Packo: +3 MMP, +2 STR, +1 AGI, +1 SKI, -2 DEF, -3 RES. Steamstream Gloves made from the Jewelscale Gloves and 15 Silkweed Bundles, 2 Spiritblossoms, 1 Searing Cluster, 1 Glacier Cluster, 1 Cyan Diamond, and 1 Entrophy! The final result fails to have the +1 CRT, however. He rotates Collapsable Shield and Overload for Riposte and Warp Step!

Boshi: +1 INT, +1 SPC. Incantation slotted in, and Aeternalis Ribbon equipped. Special changed. Craft denied- +1 MOV and +4 AGI is effectively 10 skillpoints worth of stats... and given the nature of MOV, really isn't something that should be lightly given out.

Nidra: +2 SKI. Stuffed Koala changed, and Sheep Counter created using a total of 1 Megu Patch, 8 Rose Weave, 1 Platinum Ingot, 4 Mental Clusters, and a Pocket Watch!

Venia: +2 MMP. Force Nail rotated in. Resistances shuffled. Trait nerfed. Then, 5 Copper Cogs used to update the Slayer's Splintershot! Also, Weaver's Palm created for Marron, using 5 Platinum Ingots, 5 Plasteel Ingots, 2 Eterna Flowers, 2 Spiritblossoms, 1 slab of Yggcrawler Meat, and 1 Mental Cluster.

MARRON: ...Uh, alright? I mean, I took one or two replacement arms with me when I came here, but... I'll give it a look.

MARRON: ...
MARRON: This is... actually pretty nice looking. I mean, it'd be cool if you could make it NOT chemically bond itself to me, since I might want to get another update later, but...
MARRON: Thanks!

Nezira: +1 MHP, +3 SKI, +1 SPC. -5 RES. All spells rotated. 4 CRAFTS done... and also allowed, due to one of them being really small. Anyway, 2 Luminous Crystals, 1 Iron / Titanium / Durasteel / Plasteel / Gold / Silver / Platinum, 1 Eterna Flower, 3 Yggcrawler Meat, 5 Gaiaroot Potatoes, 10 Wheat, 5 Uniform Logs, and a charge from the Eternal Flower used to create a Vitality Well!

Then, 10 Fresh Manabloom, 2 Platinum Ingots, 2 Greatwood Logs, 1 Sapphire (x25 Crafting Credits), 25 Stone Brick Blocks, and a charge of the Amethyst Archrobes used on a Mana Confluence!

THEN, 1 Greatwood Log and 1 Platinum Ingot used on Chloe's Wand. Okay, that's nice and short.

THEN but in a higher form of capslock, 1 Rose Weave, 2 Silver Ingots, 5 Psychoid Leaves, 1 Spider Silk Spool, 2 Reverie Fragments, 2 Zweet Fragments, and 1 Iti Cell used to create a Hammerspace Sack! This is equipped.

Destiny: +1 MHP, +1 AGI. She then lobs together 1 Yaga Razortooth, 1 Greatwood Log, 1 Bar of Platinum, and 25 Crafting Credits worth of other materials to create the Piercer Ring, which is then equipped.

Author: +1 MMP, +1 INT. oh my god this one was so simple

Hex: +some progress towards MOV, -1 INT, -1 SKI. Hex Plushie equipped! Trait edited, but "gaining SP" condition dropped. Craft skipped: you can't really just straight-up upgrade your thing and remain on the same tier! I will however, drop the Slashing Weakness by 10%. No cost. Your other "craft" will be handled later.

Daskter: +5 INT, -1 SKI. Trinkets rotated.

The Man: +2 STR, +3 SPC.

Irongutta: +2 AGI.

Brutishace: +1 MHP, +1 MMP, +2 INT, -2 STR.

Calibri: +2 STR, +1 SPC, -1 AGI. Eviscerator Bladetip equipped. Illusory Trap rotated for Sword Beam.

EN: +1 DEF, +1 RES, +2 SPC, -2 STR. Sandvich equipped. Intimidation and Flirt equipped. Air Dominator created with the Air Controller, 6 Platinum Ingots, 8 Iron Ingots, and also 10 Gold Ingots, just in case. Water tiles flipped to deal water damage, meaning that the game has forcibly shifted your resistances over.

Terry: Respec.

...

Just kidding. He actually didn't do one this time! Anyway, +2 SPC.

Keiko: +1 MHP, +1 AGI, +2 INT. Elder Pact created with P'hil-Sh'wif, Ancient of Adhesive. This consumes a Hunter's Mark, 5 Greatwood Logs, 50 Stone Brick Blocks, and 4 Searing Clusters.

Arisa: +1 AGI, +1 SKI 2 Platinum, 1 AI Core, 13 Wire Scraps, and 1 Mental Cluster used to upgrade the Needler Rifle to the Cursor Rifle! Second craft straight-up fails, due to generally low amount of items. 2 LED Displays, 4 Speaker Systems, 8 Circuit Boards, 51 Wire Scraps, and literally the entire Carnival Generator somehow used to create the Reactive Tie!

Chloe: +2 AGI. Calibri Plushie equipped! It climbs onto her shoulder.

Marron: +3 SPC, -1 MMP. Weaver's Palm equipped! Trait and Special changed.

Ette: +2 SPC. Repair Charm equipped!

Omorika: +1 MMP, +1 INT. She then uses the Irrigo Essence on her Amethyst Circlet! She uncorks its vial, and with a few words, the Irrigo mixes into the Amethyst, staining it and changing its color- a brilliant hue that the Author would not soon forget... were it not Irrigo. The metal frame of the circlet begins to glow gently as well, occasionally flickering with the substance. Irrigo Circlet get!

[b]Nia: +2 AGI, +1 SKI, -1 DEF. Whispering Staff and Throwlem Hand equipped! Phase Shift rotated in! Trait edited to be less bad.

Mari: +a lot of equipment.

MARI: Aw, yes! Big floppy witch hat, eyepatch...
MARI: I could totally rock a cosplay and have it be a legit build...

holy god so many crafts kill me nowwwwwww

Okay, so first off. I need to upgrade this rifle.

Let's just see... oh, this'll work. This will work very well.

I mold a giant mouse cursor out of two Platinum Ingots; well, actually, this one is the hand with an index finger raised that you'd see hovering over a link, but who cares.

Then I take an AI Core, exactly 13 wire scraps and a Mental Cluster, and use them to... ah, screw the explanation of the psychomotive forces and stuff, basically it lets the AI control the cursor. Now, since I myself am an AI within a robot body, I override the AI in the external core. That's how it works, right?

Yes. Yes it is.

I then imbue the cursor into my Needler Rifle, creating...

(T4) Cursor Rifle
(10-10) Piercing, Range 3-5, 0 Retreat, Counter: 3, Hit 7. Stat Changes: +1 SKI, -1 DEF.
Weapon Passive: Cursor Drag. If you attack an enemy, you may move them up to 3 spaces (in any direction). Every space moved reduces your damage dealt by 20%. If you move them the full distance, apply PushedAround1 for 2 rounds to them.

COUNTER: Mouse Parry.
Range: 1-5.
Perform a regular counter on the attacker and inflict PushedAround1 on them for 2 rounds.

Big whoop. That was fun.

Anyway, next up is upgrading my Elemental Scope. This'll be MK][ obviously, and the way I'm gonna do this is by taping a Entrophy to it, which gives it enough entropic energy to literally alter the fabric of reality and breach the second law of thermodynamics. Now I know, that's not how entropy works, and to that I have only one rebuttal:

no u

So there. Instant upgrade.

(T4) Elemental Scope Mk][
No, I don't know how looking down this scope makes your bullets set themselves on fire.
(+1 STR) (Secondary Element)
(Physical 10%)

Secondary Element: Upon joining a battle for the first time, select a Magical element. For the rest of this battle, you may opt to have your Basic Attacks be of both its normal element, and the selected element. You also gain a passive 20% Resistance to this element.

Lastly, my tie. Now I know, the hell am I doing with a tie, right? Don't worry, it'll be invisible - and blast EAS Tones and the visuals on the Brain Power video on any counter - when I'm done.

2 LED Displays, 4 Speaker Systems, 8 Circuit Boards, and 37 Wire Scraps combine to create a Sensory Abuse System, and a further 14 Wire Scraps connect it to the tie, and then the Carnival Generator, which I shrink down into a small, compact box that also outputs about 28,000,000 RF per tick is taped onto that which powers the entire thing. Done!


(T4) Reactive Tie
Known in the state of California to kill people, then fire them from their jobs, in that order.
(+3 CRT) (+3 CAV) (Strobe Counter) (Improved Counter)
Strobe Counter: Unchanged
Improved Counter: +50% Counter damage. Does not apply to Strobe Counter.

"This... All started at the age of seven, I guess. I was a young, happy girl then. People were already calling me a prodigy. I seemed to just learn everything within my ability to learn well, and more. I made my first wand before my eighth birthday-it was the wand I gave Maria! I was a little genius and everyone said I'd grow up to be a great person, and I believed them. I lived in a town, known as Ursa. Basically the farthest place away from proper civilization in my time that anyone could think of. People were a bit weird around there, and I didn't know why, but I was a kid so I didn't care about it. One day, though, well, I was at a friend's house... His father dropped a key to his basement, one he was told never to open. He wanted to open it, and I never had any problems with my own basement, plus I was a seven-year old kid. So I went along with it, and he opened it. I'm not sure whether or not I regret that."

"At the bottom of the basement, lit only by the light coming from behind us, there were these... Naked people. Bloody, naked people I didn't recognize. They were very thin... Very pale. Very hurt. Chained to a wall. All I really remember managing to look at before the door was slammed shut-my friend's father had found us while we were opening it... I didn't know what to make of that, and neither did my friend, but we were both confused, and I don't remember what we said, but I remember what his father did-he... He cried, he kneeled down towards his son, he hugged him, he called himself a terrible person and asked that his son never, ever grow up like him. I... I couldn't understand it! It was incomprehensible! I just couldn't understand, but I realized something. Something else. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with Ursa."

"Ursa was basically made as a front for a human trafficking operation by the Yakuza. The future is... Very different from now-things are so huge that the Yakuza had been able to found the town just as a cover to use as... I don't know, a prison? A pigpen? I don't know what they ever did with those poor souls, they weren't treated well though. That's all that mattered. And the Yakuza ruled the town. Subtly, though; even if most everyone was in on it, they weren't powerful enough to fear the idea they'd be found by any prying eyes, or a lucky escapee could lead a trail of breadcrumbs... People were charged to live, quite harshly, or they joined the Yakuza in operations-either or. No exceptions. My parents were in the former category, desperately holding out, and the only reason they were successful, and could at all, was because my dad worked on a government paycheck. Nothing else would work. The Yakuza could shake up the local economy just to ensure that anyone couldn't live there without being one of them, paying them through the nose, or being kidnapped for god knows what reason. And no-one could talk about it. 'There are no Maifa in Ursa,' was the saying. The joke was that they were Yakuza, but also that there was 'no criminal element' that anyone was allowed to speak of openly. Any funny business? You were dead-didn't matter how far you ran. They wouldn't let anyone leave the town-they discouraged trips outside through every means they could. They didn't tolerate any attempt at revealing their secrets, period. It was terrifying to slowly piece together the information, listen to my parents a bit more, just, learn all of this horrible crap surrounding my life."

"... I didn't see any way out of it that didn't involve force. And the Yakuza were... Dangerous, in many ways, as I'll explain. You see... In simplest terms, sometimes random people became superheroes of a certain mold for no good reason. And sometimes nonsentient monsters spawn out of nowhere, where sentient lives aren't commonplace. Usually. A lot of people managed the... Logistics of it all, tried to keep everyone superpowered from killing everyone who wasn't and the like. Among the nuances of the powers we kept finding, though, was that some people could give others superpowers. So the governments of... Basically everywhere, set up systems and tests to make sure only qualified individuals could ever get empowered so, because it was bad enough that you could get superpowers out of the blue, worse if crazy people started giving everyone superpowers. My mother was one of them, she just didn't use them. MANY of the Yakuza were empowered because one of their own was the tester. I thought-why not me? I was a little genius, miss perfect. I could do anything! I could learn self-defense and superpowers better than these chumps. So I tried my hardest-I trained myself. Tried learning martial arts, combat magic, whatever I could. I wanted to learn how to heal, too, but my proficiency with healing magic was rock bottom. Is, rock bottom. I just wanted to help people, help those people I saw down there in that dark room... Someone had to know. The Yakuza had to go."

"...Such it was, for two years. And then... One day I woke up because of some tiny little fairy thing kicking me in the head and complaining about stuff I didn't understand. My head felt funny to me-like I never actually woke up that day. But that day, I didn't know why, but I felt sharp. Not just waking up well-I got kicked awake by a fairy!-but I felt like that my head was just buzzing with potential... As it happened, I got superpowers all on my own. Found out when I nearly ripped a door off its hinges by accident. My mother was elated at the idea. My father was... Not as elated, nine year old girl with superpowers. So I went to the tester that day-to learn what my abilities were, record them. And the report came back... To keep details simple, my major powers could be categorized under two distinct ideas, plus immediate and physics-defying 'natural' proficiency in a single weapon. The weapon was a revolver-as old as it got for weapons at that point, but ever deadly. Not a wonderful sign. Learning gun safety at age nine wasn't very pleasent. As for the powers... One: Near limitless psionic power and potential. Mastery over the mind. Two: Infinite 'fortune,' which, in practice, meant conceptual treasure. As conceptual treasure was the standard currency, well... I was basically the wealthiest person alive, instantly! It could become whatever I needed it to be-which meant that I had access to money that could never be counterfeit, infinite food, infinite water, infiinte whatever-I-wanted. No catches, I just... Had it. OK, I couldn't generate the Artifact of Ultimate power, there were limits of quality, but not quantity, and there were workarounds. The psionics were terrifying-only one other person had a dominion similar and he had... Misused it, greatly. And he was-is? will be?-he's alive. AS for the cash... It was completely unheard of. Methods of generating items through these abilities were common but they had a few gaps, which meant they weren't worth anything to anyone, they vanished, or only acted certain ways, or such. But I had the ability to generate something that couldn't lose value, in incredible amounts, and it didn't go away. If not for some very serious talks about economics and some preexisting legislation to cover exactly what I was capable of? I could very well have crashed the economy of civilizations that spanned universes and far, far more. In short-two incredibly dangerous abilities. And I haven't even gotten into the details, or where some other tricks I have that don't cleanly fall into those two neat little categories come in."

"I was elated! At first. Infinite money! Even with the limitations I had, that meant I never had to work, I basically got a paycheck for existing and all I had to do was occasionally stop what I was doing to drop off some of the conceptual cash to the government. No problems. As for the psychic thing? I was a responsible girl who wouldn't misuse her powers-I thought I had the power to stop the whole Yakuza operation right then and there, even!... And then, the next day, after school, I got caught and cornered by several of them, and had guns pointed at my head. They could kill me-totally. But you couldn't dangle infinite cash in front of crime and expect them not to act. My friend's father... His name was Brandon, that man. He was in charge. He wasn't happy-I could just look at him, see his emotions, among other things. He wasn't happy, but he had orders to do this. He told me... In no uncertain terms, that I was either going to give them money willingly, or they'd burn my house down, kill all of my family, and kidnap me to extract the money. All I had to do was fence them-exchange their dirty cash, trade it for clean cash. I was the ultimate fence-I literally couldn't be traced. That's all I had to do. Nothing else-just quietly meet them somewhere private each week or so, take whatever their fenced cash was and 'clean it' by giving them an equal amount of the same cash. I'd even take care of the 'tax' on my family in the process, or at least, alleviate it so suspicion didn't arise. He wanted to be comforting, he told me I was brave, he said a lot-but he made it clear, I had no choice. I joined them, basically. And I hated it. But I couldn't speak about it. There were no Mafia in Ursa."

"What happened next? Well. I learned a lot. Brandon ensured my transition into the Yakuza was smooth. They had precautions against my worse abilities-the kind that would easily mean they could basically get a bounty on my head or a warrant for my arrest in a flash if they needed to, and that my ability to manipulate minds wouldn't work on them. Not normally. Hell, they even let me try. Didn't work. They at least had the decency to back up their word-I didn't have to deal with their 'side job.' I learned why. They... They were all just like normal people! Most of them signed on because they were terrified of some downright mythological 'big boss' figure that worked closer to civilization, some kind of impossible invincible terror with incredible power. Others were forced in- they were out of cash and couldn't do anything else but follow along. The worst it got was that they were loyal, but none of them were ever terribly mean people, not to me, not to anyone. They gave me sodas and stuff even though I could get my own without a problem, they were polite, they didn't hurt me... It was downright alien to even think about bad guys as good people at that age. My friend's father was the vice-captain, sucked in too deep but too strong as an individual to be anything less... but he was always, always hoping for a way out. Not for him, though. His son. Always talked about lost family. Not for very long, though. There were a few others that took a shine to me, but no-one could help me. There were no Mafia in Ursa, after all."

"As for the impact of my superpowers on my social life... A few people were attracted to me. The only other person who got superpowers on their own became a quick acquaintance. I tried dating him eventually-didn't work out, he was asexual. That sucked. Anyways, my friend-Brandon's son-his name is Nyke-he was the only person who knew what was going on with me, his father told him. He wanted to help, bless him-he got the same ideas I did. That was about it. The rest were... Well, default was either 'wary' or 'jealous.' They didn't understand why I couldn't give them money, or were terrified of my psychic powers. they weren't dumb enough to attack me-it'd probably hurt them more to punch me in my own face at that point, most of them. Some of them stuck around because I was weird, but... I just grew sick of it. I could always just look at them and see what they thought of me-their own little mental image of me, warped and distorted and turned into some villain. Or ugly. I got... Very self-conscious about my appearnace. Not coincidentally, I had infinite cash and the future had ways... Not like it helped at all, in the end-now I just had to deal with their raw envy, the mutterings behind the back, it was worse, not better. And that was when they weren't thinking of that on me. So that's why I don't like being called pretty. Because I don't even naturally look like this. Because no-one liked how I looked no matter what I did... Because everyone thought I was a monster no matter what. And they treated me like one-something to fear. Basically, the only friends I had, I never met-I retreated to, basically, my version of the internet for friends. Online games. Integrated myself into a few niche communities here and there. One I stuck with played this colorful fantasy RPG, it was a good game..."

"... As for my family, well, the differences in apperance aside... I never told them about the Yakuza deal I had to strike. There were no Mafia in Ursa. In any case, why would I? Dad and Mom hated them. I'd basically be betraying them, and it sounded absurd. As for the powers, well. My little sister didn't out-and-out hate me, but she was jealous. I did give her stuff, when she needed it or when she wanted it, but I couldn't just give it out all the time, and that drove her up a wall. Dad was more understanding, he tried to cheer me up, he was one of the few people who never ever got scared of me. He tried so hard to make me feel alright even when I wasn't. Mom was too, but she didn't stick around... Something came up for her, a ticket out, friends missing or in danger, she had to put on the metaphorical cowl again. She left us.... I saw her right before she left. It was... Brief. I didn't like it but I think I understood it. I never heard a word from her again. I'm not sure if she died. I'm not sure what she thought. I don't know what happened."

"That was life for me, for a long while. I wasn't happy, and I felt stuck, and I just kept training in hopes that one of those days I could develop some sneaky trick to escape and tell everyone, screw the consequences. It didn't look like I ever would. And so it went... Until I found her. It was... Some cold day. Snowy. I wasn't happy, school hadn't cancelled despite it being a load of snow. It almost never did, but today was an egregious case... I used my wand to make sure I didn't trip over anything in the snow, and I, well, my magic sensed something in the snow, something awfully large, and I investigated because it didn't look like a rock or anything, and I found, and, and I found, I, I f-f-f-found... I found a girl, a baby girl. Naked. Cold. Unconscious, in the snow. Dying. Frostbitten to hell. I, I, I... "

"... I did what I could. I took her up, rushed her to school, screamed for help. No-one had any idea what was happening but everyone was horrified. The nurse saved her-thank god for modern medicine! I would've been totally useless if not for that... But, like, I was all like, 'what happened?! why?!' It was so awful I was beside myself well after she got better, and everyone else was confused and some of them were crying, it was just the most awful thing to even imagine! I can't forget that day. Burned into my mind. In all my nightmares. But... After all of that, she was all better. And she was so tiny and cute. She wasn't a Nephilim-she couldn't have been the child of anyone in Ursa. Brown hair, and too tiny-a human or a horon, but not a Nephilim. But she was so innocent, so cute, so tiny... and what happened was awful! It made me sick! Because I knew what happened-the trafficking operation went a bit arwy, they had a breakout, they did what they could and tried to give the baby a chance, barely able to walk and trying to go through snow as tall as her! The Yakuza weren't very happy about it-mostly in a moral sense as even they had limits to stomach... But they couldn't publicly 'reclaim' her or anything, she was news. There were no Mafia in Ursa, and they couldn't disprove that by doing any stunts. I was news, too-I saved someone's life... A tiny little girl's life. And she was so cute, so tiny... I adopted her-I had the money, it wouldn't be hard to care for her. I gave her a name-Maria! Called her my little muffin. She was cute, too cute, and I didn't want her to grow up a lonely orphan or a foster kid or something. So that's how I met her..."

"...And some sick little part of me regrets it! Saving a child? Not that-adopting her! Not even the Yakuza were sickos enough to bring her to harm. She'd have been totally fine! I could've just done anything other than take her in-care for her-latch onto her. She didn't judge me. She didn't hate me. I was basically her actual mother for gods sake, and I was too desperate for affection. It was all so very cute, saccharine even, and it was stupid as hell! She had a clean shot out of Ursa, practically paved for her, because try as they might the government was watching a little too closely for them. If she fostered herself into another family... She could've been free of the hell, maybe. I didn't realize I ruined it. Not yet. But by the time I did, she loved me too much to leave... Or want to. And I did my damndest to keep her from experiencing the hell of it."

"... And it didn't help she had to get powers too. They were fairly tame powers-they're basically why she's so good with animals, and she had some neato tricks with Sulphur. Dangerous, but not me dangerous, but at the age of four?! That set records. That put her on the map of the media again... Of course, packaged into her otherwise fairly standard, straightforwards powers, and that superpower-granting ability I mentioned, that she was told that she couldn't use or she'd get in big trouble... She also got one of a considerably more dangerous caliber, one that slipped under my radar. Polymorphing. Oh, you may think that's not dangerous-but the knowlegeable of my age know that Polymorphing, especially at the caliber she could use it at, was more like 'murder that didn't look like murder' than just transforming objects. And she was four. And she got it in her head that she wanted to turn me into a "Super-superhero" or something. Bless her. And she did. Kind of."

Venia pauses for the first time this conversation, and reaches for her face, as if it were a mask. Her hand shifts away-clutching a mask, a new person sitting on the couch. She's still visibly eighteen, and still visibly Venia-her clothes fitted to match her size, except Ga'aunt which now looks mildly oversized. dull blue eyes, brunette wavy hair, and a pair of horns jetting upwards, black and tapering off into an ever-shifting prism at the tips. She looks normal, for a moment-but her body seems to shift and melt like an ooze, and turn black as it does. She crushes the mask.

"... I can't describe what happened well, what happened, but two things happened. I got... Polymorphed, into whoever or whatever this is supposed to be. I don't think Maria succeeded in the way she intended. Probably thought of a magical girl or something. Not... This. I can barely control my body like this-whatever powers this thing has, they're automatic. Reactive. Adaptive. And not entirely to my will. Really, what I look like right now is just a facade. More like a blob of this horrible dark thing that happens to default to a female horon of some strange description. I... Hrm. Odd. I usually hit my limit for how long I can keep my body under control about now... I haven't transformed into this form often, because I eventually lose control, start... Assimilating the environment around me? Some horrid black shape. Something. I don't know, I don't want to find out."

She flips back to the form you're familiar with with roughly the same gesture, including moving a mask off of her face and crushing it.

"... But more concerning was this-at that level of Polymorphing, I shouldn't have been able to... Well, be myself. At that level, that was murder that didn't look like murder. I shouldn't have remembered anything, but I did. Hell, no-one could even tell anything happened. So, what caused that? Well, you've seen it before... That thing that helps me. My... My soul. That freakish thing like a skeleton with the weird silvery hair and the spiders. that was the first time I saw it-looking at myself in a bathroom mirror wondering what happened. I felt sick as hell all of a sudden, like I was going to puke, shaking, nearly paralyzed from fear. And then it appeared, and I could... I was it. I moved it. It was my soul-it was me, in every sense. Freakish as it was, but it was me, and it had that power-a power that made the polymprohing, conveniently enough, a mild inconvenience at best. Among others. Pretty dangerous. But that wasn't important-not as important as that it never seemed to show up on a scan of my powers."

"... That was huge. A hidden weapon. No-one would see it coming. And I had, effectivley, a completely different set of superpowers to my own, plus the ghost-and the ghost seemed to negate quite a few of the superpowers, if not quite frankly all of them. I trained, more, harder-I had never stopped. I think I'd have some pretty impressive belts if I took a proper martial arts class or such, and that wasn't getting into the actual powers. And I had this faint hope in my heart that I may've just found the key to my problems,buried in my own soul, or that second form. My sister helped-she wanted to get superpowers of her own, too, one day. Show she wasn't useless, or something. I guess feeling useless runs in the family... Of course, that's when we discovered the real ability, of which my miracle survival was but a side-effect. The masks... They... Steal identity, basically. If you touched the inside of the mask, and you weren't me, you'd stop moving, to the onlooker, and your mental faculties would slowly diminish to nothingness. As far as I know, anyways-the one time I tried I ripped the mask off! Because its worse than just that-to assimilate the identity completely, the victim is... Consumed, over the course of five minutes, by those tiny little mask spiders. And I have to be there, too-as the spiders. And as those spiders I can't stop myself. And I eat the target-and they feel the agony-and I remember the things they forget, gain their memories, until, theoretically, I become a carbon copy of them so perfect, that if I were to 'steal' from either of you, I could fool everyone else into thinking I truly was you-there'd be no tells. A truly perfect ability, but... Too awful to use! I almost feel proud that I haven't fallen that far. But I've dreaded the day I might need to, and I've been terrified that it'll be this week. I guess that was a divergance, but its a grievance I have... IN general. Noticing a pattern? Almost all of my abilities... In one way or another... They can't be used to help people. Only hurt. I can't help people with my powers... "

"... One day, something broke for good in Ursa. I was sixteen, Maria was six. Nyke, my friend, and my sister, they got powers that day. Neither of them had anything terrifying as mine. Nyke got some astrophysics-related abilities, rather nice. My sister got control over gas. Like, all gasses. Including air. Very dangerous. Not me-tier. But that wasn't what was important. That day, the... Usual method of logging things were down, so Nyke had to input everything manually, and then, well. Brandon and Nyke had family outside of Ursa, a fact I think I mentioned. They were just lost-Brandon was too but he never elaborated on how. And they found one of them, an uncle, Brandon's twin brother, because Nyke and him shared last names-they only learned it now because the man himself went by a callsign that became more famous than his real name... Its a bit weird and complicated, that. And he wasn't just some random guy. Far from it-he was the most powerful thing that anyone knew of. The pinnacle of what our superpowers could do. And he was, well. Basically... Batman? A living nightmare for criminals, a cop. His superpowers weren't me-tier, in theory, but in practice he was so above everyone else that no-one threatened him. Famous. Powerful. Far more dangerous than any cheap scum Yakuza. Something... else, happened that day too, but it actually isn't relevant for all of this, and its also kind of... Very classified. Bad information to spread. Obliged not to tell what else happened that day. What I can say is, what happened encouraged Nyke to call his uncle, and... He came."

"His reputation was not exaggerated, to put it simply. He pretty much realized what was going on at once-the only reason he didn't stop the whole thing right then and there was because he wanted to come back, he couldn't stay, but he'd come back and arrest them all, fix everything. I had never felt so much hope as I did then. He declared Nyke to be his apprentice on the spot for... Recent revelations, not just for familial ties. Nyke managed to convince him to bring others. My other friend, my former crush... My sister, Amare... Some poor orphan Kitsune, we all called him Thrifty Pete. All his apprentices in superpowered antics that they embroiled themselves in far more than I. I would've gone, but he told me I couldn't take Maria with me, and I needed to be there for her. I managed to convince him of something, though... Use Ursa as a forward operating base for his nonsense. Quiet, out of the way, no strategic importance to anyone else, already habitated. It was perfect. He understood everything I tried to get across. Brandon, though... Well, let us say that their reunion didn't go great. A career criminal and a career cop tend not to get along. I never saw Brandon more unhappy that day."

"He left, with Nyke, and soon to follow were military personell, and the media, and the Yakuza got stifled, fast. They were under scrutiny. They couldn't flex their muscles. They weren't outed... Yet. Evasion, bribery-every trick they could pull to make sure they could delay the inevitable, they pulled. It felt like everything was going to turn out alright, and they came back after a month... And... Then my sister started yelling at me, furious."

"Nyke told her everything he knew-which was everything, basically. He wanted to play me up as sympathetic. She... I, she called me a bitch, a traitor, a sellout, scum, weak, trash, a failure, a disappointment to Maria. My dad found out too. He was... So sad. He thought everything was going well, that I wasn't sucked into the unholy hell I found myself in. I didn't understand-I thought he was just dissapointed in me, but he was terrified for me. I was complicit in every crime that the Yakuza had done-if they were busted, I was going with, simply for how deep and how bad it was. I... I hated myself. I always did, but I hated what was going on. Maria didn't understand, though. No-one told her. I didn't, certainly."

"They left, again. They were due back in another month, but something was happening, and... Well, they didn't come back. But the pressure was still on the Yakuza... and then one day... One day... The one thing that kept me going at that point-Maria-she went missing. Didn't come home from school. I asked everyone I knew, and the Yakuza-I knew they knew but they lied to my face, and, then... I didn't know why, they wouldn't tell me, brushed me off. No Mafia in Ursa. I came home in the middle of the night, distraught, spiteful, came home. Dad was home, he came to me, he was angry, he asked me if I was responsible for Maria being gone. I told him no, I wasn't, I only learned she was kidnapped afterwards... It got bad. It got into an argument. My dad... He wasn't happy about Maria but he didn't see any way to help her but wait it out. No way the strongest man alive wouldn't return, right? Even if he didn't for some reason, the Yakuza were running out of resoruces to keep justice at bay... So all we had to do was wait. But I didn't want to wait. I... I got angry. I wanted to crack skulls. That was it for me. He tried to talk me out of it, but I talked myself angrier and angrier and then..."

"... My father never tried to fight back. He barely could, if at all, but he didn't even try. I beat him to death, I barely held myself back enough to not turn him into tomato juice. He was so sad, he didn't even try to beg me to stop, he just said he was so sorry. And... and I hate myself for that! I didn't stop! This was my father! He loved me! He never stopped, he was only scared for a second! He loved Maria! He was a perfectly good man and I beat him to death! I was too angry to care. I shouted at his corpse that I'd save her and stormed off."

"Brandon intercepted me. I caused too much of a commotion. He took me aside, he promised to tell me what was up... He fed me the most ridiculous story I ever heard of in my life and I was too angry to buy anything believeable, much less that. there was no way-no way in hell, not a single chance. Maria could not just be the long-lost princess of an multiversal empire that was hell-bent on getting her back, the local government did not just loosen border patrol just to let an elite strike force in to get her back at any and all costs, and I was going to believe the Yakuza had somehow kidnapped a princess from one of the most powerful people in reality. Oh, and the kicker-he claimed that this was his moment, that he was going to finally cheat the Yakuza. The captain had orders from high up-that's why they kidnapped her from me. They wanted to follow through, random her for an exorbitant sum. Brandon thoguht differently-the emperor was... A dangerous man. A very, very dangerous man. He didn't want to risk it. He deliberately set everything up-he'd release all the prisoners to him as well as Maria, for free. They were all going to prison for life anyways, why not go out doing the right thing? And he wanted me there-he wanted to cheat the law for me a little, he thought that my connection to Maria as her caretaker would get me an in, let me jump continents. But I wasn't about to go help basically the evil empire, and I wasn't about to believe the obviously fake story I just got fed from someone who, up until that point, was perfectly reasonable!"

"Oh by the way, did anyone notice that shiny crown on Maria's head? Yeah, he wasn't lying. And I realized he was being as genuine as possible... Or at least, had managed to trick me into thinking he was, at the time. But he was genuine, and if I believed him-if I believed the intergenerational friend who protected me from the worst of the Yakuza and had never lied to me ever, about anything-if I believed him then nothing bad would've happened. It would've worked out perfectly fine!."

"I attacked. The Yakuza had rules against beating superiors. I was beaten unconscious on the spot, even as Brandon shouted otherwise. Dumped me in the middle of the woods, left a note from the captain that the only reason I wasn't dead was because I was too valuable to lose, and that I better clean up my act or I'd be in worse hell than what I was already in right now. And, of course, there were no Mafia in Ursa. I was bleeding, half-naked."

"I was miserable as hell. My life was over, and I thought of everything I could. I couldn't take them on in a straight fight, at best a one-on-one. They were better trained and better prepared for me than I ever thought... I hadn't used my secret weapons yet, though."

"And then it occurred to me, and I looked at the note they left me again."

"There were no Mafia in Ursa."

"...I found a way, in that tiny little statement, to subvert every little mental defense they had. It was a meme-they ingrained it into everyone in Ursa, which meant that anything to do with it was simply accepted. I could do no wrong, if there were no Mafia in Ursa. All I had to do was get the right people mentally manipulated first. And then, it would be effortless to... Do whatever I needed to do. And that's what I set myself out to do."

"... I might've been able to forgive myself for a hotheaded mistake. I might've even been able to forgive myself for the patricide, or my love of Maria overriding my sense. But nothing haunts me like the person I was that next week. My father's death was covered up-Nyke and his crew hadn't come back-the world's greatest hero was dead. I was at my lowest point but I thought it was my highest. I managed to do it-I subtly wormed my way into every last one of their heads. None of them even noticed even as I made them do things they would never do. I... I was on a power high, my god. I dominated them. I know how the Chaos Butterfly works-what better way than to do it for yourself? And I thought, at one point, that I was doing what I had to. What I had to do was just free Maria and the others. I went beyond that, and into terrible horrible things. I only had to dodge a few people, but everything else... By god it was effortless. And I misused it. I brought some of the Yakuza somewhere quiet and beat them bloody and ripped them naked and took out everything I ever felt on them. I was a monster. And they all said that nothing had happened. I made them suffer, made them feel terrible and weak and useless without this convenient little voice in my head steering their actions. I made them do stupid things, injure themselves, let themselves be injured by me, mocked them, laughed. I was in complete control and I was a monster with it. I wanted a spectacle-waited for the right moment. a small tourney for people like me to compete. It felt perfect to bust them then, live. I used all I could to get Maria in my hands-obviously the safest there were-and had the rest of the traffick victims come in with me. People where shocked, the Yakuza were pissed, the captain was downright ready to murder me on the spot, and I asked everyone else what they were going crazy about, there weren't any Mafia in Ursa, right?"

"By the way, that made a lot of people's heads literally explode."

"I pulled my ability to summon my soul. I had learned it subverted most of the superpowered durability people like me tended to have, so the Captain was shredded in a moment. I didn't quite see Brandon having the same ability as me coming, though, and our fight was longer, but, well... At that point, I was stronger than him and he knew it. Better. And I was angrier, too. He gave in, he didn't want to kill me, I wanted to kill him-and I did. I had killed all the Yakuza, bar one guy-just one guy who wasn't there, just didn't care for a tournament, the one guy who I also never got into. Everyone else, dead. I freed slaves-I figured I was in the right."

"I saw no further point in being there. I was about to leave with Maria, and then I learned the hard way Brandon was right. Sword in the chest. Died."

"... I woke up later in a fancy ship with Maria's mother. Learned what happened-after my little stunt, the Emperor walked in and killed everyone left, thinking the Yakuza were still around. They hadn't met up where they agreed to, so he thought they lied to him and didn't want to take chances, so he killed everyone. Everyone. Except Maria... And that one lucky Yakzua, who survived by the skin of his teeth and fled. That would mean... Most everyone else innocent in the village at the time, including all the trafficking victims I just freed, and myself. Maria was crying over my corpse, though, and then he got sad... So he used a... A very rare thing-something even I couldn't generate. A special little stone with an ultimate Resurrection ability attached. I was alive-he saved my life. I was life-debited to the new most dangerous man in reality. The only consolation prize was that Nyke, my sister and the others weren't dead, apparently, but god knows where they were. As for the last Yakuza left? He told everyone what happened, as best as he could-and he knew enough to realize that I was responsible, told everyone his suspicions. The general public ate it up. I was the greatest monster anyone knew. And... I realized exactly the kind of person I was in that moment. They were right."

"...And then he came. The emperor, and he looked very miserable. I thought today wouldn't get any better. I coudln't understand why he approached me, until he started crying into my chest. He felt awful about what happened the instant he realized what happened-that I slew the Yakuza and freed Maria and he basically killed a truckload of innocents. He... He was infamous. A dangerous, crazy lunatic who'd kill for the mildest infraction with an ego a mile wide, I heard. I had never imagined him like this. He awarded me... Basically the highest civilian honor he could for what I had done with Maria. It was almost like an insult to me that he wanted to do any of this for me. And then he offered me something... Either I could enter his country in asylum as a civilian. He would be considerably more lax about the infinite wealth and its limits. OR, I could go a step beyond that. Own a Duchy, as its own Duchess. One had gone without a title for a while... Figure it could use a new name, a new owner."

"I don't know why I went with the Duchy. In hindsight, if I was just a rich civilian, I'd be able to get into contact with Maria much easier, live at the captial of the empire instead of being stationed at the capital of my duchy. I didn't know that, though-I really didn't understand the choice at all. But I figured, the Duchy would mean I'd be in a position of authority. I accepted it without even thinking too hard. He was happy about it, delighted even, almost as if he wasn't crying into my chest a moment ago... And then he turned his attention to this maid I barely gave thought to who was helping me wake up, who got the pronouns wrong. Took her into a side room."

"So, funny thing. I checked his emotions. No self-doubt, as it was said. But no... No malice either. No anger. Nothing of the sort. Not sociopathy-he felt genuinely abysmal at what he did, and genuinely happy in that moment. And purely happy. No regret. No anger. Nothing. Whatever he did I don't know, but she was screaming the whole time, terrified, and then, as far as I knew, she stopped thinking and died."

"...And he came out of the room with an odd black kitsune."

"I had to barf after he left the room. The... thing, he called it, was for Maria. A helper. I... I really made a massive mistake. Being a duchess meant I worked for him, directly. I had authority, and power, and territory-but also responsibilities, and that included raising his army, and I only really realized how bad it was right then and there."

"The people living under me didn't give me much slack. My immediate help saw me as a boss, nothing else. The internet communities I had frequented banned me, bar the one I frequented the most, who discovered who I was shortly after I logged back on. They weren't happy about it, but I never tried to log back in. I stopped being a kid-16 was of age. The people of my old country? Hated the hell out of me. I was a scumbag traitor and a monster. No matter what I did or what I tried, I never felt happy again. I dragged myself through every task, had to get help to get out of bed, it was like I lived in hell. And I never used my powers-not for anything. I got others to do what I needed to do, put down the rebellions that shortly followed, recruit people for his army, run the duchy, ect. I did what I could here and there to make things a little bit better, but not allowing slavery when it was legal across the empire is cheap talk, and I couldn't' do much else. The Emepror was terrifying to deal with-I couldn't bring myself to rebel."

"... One day I got worse than usual. Wanted to kill myself. But I didn't want to just shoot myself in the head, no. I wanted to make sure that all of my mistakes would go away forever. I concocted this... conceptual cocktail of death. Filtered with the refined concepts of not just dying, but also being destroyed, being forgotten, being annihilated, being decayed out of existence, being, basically, nonexistent, and I injected myself with it. It was a suicide attempt... And I thought it failed. I felt a bit weak for a while, and nothing happened. And then... I got an invite to Maria's seventh birthday! I felt elated enough to actually put on a face strong enough to attend, and she was happy to see me, and then the blurring started and everyone panicked."

"... I never had the guts to admit to Maria I did that to myself. I think she thinks the polymorphing thing she did was at fault-that something went really wrong because of her. I couldn't bring myself to... I never... I haven't... Aguh! I haven't told her, yet. I couldn't try to comprehend it. I only realized I had been a complete idiot right then and there, and dedicated most of my time since then to try to either mitigate it or something. But... What I learned of it was simple. If I let it run its due course, I'd be... Erased. Completely. It would be like I never existed. And suddenly, the world's greatest monster would never have existed, Maria would be back at her home miraculously, and god knows what else good would've happened if I wasn't around. No emotional attachments, for good or ill. It wasn't some Wonderful Life plot, for sure-everything would get better, not worse. I lost the will to live, again, as I ran out of ideas for cures."

"... And then... I got the job for Sussui. An impossible 'atlantis' situation basically, except with time travel to fix the problem. Undo its destruction, bring back an ancient civilization to the present. Of course, it was situated right and tight in my lands... Granted, the only real reason why anyone would want to was because its former space was convenient. Sussui was... Not exactly glamorized. Two rival civilizations that endlessly tore themselves to pieces, who killed themselves over their own rivalry and a disregard for sanity. As sad as it was, that's the only legacy Sussui ever left. There wasn't anything else to write home about. Any resource you guys have, or will have, isn't one that the rest of the world wouldn't have had by our time. You'd be par, at best. I don't know why I accepted except to kill myself over there. There'd been plenty of attempts, and no successes. Hell. Its like they never even existed... Which is concerning. As is the uniformity of that stupid bug's victory. But even then-there was one other problem. I, that's why I came to see you, specifically, Omorika. You see, the method of time travel used... Well, its a controlled Paradox, basically. While the paradox itself is almost a non-problem, we have systems to force the outcome to be negligible, the intended effects, well. Either its copy-pasting the 'new' timeline into the old, or outright ripping it from its proper timeline into the original. No-one knows which yet, time-travel is extremely regulated and people have been killed for trying. Either way, you start to see the problem; effectively, I'd be tearing away a future Sussui from its proper place in the Multiverse, which is probably going to be nicer anyways, and putting it elsewhere-and depending on their dispositions, that 'elsewhere' is surrounded by technologically superior enemies. If they're not multiversal themselves, they're probably behind the curve needed to defend themselves or integrate on an equal level. If they are, god knows how many families and connections I'd be destroying, and either way, they'd be surrounded on all sides by... Hell, I don't even know, but it couldn't be OK to just be forcibly integrated like that, much less thrown under the rule of the 'White Rider,' oh what a stupid nickname! It feels like an impossible situation for me to solve because I hate that stupid empire and I would prefer to have Sussui kick its ass into the dirt and give that emperor some lessons in humility by some impossible means, but I don't have control! The Emperor, he's terrifying to me-blows up galaxies and recreates them for kicks, and that's just causal use, and I'm certainly not the only other superpowered lunatic under his command! Even the reason why I'm here is totally amoral and I can't fix it!"

"Not thinking about any of the moral or ethical violations I was committing and pretty much being forced into it anyways, I accepted. I didn't have a choice. But, I went on my own, which I did have a choice in, because... I don't even know! The emperor didn't want me to go because I was in bad condition and too precious to the duchy-but hell, it'd be a second of not being around, in the end. So, I built myself several robotic suits, each to disguise myself and each to prevent my powers from being used outside of it-I didn't want to be identified in the past, and all, and I didn't want my powers to harm anyone. A precaution against people trying to undo my alterations from the future, as well. That certainly worked out-they've all been destroyed beyond repair except Mr. Krabs, and at that point in the library, I almost reckon he deliberately let himself get damaged. He'd been thrashed up worse without revealing me. He's weird. I traveled back... Oh, a few years ago, around the start of the first Godmodding War. I got wrapped up in a few plots, solved a few problems, but I never, ever let the identity slip. I think everyone in the multiversal community thinks I'm several different people... They didn't know who I was, and they didn't have to care, because the real me was a stupid ass. I just tried to study Entropy and the Chaos Butterfly in peace... Which barely did me any good, had to get the job to come here to get any information at all, if I wasn't being interrupted and dragged across a downright alien Multiverse way before my own time. So I basically came in about as knowledgeable as anyone else."

"And now I'm here, and now I don't know what to think. Today's been impossible for me to decipher. Nia's always made me feel nervous but now I don't know what to even think, I'm getting hot flashes around her now and I don't know if its the Chaos Butterfly or her, and I keep thinking of her the same way those other people thought of myself, and I, I don't know why she gives me a damn, I don't know why she puts any stock in me whatsoever! And Maria's here for god-knows-what reason and she's going to get hurt, I've already almost lost her so many times now! And there's been world-ending bottles and more parasites, and I swear I keep hallucinating-I don't know why but I keep seeing my face staring back at me and I hate it, I hate it! Maxim, those Rose Cultists, now this-I keep getting angry like some kind of werewolf going on a rampage and I don't understand why I can't control myself at all! I'm terrified my powers are going to go out of control and hurt everyone again, because I can't control myself at all! Nia's hurt because of me! Probably gonna get possessed again, worse than before, because I had to be a dumbass and try to help her, because since when has that done anyone any good ever?! Why do I do anything?! I... I just absolutely hate myself and everything I've become, because I've become everything I hated! I never understood what Brandon was going on about when he said to Nyke to never be like him, until now, anyways! And I just want it to end, but now it seems like I can't even end it myself, and I don't know what to do! And my heart is, AGH! I don't get it! I don't get why I care so badly for Nia and think these awful images of her naked or felt the need to look into those memories like a dumbass and I don't know what to make of myself and I don't know what to do to get myself out of this whole hell with Sussui, because even if we win, we kind of lose in the long run! And god knows what I'm going to do about the duchy and the emperor when I get back because if I don't go back they'll personally retrieve me as a matter of security concern, and probably whoop my ass for disobeying a direct order! And here I am wondering, 'what's the point?!' No matter what happens the only thing that's been happening is that I've been ruining lives, no matter what I try. I feel like I know what the solutions are but not how to reach them because I've tried everything and nothing works! Nothing! I'm worthless! I should be able to do this, I'm practically blessed with how incredibly dangerous and versatile my abilities are and I can't do anything, with or without them! And now I'm going to fail again, or cross the one line I've yet to cross to stop it from all going nuclear, and probably watch that fail on me too in the worst way possible while I'm at it because I'm worthless!"

"I don't understand myself, or what I'm feeling or why-I keep thinking I do and then I do some dumbass bullshit anyways! I've never succeeded where it matters, unless it was something godawful enough to make me public enemy number one or something! I just hate myself so much!"

Fills by: Dealing Damage, Healing Allies (x1), Premitigation Damage
SP Required: 425

Transform into an Elite for a brief moment of time. More accurately, EM3R4-LD. (Then fully restore). This must be used at the beginning of the turn. Lasts for 3 rounds, then gives Collapsed for a turn. Only can be used once per battle, no exceptions.
Stats: 3xMHP, 2xMMP, +5 HP regen. All other stats are based on Emeralds stats, except for MOV, which is reduced to 2.

-2 SP per SPC. (Minimum of 370.)

+1 HP Regen per 5 SPC. (Cap of +10 HP Regen).

Thymebent Feedback at 20 SPC. (Whenever Thymebent Mode is active, you also gain a Thymebent Mode effect, enabling you to deal (6-6) Crushing Damage to any enemy you displace with your movement.)

R3B0RN at a combined 40 SPC, DEF and RES. (If you are downed/killed, this special automatically activates to revive you, but you are unable to act the following round and only have half HP.)

Pattern:
1. Auto-Lyonne: Restore (12-13) HP to all allies in Range 1.
2a. Umbrella Lancer: Deal (11-12) Piercing Damge. Range 1-3. Laser.
2b. Si'griut Sunder (15 MP): Deal (7-7) Direct Damage to an allied target in Range 2-3, then deal (14-14) Direct Damage to a target in Range 1-7. Inflict Healblock on both targets.
3: Move. Any walls or cover you move through are turned to rubble. Any entities in your path are pushed a tile away.
4a. Hidden Machine Guns: Deal (8-8)x3 Piercing Damage. Armorpierce2. Shots MUST be spread out; if there are less foes than attacks, the extra attacks are wasted. Range 3-5.
4b. Dust Against Dust (12 MP): Inflict 2 targets with Guardian4 and Elveil4 for three rounds, with the Elveil being a magical element of your choice. (No Erroveil or Thymveil). Range 3-5.
4c. Murder Magna (15 MP): Give all allies in Range 5 the effects of Empower3, Armorpierce3 and Slip3 to all attacks and damaging spells made by them this round. Yes. Range 5 exactly.
5a. Welcome to the Jam (20 MP): Deal (16-17) Crushing Damage to a target in Range 1, and inflict Stunned for one round and Weaken3 and Uninspired3 for two..
5b. Regular Lyonne (20 MP): Restore (19-21) HP to a target in Range 1.
6. Hidden Core. If you spent no MP this round, restore 5 MP.

Passives:
Ascendant Form. Final substats are based upon your base form. HP is triple your base HP; MP is double your base MP; HP Regen is +5 base (before mods). MOV is fixed to 2. Anything else is 1:1.

Literal Tank. You are 3x3 in this state. Your center tile is where you were standing originally. Your transformation displaces everything to accomodate.

Repurposed Defense Matrix. You gain +3 AC against any attack that targets multiple tiles at once.

First among Equals. You and any ally with this trait, as well as all your summons, must move before anyone else in your faction in a given round, even if you don't want to.

Overwhelming Presence. Immune to Prevention and Movement effects, slows, damage reduction, as well as Lethal and Very Lethal moves. Armorbreak has halved effectiveness.

Thymebent Effect: Moving now deals (6-6) Crushing Damage to any foe you displace. And only foes. Only available at 20 SPC.

Materials used: Camera Cap, 5 Luminous Crystals, 5 Seer Crystals, 5 Silver Ingots, and a Crimson Idol.

Nezira carefully disassembles the Camera Cap, taking the camera off it and setting it aside. She softens the silver with heat and slowly hammers it into the form of a circlet, before setting the circlet aside and taking the Luminous and Seer Crystals, along with the Crimson Idol.

She carefully carves a few of each type of crystal into parts of an eye, then slots them together until she has a crystalline eye composed partly of Luminous Crystals and partly of Seer Crystals. She uses some leftover silver to inlay the eye with silver, then channels mana into it to fuse the crystals together, ending up with a white-purple enchanted eye. She also meticulously inspects the Crimson Idol for any entropic residue, then purges any she finds and carefully channels the idol's animating magic into her newly-formed crystal eye, allowing it to float.

Nezira takes the original camera and holds the eye above it before blasting the camera with a beam of discorporating magic, reducing it to magical essence. She absorbs the essence into the crystal eye, giving it the ability to emit a beam of light that mimics the camera's function.

Nezira then takes the silver circlet she crafted before and carefully shapes a socket for her crystalline eye, before insetting it in there loosely -- tight enough to hold it in there normally, but loose enough to allow it to float out and return. She insets remaining shards of the crystals into the circlet in a pattern going out from the eye centerpiece, then carefully enchants the circlet and its gems. She puts on the circlet, mentally controls the eye to float out, moves it in a complicated pattern around her head, has it test a few beams of light, then returns it to its socket, satisfied.

Iris Circlet (T4) crafted!
(I've got prepared flavor text; otherwise feel free to come up with something cool!)
Stats: (+3 SPC) (+2 INT) (+1 MMP) (Blinding Eye)
Resists: Light (30%) Magical (20%) Magical (20%) Crushing (-20%)
[Blinding Eye]: Once per battle, you may scan with double your normal scan range and with Splash 1. Any foe in range is inflicted with Blind2 for two rounds.

--1: Ice Cream (Food)--
Used: 2 Glacier Clusters, 20 Fresh Manabloom, 2 Food Packages (10 Crafting Credits), 5 Refined Wood, 20 Wheat.

Nezira cautiously walks out into the forest and begins to wander, searching the forest and feeding any animals she comes across along the way with a few pieces of wheat. Soon enough, just as she runs out of wheat, she finds a sap tree, and harvests some blue sap before walking back to the house.

Once back to the house, she purchases a couple of Food Packages of milk, cream and sugar.

She goes down to the basement and cuts the flower parts off the Manabloom, then pours the milk and cream into a pot and adds the Manabloom flowers. She simmers the mixture for a while, letting the Manabloom infuse into the dairy, then takes the pot off the heat, strains the flowers out into a separate bowl, and stirs in the sugar. She takes a mortar and pestle and makes a paste out of the Manablooms, then stirs that into the blue sap she gathered.

She sets up a ice-cream-making machine using Glacier Clusters, then pours her ice cream base into it and lets it freeze for a while. Once it's semi-solid, she takes it out and swirls in the sap-Manabloom mixture, then pours it back in and lets it keep going until it's a solid, creamy ice cream. She carves the Refined Wood into wooden bowls and spoons, then scoops the ice cream into the bowls.

As a final touch, she whips some of the remaining cream, adds a dash of sugar, and tops the ice cream with thick, slightly-sweet whipped cream.

--2: Potions--
Used: 15 Fresh Manabloom, 20 Endless Gardens flowers, 5 Refined Wood

Nezira takes some Manablooms and adds them to a pot of water, along with a few of the various flowers and herbs from the Endless Gardens. She puts the pot on a stove and heats it up, before stirring the pot with a thin silver rod and infusing the water with mana through it. After a while, she takes the pot off the stove and adds more mana to it, before carefully cooling the mixture. She carves some vials out of wood and pours the potion in, while carving some runes into the outsides.

She saves and dries the Manablooms used to infuse the water, and those, along with the rest of the flowers and herbs, she powders and pours into a jar carved of Refined Wood.

--1: Food--
Used: 20 Gaiaroot Potatoes, 5 Yggcrawler Meat, 5 Hotpoints, 5 Aurora Crystals

Nezira decides to use some Gaiaroot Potatoes for a simple, easy food: baked potatoes! She cleans off the outsides of the potatoes and scrubs them in a bath of warm water, before wrapping them in foil and putting them in an oven along with 5 Aurora Crystals for heat.

While those cook, she makes a topping, cutting up Yggcrawler meat and sauteing it in a pan along with the outer flesh of some Hotpoints. The internal seeds of the Hotpoints, on the other hand, she saves and sets aside to spice up the meaty topping. Once the meat is cooked, Nezira carefully crushes a single one of the seeds and sprinkles it in, saving the others for if anyone wants theirs especially spicy.

Once the potatoes are complete, Nezira removes them from the oven along with the spent Aurora Crystals and carefully splits them in half lengthwise, topping the revealed potato-y interior with some of the cooked meat she made. She crushes the remaining Hotpoint seeds into a hot sauce and puts it on the side, before adding the completed dishes of baked meaty potatoes to the inventory.

--2: Potions--
Used: 15 Hotpoints, 5 Psychoid Leaves, 5 Frostleaves, 10 Wheat

After finishing up the potatoes, Nezira decides to make something that can have a more immediate effect. She cuts up a few Hotpoints and sets their flesh to stew in a pot while crushing up the seeds into a blindingly spicy paste. To the paste, she adds a few crushed Psychoid leaves, letting the spiciness of the Hotpoints mix with the euphoriant properties of the Psychoid into something that'll give someone a real surge of immediate healthful energy, with only a minimum of stomach burning -- okaaay, a maximum of stomach burning, with a side of mouth burning, runny nose, fire coming out of mouth, etc.

To fix that, she takes some Frostleaves and carefully amplifies their innate magic until they're frozen solid, then takes advantage of that state to powder them. She adds some water to the Frostleaf powder and stirs until it's cooled down, then stirs it into the Hotpoint-Psychoid mixture to nullify the spiciness, leaving only the surge of healthy energy.

To provide some actual nutrition to someone who drinks this potion and make sure the surge of energy and healing doesn't burn them out quickly, Nezira turns to the Hotpoints she had cooking, as well as some Wheat. She blends the now-cooked Hotpoint flesh until it's smooth and souplike, then grinds the wheat into flour. She adds some butter and oil to a pan, then pours the flour in, mixes the fat and flour together, and cooks the mixture until the flour's cooked and the mixture has become nicely golden-brown -- a roux. She stirs the flour roux into the Hotpoint liquid to provide some carbohydrates for energy (as well as digestible fat), then carefully cooks the mixture down. Once it's cooked, she incorporates the energy-boosting Hotpoint-Psychoid mixture and stirs again, then pours the mix into large flasks, one dose per flask.

MATERIALS:
-Sprint Cap
-1x Searing Cluster
-4x Plasteel Ingot
-2x Titanium Ingot
-1x Gold Ingot
-1x Silver Ingot
-1x Joltwire
-1x Coilgun Part
-50x Wire Scraps (wow we have a lot of those now)
-1x Circuit Board
-1x Speaker System
-1x LED Display

In a shocking twist of fate, Sophia can access the inventory in this state! Who knew?

Now, while she can basically make a badge out of literal nothingness at this point, she realizes she needs a Scooter for the required badge's functionality. I mean, of course she'd leave her Scooter badge on her ship where she can't reach at the moment...

She takes out two Plasteel Ingots, and somehow also pulls out a freaking Scooter cast of all things; two halves, one for the left and right sides of the scooters. She melts down the Plasteel with magical shenanigans (sadly she learned nothing from the magic club, so she's on her own and the process is slow), and uses most of it in the casts. While she waits, the also pours the remaining Plasteel into a handlebar grip cast.

After this, she uses another ingot on the base of the Scooter, forming it into the proper shape to be installed later. At last, she uses the last ingot (and whatever residue) to make the wheels for the Scooter. How she knows how to make a Scooter is beyond anyone's guess. Then again, so was her unfortunate situation and the fact she fought for her soul once and won, so what does anyone know.

She's probably going off instinct...

Anyway, she then fashions the Titanium Ingots, Joltwire, and Searing Cluster into a working engine; it's a small but light and powerful engine that uses electricity to ignite the Searing Cluster, and it does so often in order to simulate the use of fuel in the engine... wait did she just make an eco-friendly scooter by accident? Neato.

Anyway, she fashions the Gold and Silver into a powerful, long-lasting battery, and hooks it, the Coilgun part, Circuit Board, Speaker System (suitably small), the LED Display (modified to be a headlight), and the Engine together with the wire scraps.

She installs the engine and battery onto the base of the Scooter, making sure they're fastened on the back and front, respectively. She then installs the wheels; front wheel is hooked up to the Coilgun part to have it provide extra charge to the battery while on the move; the back wheel is installed to the engine, allowing the vehicle to actually move.

Art this point, she installs the handlebars tot he front wheel to help the vehicle turn, with mechanisms to control the speed attached with more Wire Scraps and such. Finally, she fuses together the two halves of the Scooter's shell, enclosing everything except the wheels and handlebars safely inside the hard Plasteel shell.

...Unfortunately the scooter looks ugly. Though thanks to it being mostly done, Sophia can now use her Time Piece to finish the job, even if it's weakened. She slams it on the ground near the Scooter...

...the Scooter gains a seat, tires for the wheels, actual rubber on the handlebars, and is painted yellow with polished chrome bits here and there. She then decides to take it for a ride.

...The Scooter doesn't start. Tch, of course, she didn't give the darn thing charge to begin with. So the pushes the Scooter around the tree for a few laps to charge up the battery via the front wheel. Takes a while, but saves her from using more materials...

She tries again, and the Scooter actually starts. It runs reasonably well for a scooter, despite being made in an afternoon. It's fast, too. While riding, Sophia drive-by grabs her Time Piece from the floor, and knits a badge out of nothing, to have it pop up out of thin air should it be needed.

She attaches it to the Sprint Cap... though in doing so, the crystal shatters, leaving the original cap. In the end she just decides to weave the remaining crystal back into the cap, turning it into a string and keeping most of its agile properties.

And with that, she jumps off the scooter. It disappears from sight, and she puts the finished cap back into the inventory... where Boshi immediately equips it.

RESULT:
Scooter Cap (T4) *vroom vrooooom~*
(+4 AGI) (vroom) (Unique: Maneuver)
Air (30%) Slashing (-10%) Electric (-10%)
vroom: The wearer may sprint and activate this ability to ride on a Scooter. This has the effects of sprinting, with 250% (maybe 300%) MOV and Skirmisher. Riding on a Scooter restricts the wearer to moving in the cardinal or diagonal directions from where they started. The wearer may still Sprint normally.

EN pulls out the Infernal Sharpshooter's Rifle. She appears to quite like the gun, taking a look up and down its surface, although she does note that it might be a bit on the less-maintained side of things. As such, she decides to take a bit of miscellaneous metal from the inventory to patch it up nice and proper, give it some care and reinforcement. Once she's done with that, she takes out the R4 barrel...

"...This coul' work. Hmm..."

After some thought, she sticks the barrel and the ISR together. As one can expect, nothing happens right away. EN shrugs, walking out of the area for a moment, and tries again with more force... This time around, something happened, albeit that something being herself igniting in flames. She keeps pushing the items together, the flames around her slowly dying down, then flaring up in green, radiation levels near her body soaring massively. It's probably not safe to be near her right at the moment... Even once the green flames burn out and she's managed to fit the items together, it's not safe yet, as a flash of green light proceeds to envelope everything in view, blinding and also kind of violently irradiating everything that it touches, which should hopefully be nothing important. Eventually, the light fades, and in her hands, EN clutches a rifle coloured pale-green and black...

(T?) Reactor Rifle
Nothing quite says "I hate you in particular" like shooting someone with a rod of uranium-235.
(20-22) Poison
WEAPON PASSIVE: Burning Radiation. Applies Fear(X), Burning7, and Poisoned3 on targets hit for two rounds. Reloader1. Scales with STR at x2 rate.
Range: 5-7
Retreat: 0
CNT: 2 (COUNTER: Nuclear Response. Range: 1. Deals (6-7) Poison Damage to the attacker and applies BadlyPoisoned2 for four rounds. Scales at a half-rate with STR.)
HIT: 11
Stats: +2 MHP, +1 STR, +1 SKI, -1 INT

Basically, once upon a time, in a town named Ursa, there was a girl named Venia. At the age of seven, she was a prodigy. Ursa seemed normal, up until Venia visited the basement of a friend's house. There, she learned that Ursa was but a front for a Mafia Yakuza group, and their gigantic human trafficking operation. They ruled the town and basically all of its people. You either worked for them, paid obscene amounts, or got kidnapped.

In Venia's world, random people were blessed with superpowers. Some people could give these powers to others, and there were tests in place to ensure that only certain people were gifted power. Venia tried her hardest to train for this power, - but it already looked hopeless, as the local tester was one of the Mafia. She also realized she had no potential for healing magic whatsoever

Two years later, Venia suddenly gained powers pretty much randomly-the only other real way to get these powers. Venia was gifted with near limitless psionic power and potential, and infinite "fortune", or conceptual treasure. The Yakuza (mostly some guy named Brandon, who was one of Venia's friend's father, Nyke) promptly conscripted Venia so they could make use of this, exchanging their dirty money for Venia's clean infinite fortune.

Apparently, most of the Yakuza was pretty normal- most of them were normal people, forcibly conscripted into service. Anyway, Venia's superpowers seemed to attract some people to her, but no romance seemed to work out. Also, everyone's mental image of Venia was apparently of some sort of ugly villain. Which doesn't exactly work well for self-confidence, and also why she doesn't like being called pretty.

All this time, Venia had never told her family about the Yakuza- it'd be like betraying them, as they hated the goons. One day, Venia's mom left Ursa for unknown reasons, and was never seen again.

For a long while, this was Venia's life. It wasn't happy or pleasant, and she felt stuck. She dreamed that one day, she would be able to escape. Then one day, she found Maria- a baby girl left in the snow. To die. She took her to school and thanks to modern medicine, she lived! Eventually, perhaps because she was desperate for attention, Venia adopted Maria. She too, obtained powers. Polymorphing. She tried to transform Venia into a "super superhero" of sorts.

The polymorph proved to be unstable, and she had been transformed into a blob of some weird black stuff with automatic, reactive, and adaptive powers. Those powers granted by it were also undetectable-as was her newfound ability to manifest her own soul. She thought of it as a secret weapon. Then, she learned of her masks- they could steal identities, and given five minutes, could fully devour a person (in truly horrific fashion).

Some time later, when Venia was sixteen, Venia learned of Brandon's twin brother, and Nyke's uncle, who was basically the most powerful thing that anyone knew of. He was also basically Batman. He appeared, and the only reason he didn't fix up the Yakuza situation right at that moment was because he through he'd come back and arrest them all. Venia had never quite felt so much hope. He took with him a few others, and he had these plans to turn Ursa into a forward operating base for his nonsense. Whatever that was.

Eventually, the military and the media fell upon Ursa. The Yakuza was stifled, put under scrutiny... and yet, they weren't outed. Then, a month later, Nyke and his uncle came back... and Venia's family found out about the whole Mafia thing. It didn't go down well. Venia's father was nothing but distraught and terrified for her. They left once again... and didn't come back. And then Maria vanished.

One day, when Venia came home, her father asked her if she was responsible for Maria's disappearance. This Of course, she wasn't. This culminated in an argument, which got Venia angry. Her rage manifested, and she beat her father to death. He didn't even fight back, or beg for her to stop. She shouted at his corpse that she'd save Maria, and stormed off.

CHLOE: ...
CHLOE: C-Could you say this in a... less... nonchalant fashion?
OMORIKA: I'm simply stating facts.

And then Venia learned that Maria might've actually been the princess of a multiversal empire. Apparently, the Yakuza wanted to charge the space empire for a massive sum. Brandon, the one Venia learned all of this from, planned to cheat the Yakuza. Release the prisoners, and Maria for free. Venia attacked, and she promptly ate gorilla. She was left in the woods, and left a note from the Yakuza captain that the only reason she was even alive right now was because of literally infinite money.

Venia thought her life was over. She couldn't fight the mafia. Because there was no Mafia in Ursa. The population had that idea ingrained. There was no Mafia in Ursa. And so, Venia decided that the best course of action would be to mentally manipulate some people. It was effortless. She wormed her way into some people's heads, took her rage out of a few members of the Yakuza, and generally mind controlled them into doing dumb stuff, until she finally killed them all on live television in front of the Yakuza captain.

She then apparently summoned her soul, and deleted the Yakuza captain. She had basically slew every last member of the Yakuza, save one. Then she fought with Brandon, and basically won but still got sworded in the chest and literally died.

CHLOE: ...Wait, she DIED!?
OMORIKA: Resurrection.
CHLOE: ...Oh.

Venia woke up on a ship, with Maria's mother. Apparently, after Venia's actions and death, the Emperor walked in and basically wrecked everyone left, thinking the Yakuza was still around. And we do mean everyone- basically all of the people Venia tried to save, the trafficking victims in the town- everyone but Maria, who was crying over Venia's corpse. So, a bit of resurrection later, Venia ended up in the ship. However, that one Yakuza member who lived told everyone of Venia's story- and now, she was basically Hitler crossed with Satan and also that one gorilla from Shield Hero in the eye of the public.

The Emperor showed up again, and in a complete subversion of all expectations, cried into Venia’s chest, feeling incredibly sorry for ruining the life of the person who saved the life of his daughter and raised him, awarding her the highest civilian honor he could and the potential for a Duchy, which Venia accepted. Then, he got very ‘angry’ at a Maid for a trivial reason, took said maid into a back room, tortured the maid without even a single iota of remorse or malice (somehow), and came back with the jet-black creepy kitsune that’s been following Maria around since. Venia instantly regretted taking the Duchy.

From then, Venia had just been feeling like a sack of gorilla. She couldn’t get up without help, she barely showed herself, shut herself off from whatever social network she had remaining, and everyone who worked under her were distant accomplices at best. Her attempts at bettering the general livelihood of the empire were also barely effective, and she was too terrified of the man who decided that galaxy-cide was a good way to pass the time. ((Note: it is not known if those galaxies were uninhabited))

Venia’s life became so awful that Venia decided she would kill herself-with a super-fatal cocktail infused with literally every ‘kill me’ concept ever thought of, and injected herself with it. Nothing happened immediately, or for a while, so Venia thought she just completely failed. Later, she got an invite for Maria’s seventh birthday party, accepted, managed to arrive, and encountered her first blurring episode in front of the whole party. Thus, Venia’s Metaphysical Cancer made itself blatantly apparent. Maria felt bad and thought the previous polymorphing incident was to blame. Venia couldn’t bring herself to tell Maria the truth. She tried to find a cure, but failed and fell back into a depression.

It was at this point Venia finally learned about Sussui, and got her mission to travel back in time to restore Sussui to the future. Except, this would basically result in said Future Sussui being ripped out from the timeline Venia just created to the ‘main’ timeline Venia was from, in some form, which would suck for a lot of reasons. Venia felt forced into this, but decided to accept it, and defy orders to go herself for reasons she doesn’t really understand herself. She took a lot of armors to disguise herself but they all broke (Mr. Krabs was one of them); she tried to study Entropy and the whole situation behind Sussui beforehand, but she kept getting dragged off into Adventures™ and came in about as knowledgeable as everyone else. And now she’s here.