really wants it; her immediate thought was just that she spends so much time switching outfits every day. Though her current jobs definitely make her an outlier in that regard, and that concern might not persist for long—notebook or not. And with Personal Hygiene, she's already halfway there because of her biology, and yet she's still looking at it, trying to weigh it against all the other things she could buy with a point.

In her defence, there are only so many hours in a day.

She writes opposite Dressing Room,

It sounds slightly ambiguous here: do I need to own the clothes I change into already, or is this power able to conjure clothes altogether? Where do the outfits I change out of go? I'm also curious how the definition of "clothes" stretches. Can I quick-change into power armor? Can I teleport my belongings to me or away from me (or create new ones) by "changing" into them?

She keeps reading...

Name: Like Roses - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Personal Hygiene)
You smell lovely. Your scent is unique to you, and may involve any combination of warm spices, floral notes, petrichor, or other things you think smell good. You do not need any justification for why you smell like this.

...and it's back to stupid. She writes "0" next to it, and for notational completeness, "Requires: Personal Hygiene". She waits for the answer to her Dressing Room question.

The long explanation of Dressing Room goes something like this:

You can use Dressing Room to summon any outfit you've worn before, including clothing, accessories, hair styling, and things like power armor or enchanted items. If you're sentimentally attached to something that you've carried in your pockets, purse, backpack, or other storage accessory before, you can summon the sentimentally valuable item by summoning the storage accessory you carried it in and focusing on how the sentimentally valuable item should be in it. That will always at minimum summon the item as it appeared when it was last in that storage accessory, even if it's been destroyed since then; sometimes it can also summon the item right to you from wherever it's been lost to, or as of the last moment it was intact. Sometimes the item will be duplicated, sometimes not, but you usually can't count on one of those things definitely happening and not the other unless the item has secrets in it that you care a lot about keeping, in which case it'll almost always be summoned and not duplicated.

Without having worn something before or being able to pocket-summon it as sentimentally valuable, you're limited to clothing and accessories that don't have any special properties outside their materials and design, and where you understand the materials and design well enough to be able to tell by examining the item whether its special properties should work or not. So the better you are at understanding the design and function of power armor, the better power armor you can summon without having worn it before, but you can still summon normal clothing just fine even if you don't know exactly how to manufacture it. And you can't summon most magical items this way, but if you learn a lot about magical materials and how to use them, you can make plenty of interesting stuff out of them with Dressing Room.

She can make infinite power armor. She can make infinite tinkertech. She spent no small amount of time studying Hero's work back in the day, when they still didn't fully understand what they do now about tinkers, and she could broadly understand the specific physics and mechanics of anything he spent time explaining—just not build it exactly as he could. She could certainly tell if his jetpack was broken. She'd have to study the schematics and grill the tinker on maintenance procedures to have confidence she's not summoning technology one jostle away from catastrophic failure, like how old tinkertech gets when you leave it in storage for too long; but with her enhanced mind, she's estimating that as hours per design, starting from blank.

It's not that very useful against Scion. It might be, if the solution looks something like an interdimensional G-driver—that relevantly classes as clothing, accessories or hair styling—but it's immensely useful against anything else.

And if she takes Isekai Roulette and drops in an underdeveloped world, she can import technology—

Can I conjure any object if it's been in a backpack while I was wearing it (and I remember the specific backpack and its contents at the time), or is that limited to sentimental objects?

It's only guaranteed with sentimental objects. It often works with things you're just really used to carrying, like if you always have a few snacks or a pair of scissors or a deck of cards with you even if you aren't attached to those specific ones; it usually works with things you were carrying very recently and only swapped to another outfit briefly; it's more hit or miss outside of that. Having a better memory helps, and so does being able to cultivate the attitude that the things you're trying to summon are the single clear obvious answer to the question of what should be in that backpack or those pockets. If trying once doesn't work, trying again the exact same way won't work either, but trying again with a change of approach still can.

I have a perfect memory. Anything I've seen once I can almost always remember in exact detail; if I deliberately try when I see it, then I definitely will. I'm thinking of something like assembling a series of labeled backpacks and filling them with a specific list of items each—for example, a travel pack with wilderness survival tools, a combat pack with weapons, a technology pack with commissioned electronic devices, a literature pack with encyclopedias and other reference books—committing them and their contents to memory, and then trying to conjure them later on.

Do you think that will work?

And she was meaning to ask this, but didn't find a good chance to do so earlier; she might as well now:

I was going to ask, as well: I currently already have powers granted by an extradimensional being. That being is more narrowly extradimensional than what the Spirit is. I think if someone naively transported all of my atoms to a completely separate universe in scope of the Spirit, or reassembled my configuration or my mind in a different universe, a lot of the time I would lose contact with that extradimensional being, and might lose some or all of my powers.

Is this something the Spirit will prevent from happening, and if so what form does that take? Would it bring the being with me, would it create a portal from here to the other universe, or something else? I'm concerned about losing my powers, of course, but also concerned that some of those implementations might put me at risk of something following me through to the next universe, or put the next universe at risk by introducing my existing patron to it.

She's guessing that the answer is that she keeps her powers, but she's hoping—

The ideal outcome for me would be if my existing patron were severed from me, but the equivalent powers "baked in" to me instead by the Spirit in a similar indelible way to Spirit-provided powers.

I think having a bunch of different specific backpacks that you put together with the intent of keeping specific inventories in them is pretty likely to work as a way to consistently conjure specific things with Dressing Room! If you want to be extra sure it'll work well, my suggestions are to put personal attention into picking what goes into each backpack, and choose the visual design of the backpacks so that they're aesthetically congruent with their contents in your opinion.

As for your existing powers... it definitely seems like you should be able to keep them without inviting your sponsor's interference in other worlds, but this situation is pretty new to me so I'm not sure offhand if there are any existing powers that would cover it. I'll think about how to design a new power that would do that for you.

Noted.

She is going to commission a tinker to create a hyper-dense information storage smart watch to download as much of the Internet as possible and every e-book and useful nonpublic document she can get her hands on, but backpacks full of hard drives will be a strong backup in case tinkertech doesn't work as she expects.

Somewhere along the line she's taken to thinking as if she's going to take Isekai Roulette, and... she's not going to inspect that just yet.

That is appreciated. Even if by default it's likely to work out well, I would be reassured by the guarantee, and if immunity to effects which normally suppress parahuman powers comes a side perk, it would be a benefit in itself.

(You said before, "Metanarrative powers granted by the Spirit can override anything else, including basic laws of physics or causality." And I get the sense from the description from some of the powers that their effects are categorically enforced without exception. I've been assuming that power nullifiers and similar effects cannot negate the powers granted by the Spirit; is that correct?)

Yes. Power nullifiers, antimagic fields, and other things that normally stop special powers from working do not stop the Spirit's powers from working, though they can sometimes suppress abilities gained through Dragon Fairy Elf Witch or forms of magic learned using Anything You Can Do.

Understood; that's good confirmation.

She keeps going. She'll ask about her agent again later

Name: Just A Little Longer - Cost: 1 ☐
If you push yourself, you can keep doing any task or working on any project indefinitely, visibly strained but never impaired by injury or fatigue. As soon as you stop, you'll collapse with exhaustion and sleep for up to a full day to regain your strength. This only works when what you're doing is personally important to you.

Name: Immunity System - Cost: 3 ☐
You can't get sick or poisoned. You can still use recreational drugs and alcohol normally, but can't overdose.

As with Personal Hygiene, she's already halfway to both of these. She won't have access to the Restful One if she leaves the universe and doesn't immediately come back, but even at baseline she requires less sleep, and she's learned to stay awake for extended periods with only short meditation breaks. Physical fatigue she doesn't experience at all. She is curious, though, for the second:

I'm currently already immune to most poisons and diseases, but I'm wondering about the edge cases relating to air, which I still need:

1. If I go into space and have nothing breathe, I assume that doesn't count as a poison.
2. If I inhale gas which is 20% oxygen, 1% carbon monoxide and 79% nitrogen—20% oxygen is normally enough to survive, but carbon monoxide prevents oxygen from binding to blood, which asphyxiates you despite being in otherwise breatheable atmosphere—I'm guessing that counts as gaseous poison I'd be immune to?
3. What about inhaling an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide?
4. If the above counts, what about being choked, causing all the oxygen in my lungs to reduce to carbon dioxide?
5. If the above counts, what about drowning displacing all the gas from my lungs entirely?

It's a slight risk revealing that weakness, but they're past the point of worrying about that at this point. The strategization upsides of being fully open about her capabilities dwarf anything else.

I think carbon monoxide counts as a poison, but not being able to breathe because you don't have enough of the important parts of air doesn't count as a poison. If you're worried about situations where you might not be able to breathe, you could take lots of appearance powers because those tend to add up to making your body work better even in non-obvious ways, or I could try to design a power for you that addresses that sort of thing more directly.

That makes sense. Let me think about that.

She scans ahead again.

Jumping ahead a bit, but: Battle Angel and It Gets Better cover injury but not death. Does that mean I can still die if I take them?

While she waits for the answer, she goes back and fills in her scores.

• Dressing Room: 300
• Personal Hygiene: 20
• Like Roses: 0
• Just A Little Longer: 30, only because of the "injury" part.

Battle Angel makes you very unlikely to die in fights specifically but doesn't do much for other situations.

It Gets Better says that you're going to be okay. So if you have It Gets Better, you can only die if being dead counts as being okay for you.

So if she takes It Gets Better, then asphyxiation can cause her to fail to achieve her strategic objectives, but can't permanently keep her down.

Rebecca acknowledges the clarification and writes opposite Immunity System "30" and "Partial redundancy with It Gets Better".

Name: My Ears Are Burning - Cost: 6 ☐
You always know exactly what people are thinking, as long as it's about you. This effect is not telepathy and is not blocked by effects that block telepathy. It applies even to people you can't perceive normally. You are never impaired by the flood of information.

So there was, actually, a Thinker the PRT took out in Winsconsin that had this exact power. She made a living selling information on PRT operational procedures to villains and rogues, and it helped her evade capture for a long time, until they figured out the requisite degrees of indirection to slip past her power and took her in. She's the prison warden, now, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. Or who they tell the prisoners is the warden, rather.

The power is only moderately useful if she stays on Earth Bet. She's unsure how this interacts with Scion, or if it's even going to matter what it thinks about her specifically. Most plans that destroy it don't hinge on details like that. It would still be an immense boon in ordinary operational and intelligence work, and likely useful in combat, but—not essential. They have other tools.

If she leaves to another world, where she doesn't have the vast intelligence apparatus available to her on Earth Bet, where she lacks the invisible cloud of precognitive protection that surrounds one who's a Director of the PRT, a member of the Triumvirate, and a name of Contessa's VIP list all at once—this power could be invaluable.

Does this cover anyone thinking about me in the entire universe? Does it work across universes (or is the answer to that "between some universe but not all")? Does it apply to versions of me from different timelines or universes, if I know of specifically of them, and if I don't?

Secondly, does it come with a built-in way to organize the information, or parallel-processing capability to understand all streams at once? Some use cases I'm interested in are:

• Finding out what someone specific in front of me, or someone specific I know by name, is thinking about me (when there are thousands of others doing so at the same time).
• Detecting nearby minds which are thinking about me, but which I otherwise wouldn't know were there.
• Trying to find out what a specific group and its members think of me, without knowing any specific member of that group.
• Trying to scan for any person plotting against me or thinking a particular thing about me, without specific preexisting knowledge of who might be doing so.

Though she can't stop herself from thinking—Does she want this? Is this her, living her best life as her best self? Is "knowing everything anyone ever thinks about her" the way she wants to relate to the people around her? She...

...it's tempting, but in the way becoming God with Somewhere In Mind is tempting, if that would have worked. It means she can stop worrying. It's security, at the cheap price of a humanity she's already whittled down to a husk. She's self-aware enough to know that craves the feeling of control, and this gives her that, but in a way which voids too much that matters. She doesn't know much about the Winsconsin Thinker; the files are redacted carefully to prevent archivial readers from flagging on her power. But from what Rebecca knows, the woman is absolutely miserable.

She thinks that means the answer is "no".

She'll see what the notebook says.

My Ears Are Burning covers everything, within the Spirit's whole range across the multiverse, as long as they're thinking about you specifically in particular and not a version of you from another world or the hypothetical of a person like you or anything like that. The only thing that can block it is the defensive mental powers of another vessel of the Spirit, and then only sometimes.

You can use it to find out what someone specific is thinking about you, whether they're in front of you or not, whether you know them by name or not, as long as you know of some way to distinguish them from everyone else. That works for members of groups too.

You can use it to detect nearby people who are thinking about you who you wouldn't otherwise know were there.

You can use it to find people who are thinking about you in specific ways.

I don't usually recommend it to people, though, because it's... a lot. The power does make sure that you can still think your own thoughts even through the noise of everyone else's, just as well as you could have if you weren't hearing them, but people still tend to find it emotionally overwhelming, and it can make it difficult to form genuine personal or professional relationships, and people who take it tend to find that their lives become much more about what other people think of them than they might have liked. It takes a very specific type of person to be better off in the long run with My Ears Are Burning than with a different power that helps them accomplish what they were looking to accomplish with that one.