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After coming home from a vacation, a 14 hour shift of patting and hugging and nuzzling people can fly by and feel almost refreshing! Although, you do get a bit sore in the throat... but it's sore in a good way! Tomorrow will probably be a much shorter shift. Let's try learning some physics facts that'll be fun to share with people! Like how that "3 filters can let in more light than just 2" thing that she's really having fun grappling and wrapping her head around works. Cynthia walks over to the main room, finding a comfortable lotus position while grabbing the fancy notebook that she asked the apartment building housekeeper to bring together with her laundry. She thinks intensely, wanting her train of thought to start on the right station...
Cynthia chooses to start with the more expensive powers first. The ideal is eliminating as much of the option space early, to avoid the combinatorial explosion of possible options, right? In the threes, there's... superhuman strength! That seems like an OK start! I feel like Friends in High Places can be turned into everything else I need, really. And I think my charm should get me the other kinds of friends... being immune to illness and poisoning... I've put on some seriously-protective PPE for Pandemic Awareness Days, I'm not too worried outside of someone trying to poison my food. I'll just avoid that kind of situation? Gifts produce deadweight loss, no thank you! And you can probably find true love just by dating? Feels vaguely redundant, really.
So then the 2s are left. A conveniently short list, huh. "Effectively tame any animal..." that could be incredibly helpful if I ended up someplace with dangerous animals causing damage! Or useful beasts of burden. Or even here! I want to try doubling down on the time-multiplication. If I can hang out and spend time together with enough people without even doing anything interesting or important, I'll have all the time in the word... Iron Will sounds useful, but also slightly scary. Let's consider it on the second time through?
The 1s seem like they're making the most sense, really. Always being clean and smelling amazing, looking amazing... I want people to to be able to exceed my beauty, honestly. Feels slightly unfair if they can't. If I wanted compliments, I'd just... choose the right friends??? True Love's kiss only works on my "true love." I don't think that'd be enough people.
With the no-brainers, I'm ending up on 13 points left over. Let' just lower our standards a bit, shall we? Perfect singing, perfect hair, an iron will, Fated Lovers, really nothing new in the 4-and-above... that's one final point that I'd maybe want somewhere. For the ultra-beauty?
"As mentioned, it's common to end on choosing a destination. There are 3, although I suspect I know which you'd choose."
| Power Name | Power Cost | Power Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Stay Put | 0 | You're just going to take these powers and keep on keeping on right where you are. |
| Somewhere In Mind | 0 | You have a destination you want to go to, or another CYOA you're pairing this with. You can choose any place, real, historical, fictional, or made up in your own head right now, and the Spirit will take you there. After that, you're on your own as far as further interdimensional travel. |
| Isekai Roulette | 0 | Trust to the will of the Spirit and let it take you where you need to go. It will look at far more options than you could ever know about, and pick something that's likely to be even better for you than whatever you would have chosen on your own. |
"Yep, I'm taking the Chef's Choice. No way is my imagination better than yours. If it's better for me, it'd also bet better in terms of powers to eat using Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. So that power will subsume a vast amount of this table. So that's the combo I'm taking. With my present decisions, I'm 4 points short. I'll be choosing to make it up through... I think Fated Lovers is the least-good effect I've currently chosen. And also Angelic Tones, although that's slightly more dubious."
"Perhaps there's a downside that makes sense? They'll Know is fine, honestly. I don't have powers that affect people's preferences, so I think they'd be fine with me having and using them. Actually, I'd be happy to have my friends knowingly enjoy the benefits of my power; that's barely a downside at all! Realism weakening I can Fix Them probably makes it a non-starter, I don't need points much. Decorative is the least-harmful of the cheaper options. But it seems like it's very annoying for just one point, much like Style of Sisyphus."
"Wait, now that I've added 2 drawbacks (how is There is Another a drawback??), I actually have 81 points total! Let's go back... so, a bunch of things I like add up to 80 points. The Chopping Block has: perfect beauty, perfect singing, maybe Iron Will isn't worth 4 points? Fated Lovers... honestly, I'll just be good at dating. And True Name magic sounds like it could be impossibly dangerous, and I look pretty good as it is. Having Friends in Low, High and Strange Places should get me a lot of things money can't buy, and lots of chances for time-multiplication shenanigans. So, I think that's my build, really."
"A most fascinating build, miss Cynthia. It seems your thinking was money, time, and what money can't buy. I think you had a very clever strategy! What are you thoughts on reviewing it, considering chosen and potential options side by side?" The book doesn't wait for Cynthia's reply before creating a column sorting all the powers she had chosen by their cost, next to a column showing all the options she hadn't taken costing the same. There really isn't anything too tempting in the second column for Cynthia.
"Yeah, I don't think there's anything particularly worth picking up among the unchosen options. Can you give me time to write a letter explaining my situation and freeing up the basic assigned to me, before teleporting me off to somewhere that's even more perfect than anything I could manage to think of? ...would it hurt you if I ripped off a sheet from your pages to write on?"
"No, that wouldn't hurt at all! Actually, I suggest you dictate everything to me. Easier on your end, and it'd prove that there were supernatural forces involved in creating this letter." The notebook begins writing out an explanation for Cynthia's situation, that it is a power traveling across time space, choosing to bless Cynthia with the ability to travel to other dimensions. As well as answering a few NP-complete problems in ways that are easy to verify and impossible to fake, because it has supernatural abilities of that particular type, of course.
Cynthia dictates a letter telling everyone what happened to the notebook, before gently ripping out the page. She walks over to the elevator, letting the housekeeper know through writing invisible ink on the elevator's wall that there's a letter in her apartment that she wants to send to her parents and publicize to the world. The she walks back into her apartment, standing tense in front of the door to her bedroom. "You'll make it so the door opens into the Chef's Choice world instead of my bedroom, right? I can only ever be ready now, so... let's go!" Cynthia decisively starts making her way toward the door (usually leading to) her bedroom.