Right.

She missed some of that. It's not like her, but her mind is scattered after that conversation on Scion. She needs to focus. Rebecca puts a check next to the responses and, opposite Omniglot and Anything You Can Do, writes "20" and "400".

She's not sure how to score the latter since it's a long-term investment. With those clarifications, she's almost certainly going to find something worth it on her journey. If she lives to hundreds of years across hundreds of universes—and isn't that a daunting yet intoxicating thought—it'll almost certainly be one of the ones to pay off the most, next to Battle Maiden and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. But she needs to live long enough for that first. The clincher may be that part of her finds the notion of making herself even faster at learning endlessly tempting.

(Omniglot is useful, but mostly in the early hours of very first contact. She thinks she can manage. She used to pilot reachout projects in the early days when Cauldron was still focusing on expanding and putting out feelers across the multiverse, and it's not quite the same because alternate Earths tend to share linguistic ancestry, but she expects some of the experience to transfer.)

Now she thinks about it, is "being better than everyone at everything" part of her idea of living her best life as her best self?

...maybe not everyone, but being a cut above the rest and excelling at everything she puts her mind to, being at least ninth decile if not ninety-ninth percentile...

Yes, she thinks.

Perhaps one could call it a character flaw, call it pride or arrogance, but she can't bring herself to resent her brain for it. Her first powers gave her the ability to back it up—or maybe it was having those tools that lured her into the habit of enjoying it?—and now with this, she can truly have her cake and eat it.

She crosses out the "400" on Anything You Can Do and changes it to "600".

Moving on:

Name: Personal Space - Cost: 3 ☐
No one can touch you intimately if you don't want them to. You can still be struck in a fight or bumped into in crowds, but things like hugs and kisses and sex only happen if you're okay with them.

Name: Closed Book - Cost: 1 ☐
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly read your thoughts or feelings.

Name: Indelible - Cost: 1 ☐
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly alter your thoughts or feelings.

Name: Iron Will - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires Closed Book and Indelible)
You are immune to all forms of mental illusion, alteration, interference, or control. Even extreme torture, extended solitary confinement, advanced brainwashing techniques, and so on cannot touch you. You can be lonely but not cripplingly lonely. You can be upset but not traumatized. (You can choose to allow specific effects like communicative telepathy on a case-by-case basis.)

Personal Space is niche for Rebecca. She's not averse to most contact,  and maybe she's overestimating how well she'll deal with sexual assult, not having experienced it herself, but she think by the time someone has overpowered her to that point, she has more important problems to deal with. She scores that "2".

Closed Book, Indelible, and Iron Will are obviously invaluable, except:

There are some forms of precognition in this universe which we speculate to work by surveying the world and using the observations to simulate how the future will pan out. In a sense, this could be said to involve reading brains to predicting what they will do next. The methodology might range from atomic-level particle simulations to generating abstract models of minds (and the thoughts in them) by interpreting particle-level data. How do these interact with Closed Book?

Also, should I be parsing "specific effects like communicative telepathy" as "similar to communicative telepathy" or "an example being communicative telepathy"? I'm assuming I can allow, say, demonstrative illusions; can I consent to a mind-control effect being placed on me to enforce non-violence in a meeting place, for example?

Closed Book has no problem protecting you from powers like that.

'Communicative telepathy' is an example, not a constraint, yes. You can allow any effect you want, but only if you correctly understand what it would do - someone can't say "will you allow my communicative telepathy?" and trick you into allowing their mind control that way.

So Closed Book works on simulational precognition which includes looking at the atoms in my brain as a necessary step, but not "true" precognition which works by future-telling physics or future-telling magic; is that right? Or does it exclude the second too?

If I take Iron Will, can I choose to allow an exception to Closed Book, allowing someone to read my mind (and use precognition on me)? Assuming I can't already do that with just Closed Book. I have precognitive allies and I'd like to be able to let them use it on me when needed.

Closed Book will also protect you from "true" precognition if the "true" precognition involves looking closely at your thoughts or feelings, or at predicted future actions that are revealing of your thoughts and feelings. The result and the mechanism both matter but the result matters more.

Iron Will encompasses its prerequisites and lets you allow exceptions to them.

She's glad she asked for clarification now.

To make sure I understand this correctly: someone could use precognition of any type to find out what attack would damage me the most, but any type of precognition would fail if they were trying to drug me into telling them my thoughts? And I'm guessing any gray area in between depends on the specifics and what I feel importantly counts as my private thoughts and feelings?

And she puts a checkmark on the Iron Will clarification.

Yes, that sounds right. But they wouldn't have to be drugging you for the precognition to fail; even just asking you personal questions, or studying your responses to events, could fall under Closed Book if the result revealed your thoughts or feelings in ways that ordinary conversation wouldn't.

Does "thoughts" include, for example, contingency plans which I have for enemy action? If they're only in my head, I mean; I'm guessing if I wrote them down on paper somewhere and they read it in their precognition that doesn't count.

Or she's still underestimating the scope of Closed Book. It shockingly more potent than she initially imagined. Maybe it counts if it's her personal diary?

Yes. If you wrote them down then they can be discovered by looking at where you wrote them down but they still can't be discovered by looking at how you think and act.

✔ Could you group Iron Will, Indelible and Closed Book? Score 800.

Then:

Name: It Gets Better - Cost: 5 ☐
You're going to be okay.
Your mind and body may never be perfect, but they are yours, and cannot permanently be taken from you. In time you will heal from any injury, escape any imprisonment, and recover from any trauma; maybe not in exactly the ways you hoped, but always in ways you're okay with.

The notebook already answered the question about death which she wanted to ask. Absolute security for five points. She doesn't know why anyone wouldn't pick this. 800.

Name: The Great Equalizer - Cost: 8 ☐
Where you go, Fate shatters. Forms of prophecy that were once perfectly reliable stop working, or show a broad array of possibilities instead of a single coherent future. Imbalances of magical luck wash out, leaving everyone lucky and no one able to leverage their luck against an opponent. If you stay in the same world for a year and a day, this effect will be permanent even after you leave and even if someone tries to constrain the future anew in your absence.

This seems... just bad. Closed Book, with her new understanding, obviates much of the value against enemies, and this symmetrically cripples her allies in a way she can't control. Even if she can get a modification to include an off switch, she can't see getting much use out of it. Luck and fate might be things the Iron Will suite doesn't defend against against, but the marginal benefit of that compared to the sledgehammer this takes to the fabric of the universe? She writes "0", but asks the question anyway:

Do things like luck and fate get blocked by Iron Will? If someone curses me to be fated to die, or a close ally I regularly work with, for example. Even if the lucky coincidences aren't acting directly on me, they're still trying to influence me and probably hinging on facts about my responses to events that are only accessible in my mind?

If someone curses you or a close ally to be fated to die, Iron Will won't necessarily protect you, depending on the details of how that specific type of curse works, because the result isn't mind-affecting. Iron Will would only protect you if the curse needed to affect your mind specifically in order to function and couldn't succeed any other way.

Could there be a power which specifically only excludes me from fate (except specific cases I choose to allow), without breaking fate for everyone else outside local ripple effects from my actions? I have the same concern as before that this might indiscriminately hurt my allies' capabilities as well.

I'm not sure. I can think about it, but I might not be able to come up with anything. I'll try though!

It's okay if you can't. It might not make my final list anyway, since it sounds like it'll be only situationally useful.

And because she has It Gets Better.

That's all of the Yourself powers done. She takes a look at the table in the back to review her current build.

Something seems odd about these two but I'm not sure what to do about it. Maybe just omit A Thousand Ships from the cumulative score count?

Her first thought is: 70 points is incredibly generous.

Well, it's not a video game; it's not an exercise balanced for difficulty. Still—and she vaguely flagged this feeling on her initial readthrough, but it's still different to see in hard numbers—she can get most things she cares about and still have a bit under half her points left. As a first pass, she's thinking everything down to Inner Strength + Lightfoot, and possibly Personal Hygiene. 41 points spent, 29 remaining.

A quick skim to check if anything under that cut line she'd like to re-score.

• What's In A Name she should discount further because it's redundant with Iron Will and Closed Book.
• Seeing Inner Strength + Lightfoot so close to the cut is slightly disconcerting, because she does want that, but the chain does cost 8, so she thinks the placement is correct.

That seems like it. She adds a note,

This is very nicely formatted. Thank you for the catch about A Thousand Ships and A Hundred Ships; I wasn't thinking about that. You can just delete the A Thousand Ships row, and in the notes column for A Hundred Ships add "A Thousand Ships omitted from table"?

I'd also like to decrease the score of What's In A Name to 2. If I want to make changes like that, can I just edit or write in the table?

The PRT's ERP system has a clever algorithm to resolve exclusions and dependencies, but they don't need that kind of complexity here.

Do you have any overall comments about my build, like redundancies or synergies I'm missing, or other mistakes?

Also, while we're at a stopping point, do you have any news on my earlier question about my existing powers yet?

Yes, you can just cross things out and write replacements and I can neaten things up afterward.

I'm not sure what you mean about redundancies and I think I might be missing something about how you think of them. Could you name some powers you see as being redundant or partially redundant and explain why you see them that way? It seems odd to me that you think of Immunity System as partially redundant with It Gets Better but maybe what you're looking for from Immunity System is different from what I'm expecting.

I'm still working on a power to let you keep your existing powers in a more permanent way with fewer downsides, but I think I might have it figured out pretty soon.

I was thinking of it as partially redundant because gaseous poisons are one of the few widely accessible ways to kill me, I don't want to die, and It Gets Better prevents me from permanently dying. Immunity System still adds the value of preventing poisons from causing me to fail to protect things or achieve objectives, which is why it's not fully redundant. But yes, I think that's a poor example of redundancy since it's more about how I relate to the powers than about the powers themselves.

A better example might be What's In A Name being partially redundant with Iron Will because most true-name magics I've heard of, and am worried of, involve being able to control or influence someone whom you know the true name of. (Is that correct?) That's why I asked to decrease its score.

Okay, I think I see what you mean now about It Gets Better and Immunity System. A lot of the name magic that What's In A Name protects against is forms of influence or divination that Iron Will would also cover, but not all—for a simple example, lots of places with true name magic have kinds that can be used to find someone's location, and Iron Will won't protect against that. But of course that's a lot less important in most situations than protecting against mind control.

I don't think I see any major redundancies along those lines in the powers you're favouring. I do think it might be worth pointing out that all the appearance powers synergize with each other, and if you have a lot of points left over, Perfect Hair and Emerald Orbs and even Like Roses could be worth picking up just for their indirect effects even if you aren't interested in their direct ones, as long as you won't actively mind having them. Having more appearance powers makes things like Inner Strength work a little better, and it sounds like you care a lot about your body working well and staying intact even though it already works really well and is really hard to hurt.

She puts a check on the response about redundancy.

You did mention that the appearance powers have synergies and indirect effects, but I glossed over it a bit; thank you for reminding me.

She thinks for a bit and corrects Perfect Hair to 10 and Emerald Orbs and Like Roses to 5, and adds the note "Loop back" to them.

I might loop back to them to ask you more about those benefits, if I have the slack at the end. For now I want to look at the Power of Friendship section.

✔