78 Meta Essence CYOA 78

Essence of the C'Tan

By consuming this Essence, you gain the full capabilities of a perfected C'Tan. Your mastery of physical reality has very few peers.

-You gain the physical form of a C'Tan, a vast cloud of exotic substance derived from the earliest moments of the universe, bound up into a shell of living metal. The physical power of this shell alone, without taking into account any of your greater attributes, exceeds that of smaller titans, and you can easily exploit the nature of necrodermis to alter its form and add new technological devices. Should you find it necessary, you may hold your true form slightly out of step with normal space, reducing its apparent size to a minimum of one millimeter across. Constructing puppet bodies, such as a mass of cloned flesh that appears to all non-psychic sensors to be a completely normal human, is completely trivial, even drawing upon only the innate capabilities of your living shell.Your etheric substance yet burns with the primeval fire that birthed the universal, and so defies the cruel laws of entropy, generating all the power you could ever need to fuel your natural abilities. Even should you choose to feed upon something, you will never develop any manner of addiction or derangement.

-Your mind possesses all of the positive qualities of an ancient, inhuman consciousness and a mortal human mind. You are immune to boredom and all forms of mental decay caused by the passage of time, yet are no less motivated to pursue your goals. Your memory is absolutely perfect, unless you choose to delete information, and the substance of your form is capable of storing preposterous amounts of data. This provides an absolute self-awareness (amongst other benefits reducing pain to a simple awareness of damage), and yields near-absolute willpower. Due to the combination of a construction that fundamentally opposes the supernatural and a perfected physical nature, you are effectively immune to all forms of memetic threat and corruption.

-Every ability ever shown to be possessed by a C'Tan or shard thereof is in your possession. You can match or exceed every other C'Tan, even in their own areas of specialization. This means you can freely turn matter into antimatter and back again, transmute mud into necrodermis and other hyperadvanced technology, generate new matter from nothing but the energy you constantly create, phase through any material substance, apply incredible telekinetic force with flawless precision, defy causality and fling opponents outside of time, directly manipulate every fundamental force, and far more.

●The sheer processing power of your form is absurd. Though your tactical or strategic ability is not improved, by brute force simulation alone you can surpass anyone who does not benefit from such psychic nonsense as outright precognition and fate-manipulation in both fields.

●Your capacity to suppress the Warp is sufficient to instantly snuff out every demon in an area spanning multiple star systems. In fact, it is only a hair less than what would be needed to hold back the Emperor of the Great Crusade era entirely, should the whole of its effect be focused on Him. It applies with full effectiveness to all forms of supernatural power you wish it to- even selectively, only weakening the powers of your enemies.

●Your substance operates upon the most fundamental levels of reality. No purely material device can destroy it without risking the unravelment of reality. It may still be that you could be broken into pieces, but the manner in which your mind inhabits your form ensures that even the smallest fragments would retain the whole of your identity and memories. Whether a supernatural effect potent enough to completely overwhelm your innate anti-Warp capabilities could safely destroy you is uncertain, as is whether your truly peerless comprehension of the material would let you do the same.

-In addition to your standard capabilities, you have a specialty of your own. The substance of your form is uniquely adapted for this power, and so it grows on its own as the rest of your abilities become stronger. This might entail, but is not limited to:

●A mastery of life and genetics that allows you to devise whole planetary ecosystems with an errant thought and engineer organic life that surpasses mighty races like the Orks, Tyranids, and Eldar without suffering any trace of psychic taint. Even psykers may be in some way copied by engineering life that naturally assembles the necessary structures to mimic the world-shaking power of a C'Tan at reduced scale.

●A capacity to produce and manipulate force in incredible ways, turning the binding energy of a planet on itself to shatter it with a blow more gentle than a soft tap or reorienting your velocity relative to the galactic core to accelerate to absurd speeds in the space of an instant. Allows you to achieve FTL speeds in an unusual manner by modifying the equations that determine velocity.

●A quirk to your etheric substance that allows it to remain connected and whole despite any physical seperation, as well as a flawless method of data preservation. Allows you to unravel yourself into any number of lesser C'Tan without losing coherence of self, guarantee your own survival as long as even one of these fragments persist, and recombine with trivial ease. Even if seperated over a hundred different galaxies, the quirk that allows your mind to remain whole allows you to reclaim your etheric substance from distant vessels at will.

●An innate excellency in the instantaneous transmission of matter and a capacity to contain unlimited amounts of potential mass within your etheric substance without effecting your actual mass. Allows you to consume arbitrarily large quantities of unshielded matter in the space of an instant while preserving it for later use.

●Access to an anti-Warp mechanism that scars and damages the Warp rather than merely seperating it from normal space. Allows you to unmake souls, permanently kill demons, and render psychic effects forever weaker throughout vast areas. Insufficiently powerful beings may find themselves unable to use psychic powers at all within your scarred domains.

-Given materials of the appropriate kind, you may upgrade all of the powers of your C'Tan form. This has no upper limit, and scales linearly- given unlimited resources, you would wield unlimited power. The perfected construction of your form eliminates most of the drawbacks one would expect of building upon yourself in this manner. Distortions of space allow you to fold away excess mass, preventing it from overburdening you, and the amount of energy you create grows in direct proportion to the amount of energy you require to fuel your powers. Though you intuitively know how best to synthesize the extremely exotic substances you require for these upgrades, other C'Tan, and shards thereof, are themselves a prime source of everything you could need, and you are immune to all negative consequences of cannibalising your kin. Indeed, even if other C'Tan attempt to devour you, your essence will eat away at them from the inside.

-You are capable of replicating all of the powers of your C'Tan form, or lesser versions, in purely technological formats. If you were willing to pay the price required, you could even construct new C'Tan entirely. Even if you find yourself unable to synthesize the exotics necessary, you remain able to splinter off fractions of your etheric substance, carving away precise portions of your strength in a manner that holds your mind firmly intact. In any case, unless you use materials worthy of a C'Tan in these constructions, they will always be in some way inferior to the examples of these powers in yourself. Where you could suppress the Warp across entire star systems with a body that appears to be smaller than a human heart, a 'cheap' machine to ward a single planet might take the form of a number of pylons large enough to dwarf skyscrapers.

-You have access to, and complete comprehension of, all technologies ever created or used by the Necrons, explicitly including at least one non-Warp form of FTL travel. This is your low end: so firmly tied into physics itself are you that your comprehension of the material universe is literally perfect. Given a moments consideration, you could develop technologies that match or exceed those of the Dark Age of Technology, the Eldar at their peak, or any other faction that wasn't around when the universe was born (at least in those fields not reliant on Warp-tainted nonsense). Every piece of technology you create is so advanced that it is impossible to reverse-engineer, or even vaguely comprehend, without a preexisting mastery of every one of the concepts and principles it relies upon.

●Your knowledge and understanding of all non-supernatural aspects of reality is again, perfect. Upon your first exposure to any technological item that does not make significant use of supernatural elements, you will comprehend it absolutely. On observing a supercomputer the size of a star hosting a transcendent AI, you could trivially discern the sequence of inputs that would make it forever loyal to you.

●Though you do not lose your capacity to understand the supernatural, neither do you gain any benefits in deciphering the secrets of such forces. You still have a soul, if you had one before, and your great intellect may help in learning to use it, but your psychic power and general growth rate is not significantly improved by your C'Tan nature. It may indeed be possible you could one day bind magic into your nature just as physical reality is now, but such would be a truly incredible undertaking.

-You possess the details of a process that converts any willing subject into an immortal version of itself, devoid absolutely of supernatural forces. This process can function on any manner of being at all, even a god, and can strip away any manner of metaphysical essence. The removed aspects of a being may be preserved and stored away, or destroyed utterly with no chance of recovery. Every being subjected to this process is almost as immune to corruption as you, and will remain loyal to you for eternity unless subverted by external forces.

-You gain knowledge of a secret lost even to the other C'Tan, a backdoor into the Necrons and all of their technology. With this secret, you may hijack any Necron or Necron technology you encounter, rendering it perfectly loyal to you. Even were you to be trapped in the greatest of Necron prisons, you would be able to use this secret to subvert your cage and release yourself at your own leisure.

-Upon consuming this Essence, you may (optionally) send yourself to any point in the Warhammer 40K timeline after the Necrontyr became the Necrons. The manner in which you are sent to WH40K is at your own discretion, as is the location of your arrival. So long as you will it to be so, there will be some means be which you could eventually return to your world of origin.

Essence of the Pioneer

 -You are capable of accessing and traversing an endless sequence of novel axes of travel. The more your actions push against and transgress boundaries of all kinds, the more rapidly you will gain access to new axes.

 -These axes may include, but are not limited to:

-The Planetary Axis, each step taking you one planetary body closer to or farther from the local star.

-The Stellar Axis, each step taking you one star closer to or farther from the galactic center.

-The Axis of Languor, taking you to worlds where there are simply more hours in a day, more days in a week, more months in a year, more years in a lifetime, or vice versa.

-The Axis of Grandeur, taking you to worlds where all things are more potent, and that which is most exceptional is elevated disproportionately more, or vice versa.

-The Watchmakers' Axis, taking you to otherwise-identical worlds whose timeline is offset from yours; this is not time travel in any regard.

-Sideways, allowing you to step left and right through a seemingly endless series of uninhabited worlds.

 -Your speed, along any axis of travel, scales linearly with the greatest historic distance, on that axis, you have achieved from your point of origin. Increasing your speed exponentially is therefore as simple a matter as moving continuously in one direction.

 -Through any means of instruction, including the creation of documentation anyone can study and reproduce, you can teach others to travel along these axes. Each axis of travel is taught seperately, and though your teachings can be constructed to make your disciples arbitrarily slower along these axes, they cannot teach someone to move faster than you.

 -The negative effects of environmental conditions, where concerning you personally, are scaled logarithmically. Multiple environmental hazards cannot work around this protection; they are aggregated together for the sake of this effect. For any natural phenomenon to kill you outright, it would need to be dangerous enough to destroy a universe.

 -As long as you do not blatantly act so as to bring grievous harm upon it, no thing that is not a 'person' will perceive you as a danger, something useful to be consumed or otherwise exploited, or even an obstacle to be removed. You could safely snuggle up against a mother bear and her cubs, or wander freely through the halls of a Borg cube. The hazardous actions of any creature this effect protects you from are considered environmental conditions, so long as you do not break the protection.

 -Given even lazy, half-hearted efforts, you can rapidly learn how to safely eat, drink, or breathe any gaseous, liquid, or solid substance. That which does not fit within those categories, but has some capacity to physically interact with your body, may be lumped into whichever is most applicable. The consumption of these substances is made comprehensively safe, in terms of nutrition, long term effects, metabolic byproducts, and more. Without accounting for your environmental protections, you could safely scoop up liquid methane with bare hands and drink it like water.

-Through any means of instruction, including the creation of documentation anyone can study and reproduce, you can teach others to safely consume arbitrary substances.

 -You will always be able to, in some way, lastingly alter an environment to better suit yourself. Should some aspect of a location be beyond the limits of your ability and resources to improve further, you will be struck with insight, realizing instantly a technique by which new, meaningful improvements can be made without exceeding your limits. This allows for self-imposed limitations as well as those impossible to break; you could prepare for a journey through space by learning how to farm without seeds, soil, light, or air.

-This may produce effects that are blatantly supernatural, within the remit of 'improving a location'. You could eventually create a forest where the sun never rises, an island whose inhabitants inevitably become tenfold greater in body and mind and spirit, a supernally luxurious palace, a roiling everstorm that rains down endless gallons of the elixir of immortality.

 -When altering any environment, the area so altered grows linearly with the total area you have previously brought to that level of quality. Expanding the scope of your terraforming exponentially is thus as simple as continuing to garden, until you can uncap a mason jar of air and bring atmosphere to a dead planet.

 -The changes you make to any environment are as permanent as you yourself. This takes into full account your environmental protections: a tiny bubble of air on the surface of the moon might be made thinner and colder by the vacuum around it, but it will not simply dissipate. Over time, improvements diminished by their surroundings will blossom into the fullness of their potential: a decade later, your bubble of air would have thickened and warmed, and brought with it a tiny patch of blue skies. When tended, by you or by others, the permanence of an improvement is reinforced. This is chiefly relevant for the aftermath of your own demise, allowing the inhabitants of a mountain valley carved into the surface of a black hole to keep their haven from collapsing around them.