She takes a moment to compose and reset herself.

This makes it feel real. Less like she's building a character for a video game, and really hitting her that—she, Rebecca Costa-Brown, is going to take these powers into another universe.

And she's back.

You're welcome.

She smiles, and goes on.

Name: Planned Parenthood - Cost: 1 ☐
You can only have children if you actively and specifically want to. Your partners will instinctively believe you about this, and won't be concerned that you might be wrong or fibbing.

Name: Providential Parenthood - Cost: 1 ☐
(Replaces Planned Parenthood)
You can only have children when you're really ready for it, or if you actively and specifically decide to.

So she remembered this when she read through the powers for the first time in the vault, then she forgot about it at some point, and now she's remembering it again.

Rebecca is infertile. Or she can only assume so; it's not as if she's tried. She doesn't have a menstrual cycle, and the logistics of a pregnancy and giving birth don't work with her powers. She never really thought about it much, because she never expected to get to a point in her life where it'd be in consideration. She would be on the run, or she would be tried in the highest court the Earth had left for her deeds, or—by far the most likely—she would be dead.

But now she'll be gone for years, decades, potentially centuries, and when she comes back to finish the job, she's not staying.

She's not staying.

She never thought it out loud, but it was in the back of her head all along. There's nothing left on Earth Bet for her. This day, right here, is the best time for Rebecca Costa-Brown disappear, first for a moment, then forever. She's bought the world as much time as she could, but it's the end of the line for her schemes. She'll miss some of the people, but she doubts many of them will miss her back, and she won't grovel to make herself miserable. She has no intention of facing what the world will call justice if she has another option. She might come back to visit, she might take anyone who asks with her, but she's not going to start a new chess game with the world order that will rise out of the aftermath.

So family isn't only an irrelevant hypothetical anymore. There's no expiry date on her journey, this time.

She doesn't know how to feel about that. Again, there was never a burning void in her for the last twenty years. But will there be one, come fifty, one hundred?

Then the first question is:

I'm currently infertile. Will the Well Endowed/Hollow Leg/Inner Strength chain allow me to bear children?

It's very likely, if that's something you want your body to be capable of! And the descriptions don't say so, but the Parenthood powers can also help with that. Taking Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and collecting some heritages can help too.

That was her second guess, that taking one of the Parenthoods would implicitly make it possible. In that case, it's only sensible to take these since she doesn't know anything about the availability of male birth control where she's going, and Earth Bet's solutions for women almost definitely won't work or last.

She does not find surprise pregnancies that are metanarratively guaranteed to not be happening at a bad time exciting, so she scores Planned Parenthood at 100 Providential Parenthood at 0.

Taking powers so she can have sex isn't strategic, but, well—living her best life as her best self.

I'm curious if you have any guesses for how, specifically, it'll work. Will my children inherit some of my powers (Dragon Fairy Elf Witch inheritances and Spirit powers)? Are those also metanarratively guaranteed against drawbacks and catastrophic interactions? And if they don't inherit powers, how am I going to not crush them during the pregnancy and birth, or will it all work out somehow with no single predetermined solution?

Your children won't inherit the Spirit's power, though they might be chosen themselves someday, if they turn out with compatible personalities. They will definitely inherit heritage you pick up with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, but it will come with the same guarantee of powers without drawbacks that you have. Every appearance and body-protecting power you have, as well as Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and the Parenthood power, will contribute to making pregnancy easy and safe for you and your child. It probably wouldn't take more than Inner Strength by itself or Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and Planned Parenthood together to prevent you from hurting them.

✔

Moving on.

Name: Two Become One - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Planned Parenthood)
When you have sex, it is always special and wonderful and beautiful. No one ever elbows anyone in the face or makes undignified noises.

Name: Laugh Together - Cost: 1 ☐
(Replaces Two Become One)
When you have sex, you find it easy to free yourself from expectations and anxieties and immerse yourself in the experience of the moment. Your partners get the same benefits.

Name: Bop It - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Two Become One)
The mysteries of another's body are an open book to you, and you always know exactly how to move and touch in order to please someone in bed.

No. Sex is not that hard.

Name: The Princess And The Dragon - Cost: 3 ☐
No matter who or what you're trying to sleep with, the logistics will all work out, somehow. Arbitrary differences in size, biology, temperature, substrate, and underlying physics can be gotten around with sufficient creativity and determination.

This one she will allow, because it sounds genuinely difficult to do herself satisfactorily, and a blanket guarantee makes things less tedious.

Name: GGG - Cost: 4 ☐
Your true love will be willing to try just about anything you suggest in bed, and if you really enjoy it, they'll really enjoy it too.

Name: Before Your Eyes - Cost: 4 ☐
In your presence, people become willing to experiment sexually in ways they normally wouldn't. For some reason this applies especially well to boys kissing each other.

No. If her partners do not want to do things with her, she will just not do those things.

She puts "50" on The Princess And The Dragon, and 0 on everything else.

And there's this.

Name: Fated Lovers - Cost: 3 ☐
You will meet someone who will go on to become your true love. If you enter a specific universe with a specific target in mind, you'll meet that person under favourable circumstances, and if it doesn't work out with them, this power will keep introducing you to new possibilities until you find someone who's right for you. If you're the sort of person who can have multiple true loves, you'll keep meeting new ones until you have enough.

Name: Fated Friends - Cost: 4 ☐
Wherever you go, you will be steered into meeting people you'd do well to befriend. It's up to you to recognize and appreciate them.

She already talked this through with the notebook and herself earlier. She doesn't want the ducks lined up for her. Still, looking at these powers again, she feels the tug of temptation.

But—

So when you hire someone straight out of college, or one of her Wards graduate into the Protectorate proper, they don't know what they're doing. They don't know who to talk to, they don't know where to ask for help, they don't know when to escalate, they don't know how to run a project. You want rails to set them up for success. A direct manager with the bandwidth to keep track of them. An assigned mentor, training rotations, clear documentation on their role and expectations.

But that's not supposed to be forever. At some point the hires need to hit the next level. You want them to start reaching out, networking for themselves, making decisions; you want people writing the runbooks instead of just reading and regurgitating.

Taking Fated Lovers and Fated Friends—it'll grease her way for a while, sure. But it means living her entire life, forever, with the training wheels on.

No.

Rebecca marks them both with "0". For clarification of her thought process, she writes in the notebook,

I touched on this in our earlier discussion about what powers I'm looking for. I'm wary that these could make it difficult for me to develop the skills that I would have developed without them (proactive networking, finding people who share may interests, leveraging opportunities to pursue what I want out life) if the narrative is always placing the right people conveniently in reach. Does that make sense as a concern?

In case she's misunderstanding how it works.

Hmm... so, I do see what you're saying, but...

As much as possible, these powers try to make you stronger, not weaker. It's harder for Fated Lovers and Fated Friends than it is for something like Battle Maiden or the Friends In Places powers, but in general, if you're trying to learn a skill, your powers want to make that easier for you, not harder. If you're trying to improve yourself, your powers want to support you, not stifle you.

I think, though, given what you've said, that you would still be better off without Fated Friends or Lovers, because you would end up wanting to form relationships without their influence, independently? Is that right?

Yes, I think so. Since you said people can typically achieve comparable outcomes if they put effort into it, I think it'll be more rewarding, and better for relating to other people's life experiences.

Even if the Spirit arranges it so I can learn the same skills with, say, situations where I need to deploy them to succeed with my Fated ones, it's still a distortion to the world observed from my perspective which others don't observe, if that makes sense? I would prefer any effects to be either localized inside me (as in the Yourself powers) or applied to everything (such as Isekai Roulette selecting a good destination, or maybe The Great Equalizer, if I'd taken it) but not apply only in a bubble of relevance that follows me around, both as a practical matter of calibrating my mental models so I don't get out of sync with normal people's perception of reality, and as an aesthetic matter of my preferences.

I think I see what you mean, and that makes sense.

Name: Sorry About That - Cost: 3 ☐
Your true love will be extremely forgiving. Even if you make mistakes or act thoughtlessly toward them, a simple apology will mend things between you. They may expect you to try to improve, but they'll be infinitely patient about how fast that improvement takes place.

Name: Excuse Me - Cost: 5 ☐
(Requires Sorry About That)
All your friends will be just as forgiving as your true love.

Name: Tragic Backstory - Cost: 8 ☐
(Requires Excuse Me)
Something terrible happened to you in your past. Anyone who hears about it immediately forgives you for any and all bad behaviour in the present. They will not expect you to grow or change, and will continue sympathetically excusing whatever you do indefinitely.

She does not want to Master people into forgiving her for her actions.

She does not need to Master people into forgiving her for her actions.

She knew what she was doing when she did it. She will not entertain the circus show they would inevitably demand of her, but she made her bed and she will lie in it at least this much.

And she doesn't have the patience to nitpick with the notebook over Nullified and mind control and environmental influences.

She puts down 0 for all three.

They cost a ludicrous number of points anyway.

Name: Sense of Style - Cost: 4 ☐
People who are romantically interested in you will start dressing more to your taste. The more romantically compatible they are, the better they'll be able to guess exactly what to wear to catch your eye.

Name: Bonus Style Points - Cost: 3 ☐
(Requires Sense of Style)
Luck will shine on anyone trying to dress up for you. They'll get their hands on outfits they couldn't normally afford, their clothes will fit better, and in extreme cases they might even find themselves able to change shape, sex, or species—though only in ways that make them more, not less, comfortable in their own skin.

This is stupid. Zeroes.

Name: Self-Reflection - Cost: 5 ☐
Whenever you meet someone who is you, or was you, or could have been you, or will be you, a special bond is formed, allowing you to keep in touch with them no matter how far you travel. You can speak out loud to someone who is you, and they'll hear you as though you were standing right next to them; you can write notes to someone who is you, and the note will appear near them; you can send messages to someone who is you, and they'll receive them even if there's more than a world between you. The person on the other end of the bond can contact you in just the same way. This lasts as long as each of you considers the other a reflection of themselves and each of you wants to stay in touch with the other.

This one is just confusing. On the more mundane side there's Echidna clones, but there's also making contact with versions of herself from other timelines, Earths or precognitive threads. Or something more complicated she doesn't understand because she doesn't have a solid model of the wider multiverse.

Is Self Reflection something designed for a specific type of person I'm not, like Not Like Other Girls, or is this a common occurrence in the multiverse? I can think of some ways I might meet other versions of me based on what I know, but none of them seem likely and important enough to spend points specifically on synchronizing with.

For many people, especially the sort of people the Spirit can see best, it's very true that out there in the multiverse there are other versions of them, either in versions of their world that are similar but different or as the same personality and the same broad shape of a life translated into the context and circumstances of a completely different world. Also, some people like to make copies of themselves on purpose. If finding other people who are you and coordinating with them doesn't seem like it would be a personally enriching and rewarding experience for you then I think you can skip this one.

No, she doesn't think it would be. She might see the appeal of splitting into multiple bodies and piloting them at the same time, but even that is more about the utility than it being intrinsically appealing to her.

She did expect "versions of their world that are similar but different", but "the same broad shape of a life translated into the context and circumstances of a completely different world" she did not, and she's uncertain how to act on that information, or what it even means in material terms. That one she's a little intrigued in seeing first-hand, but not in a way where she'd want to form permanent mind-bonds with them. She'll just keep it in her hypothesis space when interacting with other worlds.

That doesn't sound particularly rewarding, so I'll skip.

She marks down a "0".

Name: Popular - Cost: 3 ☐
Wherever you go, you develop a reputation fast. The sort of people who you'd like to have as fans tend to hear about you and be impressed. You may not make an impression on mainstream society at large, but you'll develop a following among the people who best resonate with your style.

Name: Famous - Cost: 3 ☐
(Requires Popular)
Wherever you go, people really take to you. You're the subject of constant gossip and most people have heard of you before you meet them. People you've never met will get crushes on you.

She's not going to waste points on something she can do herself if she wants, and not being able to control this is, as with Mysterious Allure, inconvenient. Zeroes.

Name: Undiplomatic Immunity - Cost: 6 ☐
You are above the law. Any crimes you commit will be overlooked by the authorities. Note that, if you do enough crime that you start looking more like an invading army, local governments will still feel free to declare war.

She doesn't even have complicated feelings about this one; it's just stupid again. Absurdly powerful, but—not the way she wants to relate to the world around her, in her best life as her best self. She wants to exist in a society of moving parts, not a dollhouse that rewrites itself around her. Zero.

Name: Friends In Low Places - Cost: 3 ☐
You make friends easily among the lowest echelons of society, the underdogs and underworlders. Moving and acting in these circles is intuitive and natural for you.

Name: Friends In High Places - Cost: 3 ☐
You make friends easily at the highest echelons of society, among the rich and powerful. Moving and acting in these circles is intuitive and natural for you.

Name: Friends in Strange Places - Cost: 3 ☐
You make friends easily in small isolated communities, among those who may be scorned by mainstream society for their differences or may just be so obscure that mainstream society mostly hasn't heard of them. Moving and acting in these circles is intuitive and natural for you.

These technically fit her criteria for the type of power she wants to take, but they displease her still.

The problem, she realizes as she pokes at that feeling, is that this is something she already learned. Turning her strength into even greater strength is one thing, when her original strength came out of a vial anyway. Battle Angel, Battle Demon and Battle Maiden do itch the same way a bit, but combat is one area in which she cannot afford to give ground for pride. But her exercise of charisma was learned, and those skills are sufficient, and bolting on explicit superpowers to take them all the way to supernatural feels almost like an insult.

Zeroes. She annotates,

I already developed a good grasp of these skills through study—and a good grasp of the fundamental principles to rederive them, if I land somewhere my intuitions are miscalibrated for—so I don't particularly want to enhance them further; it feels cheap.

Does the notebook have anything to say about these last powers?

That makes sense. I think those powers are most useful for people who want to travel the multiverse a lot and become quickly and smoothly at home wherever they land, and if you would rather use your own skills for that even though it can sometimes be less convenient, I think that's very reasonable of you! Just so you're fully informed, though, the Friends In Places powers operate almost entirely by giving you information you wouldn't otherwise know, and if you wanted to learn from them rather than leaning on them, they're very well suited to that approach.

So if I already know how to navigate a situation, or have learned how to navigate a situation from previous Friends In Places information, I won't get any nudges from Friends In Places? Can I notice what instincts are coming from me, and what is coming from Friends In Places?

Yes, that's a popular way to interface with those powers. (Some people prefer to integrate the powers seamlessly with their own thoughts and not have to think about it, and some people prefer to experience suggestions smoothly but be able to pay attention and know where they're coming from, and some people prefer to consult the powers proactively whenever they have a question and otherwise be mostly left alone unless they need an urgent warning.)

That makes them a lot more appealing.

She gives the last response a checkmark and corrects the scores to 25, 25 and 50.