"In abstract? Yes, all the time. In this specific case? No, I've never seen anyone opt for that option. It is *theoretically* survivable, in the sense that there might be a few people in the multiverse with a workable plan for surviving. I still don't recommend it, unless the idea of having all your works and loves destroyed appeals." 

"Hmm." Her eyes flick up to the previous entry. "...this doesn't really engage with the ethical implications of creating one's own universe."

"It does not. Are they not fairly obvious?" 

"Well I would've thought that the ethical implications of creating your own universe are terrifying enough that people mostly wouldn't... do it... or offer it so casually... maybe I'm mistaken about how casually it's being offered."

"The stakes are very high, you are very unusual, and I do think you'd do a good job, and if you weren't going to do a good job, I'd encourage you to take the options which improve your personal charecter before we created a universe based on that personal charecter." 

"Also if it wasn't clear, each of the Patrons decided mostly on their own recognisance what options to offer you." 

"...what evidence do you have about my personal character?"

"I am very good at reading people." 

"...if you say so." She goes back to reading.

"...are there people who object to being a tree?? Being rewarded for risking turning into a tree seems like free money."

"It entails a nontrivial risk of both immobility and eventually cessation of consciousness if we cannot mitigate it,  a substantial risk of causing potentially undesirable changes to your physical form, and it reintroduces the threat of aging at a power level where lesser forms of immortality are trivial to come by. But it is mainly priced as it is because taking the deal provides slight mitigation to the Originator's own, more severe, version of the problem, and that's how much she's willing to pay for that." 

"Hmm. Speaking of which, actually, I notice that there's at least two separate options to be paid to sacrifice something to help one of you out, and an option to become somehow metaphysically better at sacrificing things? Do those combine in the way my phrasing implies or are they totally unrelated?"

"Crown of Thorns enhances the value and power of your blood specifically, rather than increasing the effect of sacrafice in general." 

"Hmm, all right." She keeps reading.

"So," she says as she reaches the end of the document and starts scrolling back to the beginning, "I notice that this whole conflict seems to be taking place at a power level so mind-boggling that I don't actually have a frame of reference for how useful any of these options are relative to each other or to anything I've ever encountered in my life. That makes it kind of hard to decide what to pick."

"So, if your goal is to be immediately decisively useful to us - that would be extremely hard. I'm not sure it's not possible, but I don't have ideas for doing so. Realistically, your goal here should not, under any circumstances, be to try and fight the Heneral or the Pit directly yourself, at least in the short or medium term. We already have people willing and able to take those risks, and they are in fact extremely strong. If you do want to contribute as much as possible then there are, I think two ways to do it. The first is to come up with a specialised combo of powers which does something very useful for the alliance such that we can incorporate you directly into our broader strategy. We need to fight, but we also need resources and new magic and explorers and diplomats and people to fight all of the hundreds of smaller conflicts which wandering the multiverse saving worlds and toppling tyrants and learning magic has been known to involve. Making yourself into an extremely capable person for those goals would be extremely useful even if you're objectively an order of magnitude weaker than our patrons; even I can only be in nine places at once. The other angle to think about things is to take a "greedy" build. You have a lot of support from the alliance, a lot of protection and ability to be confident you'll be sent up against threats you can probably handle by a well-meaning management. So one sensible form of ten year plan is to design a build which isn't strong now, but which has a lot of potential, and spend nine years getting stronger, whatever that means to you, and then the final year of the war doing something really amazing. Both of these angles require a strong eye to synergy and compounding strength on strength; no single option alone is enough to achieve either of them. It's certainly worth remembering that nothing will prevent you from obtaining further magical enhancement or learning new magic the hard way, or obtaining them as rewards from your mentor later. Beyond those considerations, I think it's very important to remain true to yourself and choose a power and a role which you feel you are capable of performing in happily and sustainably. Burnout is a real problem our agents face and one to be headed off at the first pass, and moreover, many forms of magic genuinely care a lot about personal character, and you'll be limiting yourself if you try to be something you can't be with your whole heart. Better to be our hundredth greatest contributor in a manner that's strong and full of potential than our tenth strongest contributor in a way that will shatter under pressure, and with the Remittances on offer, it would be hard to not reach the power level of our top 100. Perhaps if you designed your build to be deliberately as anti-synergistic as possible? If you unlocked the Litanies and then refused to do anything to train them?" 

"Hmm. All right. ...I think I'd like to know what a deep scan of my soul turns up before I try to make any big decisions."

"Very well." Orden's remaining eye will glow with a warm golden light, and he will make a few arcane gestures. 

What is going on with Esmeralda's soul?" 

So, on the surface level, there is nothing out of the ordinary with Esmeralda's soul. She's a thoughtful, diligent person, with a strong ethical core but definitely more ruthless than kind. She has had a reasonably pleasant life with little in the way of hardship. She's strong-willed, opinionated, and very intense about matters of aesthetics. Her soul is well-shaped for magical potential, but not so much so that you could glance at her and immediately see a one-in-a-hundred-billion talent.

It's only when you get down to the very deepest part of her soul, the oldest and most hidden part, that things start looking weird. Because right in those uttermost depths...

...there is another entire soul, a whole extra person's worth of person, this one structured in a somewhat foreign way. It's the same person as the outer Esme, more or less, but shaped by slightly different experiences, bearing not just potential but real actual magic of a kind which Orden has never before encountered, though it's fairly faint and probably not a major power as he would tend to count things. The two of them are seamlessly conjoined, the alien soul hidden within Esme's like the speck of dirt at the center of a pearl.

But wait, it gets weirder!

The extra soul inside her soul is a bizarre situation involving novel magic but it's still, on some level, basically normal. It may never have happened before but it's the sort of thing you could imagine seeing under the right conditions. The more he examines her soul, though, the more he begins to notice something not remotely normal at all.

"Well fuck. Are you aware that you have two souls? And some third thing ... I have no idea what the third thing is. I'm genuinely amazed that all this could pretend to look normal on the surface."

He starts pouring on the divination magic. What, in the name of the Authority of Hunters Triumphant and the Authority of Hallowed Lore, is going on here? The glow of his eye intensifies. 

"I have what??" she says, sincerely baffled.

Meanwhile, the strangeness obligingly begins to come clear.

This person, chimeric soul and all, has gained the favour of something extremely distant and extremely powerful, something to which Orden's whole local multiverse is just one of countless multiverses that it can peer into and meddle with at will without the slightest fear of being so much as momentarily troubled by any local force—though this one might be especially far from its usual haunts, a bit of a stretch to reach.

Its greatest joy is found in the empowerment of people who resonate with its nature, to allow them to live the lives that are best for them by their own standards, and Esme/Rosy resonated with its nature particularly well and so was particularly well suited to such empowerment. Until this moment, her vast bounty of inviolable boons has been hidden, waiting until the time was right to reveal itself. These powers taken as a whole are almost more like a living thing than a list of abilities: they have the leeway to choose when, where, and how to act, and their single highest goal is to make sure that their bearer leads the right life for who she is as a person and what she wants, including by constraining themselves to never do anything on her behalf that she would find unethical or otherwise disendorse.

The bounty in question includes, but is not necessarily limited to:

• A fairly comprehensive tendency to always have the right appearance, across most possible aspects of appearance. (This does have the downside of making her style very recognizable both straightforwardly and metaphysically, so that it is very hard for her to conceal her identity once she is perceived at all; and in moments of high emotion, she may find it hard to conceal reactions that are being highlighted by the very substance of her being.)
  
  • The power to instantly be wearing any clothes she's ever worn before or is reasonably familiar with, as long as the moment of transition is not directly observed.
    
    • And the ability to pull out of her pocket a copy of any object she's ever held, as long as it fits through the opening of the pocket.
  • Supernatural grace and agility, and the ability to step so lightly as to leave no trace, and to never be harmed by the impact of falling.
  • Total immunity to being harmed by name-based magic.
  • Immunity to illness, poison, starvation, asphyxiation, nutrient deficiencies, and similar.
  • Immunity to getting dirty.


• A handful of useful tricks for combat:
  • Immunity to being injured more than superficially in battle, excepting injuries which are deeply aesthetically appropriate.
  • Deep insight into gaps in an opponent's defenses.
  • A guarantee that no matter who she's fighting, she will always be able to match them at least long enough to retreat to safety, even if they are vastly more skilled and powerful on every level.


• A guarantee that wherever she goes, she will find opportunities there to generate enough value to legitimately afford to buy anything for sale in the local economy. In context, this power applies more to the local multiverse as a whole than any specific world within it.


• A guarantee that no matter what happens to her, she will eventually recover from it to be okay again by her own standards as defined by her powers watching on her behalf.
  • And that when she treasures any item or ability so deeply that it seems like a part of herself, it will literally, metaphysically become so, subject to the same protections as the rest of her.


• The power to be beloved of nearly all animals, and to tame any animal with kindness and gifts of food.
  • She can also tame houses if she lives in them for long enough.
  • The whole underlying nature of a world itself becomes slightly kinder in her presence, persistently and in ways that tend to ripple outward and quietly improve the lives of anyone causally downstream of her.


• The ability to learn much faster than anyone should have any right to, and to learn things it should be impossible for her to learn.
  • Especially languages.
  • And magic.
  • Under some conditions, where appropriate, as decided by the same inviolable arbiter that governs where and how these powers activate, she actually just picks up useful attributes directly from people and situations she encounters, while leaving behind whatever aspects of those attributes she might find uncomfortable or inconvenient to have, and not interfering at all with the source even if the power in question should theoretically be singular and indivisible.
    • Speaking of which, she has the Authority of Hunters Triumphant now.

The Authority of Hunters Triumphant: A tribe lives or dies by the efforts of its hunters. For civilization to grow, some must leave its walls and return with treasures. Makes Practice more efficient. Lowers the threshold for Acknowledgment and dramatically increases its rewards. Nullifies deleterious effects in the event of Descent. Notably, increases compatibility with other magic systems and can bypass restrictions that would otherwise render the bearer ineligible, e.g. not being born in the correct universe. Metamagic perks, but all gains are lost on death. Native powers are relatively modest, focusing on stealth and information-gathering.

"Well, isn't that something." Orden will write out his impressions of Esme's powers for her. 

"With all this, you might really get somewhere. I wouldn't want to test those guarantees against the might of something like the General, but. It's really true what they say, isn't it? There's always a greater power."

"I should be able to help you get the most out of the Hunters Triumphant - you know it let me Choose two Towers? It was a bit of a pain, but I bet we can make that work again. It should have pretty good benefits for anything else you do." 

"I need to. Process. Some things," she says, gazing into the middle distance.

"Right, okay, so, with a little more context the two souls thing isn't that surprising, I've been dreaming about the other me all my life. I have no idea what the fuck to think about the Third Thing. I... think I might half remember meeting it now, though? No details, just... The sense that I made friends with a cosmic being and got lots of neat stuff out of it. When I was the previous me, and possibly also dead."

For some reason it seems to her on an intuitive level that the mysterious source of her mysterious powers endorses Orden as basically legit about what he's offering and what he wants. She's not sure how she feels about this so she's reluctant to bring it up.