Essence of the Operator (Arknights)
This essence comes in a strangely labeled plexiglass bottle, and tastes like everything in a chemistry supply cabinet was thrown into it.
○You gain the ability to use Arts, which uses the energy found in originium materials to perform magic. Your Arts follows a theme - Meteor has wind, Kjera has ice, Ifrit has fire, Amiya has her dark matter, and so on.
○You gain enough combat skill and power to be considered a top operator. Your combat skills have been highly refined and your body and equipment has been honed to a keen edge. Your capabilities allow you to fulfill multiple tactical niches and shift between them easily.
■(In game terms, you're a 6*, E2L1 with M9. Pick any game subclass, and come up with a kit with a theme. Make your skills diverse and don't have one overshadow another. As long as you aren't more OP than Chen Alter, you're fine. Modules are a part of your kit but you don't have them right now.)
○This means that you are capable of such impressive feats as:
■Jumping backwards over 40 meters from a standing start, while firing with perfect accuracy
■Running and jumping about 100 meters in around three seconds, in armor.
■Raising massive plumes of dust from a fast blow
■Charged attacks being capable of knocking down buildings
■Surviving getting tossed across a parking lot by an explosion, with the point that the explosive was touching being in pain but not having any impaired functionality.
○On top of that, you also have an alternate role that you are less skilled in. While your skills are not as refined and your equipment is not as good, you are still a powerful operator in this role.
■(In game terms, your alter is a 5*, E2L1, no masteries. Pick a different subclass for your alter.)
○You gain the equipment needed for each of your roles. This cannot be permanently lost or destroyed.
○If your roles and kit involve a summon or pet, like Skalter's boop noodle or Deepcolor's friends, then those are now available to you and will remain so in all situations.
○Gain knowledge and exceptional skill in any one instrument, along with a copy of that instrument and your own personal image song.
○Gain knowledge of how to maintain and repair your equipment and synthesize the materials needed to do so.
○You may gain knowledge of any civilian jobs or engineering fields in the Arknights universe. (This is where your "base skills" are.)
○Optionally, you may gain the ability to train others, helping them improve their combat skills. This will be most effective if their combat role is similar to yours.
○You gain resistance to Oriopathy and other "crystallization"/"magic overload" diseases. While you are not immune to them, you are heavily resistant to getting them and progression is greatly reduced unless you are seriously exerting your Arts/magic. (Basically, unless you're copying Amyia or Frostnova and really pulling on the extra power it gives you, it will progress so slowly that old age could beat it out to kill you.)
○Optionally, you may have your body changed into that of any Terran race. You may chose which one as well as adjust the aspects of your new body within racial limits.
○Optionally, a small team may be formed around you. This will consist of another 2-4 operators, who will all have good relationships with you and the others. You may choose their appearances, classes, and capabilities. However, their abilities are limited to below a top operator. (In game terms, they're 5* operators.)
○Optionally, you may select one of the three options below to happen:
○First, you may be transmigrated to the world of Terra.
■Optionally, you may receive a "background" as a cover story. This will also include common knowledge that would not be available via the game.
■Optionally, you may have fate arrange for you to have a positive first meeting with one of the factions.
○Second, you may be reborn in Arknights, well before the events of the plot kick off.
■The other members of your team will be born around the same time, in the same area, and will be fated to become friends with you.
■Optionally, you may have have fate arrange for you to have a positive relationship with one or a few of the characters before canon starts.
○Third, you may add any Arknights factions you want to your current setting.
■If the factions are historically integrated with your current setting and you are also historically integrated with the setting, then you may optionally have a positive relationship with one or a few of the characters in the faction before the story starts.
■Otherwise, you may optionally have fate arrange for you to have a positive first meeting with the faction.
Notes: Remember that you aren't stuck with game mechanics. You're not stuck with one skill per fight, you can move around and dodge and block attacks and all that. No, I don't know what DP actually means in the context of the real world.
Essence of the Tactician-Doctor (Arknights)
This essence comes in a bottle inside a first-aid kit. By the time you finish drinking it, you've already forgotten what it tastes like.
○You gain a stunning level of tactical skill, focused on using small groups of diverse units. Your commands could allow a group of a dozen operators to handle an army of 400 without any losses.
■This starts with a solid grounding of education and experience of battlefields of all sorts.
■This includes on-the-fly planning and replanning, as well as a good understanding of when your current plans are about to become unsalvageable.
■You understand how to get the most out of your operators and assets, including positioning, synergies, and timing. Understanding how small details in one operator's capabilities affects the result of pairing them up with another operator is trivial for you.
■You have a high level of precision in the timing of your commands. This allows you time usage of skills for maximum impact, as well as retreat and deploy operators at precise moments and in large groups.
○You may view any battlefield from a bird's-eye perspective. This also allows you to track invisible or otherwise concealed enemies.
■You also have real-time information on the state of any operator under your command, as well as secure communications with them.
○You are aware of the enemy's movements before they make them. This isn't long before any maneuvers start - only thirty seconds - but it will blunt surprise attacks and allow you to lay traps more effectively.
○When a battle is about to start, you may simulate the battle up to thirty times in an instant. This will not give you all information about the enemy tactics or their responses, but any information about the enemy composition, planned tactics, or hidden abilities will be accurate.
○You may "deploy" or "retreat" operators under your command.
■Deploying an operator puts them on the battlefield in a location and facing of your choosing.
■Retreating an operator teleports them from the battlefield to the nearest safe space. You automatically retreat any operator as they die.
■Both retreating and deploying grab all of an operator's loadout. It will also reverse any injuries or aliments they picked up on the battlefield. This also refreshes expended equipment and skills. Redeploying an operator on the field will not reset any on-field buffs they have gained, but retreating will.
■Deploying an operator costs "deployment points." These points start at a low number at the start of any battle, and you generate them constantly during combat. Scouts, leaders, and some others under your command may also increase your DP generation when present on the battlefield. Retreating an operator before they are dying will also give DP.
■Operators with increased power or skill require more DP to deploy, as a general rule. This amount may be reduced by effects from some operators.
■You may only redeploy an operator after a certain period after the last time you deployed or retreated them. This is usually a minute for most operators, but stealthy and mobile operators have a decreased redeploy time. (Less mobile operators, such as wheeled robots, take longer.)
■You may also deploy, redeploy, and retreat tactical objects and summons. These include mines, summons, traps, support equipment, and other objects that you have access to.
○You find yourself replete with opportunities to gain the loyalty of people with power, capability, or potential.
■Optionally, if not in the Arknights universe, you may gain the ability to recruit any characters from Arknights as your operators. You may also gain the opportunity to recruit "local" expies of Arknights characters.
■You also gain the leadership and management skills needed to keep everyone on board, on the same page, and not at each other's throats.
■You may also give your operators headpats at random times without real consequences.
○Trusting in you gives your operators a slight physical edge.
○You gain extensive knowledge of all commonly studied sciences, along with cutting-edge medical knowledge.
○Optionally, gain a landship - a mobile town, essentially. (Or, if not in the Arknights universe, a local equivalent.)
○Optionally, you may become The Doctor of Rhodes Island as of their awakening from the Chernobog Sarcophagus. This will not give you their memories but can give you their mannerisms and manner of speaking. If you took the landship, then you get Rhodes Island.
○Optionally and exclusive from the above, you may be otherwise transmigrated or reincarnated into the Arknights universe.
Essence of the System Gifter
This Essence comes in a black bottle with red text, and tastes like cheese.
○You may create Systems, rules and frameworks designed to manipulate a person's life.
■Due to the nature and structure of this power, you gain a great ability to understand, analyze, and design rules. You are so good that five minutes of your work equals a thousand years of crunch-level work from the fifty best lawyers (sorted by that skill) chosen from across history.
■You start with a library of common applications, like displaying information to a Subject or letting a Subject give inputs to the System.
■While the rules of the System may be changed at any time, any "offer" extended to the Subject must be honored until it is rejected, failed, or expired.
■You cannot directly kill the Subject with the System.
○You may start with a single System that can target a single person. This person is the System's Subject and is a necessary person for the System to function.
■While it is possible to change the Subject, this is a major event that is complex and draining, and cannot be done trivially.
○Your System has almost unlimited reality-warping power, but only in relation to its Subject. A System can bring back the dead - but the dead who are important to the Subject. A System can manipulate the weather across an entire planet - but only to arrange for certain weather for the Subject. A System can rewrite history, but only to change the important events for its Subject.
■A System can (and often will) provide great power to the Subject that is not limited in action by "what is important to the Subject" but simply by the mechanics of said power. However, this power cannot be activated directly via the System.
○You may create assistants and AIs to help you manage the System.
■Such created beings will always be loyal to you and cannot be subverted.
■AIs exist within the system only, lacking a physical form.
■Assistants exist in the real world. When created, their power cannot exceed yours.
○Once the Subject of a System has completed a narrative arc, you may create a second System.
○If you encounter the Subject of another System, you may hijack the other System and treat it as one of yours.
■Before doing so, you may trace out the System to find who created it and who is maintaining it.
■You can employ a variety of countermeasures against other System-creators when hijacking their Systems, but only at the moment of hijacking.
■These including "sealing" the System so it can't be interacted with, outright killing the creator, and erasing all memory and traces of the System from the creator's mind and possessions.
Essence of the System Administrator
This Essence comes in a light blue bottle with black labeling, and tastes like tears and rage and salt.
○You have at your disposal a System, a non-physical system with rules for empowering and interacting with a large number of people.
■You may add individuals as users to your System, and can do so en masse with no cost. Targeting can be by any objective standard.
■Adding someone as a user will automatically add any traits, skills, and abilities to your System's library so you can work with it easily.
○Your System works according to a rule framework designed by you. These can resemble video games of various sorts, or follow other frameworks.
■You start with a library of common applications, like displaying information to a user or letting a user give inputs to the System.
■Due to the nature and structure of this power, you gain a great ability with regards to understanding, analyzing, and designing rules. You are so good that five minutes of your work is equal to a thousand years of crunch-level work from the fifty best lawyers (sorted by that skill) chosen from across history.
■You also gain an equal understanding of formal logic and game design to help you.
■No System rule may single out or reference a single individual. Implementations of rules can (for example, a quest can list specific people with certain roles.)
○While the rule framework will be applied equally to all people, you have some power to interfere with this. This can't affect how the rules are implemented but can mess with the inputs to those rules.
■For example, if your System has stats, you can lower them to zero for one specific person. You may also add parameters that have other negative results. This direct, single-target editing does not have to provide compensation.
■You cannot kill someone through the System directly.
■You can assign someone with certain parameters that means that they follow an effectively different set of rules, but those parameters must be theoretically possible to achieve without you directly affecting the values.
○You may create assistants and AIs to help you manage the System.
■Such created beings will always be loyal to you and cannot be subverted.
■AIs exist within the system only and can be copied. For example, you can create AIs that answer common questions about the System and copy them to each user.
■Assistants exist in the real world. When created, their power cannot exceed yours.
○In order for a user to gain something from the System, something must be sacrificed. This can be something as simple as effort, or it can be physical objects or whatever else you desire to implement with a framework.
■The ratio of sacrifice to gain is not fixed and can vary across the population of all users and between different types of sacrifice.
■When adding someone as a user, you may provide an initial set of gifts. This applies even to bulk user creation.
■While you may alter the rules of the System at will, any subject of the System will receive some compensation for most nerfs you apply. The compensation doesn't have to be perfectly equal in value but should be comparable.
○Your System has different effectiveness depending on what it is trying to manipulate.
■Your System has a great deal of power when it comes to working directly at people, or animals or other "individuals."
■Producing or modifying physical objects or equipment for a user is easily possible, only slightly more expensive than just modifying the user if producing equipment. Personal property not intended to be on someone's person is slightly more expensive than equipment.
■All other changes require a sort of "juice" that comes from people actually using the System. If you want to create a dungeon to grind in, an island to be a nation, or completely rearrange the globe you need to have enough juice to do so.
Essence of the ROBslayer
This essence comes in a plain flask with a glass stopper. It tastes like mundane water, which is what any analysis will say it is.
●You are now are ROBslayer, a being capable of killing theoretically omnipotent beings, as well as gods, aspects of reality, and other similarly powerful beings. ("ROBs")
●You have gained a Blade, Shield, Armor, and Cloak. These are metaphysical, though you may manifest them physically.
●Your Blade
○Your Blade is how you kill your targets. It is imbued into your attacks, and even can even strike through things such as remotely operated weapon systems and laser target designation
○Your Blade is a one-hit kill against ROBs. Imbuing an attack with your Blade will make it unable to miss, be retconned, dodged, blocked, or otherwise neutralized provided the target is a ROB. It has no other effects on the attack.
○You may target a ROB through an avatar, expression of their power, or a possessed person.
○Slaying a ROB is unrecoverable, unforeseeable, and instant.
○If the ROB you slew was maintaining important aspects of reality, then your Blade will manifest them as Mantles. You can use them yourself to gain some of the ROB's powers (related to the important aspect), but doing so also saddles you with some of their responsibilities and obligations. Mantles can be given freely and uncoerced by their holders.
●Your Shield
○Your Shield protects others from ROBs. You may designate people, organizations, civilizations, and territory to be protected.
○Your Shield protects them from any or all ROBs directly interfering. This choice is binary - either any given ROB can affect them or not.
○You may get past effects from ROBs, choosing a timescale and undoing all effects made during that time.
○If you slay a ROB and important aspects of reality immediately collapse, your Shield will be able to maintain them instead for a short time.
●Your Armor
○Your Armor protects you from ROBs. It also protects you from reality warping and retcons in general.
○If a retcon happens, it will tell you what memories you should have in the new timeline.
○ROBs can only affect you with your positive, affirmative, uncoerced consent. You may consent to only specific parts of a given set of changes, if you want to avoid enforced drawbacks.
○You instantly and immediately know how a ROB is planning to affect you. This allows you to immediately decide what parts you want to accept