“YES. USE THE BOOK.”

Then the feeling was gone, and she was lying on her side on the alley street with a slight ache between her temples with her lungs heaving for breath.

After several long moments of a mix of awe mixed together with a tired sort of despairing cheer, she sat up and flipped to the notebooks page.

She began reading over the list once more.

What is metanarrative protection? How powerful is it?

Did demigods have that sort of power? That could explain the stories of them doing seemingly impossible feats. That it was phrased as narrative protection unnerved her a bit, though.

You're back!

The examples I already wrote get across some of the idea. Like if you took Inner Strength, you wouldn't have the problem of accidentally hitting someone super hard (unless that would end up with a more dramatic and satisfying outcome)! Or Omniglot not having you end up forgetting old languages, or other pieces of knowledge that aren't languages as your mind makes space.

Okay, so not quite the level she was initially thinking of. Still, useful.

She was not leaving Golarion. There was simply too much to be done here.

Skipping over the first few vain options, she immediately chose  

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.

…

How does My Ears are Burning work? Does it work on Gods? Does it work on the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed?

Um, you still have to interpret the thoughts. It just means you won't be overloaded by them... most God-thoughts you can't understand. Also it might not apply to the Spirit. Dunno.

Does apply to mortals and probably many outsiders, though.

That's an instant addition then. It wasn't as powerful as Detect Thoughts but also in some ways it was excessively better. She doubted that it actually worked on Gods at all. Possibly the notebook exaggerates to some degree? Or while it won't get detected as telepathy it would get blocked by some other method?

Some of these do have issues of being able to turn them off and on. It would be hard to handle secrecy constraints with that. Being able to make trustworthy deals without the other side being forced to assume you're mindreading them and thus playing on a level higher (and so they're restricted what actions they can take without you exploiting them) is useful.

Probably also polite.

Can I have the ability to turn it off for specific people? Do you allow modifications at all?

If the strange ''Spirit'' behind all of this was giving her absurd abilities, surely it would be fine with her shifting them a bit to be more reasonable.

Sure! I can do modifications if they keep the general spirit of the power. A bunch choose to change options to seem less like mind control, though they're usually metanarrative rather than mind control to whatever degree that is easier and what you prefer.

Right. The mind control options.

She'll face those when she gets there.

Reading more closely than she did last time, the way these options are phrased either means this is a God beyond Pharasma or something very weird is going on.

Well, the latter is true either way.

The world does not look like it should if the Spirit of Femininity dropped on anyone, likely even a young teen noble girl in Oppara. Unless they did and wasted a bunch of points on simple options and still became Empress, and it just wasn't known how she became so impressive.

Maybe this is what happens if a God isn't restricted or long-term thinking, it just drops ninth-level equivalents on specific people?

She selects the rest of the easy choices.

Battle Angel, Battle Demon, and Battle Maiden are clear choices. She also doubts they're a match for gods, but against mere humans they'll likely be quite useful.

Grabbing the three money powers is also useful. She thinks this will probably make gold worthless eventually? Or does metanarrative protect against that?… how. (Does it just mind control them into not caring as the money fades, and then if this is a Good power, somehow also make so they still experience the positive effects from that? Wouldn't that still mess with money? She wasn't an Abadaran). An easy test with this would just be to go purchase a good headband.

How do the money powers work? Will there be issues due to creating gold from nowhere? What kinds of money does it work on? Surely not souls?

Closed Book, Indelible, and Iron Will are obvious choices as well. Immunity to mind control is rather a necessity.

I'd like the Iron Will and related modified such that I can deliberately-carefully allow effects past.

She might need to go under a Truthtelling or a Detect Thoughts deliberately. Also they said the Starstone shifted your mind/soul to be like a God.... she had not been expecting to think of any form of Godhood anytime soon. Or ever, when she was being honest with herself.
This threw into relief that she was still not really expecting any of this to be true, despite the vision from Milani, that this would end up being a dream or demonic hallucination or whatever else.

Delphine set the notebook aside for a moment and stared up at the sky from this random alleyway.

Then she shook herself immediately and grabbed the notebook. If this was real, this was the most important thing to occur within the last century (she was not going to say it was more important than Aroden dying).

Um, you won't have any issues with the economy not working. Beyond the obvious problems if you buy all the land, or people getting annoyed at you for purchasing every magic item. It will resolve itself in a reasonable manner, based basically off your preferences. Souls.. might work if it is a reasonable currency to be trading in, but probably it would try for something else first like gold or magic or energy.

... Think of it like the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed having prophecy it can use to know what to nudge.

 

Sure, I can modify that! You should think carefully before weakening your defenses!

Oh.

It had Prophecy. This made everything click into place. It was throwing this level of power at her and also acting to do interventions… and presumably it did not have the other Gods also trying to push the future as much since Prophecy was broken.
Rather, it had something like prophecy, but still.

Prophecy provided an explanation for why this seemingly had not happened before. Had this obscure God managed to find the secret to getting prophecy back and was now selling it to the other Gods at the rates something like that deserves? Would Delphine find a dozen new churches to the Spirit within the next year or two? Should she worry about Prophecy returning changing up how adventurers do quests?

Does the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed operate in Golarion? Are they trading its sortof prophecy with the Golarion Gods?

I'm an avatar of it, so it is operating in Golarion!

I don't think the Spirit does that? It is far away and it has troubles talking with some Gods as well.

Why does it have trouble talking with Gods??? It obviously created a perfectly good human-like Outsider-in-a-book. Maybe its like one of those horrors you sometimes hear whispers of yet somehow less awful?

I mean beyond you, and the direct interventions needed for the powers you'll give me and the direct metanarrative for that.

As far as I know, no!

Weird. Maybe it was primarily centered about other planets or planes, and it was just sending out powers to places it cared somewhat about? 

(A part of her said it was because to save Golarion, the Spirit only needed Delphine, but the Spirit's domains don't seem to actually be sane human-like values — like Sarenrae where it was human-like but probably strange and weird in various ways. Also there was no way she was strictly the best person to give the notebook to, even if you postulated something something best person along the femininity/doing-good tradeoff axis. She credits Aroden for knowing most of those concepts.)

Back to mind-control powers.

While prophecy made these significantly less like mind control, some of them seemed like they would still be most easily implemented through mind control or at least abusing others. If you have a God personally manipulating cause-and-effect to bring about beneficial outcomes for you in these ways, then it strays into questions of… she does not actually have terminology or existing frames for thinking about this. It is like when the Splendor 30 Outsider convinces the adventurer to be friends (and then drags his soul to the Abyss, because that's obviously a Succubus). No, not even quite that. Those are sometimes definitely mind control. However sometimes it is knowing the right words to convince the person, in that these words do actually make them feel that way. This was less that, and more they will end up feeling that way regardless of what you say. She wasn't sure if that was beter or worse, she was leaning towards worse.

The question then was whether that mattered. She was being given powers that would make a Greater Succubi jealous. Even if she (foolishly) restricted her usage of them to those that were certainly permissible targets, she should choose the most effective and powerful combinations that she could imagine. 

And there were many targets that she imagined where these powers would be useful. She had always known in the back of her mind that she was not Iomedean enough not to betray an implicit truce if it was important enough. It hurt to acknowledge that gap separating her from those she felt truly understood the horrors of the world.
She was not Asmodean in her interpretation of agreements, but nor was she Iomedean where one tries to leave the other purely better off. Nor was she Abadaran, for they were the Iomedean ideal through a Neutral lens. She would pressure and twist as it benefitted her, to whatever degree that was beneficial. If it made her easily given word less valuable, then so be it.

(Idly, she wondered whether she would end up Lawful Evil before the end of the month.)

Captive Audience wouldn't be useful enough. With enough Splendor enhancements, you could skip that sort of problem.

Abusing Bestest Friend to acquire a specific magical creature which had some side benefit that would be hard to get otherwise was a question that she tabled. Reading a full Bestiary had never been a good use of her time.

She immediately wrote a tick mark next to Undiplomatic Immunity. She wasn't sure that it could be done with just prophecy without other significant knock-on effects. It would still be massively useful.

Delphine stares at several of the options that might be bendable. She is not quite sure it is in the spirit of the matter to bend them, or whether she should.
She doubts that she can muster enough love by any reasonable definition to use I Can Fix Them on anyone she hates enough to use it upon. 
Similarly, the restrictions to friends for Agree to Agree make it less plausibly useful with alteration.

She doesn't actually want a true love. Not that she doesn't like romance — though admittedly it has never been a priority — but rather that it never seemed like a good investment of time. Rather, it was a negative investment of time. The number of stories she heard of people settling down with families when just a couple of years before they were powerful adventurers had always made her shudder. It was good! Though, she maybe had some trouble really feeling that. It was a trap when one had goals like hers, a trap that she didn't want to fall into.
However. Being able to specify your true love combined with them being in some sense your best sort of love was extremely powerful. Working together could do wonders, it was how humanity got this far. Just, your average marriage even among adventurers is not the sort where they uncomplicatedly improve each other (along the metrics that dominate her considerations).

Does 'true love' mean what I expect it to mean? That is, it fits my sense of what kindof person I would be best allied with and presumably also like since those are what I want? I don't want them to simply maximally satisfy the love feeling within me.

Also are they strictly from the existing population, or are they potentially created?

Like most of the metanarrative powers, it tries using methods that you would endorse and are easy for the Spirit. If you want the perfect match but strictly from currently alive humans, then there will be less finagling behind the scenes - but also that category makes less sense with how the narrative works. There are lots of possible-currently-alive humans that would produce the same world you live in.

But yes, it will try to choose a person that you would endorse and not in a tricksy way.

So. True love it is, then. She doesn't take the powers about them forgiving her, and definitely not any of the sex ones. True Love's Kiss is an easy choice because of being able to break arbitrary curses. She has enough protection that she would probably be fine most of the time anyway, but this will help protect them as well.

She takes Popular as well. Famous is a maybe, but has greater downside risks due to higher awareness. She doesn't actually trust the metanarrative, or perhaps her sense of the metanarrative, for protecting her from all of basic cause and effect. Becoming a famous absurdly powerful adventurer gets attention, which she wants, but not everywhere immediately.

She grabs Well Endowed and Hollow Leg just so she can get Inner Strength.

As well as Mysterious Allure. Possibly obsoleted by sufficient Splendor but it will help.

She stares at the number of points left... did the Spirit simply give enough points to get practically all the good options and then force her to choose more minor options?

Maybe?

Though there's still useful options you've ignored.

Not that I'm saying anything because you keep forgetting to ask me half your thoughts!

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and Anything you can do. If the metanarrative is powerful enough this means she can become a large variety of sorcerers without the downsides. Plausibly better if she can get direct heritage from an Angel?

She grabs a couple of the nice ones like hygiene. It would waste time that could be spent using this power.

Eventually she's her list.

I've chosen the powers. Is there anything more I need to do?