Anything At All (Worm v1 CYOA, Kaleidoscope, SI, one-shot)

[cliffc999]

I stood on top of a low rise in New Hampshire, looking down at the space that only a moment ago had been occupied by a city of several hundred thousand peopled called Brockton Bay. Now there were barely twenty thousand people present there, and nothing remaining of the city they used to live in. And I was entirely responsible for this, and no one else.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

I suppose you could say the beginning of my experience was typical, given what I know now about the truth behind ROBs and CYOAs. I'd filled out an online questionnaire, thinking it was all an imagination game, and then suddenly I was standing in a filthy alleyway in Brockton Bay with nothing more than the clothes on my back and a $100 bill in my pocket. And, of course, my body and mind overflowing with vast and eldritch powers like nothing I could even remotely imagine.

And this sort of thing is why you always put Invictus or its equivalent on the build sheet whenever available. So that you don't completely freak out when reality suddenly upends all around you and accidentally the city with your vast power or anything.

Still, even though I'd certainly have made another build if I'd known it would become real my 'minimalist' approach left me more than well-equipped enough to deal with the new challenges. It was the work of a movement for me to use a self-targeted Kaleidoscope to temporally accelerate my thought processes to the point the rest of the world was effectively in 'pause' mode, and then I began to get to work.

The first priority was to make sure I didn't get killed on the spawn point, or anywhere else for that matter. Because how pathetic would that have been? And so I reached out and wrapped a little knot of recursive time around my soul - that's the best approximation English can give for what I was really doing, at least - to ensure that anything that killed or unmade me would simply trigger an automatic local rewind of my temporality, thus bringing me back to life and with a chance to use my powers to avoid whatever killed me. Something akin to Alabaster or Grey Boy, only without all of their limitations.

There was even a minor compounding effect linked to my capacity for consciousness so that if I rewound to a state that still precluded the ability to think, I'd just keep rewinding until I was able to participate in the action economy again. The power of the Kaleidoscope was essentially unbeatable, after all, so my only real fear was being incapacitated or killed by something I couldn't see coming until after it was too late to counter or evade it. And now that fear was entirely dealt with.

I then tsk'ed inwardly at my poor physical condition. I hadn't had a horrible draw in the genetic lottery, but outside of a moderately above average intelligence I really hadn't drawn any winners either. And then there was the part where I wasn't in shape at all and my health... well, it could be better. But if Kaleidoscope let me copy powers from alternate selves, then it could certainly copy DNA as well.

So I reached out sideways and ran a sort of temporal search algorithm across every alternate possibility, in both real timelines and hypothetical ones, for every single DNA combination that could possibly have resulted from both of my genetic parents. I then mentally highlighted all the better possible mes - genetically speaking, at least - and cherry-picked the best gene out of the bunch of them from each individual gene site, then used the precognitive function of the Kaleidoscope to make sure they'd all function optimally in combination. I then selectively overlaid each individual gene I possessed with the corresponding 'best' gene I'd found for that particular genetic site across alternate time, eventually ending up with a DNA construct containing the single greatest possible draw in the genetic lottery that I could have hypothetically gotten even before receiving this CYOA, if everything had lined up perfectly. After all, it was only the first day. I could see about possibly upgrading myself further later, but for right now I just wanted a clean bill of health and some moderate upgrades.

Tweaking my new body to suddenly have the health and physical conditioning of an alternate timeline where I had had optimum diet and exercise from birth was even easier than what I'd done so far, and I deliberately relaxed the 'pause' function just long enough to draw a deep and satisfying breath with my new lungs, look at the alley through my new 20/10 vision, and steady myself before the plunge.

Right, self-indulgence over. Back to work. This main quest wasn't going to solve itself, after all.

I wrapped a field of temporal concealment around me just in case my target had any defenses I didn't know about versus postcognition, then reached out with my temporal senses to find the Scion avatar. Using that I backtracked to the main Zion hub, and then I postcog'ed that to look back and back and back through time until I'd located the Entities homeworld. Invictus let me remain steadfast despite my glimpses into the depths of unimaginable cosmic horror - even with me abstracting and summarizing the input feed quite a bit, watching all the nigh-uncountable yottadeaths caused by the completion of almost two thousand previous Cycles was still nothing I wanted to do again any time soon.

Still, having watched the sort of destruction the Entities wreaked every time they were finished with a world to move on had at least taught me the technique for destroying not just a world but every single possible alternate of that world along the entire reach of the local multiversal brane, so I considered it poetic justice when I finally reached the Entity's homeworld, reached back in time to the moment before the first proto-Entity left their planet for the stars, and dropped the same destructive effect right on top of their eldritch little heads. And by doing so retroactively burnt the entire existence of the entire Entity race anywhere, in any possible alternate timeline to Earth-Bet, straight out of the multiversal possibility matrix for good. All of the changes caused by them and their empowered parahumans and Endbringers, all the good deeds and bad deeds, the gains and losses, everything. Vanished, like tears in rain.

Everyone mentioned in Wildbow's story, everything they'd done or known, had all vanished like it had never existed - because they hadn't - and had been immediately replaced by the story of a mundane Earth that had never known parahumans or Entities. Even the city of Brockton Bay itself blinked out of existence, to be replaced by the much smaller town of Hampton, New Hampshire and a somewhat altered version of the coastline. Which is how I'd left the alleyway I'd been standing in and ended up on a low promontory overlooking the nearby small town. I hadn't moved at all, but the world had.

I was curious as to how the hell even the coastline had slightly changed, but apparently the ripple effects of the Entities' destruction went back further than the arrival of Scion on Earth. Then again, it was hardly impossible that some faint, distant fallout of some prior Entity-affected race had infinitesimally shifted the planetary formation of Earth or suchlike. I could likely narrow down the exact cause if I cared to spend a lot of time postcog'ing, but for as much as my power helpfully abstracted the input there was only so much it could do if I tried to comprehend too complex or large a dataset with my still baseline human brain. And given the sheerly incomprehensible capacity for destruction that I had now - which I'd just proven on a scale the Entities themselves couldn't dream of - I was going to be very careful and deliberate with any upgrades to my brain. Invictus might grant an infinite capacity to endure trauma without breaking, but there were still other ways to go crazy.

Still, as much as I tried to distract myself with such thoughts the fact remained that the primary victory condition of the CYOA completed. I could go home now even if I didn't have Kaleidoscope. And with it, I could go anywhere or anywhen I wanted.

So now what did I do?

* * * * *​

I walked out of the upscale restaurant in New York City that I'd chosen for my celebratory lunch, my ROB-granted $100 starting fund pretty much demolished by the one meal I'd ordered. I blinked the remaining change into the nearest church collection basket to keep it from cluttering up my pockets, and found the nearest park bench and sat down. After all, I could pull things out of alternate time tracks as well as use my power to split off new time tracks, so I could combine those two effects to split off a new alternate timeline just for one individual object alone without splitting the rest of the universe, then yoink the temporal clone for my own use before anybody even noticed it was there. Thus allowing Kaleidoscope to act as a perfect matter duplicator among all its other functions. That's how I'd duped myself a set of clothes upscale enough to allow me in the restaurant, after all, while simultaneously blinking the t-shirt and jeans that ROB had given me for the trip into nonexistence.

There wasn't a single power in the Worm v1 CYOA that wasn't bullshit powerful, but Kaleidoscope was absolutely at the top of that heap. Alexandria would let you punch the planet with the moon. Eidolon was an infinitely flexible swiss army knife on a scale sufficient to redraw global maps. Power Manipulation could scale up to almost anything, given sufficient grind. But Kaleidoscope started at letting you casually crush entire timelines - entire universes - and scaled up from there as far as your imagination could come up with new applications for arbitrarily manipulating space and time.

So what the fuck did you do with that kind of juice? You could scry virtually anything, change virtually anything, and even retgone entire species that you didn't like. It could arguably be said that if anything went wrong where you could possibly have stopped it, you should feel guilty for not stopping it.

Yeah, no. Any Worm fan knew that if you went that route you'd go crazier than Panacea would have... well, back when Panacea still existed, that is. It really did bother me - a lot - that all the people I'd read about, people who I now knew had been real people, had been retgoned to be replaced by the people who would have existed had Entities not interfered in the destiny of anywhere. And yes, given the destruction that the Entities had wreaked and would wreak, they had to be destroyed as thoroughly as possible. Even the most generous interpretation of the canon victory in Worm still only had our planet being given a reprieve while the rest of this local multiverse was still fucked beyond fucked. And the flaming quantum hell of it was that the method I'd chosen had the least collateral out of all the possible methods, because hunting them down one at a time throughout the present multiverse would still have left thousands of species in the past all genocided and gone. Now those races would still exist and contribute and flourish and grow on a galactic scale, just as humanity would, even if there had been such great cost in individuals.

Even with Invictus, I never, ever wanted to face this kind of choice again. But for as long as I had these powers - and I would always have these powers for as long as I continued to exist - I had to decide what I would do with them, and what I wouldn't. And that... was not an easy decision.

Going around stomping everything I didn't like? Bad idea. The one thing I didn't have unlimited amounts of was good judgement. No matter what I found to augment my mind with, it would still be finite in some aspect and certainly wouldn't be morally perfect. Not unless I went to some fictional universe where it actually was possible to be that, but I'm pretty sure something that wildly divergent on the ontological level wouldn't make for great compatibility with the rest of the multiverse when I came back out. I did not want to become some type of ethical paperclip maximizer doing more damage to the multiverse than the Entities I'd just destroyed.

But neither did I wish to wander around just indulging myself as things came, without any concern for the larger picture. An indefinite period of doing that would mean I would nigh-inevitably decay into total moral apathy about the fates of others. I didn't want to end up as some cosmic nihilist like Owlman from "Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths", so overwhelmed by the idea of a multiverse of infinite possibilities that he ended up believing all individual choice was meaningless because a timeline would always exist where the other choice had been made, and thus seek to destroy all alternate timelines because that would be the only 'meaningful 'choice. I never wanted to end up looking at the oblivion of myself and everything else and shrugging "It doesn't matter.", either.

So, how did I split the paradox between simultaneously needing to do all that I could on the big picture scale so that I never fell off the point to the nihilist side, while being unable to operate on the big picture scale with a solution to the Problem of Evil that didn't involve multiversal paperclip maximization on the other side the point...?

And then I laughed as I realized that the problem I faced? Was also the solution. If the full range of infinite possibility was so large that I couldn't encompass my mind to cover it all and thus make informed choices, then that meant I didn't have to see everything to rest assured that I was doing the best I could.

And so I reached back, back, as far back as possible, as close to the initial Beginning of Everything that even the Kaleidoscope could reach because as it turned out I had at least one finite limit to my power after all, being Forbidden to see the actual Start myself... and tapped it with my power, not trying to intellectualize or micromanage at all but simply expressing the simplest, clearest wish I could to the fabric of probability itself and letting All Of Creation take it from there.

Just make things better, if you can. Better for everyone.

That much, and nothing more. A sort of self-sustaining PtV/probability-manipulation effect that would do everything it could to shift unfair fates to fairer ones, unhappy endings to happier ones, while taking into account not to go too far and ruin everything. A blessing on all creation, and one told to avoid all the usual pitfalls of such things, so that I could rest assured that I had literally done the best I could possibly do. Even if I'd never entirely know what I'd done, or why, I didn't need to know. Simply knowing that I had done it meant my conscience was clear, and I could now stop and wander around and smell all the roses I wanted without feeling guilty that I wasn't helping.

And even if I did more local interventions as I tripped over things I particularly didn't like during my upcoming multiversal wanderings? That was all right. The cosmic tweak I'd just done was calibrated so that even I couldn't fuck my own creation up, but would instead have everything I did from now on - just like everything everybody else would do - eventually work out so that it was still all part of the plan. Because even if there wasn't a Plan before, there was now, and it would be neither capricious nor cruel. No more cosmic nihilism, no more possibility of an omnipotent sadist in charge of everything. From now on all of existence would have a net trend in a positive direction overall, at the best rate it could without counterproductively setting back other things like the right to self-determination or infinite diversity in infinite combinations or suchlike. And it would all be done at such a subtle root layer of reality that it would be like things had always been this way.

After all, when you did things right then people wouldn't be sure that you'd done anything at all.

* * * * *​

Spoiler: Worm v1 CYOA build

Mode: Hard (3 pts)
Origin: Self-Insert

Powers:

Kaleidoscope (2 pts) (1) - You are attuned to not only the fabric of space and time but the very essence of the multiverse itself. All worlds, timelines, and possibilities are now within reach of your new senses, and you find yourself able to manipulate them to your will and even travel between them. What you can accomplish with this is only limited by your creativity, imagination, and experience. Drawing in alternate versions of people to fight under your control, copying powers from alternate selves or fictional characters, fixing a destroyed neighborhood by overlapping a pristine version of it. These and any imaginable manipulation of space and time (time travel included) are within your reach, and it isn't limited to the Wormverse. The entirety of infinity is at your fingertips. If you wanted to you could just walk on home right now and leave Earth-Bet to its fate. But where is the fun in that.

Perks:

Invictus (1) (0) - Your will is absolute, boundless, and unbreakable. By taking this factors such as distress, suffering, and difficulty mean nothing to you. You are capable of undergoing any disaster without batting an eye, ignoring any amount of pain, remaining mentally untouched by even the most terrible events, and even the most fearsome odds will not give you pause. Abilities that would affect your mind or control you are useless, you shrugging them off as nothing more than an irritant. You will never break, never bow, and even come a thousand apocalypses you will stand as tall and resolute as ever. Being torn in half, locked into a time loop of endless agony for thousands of years, or facing the most hopeless odds are nothing to you.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: I posted this on SB a couple years ago, and while I'm not going to double-post everything I did there over here I figured that since there's a resurgent interest in Worm fic on the NSFW forum right now, I might as well get one of the very few Kaleidoscope-based v1 CYOA fics I've ever heardo of, let alone written, back on the grid.

I also had fun playing with the 'I arrived, suddenly freaked out at the CYOA, and accidentally'd Brockton Bay with my mightypowers' thing. Like, I saw that once, but that once still had me going "WTF?!?" So, I trolled a bit with the opening implying the same deal before revealing what had really happened.

Hope you enjoyed!

I also intend to use this thread to hold my collection of essays on how to abuse the Worm v1 CYOA, as I also did on SB.​

 

[cliffc999]

Some Thoughts on Inspired Inventing

Despite having written one of the better-known Inspired Inventor stories with "A Ghost of a Chance" (which I'm not linking to this post because that was deliberately an anti min-max story, and this is a min-max post) and my somewhat unorthodox oneshot "Taking Care Of The Essentials First" from my slushpile thread, and having even better ones to draw from such as "Technology Will Win The Day" by sun_tzu or "The Von Neumann Steamroller" by 'I just write' (thank you, FunctionalityOfSystems for reccing it to me last Thursday), there's still some Inspired Inventor tricks I haven't actually seen put into print yet. Plus, the other fics I just recced have some that would be useful to collate here.

So, let's share some ideas for maxing out Inspired Inventor. I mean, some non-obvious ideas. I don't really need to tell anybody how to abuse self-replicating technology to make yourself your own Supreme Commander faction or anything. We already know those ones. But, here's some things to spend charges on that aren't just clarketech.

First up, I will repeat the advice many of us already know - the PRT Threat Rating scale was not designed for power measurements. So when the v1 CYOA used it for power measurements, they kinda were trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. This has caused much inconvenience and fanwanking in every CYOA thread using Inspired Inventor or Power Manipulation since.

So, I generally use a system of '1 charge = veteran real-world professional', '2 charges = cinematic levels of hypercompetence', and '3 charges = basically anything within the purview of the skill that is possible by the local laws of physics without shard bullshit to cheat with'. But, that's just me and my local fudge factor. If you don't want to do that, some advice:

1 charge is PRT rating 4-5. That's 'one full squad of trained operatives should be able to deal with this', or 'one full squad + parahuman'. Of course, this assume that a) the charge is for something directly threatening and b) you have all the tools and equipment you need to utilize the skill.

To put it another way, Kid Win is a Tinker 4-5. Alone and with bare hands, he needs one PRT trooper to whoop on him... with their bare hands. But give him his full combat loadout and now you need the entire squad of troopers and their armor and their confoam guns. So even when used by vanilla rules and not fanwanked approximations, the threat ratings for the PRT - and thus for Inspired Inventor - are still heavily dependent on context. So, use the wiggle room in your favor.

And so, now some useful charges to buy as early as possible.

* Urban Survival (1 Charge) - Hey, remember every Worm fanfic ever where the SI gets his 'Welcome to Brockton Bay' reality check by not spotting the muggers in time to duck? Or has to implausibly handwave his way past the difficulties of living homeless and on the streets, like all v1 CYOA Self-Inserts drop into if they didn't take Secret Base? Or painfully feels his lack of even the most minimal streetfighting experience and the sort of awareness and reflxes it breeds? Well, by spending this you get the benefit of a lifetime of experience growing up in a decaying urban dystopia even if you're from a gated community in the burbs. From reflexively spotting the posture and attitudes of muggers and gangers from in the middle of a crowd of citizens, to knowing just how to walk so that you neither broadcast 'I'm a victim!' signals or 'I'm challenging your turf!', to paying attention as you go along for things like potential escape routes from people walking up on you creepy style, to knowing how to dumpster-drive and find places to crash and navigate condemned and abandoned buildings without killing yourself to some basic streetfighting moves and reflexes (no, this isn't enough for parahuman combat. Yes, I'd still much rather face a crackhead mugger with this than with nothing) and all that, this has you covered. Even once you've tinkered up your wargear and are ready to roll out as a badass hero, knowledge of how to live in the gutter - and how other people live there, and thus how to better deal with and find them - could still be useful for something.

Plus, dying <24 hours off the spawn point is embarassing.

* Applied Metaphysics (1 charge) - This one's from 'The Von Neumann Steamroller', and it was one of the ideas I was most impressed with. Knowing with certainty the answers to such questions as 'Is there life after death?' and 'How do I get to a good one?' and suchlike is great zero-day knowledge. As well as the 'applied' part meaning you can expect to be given to all sorts of things like meditation techniques for getting in touch with your soul that actually work, does good karma exist and how to gather it if it does so as to help deal with bad luck, etc, etc.

If nothing else, it's substantial peace of mind at the cost of 1 charge. Cheap at the price, even for those of us with Invictus. Invictus lets you endure an infinite amount of crap, but it doesn't actually make it not crap.

* Specialized Reincarnation Mudras (1+ Charges) - My own idea from 'Taking Care of the Essentials First', this is as early a buy as possible if your story is willing to go with the idea that reincarnation exists and that a lifetime of the proper devotional disciplines (always remember that II gives you not just knowledge and not just skills but also the ability to use those skills as best you can, meaning that the knowledge download already includes the benefits of enough practice that the skills are already second nature) can affect your reincarnation cycle so as to let you do things like 'In my next life, I will still have all my memories and still have my CYOA powers and perks'. I mean, ROBs and shit have to exist just to get you this far, so you already have more than enough room to go 'This is not strictly a materialistic universe'. As to the variable # of charges, it's up to you to decide whether or not something this narrow-focus yet still this advanced can be done with 1 charge or if it takes more, or if the synergy from buying Applied Metaphysics first means you can save yourself charges here.

Obviously, it's up to you whether this hack even works in your particular fanfic's rendition of the multiverse. But if it does, then here it is.

* Applied Psychology (1 charge) - Aka 'Social Skills For NEETs', only better. Welcome to being a minor social Thinker. Minor because you can't do Tattletale or Ingenue type shit of cold-reading deep secrets right out of people, or convincing them to do atrocities on sheer manipulation. This is high-end normal social skills, meaning you top out at things like 'career politician', 'veteran diplomat', 'professional con artist', 'carnival "psychic"', 'highly talented peer counselor'... all simultaneously. So you're not going to be convincing anyone to just abandon their moral code or instantly go directly against their strongly-held beliefs or biases with just this. But you can still do a lot.

After all, this is the story where Emma Barnes managed to somehow rule most of a high school contrary to all common-sense expectations just by the superpower of being really good at mean girl shit and fake innocence. You've got that only way better. Whatever you intend to do in the world, being able to avoid all the beginner... and most of the intermediate... mistakes at failing to read the room, not knowing when to change the subject, blowing your tact roll, being unable to redirect or misdirect, or being unable to spin, reassure, sympathize, or empathize - or at least look like you're trying to. And yes, you can't work miracles with this... its not even ShayneT's "Intuition" levels of being a social Thinker. It is, however, Intern/Deputy/Emissary levels of being a 'social Thinker', and Intern!Taylor still got so much mileage out of that. And so can you.

After all, we already know what happens when someone devotes all their time into learning how to Tinker and fight better and none of it into actually studying how not to be a tactless asshole. That's when you go full Armsmaster. Never go full Armsmaster.

* PRT Agent Training (1 charge) - Yes, it's another one of mine. It's useful both because it gives the sort of badass agent skills that, assuming equivalent gear, lets you take on a small squad of your fellow agents single-handed with at least some odds of winning, and because it's most applicable to what you're doing. On top of just being a nice generic 'federal agent' skills package at an elite level, with all that implies. And it's specialized for being a PRT agent, so on top of all the above you know things like the general logic of parahuman combat, the standard categories of threats you will face and the basic tactical tree to run against each one, what Master/Stranger protocols really mean and the various concentration techniques they use to at least try to blunt the effects, and, best of all, a good outline of all the various methods by which the PRT tries to run down and rope in independent parahumans like you. Know your opposition, after all.

* Handyman/Odd Jobber (1 charge) - Before you laugh, consider that as an SI you may need some kind of day job at least early on. Or later on, if your strategy involves blending in like a normal person at any point. Or even just if it gives you a general feeling of self-confidence and self-reliance to know this kind of stuff. Now consider that this particular charge is basic apprentice- or journeyman-level knowledge of pretty much all general trade skills. So while you're not quite Heinlein's idea of the ideal individual with this alone, you can still run a lunch counter, build a porch, fix a pothole, lay in a driveway, repair a fence, rewire a house, help build a house, use any common hand tool, etc, etc, etc. Which is very good for finding hand-to-mouth labor almost anywhere, very good for general survival if you're thrown into a situation without your Tinker tools and have to start making shelter and shit from scrounging like a Fallout character, and best of all, means you will never be the sort of impractical comic-book genius who forgets that his shining Clarketech wonder weapon works a lot better with a handguard so the operator doesn't take his own fingers off with it like a badly-designed chainsaw.

And if absolutely nothing else it keeps your Tinker cave from looking and smelling like a frat boy's crash pad, because you actually know how to cook, clean, and do basic home repairs like an experienced housekeeper. And yes, you'll soon enough build a robot to do that for you, but you still have to properly program the robot.

* Personal Development Techniques (1 charge) - Because it rolls off the tongue easier than 'Applied nutrition, personal fitness, and body dynamics'. You probably have Invictus to let you grind it all out the hard way without needing to min-max it, but wouldn't it be more fun to keep your personal fitness up with a scientifically-min-maxed program of diet, perfect form, and tailored dynamic-tension exercises to let you get the optimum trade-off between slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle and healthy living? And then use all the time saved to do fun stuff?

As well as letting you distill this all into a fitness program you can teach others? You are getting minions, right? So while this probably isn't a day one purchase - it takes time to ramp up - it certainly is an early days purchase.

Especially if you remember that the character 'MVP' from Marvel Comics was able to get results comparable to the 616-version of the Super-Soldier Serum (i.e., the peak human one, not the MCU's superhuman one) simply by spending enough years on proper diet and advanced mind-over-body exercise methods, as collated by the inventor of the original Super-Soldier Serum as an old side project. Or that Armsmaster likewise optimized his physical training methods as far as his Efficiency shard could take him... and he was using crap shard-based Tinkertech knowledge, the kind that is never complete, conclusive, or simple. You aren't. So while you might not be Captain America with this + hard work, you'll still be in far, far better shape than most of the spec-ops troopers or veteran heroes you'll meet, let alone the average people. And your inevitable martial arts/combat training charges will work even better with this kind of thing as a foundation to build from. Remember, Inspired Inventor loves charge synergy.

So, that's some non-obvious charges to spend in your first couple of days. As for tech trees and tech ideas, most Inspired Inventor authors already have their own ideas on what they want to build, so I won't tell you how to do it. Besides, I already linked all sorts of fun fics to rip off be inspired by.

But, I will highlight one technique I really liked from 'Technology Will Win The Day' because it tends to get lost against the backdrop of all the awesome clarketech going on around it...

And that technique is the Programming Suite. Because no matter what exact type of glorious technopolis your Tinker-12 ass is going to build, it's going to involve a lot of automation. And so you need to rip off 'Technology Wins The Day' by using 3 charges in Software Engineering, 1 charge in Efficiency, and 1 charge in Ease-of-Use to create the ultimate progamming environment. With a ludicrously versatile library of functions and code patches that can in combination build anything from a game of Tetris to an AI fit for a Kardashev-III civilization, that are also ungodly efficient and with a programming interface is so intuitive that it makes coding complex programs as easy as just twiddling the touchscreen even for a novice non-Tinker programmer, a few man-hours spent building this bad boy early will spare you sooooooo much time not having to hand-code all your shit later.

And the benefits that Efficiency and Ease-of-Use will have to everything else you make is also awesome. Along with other things that 'Ad Hoc' used in 'Will Win The Day' to passively boost all the tech they made, such as Ruggedization and Minimalism (i.e., knowing exactly what gizmos to build in the first place to complete more tasks with less tech, as opposed to Efficiency which is about making a particular gizmo do more for less cost).

 

[cliffc999]

Ah, Eidolon. The swiss army knife of the v1 CYOA. It trades out being able to bust the power curve on the high end in return for instant gratification and nigh-endless versatility.

So, while you can't retcon the entire universe in a minute with this power, you can still do quite a bit. Some fun things to remember about Eidolon...

* Even at the base level, with no Shattered Limiter, you get any five powers that you want up to a max of Rating 10 for each individual power. Each power starts out with you having total understanding of every tiniest nuance of the power and a perfect mastery in applying them.

* Your Eidolon power is weakly acausal and automatically reactive. The description explicitly mentions that left to itself, your power will instinctively swap slots to something useful in the near future. So you're ridiculously hard to kill even by ambush, because you don't get 'caught with your powers down'. Even if you're slack, a useful defense against or escape from what you're about to get nuked with will boot up when its most useful. This doesn't mean you should go around being careless, but it does mean you have a lot more wiggle room.

* There are Trump powers that let you permanently augment the properties of objects (Dauntless). You have access to them. There are Trump powers that let you temporarily give people powers (Othala). You have access to them. There are Trump powers that let you temporarily give people skills and knowledge. (Teacher). You have access to them. And unlike them, you can make that shit permanent. So nothing stops you from using Eidolon to augment yourself with lower-level 'always on' powers to keep you from having to switch slots more often. Imagine if you could run the sort of regeneration that Othala gives people all the time, for example. Or what happens when you boost all your faculties of body and mind both to peak-human, if not more.

* If absolutely necessary, jam one slot to Trump 10 (temporarily grant me X) and another slot to Trump 10 (make temporary power grants into permanent ones), then shoot yourself with both simultaneously.

* Oh, and remember back in the Power Manipulation entry where I outlined a blueprint for a self-therapy power? Yeah, shoot yourself with that one regularly.

* If you remember nothing else while using Eidolon, always remember this one phrase. "If you hit something with a hammer that you then vanish, it's still been hit with a hammer." And I don't just mean that if you used a Blaster power to set something on fire then it will still burn once you swap out the slot. Oh no, I mean that if you did things like create a power slot that let you instantly learn things, you'd still keep the learning after losing the slot. So nothing stops you from being a Batman-level polymath really soon now. Or having the perfectly healthy body of your dreams. Or cramming ultra fast for that exam. Hell, just give yourself a slot for 'Victor, only this one doesn't steal but copies' and then just go around pinging everyone.

* Sting is a power you can grant yourself. Stilling (aka the Golden Fuckoff Beam) is a power you can grant yourself. You should never need to shoot anything twice unless you're playing with your food or trying to brute-force Zion.

* Eidolon may canonically grant himself Tinker abilities via his slots, he just usually doesn't bother because it's much slower than anything else he could be doing. You don't have this limitation. The possibilities for abuse are tremendous.

* There is a very cheap way to break past Eidolon's only major limitation, the power cap. And that way is to take Shattered Limiter. Remember, SL isn't just +1 slot per 6-12 months. It also doubles the magnitude of the base power every 6-12 months. So after your first decade, assuming you had Shattered Limiter and spent all 10 years as a couch potato, you'd still have 20 slots of powers each one of which could individually run a power 1,024x (2^10) as buff as a power you could have made for yourself while starting out. Whether you interpret 1,024x greater in magnitude than an initially Rating 10 power to mean Rating 20, Rating 30, or Rating YES, even the most conservative estimates mean holy shit.

So, yeah. Take Shattered Limiter and Eidolon, be prepared to ride the infinite escalation train to nigh-omnipotence. And sure, that's SL and almost any powerset but the nigh-infinite versatility of Eidolon makes it really broken.

 

[cliffc999]

The Munchkin's Guide to Power Manipulation

First off, we'll post the exact text of the power description for reference purposes:

Power Manipulation: Some of the rarest and most valued parahumans are those who can affect the powers of others. People who nullify allow enemy parahumans to be subdued as easily as an unpowered human being, those who boost other's powers giving their allies a much needed edge over the opposition. Some even have the ability to copy or steal powers temporarily. You can do all this and more, and only your personal desires can stop such effects from being permanent. You can nullify, enhance, modify, copy, and even steal the powers of others (whether this takes the shard along with them is up to you). Transferring powers from one person to another is trivial, even stacking multiple onto a single target. You also have five charges a day which lets you create shardless powers like yours, whose nature are fully under your control. A single charge can result in a power that would be rated around 4-5, with more charges increasing its power, versatility, pushing or removing limits, or adding more functions. You can manipulate and sense created powers regardless of the location of anyone you have given them to. You also have an ability to sense parahumans and powers within a large area. Created powers are yours until you transfer them to someone else. Charges can be spent to boost any of your powers, including others bought here. Changes can be reversed at will, and you can deconstruct powers you have created but do not recover any charges from doing so.


The underlined part is something many PM fanfics don't get nearly deep enough into. You only need charges to create new powers ex nihilo. Virtually everything else is talked about in the part that doesn't mention needing charges.

So it's all spammable and free. Including all your Trump effects. So even if a Power Manipulation SI dropped into Worm and got immediately attacked by a wild Lung on the spawn point, he's still got an 'I Win' button to press before he even copies or grants himself a power... he can just go all Hatchet Face on Lung and hey, no more rage dragon.

But that's just scratching the surface. You can boost powers, jailbreak powers, temporarily off-switch powers, or permanently depower people... without charges. You can 'NOPE' the shard right out of anyone you think shouldn't have powers. You can copy powers and stack similar powers together to boost them higher than the originals. All without spending charges. I'm thinking of a PM fanfic I read once where the MC copied Glory Girl and Aegis on the first day, used the 'minor chargeless edit' feature to hack the timing on GG's shield so that the vulnerability was a non-factor, then heterodyned Aegis' physical boosts with GG's non-physical boosts to become an Alexandria package exceeded only by Alexandria... for zero charges. And then he actually met Alexandria, and whoo boy.

You can "sense parahumans and powers within a large area". So you could spend your first three hours in Brockton Bay without spending a single charge and still end up with the combined powers of most of the capes in town.

No, seriously. Get on the bus and go to Arcadia High School. Sit on the park bench outside and a 'large area' lets you hit most of the campus. Shazam, you just picked up Glory Girl, Panacea, Shielder, and all the Wards except Shadow Stalker and Vista. That's enough powers combined you're already an A-class cape, and you're barely even getting started.

Now go to Winslow. Ping Taylor for a hit off the Queen Administrator bong and give yourself that sexy, sexy unlimited multitasking. You don't even need the bugs. Now you too can seamlessly use multiple powers in mid-fight and Trump your enemies and still remember to duck! Plus, you've got access to Shadow Stalker's powers as well, meaning you can get into anywhere in this city. You can even use the edit function to remove her electrical weakness... that shouldn't even require a charge, because the threshold of how much you can edit a copied power before it becomes totally original is vaguely left unspecified but implied to be rather large, and simply hitting 'remove drawback' is not quite there.

But hey, you've got a stop at the Medhall building to make first. And now you've got Kaiser's power, and Fenja and Menja's, and any other of the E88 capes who actually have jobs there. (Canon's not clear).

And we haven't even done the Rig yet.

Or camped Somers Rock during a big villain meet.

And God help the world after our first Endbringer fight.

Oh, and a thought occurs; your Trump power works on Endbringers. And arguably, on Entities. It's the Worm v1 CYOA, after all, there's not really any limits that they don't actually specify in text. What happens if you just... turn them off? They're basically made out of shards, after all.

And lastly, some powers I'd spend my first day using charges on in addition to all of the above. Note - I am using the actual PRT Threat Rating Scale, the one where the #'s mean how dangerous you'd be to a PRT squad trying to take you down, not the one where they're used as power ratings. And if that means I'm taking shameless advantage of the Worm v1 CYOA's decision to mis-use a threat rating scale as some type of power measurement, well, the entire point of an "exploit" is taking advantage of that kind of thing.

(add) Agh, I forgot a trick I learned from one of the omake to 'Yaldaboath' - using your Power Manipulation to give you a Trump power designed to speed up the refresh time on powers that had time-based recharge requirements.

So, a change. First I dump 5 charges into this power, then I start buying the rest of the list below.

Patience, How Long Does That Take? (Trump 12+, 5 charges) - This power is a self-targeted Trump effect that changes the refresh time of 'charges/day' powers such as Power Manipulation from "per day" to "per [arbitrary period of time]". It may be mentally toggled on or off, and the time increment may be dialed anywhere between 'Planck moment' and 'eternity'.

So you arrive, drop this, and then basically don't worry about counting charges anymore. Ever.

And now, some useful powers to buy first off:

Path To Mental Health (Thinker 1, 1 charge) - In the fanfic "Forced Perspective", Taylor had a touch power that was basically 'Your brain gets a dose that's the equivalent of spending a year with a Yamada-level therapist that you were actually trying to engage with.' I'll take some of that as a self-targeted effect, thank you! So no Master effect, no forcible personality rewrite, just my brain's own mechanisms for healthily coping with and resolving trauma actually being used instead of being ignored, and far more quickly and efficiently than normal.

Because yeah, that's a background process I want running in my brain literally all the time. This is Earth-Bet. Everybody fucking needs a therapist. And I damn sure will if I spend any time here.

... mmmmmmaybe this power should be copied to other people.

Charles Atlas Superpowers (Brute 2, Thinker 2, 1 charge) - Yeah, that thing from the Worm v3 CYOA? Well, rating 2 means 'alert, exceptional, well-equipped, or trained individual should be able to answer or address the ability in question, but it can still prove problematic', which certainly sounds like 'peak human potential without training' to me. So a single charge should boost my ass to be intellectually and physically exceptional for a human being all-around, which certainly won't hurt.

Plot Armor (Shaker 9, 3 charges) - Probability warps around me so that I do not die or become permanently incapacitated. Think like Ack's 'It Got Worse', but focused solely on keeping me alive and functional enough that I never die or become permanently incapacitated. So long as I still have that little, I can use my other powers to fix whatever shit I'm in. And the reason I'm dialing it down that far is because Shaker: Nope would actually start warping reality around me and funnelling the course of my life into a desired direction, like the protagonist of IGW. This is day one, I haven't even decided what the fuck I'm going to do yet, I just don't want to get ganked on the spawn point. So, an extremely powerful ability but one that's got an extremely tight focus of only keeping me able to participate in the action economy. I'll do the rest on my own. Besides, I can always boost it later.

And there we go. Even if I hadn't used the recharge hack that's only the first day's worth of charges. Between that and my bus tour of Brockton Bay, I'm good. And with the recharge hack, well... yeah.

 

[cliffc999]

You know a CYOA is broken when "become the Emperor of Mankind" is probably the second least broken power in the list, if only because Emps has actual feats and limitations.

Click to shrink...

The things about Emperor of Mankind that break the CYOA that very few writers seem to get into:

* Psyker powers are entirely out of context for Worm. You should be able to mindcrush Zion the instant you get line-of-effect to him simply because every single one of his anti-Master defenses is built to stop the sort of mind control powers he already knows about, or anything vaguely similar to same... which you aren't. Wildbow wrote a materialistic universe where souls and metaphysics and magic and psionics don't really exist. The flipside of that is nothing has a metaphysical, magical, or psionic-based defense.

* As per the explicit wording of the CYOA your mastery of Imperial technology isn't just what the Imperium has in 40k, it's anything humanity ever knew. The lost STCs? You have all of them. Full on Dark Ages of Technology crazy shit that was starting to approach pre-Fall Aeldari bullshit tier? You have all of them. A ready-made excuse for the author to freely yank anything out of the ol' Colon of Holding short of full-on Necron tier lunacy? You have all of them.

* You're immune to the Tinker cycle. It's admittedly obscure novel canon, but the Emprah has proven able to materialize raw materials and solid objects straight out of the Warp. Like, it's still only an enormously simplified version of how the Eldar create wraithbone, in that they're creating psyker-reactive programmable matter by the sheer power of thinking really hard and he can only create normal matter, but the man once canonically turned a shattered wreck of an Imperial Titan into a fully-functioning mint-condition mecha by staring at it. So, none of the painstakingly gathering raw materials to build the tools to the etc. to get 40k technology. If you want to start making some Custodes, just find an empty basement, pull up the blueprints in your mind, and then just Matter Creation your entire lab and the growth tanks. Boom, one minute.

* You don't need Blank. If Tzeentch himself has trouble precoging you, Path to Victory can go eat all the dicks.

* You don't need Inspiration. Seriously, have you seen this man's career? He's such a giant shadow in the Warp that his passive aura is a massive awe effect in 40k canon. I'd almost imagine that the Inspiration perk was based on him.

* You arguably don't need Invictus (but I'd take it anyway) given that the Emprah's mind by itself can do things like go 'So, all four of the Chaos Gods are trying to corrupt me. Meh.' or 'So, ten thousand years of being a barely alive piece of jerky single-handedly holding the Astronomican with one hand while preventing the formation of a new Eye of Terror by the collapse of the Imperial Webway with the other. This sucks, but I can deal.' I mean, the man is basically a Warp-fueled god construct that was specifically designed to be unbreakable and incorruptible.

* The strength and speed and durability of the Emprah is way lowballed by most people. Like, the CYOA hints that you can compete with Brutes. Ummm... no.

OK, let me put it this way. Primarch strength feats include bench-pressing an Imperial Titan or holding up one entire wall of the Imperial Palace at the high end. The Emperor is as much stronger than his children as they are stronger than you.

A Primarch can take a railgun to the face without his armor, breathe in an atmosphere made entirely out of acid, and in the case of one who is also a Perpetual (which the Emprah is)... well, I was told once that there was once a case of a guy who got decapitated and thrown off a cliff, and he'd regrown his body under his severed head before he hit the bottom. The Emprah is, again, as much more bullshit than that than they are more bullshit than normal humans.

The average Astartes can move so fast they can dodge bullets. The average Primarch is so much faster than that that the Astartes can't even see him move until after they're facedown in the dirt. And the Emprah... well, you know.

So barefoot and in your underwear, right off the spawn point, you are not just 'a Brute'. You're basically the motherfucking Hulk as far as anything on Earth-Bet is confirmed. Velocity is a stationary object compared to you, your durability is in the top 1% of the planet (and this is a planet that has Alexandria and Glory Girl), and your strength can topple skyscrapers. Without even using any of your knowledge or pysker powers you can still show up at an Endbringer fight and be maybe the third biggest Brute in the crowd, and the first two are the Endbringer and Alexandria.

* The average Custodes has a degree of combat skill and training that makes them a postgraduate-level genius in pretty much any art or science related to the military and a grandmastery of all martial arts and weapons that would let them be a serious annoyance to an Astartes even if they were in a baseline human body. The Emprah is the guy who taught them everything they knew. But not everything he knew. And since the CYOA gives you all his knowledge, you have all that skill. And not just at punchy, but also at strategy, tactics, and logistics. Even with no powers and reduced to a baseline human body, you'd still have the skills and knowledge to be memetic Batman.

* You have biokinesis as well. Not Shaper-tier of course, but it's a legit psyker power in 40k (and of course you have all of them at Alpha-Plus tier, you're the Man-Emperor of Mankind). You can heal, reshape, and augment people. Arguably the only thing keeping you from being 'Panacea, but at range' is that you actually have to know enough genetics to design the new organism yourself while she can just tell her shard the wishlist and it automates the process. But you can certainly heal the shit out of people.

You can also have self-targeted biokinesis. Your physical appearance is not really a problem re: standing out, because you can reshape your body to look like anyone you like. The Emperor was able to spend 30+ millenia of human history blending in under all sorts of assumed identities after all... and no, that was not just psyker illusions. I mean, the man is like twelve feet tall in his 'Emperor' form. Back in the past the damn ceilings weren't that high most of the time. Illusions or not, he wouldn't have been able to fit in the room.

 

[cliffc999]

No, it's not Invictus. Or Inspiration. Or First Impression, or Resources, or Secret Base, or anything else. It's this bad boy.

Alternate Continuity (Reincarnation): By taking this perk the restrictions on the changes you can make to canon in choosing your life are completely removed. Any changes you can imagine are fair game, the only hard rule being the presence of Parahumans, Endbringers, and Entities. Want Earth-Bet to fight off the Endbringers with mechs that channel the powers of their pilots? Want the nature of shards to be different, parahumans triggering in a moment of unbridled heroism? Perhaps there are no shards, Parahumans being a natural evolutionary trait of humans who undergo a trigger event, with the Entities having arrived here to study them. As long as those three basics are obeyed in some form or another, your wishes are fair game.

'There have to be parahumans, Endbringers, and Entities existing and that's all' is one SERIOUSLY broad set of permissions. Like, it's just asking to be cheesed.

So, here's an alternate continuity:

* Abaddon, Eden, and Zion were the last three Entities left alive as their race's self-destructive omnicidal idiocy led them to cannibalize themselves. Because sure, while a remotely sane species wouldn't have decided to murderfuck themselves to death out of pure selfish spite, this ain't a remotely sane species.

* Abaddon died shortly after gifting Eden with the poisoned PtV shard, his goal being to destroy the last viable breeding pair of Entities in the universe. Eden died while lithobraking. So now there's only one left.

* Zion is depressed to the point of being a sleepwalking zombie that will never trigger enough to go omnicidal, because he knows it's all over and he's just that broken. There will never be a Golden Morning, he'll just quietly drop dead when his power reserves run out assuming he doesn't cack himself earlier.

* The function of shards to try and regrow into new Entities in the absence of their parent Entity was disabled earlier in the Entity War because it was being weaponized against their users. Zion doesn't even know how to reactivate it if he wanted to, that was the Thinker's job. So, none of the shit in 'Ward' will happen when Zion dies. Shards will just eventually... run out of power, and quietly fade away.

Congrats, you solved the big problem of surviving the CYOA. Golden Morning will never happen. If you're really impatient you can put in things like 'Zion just decided to kill himself, a second after you arrive he'll be dead' (because this technically fulfills the requirement that an Entity must be present at the start of the CYOA), possibly while also accidentally falling on Eidolon and removing the Endbringers. Or whatever other hax along those lines you can suggest.

This also works in any other version of the Worm CYOA that allows the alternate continuity patches. IIRC v3 does, not really sure about the rest.

But yeah, if you just want to have some goddamn superhero adventures without putting up with the cosmic doom plot, pay 1 point to just dropkick the cosmic doom plot.