I stood on top of a low rise in New Hampshire, looking down at the space that only a moment ago...
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Anything At All (Worm v1 CYOA, Kaleidoscope, SI, one-shot)
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Anything At All
cliffc999
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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.
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.
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.
* * * * *
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.
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.
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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.