Orden will sit and let her think. Or possibly leave an illusion of him sitting and letting her think while he quietly teleports out and spends the time doing subjective months of training in a hyperbolic time chamber until she's done processing. One of those. 

But first, he'll finish looking at her powers and transcribing them. Can't let a little thing like a previously unique power of tremendous potency being effortlessly duplicated distract you. 

Continuing on, then...

• The ability to teach supernaturally well, if she has a personal connection with her student.
  • And if she's having trouble communicating with someone she can focus for a moment and receive unassailably accurate intuitions about what they mean to say to her, how sincere they are about it, and how best to get across what she's trying to say in return.
  • Potentially unlimited time dilation while engaged in social bonding.
  • Accurate intuitions about how to fit in smoothly in any social milieu, allowing her to quickly achieve native-level cultural fluency anywhere she might travel.


• If she forms a close relationship with someone they tend to become psychologically healthier in whatever ways are endorsed by both them and the benevolent force from beyond space and time that offered her these powers.
• The power of True Love's Kiss, which can heal literally any malady.
• A guarantee that if she truly cares for someone, they will never be permanently parted from her except by their own uncoerced choice; anything else that might come between them will eventually be resolved, including death.


• A guarantee that if she deliberately invites the attention of dangerous entities, all resulting danger will be focused primarily on her and secondarily on anyone who deliberately chooses to involve themselves in the situation, eliminating collateral damage to uninvolved bystanders and loved ones. This does not prevent dangerous entities from unrelatedly harming bystanders in other contexts, just means that her personal choices in particular can't hurt anyone who doesn't opt in.


• Powers that she isn't using or that aren't relevant to a situation can conceal themselves so fully as to be impenetrable to all possible divination, though powers she is actively using are impossible to fully conceal in the moment. Several powers she currently has are concealing themselves in this way, and there are many more that she could spontaneously acquire under appropriate conditions. Her powers are choosing to deliberately inform Orden about this because it's appropriate for him to know; most people wouldn't get even this much.

By the time he finishes writing, Esme has mostly recovered her composure. She scans through the list, then reads it through again more closely.

"Well, I would say it feels like it's missing something somehow, but I guess it explicitly states that it's missing several things. Wonder what they are. Anyway, am I correct in assuming that this changes the game as far as what choices it's reasonable for me to make?"

Orden has actually spent more than a little of his time off grinding thinking about exploits. 

"Just a little, yes. By which I mean, it completely changes the game. If we can get your magic-copying power to work reliably then you are probably the single strongest person to have ever lived. And then the magic item copying - if we can copy the rings! And even if none of that works, your defences are unprecedented, if they're of sufficient magnitude to protect against the General, you'd be one of our best fighters by default. And if I can copy them, then that's it's own sort of game-changer. I can think of about a dozen other things." 

"I'm not sure it's safe to let any of this information leave this room. I'm not sure it's safe to let you leave this room. I'm not even sure it's safe to tell the rest of the Alliance. I'm not entirely convinced that I shouldn't just sacrifice my existence entirely here and now to empower you to the maximum extent possible, if in doing so you will become able to defeat hell." 

He is looking remarkably calm about it, all things considered. Having a subjective month to think about it helped. 

"...I would really rather we not impulsively jump to solutions where I devour you for power. We've only just met."

"Well, yes, I would need to verify your morality more comprehensively than I had done previously, there are probably order of operations issues to keep in mind. But the Pit exists, and this could change everything. It'd be worth it. I think I'd need Penelope's help to sacrifice myself in a way that actually gave you my Expression, so we'd need to bring her in on this. I'm not sure she'd go for it." 

"How about, before settling on that one, we explore other possibilities."

"Sure. You have a better intuition than me for your powers, I suspect. Do you think we can get the magic-copying working reliably? Or if not reliably, frequently?" 

"I think that depends entirely on how many powers you have available that resonate with me on a personal level."

"We have a lot of different magic. Even putting aside the diversity of contents in the list I provided you, we have many systems of magic which weren't on it, for various reasons - usually inefficiency or difficulty of transmission. Lots of systems just require training time and we only have genius tutors for some. Perhaps, if we relaxed infosec slightly, we could do a lineup of all of our members showing off their magic and see what resonates with you? But we'd have to agree that relaxing infosec is a good idea." 

"Then for now let's hold off on that too. I also get the sense that, hmm... it might matter somewhat what context I'm encountering magic in, whether I'm getting the opportunity to appreciate it properly, so a talent show assembly line might not be the best way to go."

"Under what circumstances do you feel like you'd be best able to appreciate magic?" 

"...I swear I'm not trying to give you the runaround here, but it depends on the magic, doesn't it? Like... what I like about something, and whether I get the chance to see that side of it, are sort of inherently hard to predict, because my aesthetic preferences are complicated and it sounds like your repertoire of superpowers is too. I can definitely tell you what kinds of things I expect to be generally interested in, but there's always the chance that whatever summary I give you will be missing some nuance that would definitely apply to some specific case I don't know about."

"The goal isn't the achieve comprehensiveness; I have no doubt that if we succeed in our goals, ten thousand years from now you'll still be randomly stumbling upon arts you consider worth having. The question is how, in the short term, it's most efficient to scale you up into someone capable of fighting the likes of the General and the Priestess on an equal footing. Assuming I am correct in my understanding that your defences would work on their powers, and that taking the fight directly to the Pit personally is something you're willing to do. But at some point it does become plausible that exposing you to random magic systems for the sake of seeing if they click with you aesthetically is less efficient than just teaching you the old standbys." 

"I admit that 'taking the fight directly to the enemy personally' is generally not my first approach in any situation, but I'm not, like, categorically opposed to it. If I had to pick my favourite approach to the question of how to endow me with the best and most fantastic magical powers, it would be to sort through lists of descriptions of all the most powerful or versatile magic that's reasonably accessible and plan out which things seem like they work well together and which of those seem like I could plausibly pirate them with my mysterious mantle of copyright infringement, or get my hands on them otherwise, then work my way through the less powerful or more obscure stuff once I've hit the highlights."

"If you have any other ideas for destroying Hell and freeing those within, I'm all ears." 

"As for lists of magic - well, there's the one we had prepared, but it's not remotely comprehensive. If nothing else, trying to get the Traveller to keep a useful record of everything he's got is an exercise in futility. A good enough starting point, though. I'll see what other documentation I can dredge up." 

"To what extent should I be thinking of myself as resource-constrained when I go over the list again? Like, it sounds like I could get an advance on coins, but I'm much less sure about Remittances. Though if I wanted to take the high risk high reward route, I guess I could always get a second one the normal way. If I trust my ability to always be okay eventually, and I think I do... Though of course the bigger factor by far is the collateral damage, and I'm much more reluctant to risk other people than myself based on a feeling that the strange cosmic force I only half remember meeting was shaped like a friend."

"We don't have a secret emergency cache of Remittances for you to use, no, so you still only get one, except for the Greater Bestowal, which I will provide as a matter of course. Some of them we ought to be able to manage to replicate later on - the litanies in particular. But not the fast way. Don't worry about Ordinal Coins. Please don't provoke the Wind. People whose losses are in abstract acceptable can provoke the wind for high risk and high reward. People who are essential should not. Even with your protections ... It's creative." 

"It seems to me that either we trust the mysterious cosmic force to be on the level, and it doesn't matter how creative my enemies are, or we don't, and I'm not special enough to be irreplaceable. Right?"

"When I say you should fear it's creativity, I am observing that it will in fact hurt you comprehensively in whatever ways it can, including going after your works, loved ones, and whichever civilizations you happen to be fond of. It's operative mechanisms are destiny and raising up foes perfectly designed to be your counter. I do not want to discover how many millennia you (and everyone else) can be tortured for before you end up okay. Also, you are ignoring a very important third scenario, where the mysterious cosmic force does exist and is helping you but is claiming to grant 'absolute effects' that, while very very strong, are not proof against other sufficiently elevated mysterious cosmic forces. This is a scenario I have seen many times, powers which appear absolute at first but in practice break down under sufficiently extreme conditions. I have no idea how we could test this in advance, against something as extreme as the Wind." 

"To be clear I'm not immediately advocating this, I'm just noticing that it's an option if I trust the guarantee of no collateral damage from my poor life choices."

"Fair. Though I don't think the no-collateral-damage clause applies against ongoing awfulness which will only be prevented if you and your allies succeed proactively." 

"Well, sure, but it means I won't change how the ongoing awfulness is targeted except by bringing more of it on myself specifically, right? Again, granting the premise that this alarmingly broad guarantee somehow just works."

"Yes, granting that alarmingly broad guarantee." 

"So 'extra Remittance via poor life choices' is a viable conditional plan with a hard-to-meet condition because we don't know how to verify the no collateral damage power. Why do I get an extra Remittance for annoying the evil cosmic weather, anyway?"

"It's more that most of the processes for fitting that much power into a single soul on short notice attract its notice. They're 'hubristic' apparently."