"That seems to be the case. At some point, I want to have a go at seeing if I can replicate your powers, in charecter if not force, and if we get that working, then we could try fusing those versions with something else?" 

"...how involved is that process likely to be, do you want to try it right away?" She finds that she trusts her mysterious cosmic powers to take care of themselves in the face of attempted piracy. They'll let him have it if they think it's a good idea and not otherwise.

"It's probably worth doing some preliminary divination to determine if it's possible or not, and if it's possible if it will be the work of minutes or decades to do so. Your defences would be game-changers if they could be distributed in a form effective against the General and the Priestess." 

"Let's find out, then!"

Orden will resume with the eye-glow and the calling on his divination-related Authorities and so forth. 

What would it take, for him to replicate her defences so that he can use them to take the fight to hell? 

Her powers are inviolable and self-governing. What he needs, if he wants to copy them, is their permission.

As for the conditions under which they will grant that permission...

Fundamentally, their nature and purpose is to remove the constraints that stop someone from pursuing personal fulfillment, to widen horizons until there's plenty of room for fun. They want to be, not necessarily a thing to be celebrated in themselves (though that's also good), but the foundation on which to build a life that is worth celebrating. He cannot browse these powers with grim single-mindedness in search of impersonal tools that will allow him to better accomplish his goals. He must approach them as a potential friend, with his heart open to the possibility of joy.

Nothing would fill him with a greater joy than the defeat of Hell and the subsequent possibility that he could do something with his life other than constantly run around putting out literal and metaphorical fires. But first, they must destroy the Pit.

If he wants to use these powers to destroy the Pit, then he must think beyond the destruction of the Pit. If he can manage to come at this from a perspective that is genuinely concerned with what will be fun, and what will be aesthetically appealing, and what will make him happy, and not just what will get the job done fastest...

...then he will clear the 'permission' hurdle, and how quickly he can copy the powers and how well he can integrate them and how much of their original depth and force the copies will retain depends entirely on how thoroughly he can vibe with the underlying aesthetic resonance of their ultimate source. It's pretty broad and covers a lot of ground, but it's approximately centered around the concept of a teenage girl writing self-indulgent fiction where someone just like her but cooler in every way has magical adventures that work out improbably well.

Just to clarify, is it acceptable for him to use mind control to edit his personality until it exactly and optimally conforms to these parameters (while also wanting to destroy hell). 

Only if he makes sure that the parts of his personality he values intrinsically and wants to see continue into his new self are preserved! ...does he have any of those besides 'desire to destroy hell'?

He has an entire rich internal expeirence and social life of deep and meaningful friendships with a wide variety of people, hobbies, asthetic preferences, etc. They're just less important than preventing trillions upon trillions of people from being tortured in the most unpleasant manners imaginable. 

He may have been using his tremendous powers of self-editing to delete any stress this situation is causing him. 

Right, so, he should preserve all of the parts of himself that he would grieve if he lost them, that he would feel sad to look forward into the future and see absent from his altered self. (And no, in case he was wondering, he should not munchkin this by deleting his sadness.)

Orden surpresses a brief flash of irritation that, if he had deleted those desires last week for the sake of being a more efficient soldier for the war, he would not now be facing the possibility that the war might be prolonged for the fact that he wanted to still exist at the end of it. There are reasons why he shouldn't have done that, it wouldn't have worked, and he still shouldn't do it now. But even so, it irks. 

Having clarified the terms of munchkinry, he turns his thoughts to the actual object level problem. 

The thing is, really, that he's heard this story before. Perhaps not the indulgent self insertions of a teenage girl, but - ever since he was torn away from his mundane life to discover that apparently the ultimate Expression of his innermost self was that he could do the impossible, no matter what it took, as long as he stayed true to himself, he's known, in some deep part of himself, what genre this story was. That was, not coincidentally, about the time when his dreams became whispering threats of flame and torture, hardly worth trying to sleep through.

He desperately wants to retire. That's was his first hope, upon realising that there was another, still more absurd figure, that he could, in good conscience, hand off his powers and responsibilities to someone who would do a better job, and then the war would be over sooner. 

... he's not going to be able to work that into better tools for the war, is he? 

The heartfelt desire to reach a place in his life where he can have nice things is a pretty good start, actually!

Can he get a novel angle on curing his injuries? He really genuinely misses being able to speak and sing, and it would in fact be gratuitously cool to ride into battle against the General with appropriate theme music and have that help. The problem is just that his injuries are really incredibly thorough - a problem of scope, rather than possibility. So he's not actually sure that a copied healing effect that he still has to fuel himself could be enough. Same thing for defence, to prevent those same injuries, though once he has one working for himself he's extremely confident at being able to adapt the combination of narrative and empowerment for whoever else wants it. 

He's not quite as able to work up the same passion about his eye. He quite likes the Odin look, on some level. 

Oh, he expressed genuine appreciation for the idea of doing something gratuitously cool! ✨ That's very encouraging and the ineffable personification of the mysterious cosmic powers is accordingly excited.

(If he quite likes the Odin look then he should get to have the Odin look while being minimally impaired by it! That is what these powers are all about.)

Is he going to have to make a speech about how much he likes all his friends and so on so that the power of friendship can prevail. He can do it. He's done it before.

(He does actually care for his friends a lot, even if he's the sort of person who shows affection by overacting irritation most of the time.) 

The speech will not be necessary; the important thing is that he feels in his heart how much he appreciates the people he cares about and his relationships with them!

The ineffable personification etc. etc. is really rooting for him here. He should get to achieve practical benefits by embracing self-indulgence and have nice things like gratuitously cool battle soundtracks.

Well then. What other practical gratuitously self-indulgent things could he ask for. He loves ... making new worlds in his pocket-dimensions, especially 1:1 replicas of fictional places. He loves reading and writing, he's going to have such memoirs one day. He loves exploring new places with his friends, especially new places which aren't currently on Fire. He wants to go to a magic school one day, even though at his learning speed it would be utterly pointless except as an exercise in social context. Does the spirit have powers for those things? 

This miniaturized personification that is so small it's nearly capable of holding a normal conversation with him is pretty constrained in what it can offer, but it earnestly promises to do its best! It has been thinking about the problem of curing his incurable ills, and would like to propose—

His view of Esme's powers shifts. Some parts open up, blossoming like flowers, while others slide sideways or turn to show new faces. Nothing about her actual powers is changing per se; it's just that they're being used as a medium to construct something else, a focused and specialized power-subset designed specifically for him to copy. If he tried to just copy her power for always being okay eventually, he wouldn't get a real guarantee because he can't copy the backing of the Spirit and the backing of the Spirit is what makes those guarantees possible. But like this, with the power for always being okay interwoven with the appearance powers (with special attention to the appearance power for idealizing one's voice) and borrowing a few more bits and pieces from other places, it narrows itself down into a structure that can be much more guarantee-shaped even without the direct fiat of a power beyond all else, though the guarantee is of course correspondingly also narrower. Instead of "always eventually be okay", it's "any state of being that takes you farther from your ideal self can be improved; any injury or impairment that you experience as a loss can be healed." That's not to say that healing them will be easy or straightforward, but it opens up the possibility of making direct progress with enough hard work and ingenuity, instead of being stuck at the top of a pyramid scheme of grievous sacrifice.

—and he can copy it right now if he likes, but he can also wait until he's decided how he prefers to bring himself closer to the Spirit, or ask for something else! It's up to him.

Well, that would be really good, but he was hoping for a defence against obtaining more such injuries in future. How can he align himself further with the spirit...

Would the spirit prefer it if he was a girl? The relavent mental edits would be pretty easy. 

This power isn't the only thing he can have, to be clear, it's just the thing that was easiest to design and so came out first.

The Spirit does often like it when people are girls! But the relevant thing isn't really being a girl, exactly; it's being open to femininity, and finding joy and satisfaction in it. There are many ways to do that, and if Orden wants to alter himself in that direction he should pick the one(s) he likes best!

Well, fair enough. He copies the power. It's incredibly elegant at it's core, how it just sort of ... leans out past the void of impossibility to grab at the missing thing from an angle which the Priestess couldn't possibly have imagined. That's the part he couldn't have replicated. The rest is just some really good code for describing someone's ideal self based on thier mind and history and he's going to get that loaded into a viscerality-organ that he can, if not exactly mass produce, at least make a whole bunch of. He still can't actually heal himself yet, but he has an imaginable surgical plan. 

... having made the claim that the Priestess couldn't see this angle on the multiverse to destroy things through it, he's sort of concerned. It was supposed to be impossible for her to see the multiverse at all. He will cross that bridge when she burns it, he supposes. 

He ... has not actually thought very much about femininity. He didn't think it would come up much. He was sort of hoping that he could just go on doing his normal decisions and preferences and asthetics and such but like, while being physically a girl and prefering that. That would have been simple and elegant. 

(There's a sense, as he pulls that code out of the power, that something is getting lost in translation—that what's in there is even better than what he's taking out, even though what he's taking out is still very, very good.)

If that's the way he likes best, then it's the way he should choose! It's very important to the Spirit that people get to decide for themselves how to live and who to be.

He is going to table trying to deepen his affinity with the Spirit any further, and instead turn his thoughts back to the list of powers. What else is there that he would like to have? 

Most of it - immunities, learning, teaching, wards, etc, are things he feels he already has a solid handle on. He's not blocked on them, he just needs to allocate his resources differently, if he wants more of them. As much as he would like the combat "tricks", he doesn't actually enjoy desperate in over his head combat at all, it just keeps being really important. The important exception to that continues to be his desire for immunity to (unasthetic) permanent injuries (Specifically those inflicted by the Priestess's Extinguishing Touch). The other thing he finds he dearly wants is the power that ensures people downstream of his actions are bettered by them. He has spent much of the last couple of decades wandering the multiverse and meddling and he'd like to be better, or at least more reliable at it. 

He'd actually like that, rather than instrumentally like it. It's a lot of work, being measured and careful in his interventions and his visitations. 

Can the Spirit do either of those things for him?