AN: This is the tipping point. Either the Dark Ones Splinter the universe the Party's in
right now, or they find themselves unable to Splinter our friends here without personally taking to the field, as Arcadia would grow
at least a couple magnitudes in power between 2 Firmaments and vastly expanded Domains feeding her a lot of extra power, and having more than 50 new Domains to play with would make her immensely more dangerous in combat even ignoring that, leaving them vulnerable or letting the group survive long enough to find them in their hole. It's also the point where Greedy becomes too powerful for anything but Apocryphal and Jester to actually stand against her on the universe-scale, generally by involve things that the High Cursebearers deal with, since her travels across the crawling chaos that is reality will swiftly reward her with more new Magic Systems a Sixth Firmament will be able to work with anywhere, such that she's likely to outstrip Arcadia in a month even if Arcadia has some kind of pseudo-Retinue and is working hard to get stronger so she can avoid being dragged into anything against her will, assuming neither of them take on horrific soul-wounds in the fight against the Dark Ones, and even that's as much due to Arcadia having a much higher Sorceress compatibility than Greedy since she's remained pure in body and mind for millions of times longer and is thus superior to even The Maiden in that respect, sort of like how the Doom Slayer's millions of years of purity in body and mind make him Cursebearer material. It's also the point where I'd likely only be able to write out the fight itself, and the Epilogue, which would likely be killing all the local threats such as the Mirage Demon and the God That Will Come to help Tyrmilion out with his empire, returning home to conquer the monsters of the Dominion, then Unified Earth, Thousand Estates, Ruined Garden, and Furthermost Reaches and do much the same, solving all their problems in return for any novel magic they might possess, including installing infrastructure to make her ontological reinforcement of her Magic Systems a permanent thing. Then she'd find her way back to the Street Where the Stones Speak in order to find out what's at the end, most likely with Daphne accompanying her. They wouldn't expect it to take long once they actually found the thing. Greedy got grabbed for the Games in Silver, so she didn't leave the Street of her own volition, though that doesn't mean getting back to them will be easy even for her. Authority of Voyages will help with that though.
So, given Jicol's Drawback blurb, it's pretty likely similar events happen on the regular, and Tyrmilion acts as a major bulwark to preventing that sort of thing shattering the Empire. His kids can hang on for a while, but if he's gone for more than a couple months, the risk starts to rise too high for him to be okay with it. Anti-Citizen One would, in theory, have his kids sent after Greedy eventually, but Tyrmilion's not stupid enough to have Henrietta and Dominique fight someone he'd have to get serious to kill, before any significant ramp-up time. Plenary Brand means he knows very well that if he didn't manage an Alpha Strike one-hit-kill, Greedy would pop Lunacy Form, and abruptly become 20 times as powerful. With Final Scion's healing powers, Elysian, and the combined healing Superpowers, nothing short of a one-hit-kill is going to put her down even in her base form anyway.
Plenary Brand making it impossible for people to underestimate/overestimate you does have advantages, since Tyr is well aware that even during their conversation, she was examining what she could discern of both him and his armor, and, in a manner akin to the pseudo-Retinue of Renaissance Woman, incorporating it into her own powers and growth. She can generate Graces on the level Gisena has access to in seconds, and every Magic System and spell she's exposed to, even tangentially, gives her more to work with. Thus, every encounter makes her stronger whether it ends in bloodshed or not. She's well past Sealing Protocol II, and she's got multiple Firmament/Progression-booster Graces in the works. Adding the remaining magics from Present Light messing with time to grab Orm, the Curse Broker, and Arcadia's remaining Magics being obtained in the present, and the remaining Progression boosters such as Arcadia's Heart(which provides some Splintering resistance too) will only pour gasoline on the pyre. It does, however, make lying impossible, as lying to oneself cannot fool anyone else, as seen when Procyon showed up in-Quest. So Turenval knew what she wanted immediately, as well as the fact that she didn't trust him. Accepting was still a bit of a gamble at this point, because he didn't know precisely what the magics Greedy possessed from the Dominion and Furthermost Reaches were beyond what Plenary gave him to work with, which only really told him the capabilities, not the mechanics, so it was difficult to fully predict the potential synergies she'd gain, especially since this level of mastery in so many different schools is rare. On the other hand, he knows that this is basically the best chance they're going to get, and he was very curious as to the end result of obtaining all of those magic systems. Being offered them himself was merely icing on the cake. Like he told Arcadia, this is the best research opportunity he's had in centuries. It also lets him keep up at least somewhat if he and Greedy end up becoming hostile if they win.
Her use of Nothing Magic to generate copies of Blue Rose, which is worth 2 Orbs, was enough to give her a framework to directly combine Coin Forgery and Nothing Magic's creation methods, giving her a multiplicative bonus roughly equivalent to 7 trillion times the previous production rate. If she'd done it with something not explicitly worth Orbs, less than double digit instances, or if it was only a 1 Orb thing, it would have taken longer, but since Eight Divisions: White can grant Magic Systems equivalent to 2 Orbs, then, logically, other things should be capable of producing things worth that much, especially since I've ruled Nothing Magic as being worth at least 3 Shining Orbs. Given it's not being limited by the Lord of Seasons, and it's focused on creation from Nothing and reduction to Nothing, it should be capable of a similar degree of creation as Coin Forgery, if more generalized. That's where Blue Rose comes in.
Since she can make something worth 2 Orbs with Nothing Magic, she can exchange that stuff for 2 Orbs with Coin Forgery. If Blue Rose was not explicitly worth 2 Orbs, there would be a significant penalty. It doesn't actually matter if Arcadia would accept this transaction, because material worth is sort of abstract to Greedy, between the opulence of her home realm, The First Dominion, which the Street stole her from, and the combined 'I can literally make as much stuff and money as I want.' of Coin Forgery and Nothing Magic, so she tends to simply take the transaction that would most benefit her. She's more than smart enough to self-delude to her benefit on the matter, and there comes a level of magic where it doesn't actually matter if things don't work exactly that way, because the efficiencies(enough to reduce the bonus from Nothing Magic two-thirds) just aren't enough to mean anything. Extrapolating these principles is enough to let her do this with all the actual physical items, such as the Anubis Card, though she's not doing it with Alreos' holocron because it seems kind of icky to do that with a person. This is all going on within her Inventory, to avoid a very disruptive flood of Orbs and Blue Rose copies being exchanged.
The upgrade from White allows her to generate extant magics she's encountered which Arcadia had on offer at 100% strength from 1-5 Orbs, for gifting to other people via Application Strike/Eight Divisions, or to enable the Divine Spark loop she's begun. Eight Divisions: Yellow then upgrades the generation further by making it 100 times easier to make the Divine Sparks, though it slows down a lot once she reaches the soft-cap, because each Firmament is a million times harder to reach than the last, though all the side-grades becoming a Goddess of Magic and each individual Magic System she possesses is going to leave her plenty to do while she waits for Coin Forgery and Nothing Magic to upgrade enough or simply to get enough from them to upgrade. Borrowed a bit from Birdsie's Divine Firmaments from his Konosuba Omakes for this, which I feel makes some sense since the CYOA this is set in was also his. If jumping one Firmament is about an EFB, then 4 would be roughly an EFFB, since each Firmament escalates in value, but so does the Arete. Especially since she can treat every Magic System she's got as a primary Domain, allowing even greater escalation and Progression, not to mention the direct power boost. At this point, gathering new Magics is a benefit because she can trivially make herself a Fifth or Sixth Firmament Goddess in them, and make them a thing in any ontology she visits, with the added benefit of immediately gaining immense skill and power in them, and a major Progression benefit in them. Essentially, she can make 'Graces' for any Magic System she's come across that enormously empower them, and do so effectively at will.
A trillion times as many Astral Coins is also a notable boost, since an octillion of them can utterly trivialize any Wishes that would have been expensive at a production of a quadrillion of them. She could likely restore The Nexus' machinery to it's full might, gain all she could from that, and then let the natives hash things out. She's essentially using them in a manner similar to Perfect Storm's Sub-Verses at the moment, and even if a trillionfold increase doesn't necessarily translate into that much direct empowerment, it does let her rise in her other fields much more easily. Much like the Infusion Graces I mentioned in Deeper Derangement, it's empowering everything and making boosts to her firmament(general sense, not the Divine one) easier. This is enough for the next stage of Curse Mitigation to be achieved in short order, so Doom of the Sailor, Sign of the Twins, Affliction of the Weary, Judgement, Seer, and Pendant's Minor Curses, and Hunted get tossed out the window, while the Major Curses and Blights get dropped significantly in power.
Speaking of Curses, each is enough of a conceptual tie to make her eligible for making them Domains of her as well. Talk about turning Curses into power huh? Having the concepts behind a given Curse as Domains, as well the concept of Curses itself is enough for another stage of mitigation, pushing her up to Stage 6, maybe 6.5 if the Curses and Curse-specific Domains have stacking mitigation in a manner similar to more potent Nullity from Gisena stacking more mitigation, but definitely no higher than 6.75, mostly because of the Sixth Firmament God of Magic improving all her other methods of mitigation even beyond using her divinity over the relevant concepts to directly contest the Curses. Divine Domains tend to work a bit like Serendipity in their mitigation. For example, if Jester made you slip at a very, very inopportune time and mess up your ritual, the Domain of it would still be a problem for your enemy, just maybe not in the way you'd intended. If you were planning on severing a limb, you might end up with a different one cut off, or maybe if you wanted to keep them from healing any more for the remainder of the fight, they'd have the healing of current injuries disabled, or maybe the rock or bananna peel would hit them in the face, giving you an opening/a moment to recover. Though getting high enough gives you the option of direct mitigation along Nullity's lines, generally at least 2 Firmaments above a quarter stage to directly mitigate that stage. Greedy might just go for the normal mitigation if she wants to take it easy for a little bit(I'm talking like 10 minutes here), or she hits Stage Seven, which seems to be where people struggle to rise any further unless it's Indenture, if Haeliel is at all the norm for High Cursebearer.
Sorceresses are already metaphysically linked to The Maiden, I wonder if linking to a different Maiden with their own Magic System has any interesting interactions? Lotus Flower is mostly for the research potential, since the healing from Final Scion combined with Elysian and the healing Superpowers is vastly superior. Different methods make it harder to prevent though.
Certainly, not the most appealing means of putting off death, but there are probably edge cases where the other means of survival/healing fail but this one doesn't. Something intended to slay gods and destroy magic, but conceptually weak to nature most likely. Plus, the control over nature opens new opportunities. The major boon to another Magic System is also very useful, likely to be dumped into Eight Divisions to improve White for more powers or Yellow for Divine Spark production.
Idolatry is immensely synergistic with Correspondence, though it has a much more voodoo bent to it by comparison. Most likely, the mystical equivalent of quantum entanglement will vastly improve the maximum size of the latter's arrays, as well as the stability of all such arrays. The knock-on benefits to Internalism will be similarly incredible.
With Drift Clockwise and Suzerain's Time and Fate Aspects, School of Present Light is going to be a lot more powerful early on than it ought to be, even with Greedy's insane Attributes making that baseline crazy high already. Especially when she burn Astral Coins in bursts to supercharge individual spells.
The big initial use Greedy will put the School of Present Light towards is the timeloop initiated to allow so many Orbs and the like, but also to reach backwards and get her hands on Orm's remaining powers in the now, not to mention make it vastly more likely for the Curse Broker to sell the remaining wares since there's a much wider range of times she can access to make that transaction. The waste light is going to get Inventory-ed for potential future use.
Remade jumps every Magic System a half-step, which, for the really far along magics from post-Nomenclature, is very useful. On the other hand, this seems to be a straight buff to baseline rather than being like the Legendary form of Sublime Fulcrum and improving the maximum too, though Progression should mean there's no problems there.
Redstar Knife is likely to have immense synergy with Coin Forgery making 'Blood Coins' a thing, and Nothing Magic allowing for vast quantities of blood to be made. Color Red will also synergize in the future. Plus, converting blood into mana is likely to be enough of a transaction for her to figure out a means of making Coin Forgery do something similar with tangible goods at a rate she can get a net gain out of.
Open Gate a) makes Wellspring Advance even faster with yet another new type of energy, and b) makes turning herself into a Goddess of Demons and/or Hell an option. The acceleration of the God That Will Come arriving is of no real consequence when they'll be taking shots at the Dark Ones within a week, even if Hell and Demon Domains don't hard counter it. Even if Apocryphal triggers and drops it from three years to three months, which Jester then knocks the ladder out from under to lower it to three weeks, it won't actually matter because by then she may well have subsumed all of it's relevant domains into the psuedo-Pantheon she's got going. Arcadia having all of the Sins being the main example in strict numeric terms.
Pulling a Konosuba and dragging the local goddess on a trip across the 'world' (in the Geas World sense) via Promise could be interesting, and with Nothing Magic, literally unlimited booze and drugs are available to bribe her with to have her stick around past the 'grant her immense power and versatility' phase in an at least somewhat agreeable state. Plus, Greedy would point out that if the Dark Ones are dead, there wouldn't be much need for the Games in Silver, and thus the hostess would be free to do something else. Even if she's
only a tenth or so as strong as them, that's more than enough to provide some safe harbor and potentially get Tyrmilion to break through her barriers via his social-fu. Greedy's not really the right person for it, because Plenary Brand makes it impossible to hide her ulterior motive of getting more out of Arcadia if she's more cooperative, rather than strict benevolence. There is some genuine compassion in there, but Arcadia is inclined to assume the worst, because of the terrible first impression, continuing sabotage from Wretched, and just not liking people much since she's basically been forced to be a glorified hostess for essentially her entire existence, which would rankly the pride of even the most humble of people. This has caused her initial 'What the hell is that?!' reaction from Plenary Brand to gradually morph into disdain and disgust once it sunk in that Greedy wasn't going to kill her out of hand for snappy answers or a little monkey's paw-ing.
Shura Demon Armor makes her a quarter demon without any of the usual drawbacks, including any Sorceress-related issues, which she can likely leverage in Divine Spark and Sorcerous Grace terms. It also acts as a budget-Lunacy Form, so she can pull it out without risking the hatred of every Social Link she's got.
Amber Void's 'several weeks to fix the constant misfires/Splintering' is mitigated by a) The Grimoire, and b) sheer ridiculous magic Progression. Further, the Orc-like 'drain all magic energy' even if it's to the Void Dimension rather than oneself, might have opportunities with The Sorceress to play with. The irony of turning Splintering back on the Dark Ones would be hilarious. While in theory it's technically not magic so much as un-magic, it seems a bit like the Orcs permanently consuming Findross to empower themselves, if with a different destination. Which is to say, not 'magic' but definitely not natural. It also works as a solid defense against Nullity by making anti-magic effects valid targets. On that note, could Dien make an anti-Sorceress 'Grace' to counter Gisena?
Ensilvered Scroll only allows 1 Fate manipulation, and too massive a manipulation results in retroactive universe deletion. With backup from various other fate-altering effects like Suzerain's Fate Aspect and Astral Magic, however, simply saying 'Greedy and her friends Progressed even faster.' should be perfectly fine. It's an additional multiplier, rather than, say, trying to turn a Combat Cursebearer into a Progression-type. Or wishing yourself omnipotent. That's what Sixth Firmament Gods and Goddesses are for.
With Nothing Magic, Artifacts are mostly of use because once Greedy's gotten her hands on one she can usually make a duplicate, though Artifice Magnus Opus Artifacts may be an exception. There may be edge cases where Draconium Rope would be useful, especially with how much magic she's got to work with, but she's planning on pulling the Drifter out of his abyss after the mess with the Dark Ones is over, and handing him his Artifacts will likely do a lot to cool his head. She'll be more than familiar enough with Crimson Riot and Blue Rose to straight-up quantum-duplicate fork the originals if Daphne is sufficiently attached, so they'd each be able to hang on to the 'original' without issue.
The Eight Divisions are unbound by the Lord of Season, so they're stronger than the 1 Orb cost would suggest from the word go. Even if he hadn't there's enough other magics with crossover, synergy, or direct enhancement that they'd go way over their theoretical maximum, and then there's the whole thing with becoming a God of each Magic System. Probably a general Domain for the Eight Divisions, and one for each Division too.
Arcadia has by this point thrown up her hands in disgust and said 'Sure, you can buy the same Magic System multiple times. Why not right?' so Greedy just bought Eight Divisions eight times to arch-master all eight colors. With her ridiculously high mental Attributes, a full day is unnecessary to make new Expressions, and even if they didn't lower the time, 10000 mental instances reduces that to 8.64 seconds.
Green acts as a healing buff, but accelerate evolution sounds like a Progression booster if I ever saw one. The bio-Superpowers presumably get a buff, and Color Red's Essence drain is most probably boosted.
Information is super important to a MAGE character, and the clairvoyance and precog are avenues she hasn't focused on much. The super-intelligence and artifice not only directly synergize with each other, but with literally everything else. Blue is likely the most useful in the direct sense, ironically, as well as long-term due to it's upgrades to ascension speed on the Sorceress end. Blue is also a major boost to the efficiency of Divine Spark creation, such that you can make one at the rate Shining Orbs used to be made, as well as improving Greedy's understanding of the process of becoming a God, which both accelerates the process, and makes it much easier for her to make people, including herself, into deities of various concepts. Blue's buff to knowledge is the only reason making people Gods of individual Magic Systems, especially multiple people for the same one, is viable.
Violet's Spacetime control makes it way, way easier for her to use Present Light to grab the remaining powers from the Curse Broker and Orm's CYOA, while the teleportation and universe-hopping respectively trivialize traveling to the Silvered World and traveling to other universes when combined Authority of Celestial Voyages, which also helps when crafting that civilization of orb minds dedicated to exploration to map out the Silvered World. Being able to make Planes sooner or later is going to be very useful in the long-term, not the least because of the synergy with Astral Magic's connections of Realms.
Red seems to essentially be Dynakinesis again, though it's tough to say if Yellow would have Essence or it would, given the close ties to blood. I'm leaning towards Essence being metaphysical enough to be Yellow's domain. Findross is similarly a toss-up, though Mana and Prana are photon-like enough for me to place them under Red's control.
Orange is Matter Manipulation, and the combined effects with the Superpower and Numeracy Seven are nothing to laugh at, and much like Dynakinesis and Matter Manipulation combined, allows for local reality warping when combined with Red. Phasing through stuff probably has little impact on magic weapons but every little bit helps. Building manifestation combined with Violet's Plane-building makes Planes/Realms a great deal more customizable, including Greedy's Internal Realm.
Yellow's Abstract domain is incredibly useful. First, because being able to produce divine fire directly increases production of it 100-fold. It also makes directly odd things like warm ice possible, which should have all sorts of interesting uses. Like Gisena's casting of magic with Runes made of Nullity.
As the Meta-power of White implies, granting abilities to others is immensely easier with this. Without White, initiating people into divinity immediately even all the rest of this to work with probably wouldn't be possible. It also allows for direct improvement of abilities, so it's most likely a Progression booster. It's not strong enough to transfer the Progression perks of Cursebearer status, not without transferring the Curses as well, but anything below that is free game, including Progression Magic and other Greater Remittances. Praxis, by it's very nature, would require some active effort on the part of the student, but initiating someone in it with White, Goddess of Magic, and Sorceress would be easier. All of this teaching is pretty much guaranteed to open a Teaching Domain as well.
Black is probably the second the best build-buff besides White, because Nullification isn't something she has much of. Amber Void is the closest thing she's got to direct anti-magic, she doesn't have a ton of direct debuffing spells to generation weaknesses, and specialized anti-telepath defenses aren't something she had in abundance before this. Combining it with Amplitude makes her immensely more powerful on the defense, because having hostile effects reduced to 1% strength and then running into the flat defensive effect of Black Nullification is something very few can reliably pierce.
Hundred Mirror Shattered would definitely have synergy with the False Mirror, and the mental effects are likely to be something the high Attributes Greedy possesses across the board will let her mitigate. A *4 multiplier to Progression, based on Hundred Seeds' blurb, is too good to pass up. Since the Magic System will go well beyond the intended end-game level, it's only going to gest stronger.
Rufescent Magic's physical empowerment isn't much at this point, but tripling martial Progression, including military strategy and tactics, is a pretty major boost, since Greedy's biggest weakspot in her build is that most of her combat skill is derived from Graces or the Attribute buffs from her magic. If faced with a strong enough Nullity bomb, sufficient to break through Amber Void and Eight Divisions: Black, she'd be reduced to the 45 Prowess and the physical buffs she's got from Superpowers. That might sound like a lot, but with most of her power's still sealed by Lunacy in such a situation, she'd be practically helpless, and skill far in excess of a normal human wouldn't be enough against anyone strong enough to do that. This lets her catch up her physical skills somewhat without cutting into monster-slaying or magic study.
The Forge Encarmine can combine with Coin Forgery(iron coins are a thing) and Nothing Magic(blood is blood, it doesn't say anything about the blood needing to come from a sapient, so even if Nothing Magic creating blood wholesale doesn't work, killing Nothing-ed animals as messily as possible is a viable alternative), as they allow Carmine Steel to be made at will, and the conceptual reinforcement provides both esoteric defense and Curse Mitigation in a manner similar to the Void Robe or Hunger's Ruin defenses. It should also have potential synergy with Color Red's enhanced Essence drain via the user's blood once you're far enough along, in a manner to Redstar Knife's potential synergy. By the same token, Forge Encarmine and Redstar Knife, with Theoretical Magic and Sorceress to look them over, are likely to cross-pollinate.
Blood Breath seems to have strong synergy with Color Violet, since they both get stronger with each death you dole out. If the Dark Ones have prepped some kind of defense against Vaal Mithrea, this might be different enough to get around that. Just because it can't be blocked doesn't mean there's no way to avoid it. For example, if, rather than blocking it, they mess with Greedy's control for a second so it reverses course... Blue Entropy, even as a beginner, can kill gods, so Fires of the Divine won't be enough to defend against it, and even all the anti-conceptual effects combined won't be enough by my reckoning, especially if Greedy gets taken by surprise by such an incident. It is also explicitly beyond the Dark Ones, meaning it provides a great deal of 'kill the crap out of them' potential, but they have to know that's an issue, and they're probably working on countermeasures of some kind. Given Nothing Magic's ability to make things Not Exist, I suspect they will strongly synergize. The mutability of Vaal Mithrea in form suggests at least some level of thematic connection, given Nothing's sheer variety of potential outcomes derivative of the same basic mechanic, just like VM. The homing capability and post-firing control is also great. The Second Discipline of Rufescent Magic involves a torrent of crimson power tied to destruction, so Blue Entropy can likely incorporate some of Blood Breath into it's arsenal, and thus into Greedy's. The combination might allow for
War Recruitment is unlikely to be used. The requirements mean that simply Nothing-ing up vast vats of clonesand sacrificing them isn't going to work, so actually sacrificing people would be necessary. Redstar Knife means more could be gotten out of this, but the Wraiths are way too weak to be useful outside of huge numbers, so even if Turenval doesn't really care about the moral issues, he's not going to bother except possibly as a test.
Sphere Magic sounds a bit like the Sphere Grid of Final Fantasy X or the Kingdom Hearts DDD Ability grabbing(except easier), except you can temporarily supercharge the abilities. The Emulations will have their Mental Contamination essentially bounce off, and allow for a lot more conceptual effects, which means The Tribune gets a boost from this one. The Connections, on the other hand, are temporary things, but I'm only reasonably confident in having them brushed aside by her massive amount of Willpower and mental Attributes. Greedy is likely to stack up a bunch of them in the lead-up to the confrontation, though they'll have slight influences on her personality even with all her resistances. With an Int and Wis so ridiculously high as to make your average super-genius look like an idiot, and an actual luck-manipulating magic, she should be able to form Connections at will. With basically every concept she wants on offer, she'll store a huge amount of conceptual powers, though each is likely to be burned within a shot or two in the actual big fight. Eight Divisions: Yellow is pretty much guaranteed to combine well with it since they're both conceptual things, though White is no slouch in this regard. Mining this for Divine Firmaments is also an option, given the connections to the concepts each Sphere represents.
Reine Magd explicitly comes from the Lotus Maiden, so it's likely to directly combine with Lotus Flower. I strongly suspect this is what being the LM's champion does.
The Dark Ones most likely count for the Arturion and Aergundias Mantles, since the Dark Ones are the strongest entities in their multiverse and killing them stops their tyranny, so you're pretty clearly defending the weak from the strong, so she gets her physical skills and Attributes doubled as long as it's up. Meanwhile, Aergundias gives her a bunch of Magc Systems to work with. Even a couple not being ones she'd have grabbed could be useful, though the utility is limited even with the incredible aptitude and skill buff. Since the Dark Ones destroying universes destroys knowledge, retroactively in some cases, killing them counts as safeguarding it.
Bem, well, the Dark Ones have made themselves the natural order, to so it probably wouldn't count as a major deed towards the Mantle's purpose if they were slaughtered. Heltkaiser seems like a bad idea when facing universe-killing monstrosities because 'redeeming' the Dark Ones seems like something that would be almost impossible, but since they aren't Ur-Mother tier 'Actively torturing everyone just because.' evil, it should in theory be possible, in the same that getting stuck by natural lightning three times in a minute and suriving is technically possible, meaning she'd be forced to try. Even ignoring how against her morals that is(Turenval is more apathetic than evil, and he's just not capable of the same level of destruction and suffering) it would leave a massive opening they would almost definitely take advantage of. Eusebio's 'Have to help people embrace their dreams' effect is a no-go because of the time it takes. Battling the Seven Sins as a character who is literally referred to as Greedy is definitely not happening so Pyldret is out.
Luckier is music to Greedy's super-duper Cursed ears, and greater talent from Immaculate is a decent boon as well, even if it's likely not very much. If Remade is any indication, a half step or so in everything, though it seems to be to the maximum rather than Remade boosting everything further along it's curve. Since Progression means no upper limit, Immaculate is likely to simply lower the slope to advance a little bit.
Drui's Blessing fairly heavily implies it would directly synergize with Eight Divisions, which just became unbound with Turenval's help. The cheerful/friendly aura it provides would help blunt Wretched, though since Plenary Brand would make the blessing obvious this would have limited effect. If it were fully unmitigated, the mental influence being known might cause it to have an opposite effect, in fact, since this is merely a blessing, not Drui directly contesting the effect.
Satan Shrugged lets you become an Adversary, which normally just empowers you physically against an enemy or organization, but can grant powers in some circumstances. Greedy will be leveraging the Adversary, and the tendency of Gods to have specific enemies, letting her generate an Anti-Dark Ones Domain for her building Godly status. This is not 'A Domain focused on defeating the Dark Ones' it's 'Opposing the Dark Ones' as a Domain. Sort of like the Giants Gaia birthed after Chronos got sliced up, which were geared for killing specific Olympian deities.
Crimson Riot coming with a cute girl was a surprise, but a welcome one. OOC, I felt it likely that one or the other would have a wielder if one was picked, and IC, Arcadia retroactively 'handed' CR out via a weak dungeon 'guarding' it, which wasn't much of an issue for the vampire since being underground and blocking the sunlight were, respectively, not an issue and preventing her main weakness from causing her problems. Thus, Daphne got her end-game sword in her early-game, and became the small town's bigshot. She managed not to get too big a head, since she knew that plenty of people could kill her before she could so much as react, but objective knowledge in the face of smashing aside most of her opponents with ease since they didn't have amazing artifacts of their own or a wildly successful Originator eugenics program to back them up can only do so much. Greedy effortlessly copying it so she could dual-wield did a lot to deflate her hype.
The trio of Originators say it's a eugenics program, but they and their inner circles know that's just an excuse for the three of them to bang. The merging of their resources and forces was a natural end result. Their fiefdom is reasonably pleasant for Melicau, provided you don't try and kill the vampires. They mostly self-police, which does have some problems, but a point is generally made of keeping actual family members off of cases.
Ordinus was an Originator who focused on the physical side, allowing second-gen vampires to match a normal Originator's physical abilities. Ordinus himself was a weaponsmaster, knowing how to use virtually every weapon there is, and how to beat or destroy them, and is a capable strategist. His role in the compact was martial, both their top combatant and their general.
Novun focused on the conceptual stuff, so even second-gens can absorb memories and emotions to feed themselves immediately, and get a lot more out of those feedings, to the point they can spend much longer between meals, and be revitalized by comparatively meager quantities of blood and Essence. Vampire-based abilities such as hypnotism, turning into various creatures or mist, flight, etc. are also amplified. She's the scholar of the trio, mundane and mystical, and leads the research team.
Yirtin simply focused on removing the weaknesses. This is similar to Luna's mother from my Richer Reality series. Traditional vampire weaknesses such as silver and sunlight are much less effective, they'd have maybe a fifth as much on one of Yirtin's servants as their counterparts, which lets her make a comparatively massive assortment because the biggest disadvantage of vampirism is how many weaknesses you take on in return for all the strength, so a lot of people who'd reject becoming a vampire on the grounds that getting stronger doesn't help much if all someone needs to do is shove an object that represents their faith in your face to leave you cringing on the ground are a lot more willing when Yirtin's bloodline makes that not the case. Though, this doesn't help much if someone is trying to stab you through the heart via wooden/silver stake, since that would kill almost anything that had a heart in the first place. Yirtin focused on diplomacy and intrigue, and her sired vampires are the dedicated anti-anti-vampire taskforce, since tactics generally well-suited to killing vampires tend to leave you vulnerable if the vampires don't have those weaknesses to any real degree, even if these vampires are weaker than Ordinus' in a fight or Novun's in a battle of mages.
Daphne is the result of them using magic to cheat and give her the best traits of the three of them by fusing the offspring of Ordinus-Novun and Ordinus-Yirtin. She's a half-step better than them in their chosen fields, and has all of their powers, with none of their weaknesses. She was being groomed to be the queen of an eventual vampire fiefdom carved out on Melicau, close to Jicol. They're likely to move in almost immediately and begin subsuming the place. She and Greedy got a Nat 100 on compatibility, so Greedy is on Love At First Sight, while Wretched has made Daphne merely smitten.
The Lucky Devil probably has synergy with Satan Shrugged, and the open-ended nature of the copying of the Seven Devils means it has major synergy with all the rule-bending and metamagics Greedy's packing. Grace creation likely means any and all methods to emulate them are available
Normally, Golden Largesse only works on one person, then takes a century to regenerate, but between Nothing Magic and Coin Forgery, Greedy laughs at that time limit by just making more. This is mostly a means of giving everybody else a version of Immortality. The version from Orm's CYOA, not being a distinct magic, cannot be transferred via White and it's compatriot metamagics. Sure, Turenval is difficult to actually kill without wiping out his phylacteries, but Apocryphal is the sort to ignore that sort of thing and send some outrageous perfect counter, so making his actual body nearly unkillable for a at least a decade is a good thing.
Arcadia's Heart was intended to just make a dent in Splintering, and for the Progression buff which is explicitly cumulative with all the other stuff. The potential synergy with The Greatest Promise as a general divine blessing for Greedy and her Party members while Arcadia is hanging around actually occurred to me later.
Silververse Word of God is of immense value, because it bypasses most theoretical defenses the Dark Ones might possess against people trying to figure out how to kill them. It also lets her know anything Birdsie might know about any means of un-Splintering things, though that's probably going to be a personal project.
The Curse Broker potentially letting her be a repeat customer is quite valuable, especially since the use of Present Light to pay him for the wares offered in the past made getting more than that difficult without messing with her past self directly and risking a paradox, which she was not willing to do. With hundreds of septillions of potential Mythic Coins available, he'd likely go for it. I'm not sure it's enough that he'd be able to rid himself of his Curses entirely, since we don't have enough information on him to know if a septillion is enough. Given he's probably at least least two tiers down the totem pole from The Accursed, and the 900+ octillion years of service from Geas of Indenture, I'm... middling? If Demi-Accursed has Curses where the Geas equivalent only demands 90+ octillion, and the Curse Broker a mere 9.37, then it's probably enough to make a dent, but not enough to resolve the issue entirely in a timely manner before his enemies gang up on him. If it's a drop of 2 magnitudes or more, then she might be able to cure his ills reasonably easily by just buying all his wares and Curses, developing Mitigation for them, and passing that Mitigation back to him. Of course, given Curses are as inconvenient as possible, there's a good chance he can't just accept charity, so she might have to settle for selling him a bunch of magics to improve his selection and buying everything she can from him, though she might be able to 'cheat' a little by, say, buying the Gonne, making a million of it, and then selling him 7 for a singular Copper apiece because supply is sky-high, before obliterating the duplicate Gonnes she's got for more Divine Sparks, which then lets him jack the price up again. Never thought I'd be conspiring to help a merchant do some price fixing.
Last Laugh is a get-out-of-jail-free card. It explicitly notes that if you're too strong for the Curse Broker to be able to help, it summons someone stronger. Greedy would prefer to use it for summoning the Curse Broker for another deal however. Surely, he's got better wares if you've got essentially unlimited Jade/Platinum/Copper for him, and Greedy might take on his other Curses just for the extra potential Domains, simultaneously easing the burden on him.
Bolt From the Blue's attack scales with physical strength, intelligence, and willpower. If a normal human could kill a Shadow Beast with it, Greedy would likely be able to instantly scour entire star clusters with one shot. All of those Attributes are more than 20 times a normal human's even ignoring the exponential scaling of an Attribute. If it's additive? Still world-destroying. If it's multiplicative? Then the entire galaxy could be at risk from a single shot. The attack-based anti-meme and Seventh Devil's anti-meme are likely to be incredibly synergistic. They won't know where the attacks are coming from, because they'll struggle to even recall that there was someone there to attack them, even if they manage to get past the Bolt's anti-meme.
Second Fiddle would have to work really, really hard to carry out it's chosen purpose, but it could be used to trace local Heroes and any OCPs wandering about who could kill these guys based on the link to them forged by the Verse. Still, it's mostly for the Verse Progression boost each Verse allows.
These Artifacts, are a) mostly to give Greedy more stuff to study/duplicate, much like the Draconium Rope, and b) help the Curse Broker out. She might become a supplier for the Curse Broker, in fact. Glasses isn't very useful with TSH on Rhetoric anyway, though it might give her some Social Grace inspiration.
Studying the 'locks away 90% of your power' mechanic of the Manacles could be very useful to someone with a Curse that locks away 95% of their power. At very least, learning to do it herself via Theoretical Magic/Graces/Eight Divisions: White should be a very potent tool.
Sigil is probably going to end up on Color Green or Color Purple, to boost them up to a level more in line with Color Red, but the real value is potentially boosting any Magic System by Average Progression if she can figure out how it works/mass produce it for all of her applicable Magic Systems. Even if it's not a huge boost to a lot of the faster stuff, essentially setting her minimum to Average before all the other multipliers would be amazing. Handing out such a boon to other people would be a potent bargaining chip too. There's going to be systems it doesn't work on, and it won't work on the Superpowers as those are bio-tech, which probably puts them in a category similar to the Transmogrifications, but that still leaves a world of possibilities.
Sword has synergy with Color Red's Essence tomfoolery, and Eight Divisions: Violet's Plane tomfoolery, yaddah yaddah, oh? It sings as it kills? The Street sings as you walk along it, perhaps there's a connection? It might let Greedy start piecing together their respective songs with more than one data point to work with. The pocket realm is liable to respond very well to the various spatial magics and her penchant for mass slaughter. She can most likely create Essence Coins via Coin Forgery relatively easily, and I'm rather curious what a septillion of them might do for it's internal world. Wellspring's Essence generation having a chunk siphoned off probably doesn't count as personal use so long as the Sword remains a discrete artifact rather than tied directly to Greedy, unlike Hunger and his Ring.
The Gonne's gun magics and war mastery open a number of potential Domains, with the obvious main examples of Guns and War. Plus Industry and Logistics for their importance to any war effort, among other things. Ten Thousand vastly improves micromanaging capabilities, so commanding a Legion on the operations, tactical, and strategic levels simultaneously should be fairly easy. Plus, it's likely to spur an anti-Mental Contamination Grace, if only because it has a gradual increase on your mental state over time rather than being a constant effect like the Curses, so she can observe changes more easily and safely by fluctuating mitigation on it's drawbacks specifically. Though, in theory, she could draw inspiration from her Curses, they're so immense that it's safer to experiment with the Gonne's drawbacks. She's greedy and more thana little crazy, not stupid.
Golden Tickets... don't seem to have any special magic she'd get much out of, excepting possibly Luck Magic. It's basically a lottery, and as Magic Systems you already have increase, your odds get worse. Still, even with a one-fifth drop per success, a hundred or so is still effectively guaranteed to work, since in theory 20 or so should have a very high chance of getting them all. The first one is grabbing one automatically, since it's impossible to get a duplicate at that point, which leaves an average of 4.75 for each of the remaining ones. The odds of not getting the second power are 0.2 on the first try, and 0.04 on the second. I'll assume anything below 0.1 is a success for this purpose. 17 for the remaining 3. 0.4, 0.16, 0.064, success. 2 magics left, and 14 tries left. 60% chance of failure on the first try, then 36%, 21.6%, 12.96%, 7.77%, success. 1 magic left, and 9 tries. 0.8, 0.64, 0.512, 0.4096, 0.32768, 0.262, 0.209, 0.167, 0.134. Failure. If the luck is a little better than projected, it might go through. 100 tries should be more than capable, even if we assumed a success at 5% chance of failure for each draw.
The sheer versatility of these Orbs from The Basis is not to be underestimated. With how many places she can go, and the foes she can generate for them via Nothing Magic, Eight Divisions: Green, etc. they would rapidly customize, and her Sorceress, Theoretical Magic, and Eight Divisions: White make it super-easy to add all sorts of neat effects. Hence the Orb civilization of explorers being a thing. The Orb-quarks are a good option to improve her Realms too. Then there's the basic attacks, which provides at least 50% of their power as a minimum threshold to hurt the user in any way even while in use, and 100% when not having been used recently. There is the ethics behind making servant races, but there's no reason to give quark-Orbs higher faculties such as self-awareness, so they aren't really sophonts, and most probably not even sapient. They're more akin to a God's angels, automatons with specific purposes they were designed for from the ground up on the physical, mental, and metaphysical levels. IRL, they'd be like robots with one specific task behind their creation. Making autonomous Bolt From The Blue Orbs could be interesting too, since she could mass-produce mooks of quite notable potency, and given they'd constantly scale of her Attributes, she'd never outscale them, as her build is actually fairly balanced between raw Attributes and conceptual weirdness. Admittedly, the Attributes are largely magic-based, but her high Divine Firmaments would make that a non-issue unless she was fighting being able to transplant their native physics to an area who could actually overcome her multiverse-scale influence. I mean, they'd need to be some serious Lovecraftian nonsense gone magi-tech to have any hope of doing that, though she might see that as a potential Geas task due to having an inherent counter to such a strategy: raise her Firmaments higher. The old standby of just making your beam in the beam'o'war bigger applied to conceptual/metaphysical enforcement.
Marrow's a Patreon thing, so it's not getting discussed.
Exavolt is a little bit like Amplitude, only it generates raw EM spectrum energy in the Giga range. When paired with Dynakinesis, it could have all sort of interesting applications, especially with such a rapidly scaling mastery from all the Progression boosters on it. Red and Ten Thousand alone are massive boons to that, and that's just Rihaku CYOA Progression boosters. Infinite Sigils ensures a certain minimum Progression speed as well.
Turenval is already going to give Diagram Magic to Greedy in return for the Magic Systems and divinity she's giving him, but I'll go a little more in-depth for how beneficial it is to her. As seen in Nameless and his Thrice-Great, advancing in one potent and/or versatile system can make you immensely better suited to Progress in another, plus, virtually all Magic Systems outside of the EFB-verse are external systems, which Diagram is explicitly well-suited to counter. Nothing Magic and Coin Forgery trivialize any material concerns, and virtually all Int thresholds are laughably low. Goddess of Magic only increases the ease, and with how many different metaphysical energies she's got, at least one of them probably counts as non-magical for the purposes of Diagram Magic. Additionally, generating new Diagrams is relatively simple for a Cursebearer/Sorceress/Theoretical Mage, especially with Turenval's mastery to take into account.
Labyrinthian is definitely going to combine with Orange's building-making and Violet's Plane-making, and the latter's universe-hopping makes opening portals at will much easier. The powerlessness outside of the Labyrinths is not an issue with so many other Magics to work with, so Labyrinth has no real downsides. Wellspring trivializes restoration of most of the Labyrinths of other people, and becoming a Labyrinthian Goddess would likely make usurping them fairly easy. Her mere presences is going to do revitalize them, likely activating a lot of their systems and the like. She might even be able to subsume them into her Internal Realm, allowing her to count them as parts of hers when it benefits her. Speaking of which, if the sheer mutability of Labyrinths transfers over to Internal Realms... well, that's just going to be unfair. If it does, then Labyrithian might also make Internal Realms viable for Final Scion if they weren't already, giving her a huge pool of territory to work with for the empowerment of Final Scion. It's a bit of a toss-up if Internal Realms automatically constitute your territory, because it's a universe linked to you as the creator, but not one you control utterly, so do you actually rule it to the point Final Scion counts it? Labyrinthian would put that issue to rest, giving her a universe-scale territory, which would empower Scion enormously, potentially to the point of skipping straight past 'regenerate from a single cell' to 'regenerate from a quark' or something similarly insane that would make dealing any damage less than total, unrecoverable annihilation in one hit like kicking the ocean. She might pull a XANA and make a bunch of miniature Internal Realms she can use to jumpstart her growth if someone hits her really hard with massive conceptual effects like The Accursed was. A bit like the instances Dien has scattered about the Human Sphere's galaxy, though more in seed AI form than a weaker duplicate of yourself.
A Taste of the Fruit is going to have the Unraveling Fruit selected, as another vector of defense against esoteric attacks. In theory, her high Willpower and Ten Thousand means she can block unwelcome external attacks of immense strength, and share that aura with others. Nothing Magic would let her give everybody the Fruit, and she could probably convert it into Coins for Turenval's use. This seems to be the Void equivalent of Ruin in terms of conceptual defenses, though Greedy should be more than capable of giving it an IFF due to not being Ruin in the literal sense, even if everyone having it doesn't let them ignore it. This is an anti-Splintering effect too, since it defends from all hostile effects, though it's hard to say how potent it is. With the unlimited willpower of Intimidation of the Pompadour, it would be incredibly potent, since they could focus and remain focused for extremely long periods at incredible intensity.
The Authority of Celestial Voyages, with multiple universes behind her and the easy means of visiting others, she'd make a decent fit, even without making herself a Goddess of Voyaging and/or Exploration. It would stack with her extant universe-hopping, making slipping into other worlds even easier. While she can fly with raw power, or skilled manipulation of Air via Numeracy Seven or the relevant Superpowers, a direct flight power, or the conceptual shut down of hostile flyers is a great way to dominate the skies. Astral Magic's starlight harvest from auroras and the command over the aurora borealis Authority grants have amazing synergy, though Coin Forgery and Nothing letting her make it on demand is fine for most spells. Then there's the conceptual explorer benefits, which were leveraged to grant the Orb-mind civilization a conceptual buff regarding exploration.
Originator Resurgent is likely to benefit from Growth Coins, the logical outgrowth of Coin Forgery's Seed and Meat Coins, since being able to produce a given Fruit or plant only requires a single successful instance, and then she can produce more at will. The Lotus Flower's nature control seems like it would stack with the aura of growing special plants. Special Attribute-boosting plants, like the various Seeds from Dragonquest IX that provide permanent buffs to Attributes with no cap beyond actually having them, are likely fairly easy to make, and it's strongly hinted to be a mystical energy proximity imbues in the earth and plants, so Wellspring might make it a planetary thing, granting her immense quantities of harvestable super-crops, and with Labyrinth's help, it should be a simple matter to make Labyrinths and her Internal Realm produce such super-crops 24/7, to the point using blood is unnecesssary for almost any circumstance, though getting anything really good is probably still going to need a direct hand. The absurd regen is also a major boon, even if there might be overlap with Elysian. Being able to share life might have...
interesting synergy with Application Strike, though stealing it's basically guaranteed to have some nice combination with Color Red's Essence drain.
With all her Graces, immense divine status, and multiple means of immortality, it's very unlikely for the lethargy that normally takes Originators to be an issue, and she should be able to resolve it, as well as the downsides of her powers such as Theoretical Magic's issues with other scholars and Color Green's sleep-causing for the others without much fuss.
It's hard to say if this form of Immortality could be transferred or not, but I lean towards no. Thus, Greedy is going to be a tier of immortality above her companions, being completely permanent and much more resistant to direct annihilation. Combined with her Progression being 100 times as fast without any extant responsibilities to slow her down and this is while not yet Goddess of Progression, which the others are and will not be eligible for due to Progression not being an explicit power of theirs, Turenval and Tyrmilion are likely discussing potential countermeasures post-Dark Ones. The best method would be to dogpile her immediately after the fight, since Arcadia is currently entirely mercenary and doesn't particularly like her they can be reasonably she sure could be convinced without much issue, though the fact that she has more Domains in her pool of potential thanks to the Curses, and Daphne is likely to side with her or stay neutral at minimum out of a mix of extremely high compatibility and massive empowerment leading to positive connotations in the vampire's mind, are complicating factors, especially since Turenval and Tyrmilion's unique Domains will be focused on their Lichdom and research, and their Rulership, respectively, which doesn't make them amazing at godslaying compared to now. On the other hand, this is their best shot to kill the Dark Ones, so killing her now or immediately after she empowers them is also a terrible idea since they've already committed this much, but if they don't do something, they'll all be reduced to following in her wake, like Aerie noted was happening in the previous update, in a matter of weeks, months at best. This would likely have happened either way if Tyrmilion hadn't gone for the head the moment he found her, so they're a bit stuck unless they convince her to grant them something akin to the Companions power that enormously empowers them at a commensurate rate to her own growth, but with so many different Magic Systems and an endless greed, there's nothing to guarantee they won't be surpassed because some power of hers, new or old, slips through the cracks of any such Party Ennoblements, even if there's multiple running to compensate. Progression is nuts, and she literally can't copy it over in full.
She could be convinced to make a pseudo-Retinue for them, but reducing the gap to merely a fourth of her Progress still runs significant risk, since she's likely to earn the opportunity for more Curses to bear in return for more power in no time at all considering how strong she's already gotten, and how much she's about to grow even without the benefits of the Dark Ones not being around. Assuming they win, of course, but assuming otherwise is planning for failure at this point. Whether against the Dark Ones or Greedy herself. A light tyranny due to lack of interest is going to be worse than Tyrmilion's literally divinely-backed rule in the unlikely event she sticks around long-term, and having her checking in on the regular to tear down any edifices she doesn't like with the encouragement of the Void Robe and the Freedom and Rebellion Domains(which also make it much harder to seal her or her powers without her consent, and even if you have it to some extent) obtained by leveraging her connection with it(which is not as strong as Hunger's connection to his Ring, but she still has a very strong affinity for it, since I feel it's pretty clear she won't brook tyrannical maniacs messing with people, even if ones that personally annoy her like the Dark Ones and their limitations on reality holding her back engender more ire, since it's all sourced from the same messy juvenile years back in the Dominion before she ended up on the Street), like a child knocking down a block tower, cannot be countenanced by either, though Tyrmilion's motives are definitely nobler than Turenval's by any stretch of the imagination. The question is how much agency they really have to oppose it. With how little they really know about The Accursed and the Curses, they could be poking a hornet's nest messing with her too much, and they'll have exchanged magic with her shortly, unless they want to increase the risk of being destroyed in every way that matters and then some. Plus, giving them so many Magic Systems as well as Godhood is likely to unlock Gifts, which will make it much easier for her to un-give those magics any time she wants, and God of Gods as Domains, which gives her a conceptual advantage against other Gods, especially within a Pantheon she's tied to, and increases the benefit of any other Domains in a manner similar to Refinement of Quickness making you move fast
better. A high-end version like this might let her imbue herself with any Domains she grants to others, compounding her advantage over them to the point of near-insurmountability. Arcadia and Tyrmilion, having established Godhood and partial Godhood before Greedy showed up, would be the most resistant, but it's still an advantage that applies to Gods in general, and since Godhood has prerequisities for any Domain, from deeds to personality traits, she can't transfer Domains to the others the way she can with Magic Systems. It would be like making someone a doctor with Coin Forgery by directly giving them the skills instead of making a currency representative of it, the detour is crucial to it's functioning, so it fails. Even God of Gods requires that she give someone else the Domain, so it's more of a loophole than anything else.
The two Word of Gods will provide a great deal of general knowledge about the cosmos(and give WoG!Orm and WoG!Birdsie some company that isn't greedy to the point of insanity), which, when combined with the Eight Divisions: Blue and Suzerain's Knowledge domain, means exploiting a given universe, whether it's dead in the sense that it's been subsumed by a non-sapient horde of monsters, or actually just lacking in life as a whole, will be much easier. On that note, that Death-Undeath world she mentioned has been pretty much consumed by literally endless undead. They just keep getting back up, and frequently you'll get multiple undead from the same corpse, up to and including smashed/sliced up corpses rising as more undead after being 'killed' the first time, and large quantities of dead flesh mashing itself together into super-undead. Ghosts are also fairly common too, and sometimes you'll get multiple of those too, via impressions forming poltergeists while the actual souls, or a bunch of fragments from a mutilated one, rise as their own spirits, though vampires and other 'only sometimes undead rather than some weird biology/magic thing that happens to be contagious' are pretty rare.
The only reason any holdouts exist is that some of the ghosts aren't inherently hostile, and there is the very rare instance of physical undead who retain their minds and don't just kill everyone they come across on proximity, sight, smell, or sound. Messing with universal concepts on the level of Death without knowing exactly what you're doing is very, very dangerous. It's not that Death is always necessary, it's just that this is generally the case with any major component of a cosmology. You could get the Marvel
Cancerverse if you messed with Life and Death, instead of Undeath. The guy was intending to have death result in Lichdom naturally(yes, I got the idea from the Pale Serpents), which would also make it relatively simple to bring them back to regular old life if they wanted, but everything went horribly wrong and he accidentally merged all the Death and Undeath divinities into himself, the clashing personalities and memories causing mutual personality death from the forced merger, creating a Blind-Idiot God, operating more as a fundamental force than an acting one but with much greater power than it technically should have possessed due to the (accidental) sacrificie of sophonthood in favor of power as the ability to cause change. The ritual and it's aftereffects merged the relevant concepts as well, generating a horrible mix of World War Z, Dead Space, Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, and Dark Souls and probably dooming the world sooner or later. Nobody there is equipped to fix that mess without an allied Death God, and any that emerge have to actively work to avoid being absorbed by the horrific amalgamation that already exists. Luckily 6th-tier divinities of the relevant concepts can undo all that and/or accomplish without screwing everything up. Greedy's just got some trauma-caution going on when she says she doesn't want Turenval messing around with that without some proofreading. Heck, Color Violet's Death connection means she can make herself a Death Goddess and do it herself.
High-tier divinities are extremely potent on the conceptual level and meta-conceptual level, allowing them to do everything from hit pause on deaths at the universal scale, to changing what dying actually means like our friend here with the universal Lichdom. Hades and Charon being the Gods of the underworld and death as separate things in Greek mythology is actually not an uncommon arrangement when the world isn't on fire enough to prevent pantheons from forming with their 'slots' filled out. If either one had had both, they'd have been nearly unbeatable on the mortal or divine scales, because they'd be immortal even harder than their fellow Gods, while able to pierce that immortality at least somewhat when it suited them, while mortals would find their dead rising again in the service of the death god in question, with anyone who fell joining them, making any sort of organized resistance futile. Good thing Hades was so chill by Olympian standards, while Charon seems to have been pretty focused on just doing his job even if that meant keeping certain Heroes from pulling dead people out of the underworld at will, huh?
Jacob's Ladder seems to be the Orm equivalent of Hunger's plans to shiv the Fates, if in the form of the opportunity to do so like the big difference in Fate-shivving potential between the Combat and Progression builds way back at the beginning of the game, though it might mean access to the conflict with the things The Accursed is fighting with. Probably the former, if only because even as strong as she'll be immediately after of the Dark Ones, Greedy won't be High Cursebearer-tier yet. Though, given the way Advancements work and her sheer Progression, I could easily see Jacob's Ladder being leveraged into such, especially with Sixth Firmament Domains and having already slain the evil top gods of one multiverse.
Actually, speaking of that, becoming a Sixth Firmament Goddess of Magic, Nothing Magic, Sorceresses, Theoretical Magic, Coin Forgery, Eight Divisions in general and White, Blue, and Yellow will do a lot to make becoming a higher Firmament easier. Blue, White, Sorceresses, and Theoretical Magic lower the threshold to do so, making it less of a challenge, widening the number of potential Domains and making granting Divinity easier. The remainder will directly empower Greedy to make rising to higher Firmaments easier, mostly by making it easier to make Divine Sparks or Shining Orbs to exchange for them. Nothing Magic, Coin Forgery, and Yellow will directly shave 6 digits off of the necessary time by adding those digits to production. Goddess of Magic only adds 5 because she's already First Firmament there. The general Eight Divisions divinity, Sorceress, and Theoretical Magic only do 3 digits apiece because they're generalists, while Blue has a lot of it's focus taken up by making more Domains available for Divinity-granting as far as the Sparks are concerned, so another 3 digits there. Still, 32 digits is more than enough to jump to the Tenth Firmament, but since that's where the requirements go up a trillion times instead of a million per Firmament, the remaining eight places aren't enough. Still, going up 4 Firmaments is enough for another 24 places and 2 Firmaments, which is enough for another 11 places, and a singular Firmament, which in turn provides just enough of a boost for another Firmament, pushing her up to Twelfth Firmament, though the Thirteenth Firmament would require 20.83 hours for each Domain still. Of course, the various temporal accelerations from her time-related Magic Systems will cut that down to size, but it's hard to say how much given Time and the time magics as Domains
might let them stack directly, so the multiplier could be ludicrous. I feel the point has come across though, and I'd honestly just be completely making that multiplier up if I went for it. This is also the reason I'm not adding the multiplier for becoming a Goddess of Findross, Essence, Quintessence, Mana, Prana, Energy of All and Nothing, Wonder, Divine Energy(which is more akin to the quarks that make up subatomic particles to a Domain's subatomic particles) and any others she might stumble across in her journeys, though the fact that they mostly serve to accelerate the others, Sorceress in particular doesn't hurt. Though it's going to be very interesting for any worlds with metaphysics that didn't have those before seeing them all implemented at once. Null Universes might actually be less interesting than universes with their own distinct energies from an IC and OOC perspective, particularly if there's any clashing.
Jumping another 6 Firmaments should be enough to let her hit Stage 7 Curse Mitigation, and she'd probably happily take on The Accursed's other Curses just for the Domain access, like I mentioned before, to say nothing of the potential power-ups he might offer as Remittances for someone who goes 'All of the above' when he offers Curses. Can you say Dream Magic, Logos,
and Praxis for even more potential power? At Stage 7 they'd be more inconvenient than truly lethal, though Doom of Ineptitude would likely be the one she'd be most reluctant towards with how much she depends on synergistic skill leveraging for the majority of her power and how badly it affects Haeliel. Geas of Indenture, in theory, shouldn't be much of a problem with Stage 7, allowing her to accomplish tasks and visit her previous worlds and bring along previous-world denizens relatively freely since she has so many world-hopping abilities, and it opens a lot of opportunities for new Magic Systems while she tries to find the Street.
Praxis might be an issue given how Greedy relies extremely heavily on cheating to get as far as she does in a manner not dissimilar to Nameless' tier-jumping via vicious cycles of gaining power in one type of magic to empower himself in another to boost the third to boost the original, etc., which Praxis and Dream Magic respectively don't and don't really allow. Logos, with immense mental Attributes to leverage, could be absolutely terrifying at this level, and with high Prowess and Willpower, messing up from outside influences is extremely unlikely, with anti-Splintering effects likely to help shield her if she does mess it up somehow. The opportunities would be well worth it though.
With Praxis, Greedy is, well, greedy enough that I could see her giving her uttermost for power. She's not called Sloth after all. She might even appreciate the simplicity of 'Just push through.' as an Advancement method after all of this synergy madness, even if she loves finding synergy for these things. Variety is important, and just because training it up can't benefit from other stuff doesn't mean it can't train/empower other stuff. Imagine Attainment of Quickness on someone with this much time hax helping them, or Refinement of Place when combined with all the other teleportation/dimensional travel hax being flung around. Plus anything she'd unlock via her ridiculous variety of Magic Systems already in place, along with the ones she's about to mine from the Silvered World, The Nexus, and the Crimson Expanse, including any potential insights she might translate into Graces or distinct magics and spells via all her other meta-magics. Imprisoner Soul Evocation did it on Hunger's end, surely at least some of the Greater Remittances would offer similar things, to say nothing of any lesser magics which might have possibilities in the Praxis. It seems to have more to do with concepts than power, so becoming a God of various things would likely let her subsume Domains into Praxis abilities for more limited but consequently more powerful abilities, which isn't especially a problem when she can grant Domains at will. Even if it's one of the ones more crucial to her production of Divine Sparks, it shouldn't be too much of a worry, since she'll be producing them in vast quantities at all times for quite some time and has The System's Inventory to keep them in, provided it's not explicitly a permanent removal. It's not 100% clear if Hunger could get Imprisoner back, since it's weakened enough that it wouldn't really be worth the trouble except maybe academically, so it's tough to say because of our sample size. Nobody has wanted to get their stuff back after sacrificing it to Praxis for an ability enough to make a serious effort as far as I know, and we don't have a large sample size to begin with. Seal of Ruin suggests that she wouldn't have to worry about it at all with some of the Praxis abilities, but that's not a guarantee of anything. She'd probably be able to get Work, Fairness, and possibly Excellence Domains if Findross unlocked perfection rather than Excellence, which isn't impossible since it seems to make things generally better across all parameters rather than one specific facet. They just wouldn't help her much, as noted by Praxis not having a Domain for itself, as The Accursed is far beyond a mere God. Even God of Gods isn't enough. Not at the 12th Firmament anyway. Various Attribute Domains might help a bit, but only in the sense Willpower usually does, or perhaps in unlocking prereqs via sufficient Attributes making it easier to do so.
Dream Magic, on the other hand, would have Dream, Nightmare(Dreams are technically all-encompassing of good and bad dreams, but are generally viewed as positive, compared to the universal negative of a nightmare, though it's tough to say if nightmares and their negative association led to dreams being held as more positive or the reverse), Dreamer, Slumber, Imagination, and, based upon the connection between the lesser and greater selves, Self, Avatar, and Connection Domains to reinforce the connection, preventing even high-order beings such as those a High Cursebearer might encounter from messing with them that way. Dream Magic may or may not be possible to accelerate with all of this, and won't be boosted as effectively as most other magics regardless, but the lesser downsides, such as being barred from returning to a given universe upon death in it, can probably be negated. Similarly, Dream-bourne abilities, which seem to be heavily Toonforce based at least initially with a dash of very solid illusions, can likely be amplified. Nothing Magic's dominance over what Is Not seems like it would handily patch the issue with struggling to make anything permanent, to say nothing of inspiration Sorceress might draw from it. Worlds with native sleep dimensions such as Kingdom Hearts' Sleeping Worlds could have lots of interesting possibilities too. The 'basically impossible to outright destroy even by high-order beings' factor would probably be amplified by already being so powerful in other fields, as well as the lesser avatar
still being nearly unkillable without High Cursebearer-tier power.
Logos explicitly notes that Dream, Sorceress, and Nothing are directly synergistic, for one thing, which means having all of them should be an incredible multiplier for it, especially with Progression Magic and Magic Godhood to bolster it, and at least suggests it's actually pretty accepting of help from other Magic Systems, though it might just be a Greater Remittance thing. Greedy's other powers provide ridiculous amounts of mental Attributes, with Ten Thousand to increase the mental load she can bear even further, handily resolving the immense intellect necessary to use it effectively. Then, there's the words of power offering mastery of a Magic System Logos allows(presumably similar in nature to God of Gods, providing a large conceptual advantage in the use of that magic and against anyone who uses it), which she might stumble across almost immediately by reverse-engineering from her understanding of the systems born of minimum Tier 15+ in all of them when combined with Domains in relevant concepts and the Magic Systems themselves, as well as Logos' additions to her understanding of magic, metaphysics, pataphysics, and meta-metaphysics. This would imply Logos also has such a word, which would likely be it's own feedback loop, to add onto the pile. Especially with Speech, Song, Vibration, Sign, Rune, Reality, and Making/Unmaking backing it up via Domains.
There's the Divine Firmament loop where raising any Divine Firmaments in any Domains that are relevant to raising the Firmament feeds back into the process, most notably God of Gods increasing the potency of all Domains and slightly increasing potential Domains for Greedy after that initial burst from making duplicate Domains of the ones she grants her Party, the Sorceress' tiers in various mystical energies to boost all parameters or make achieving those tiers a simpler matter, the Sorceress Graces loop which we see in Jeanne and Gisena where the Graces make the user better able to research more Graces via temporal acceleration, lowering the requirements, or direct intellectual improvements, which is similar to the intellect loop from various Int/Wis boosting Magic Systems making it easier to boost the magic higher, especially the Sorceress feedback loop, and the new Magic System Logos Name loop, which boosts all Magic Systems, with the potential to include Logos and generate an even greater ascension with a feedback loop within a feedback loop, and the Meta-magic loop from Theoretical Magic, Sorceress, and Eight Divisions: White basically letting her make up new Magic Systems and spells as she wishes, which Enigmatism handing out new spells as she solves puzzles for it only compounds on. This seems like a good point to say her growth is truly unlimited, considering how many of her systems feed into each other and how many explicitly don't care about current ontology even without a high enough Divine Firmament to impose complete ontological veracity whether the local dimension/universe/multiverse/omniverse likes it or not.
The point is, she'd finally achieve sufficient might for a High Cursebearer(and outescalate Doctor Apocalypse and the other assorted Drawback/Curse threats for quite some time since Rival/Twins would have been mitigated into non-existence), and she'd only have to do the divine/magical equivalent of going Super Saiyan 6, combined with SS God form, Perfect Ultra Instinct, and constant Kaio-Ken *100. I just had to mine 7 different CYOAs, make up my own, and then smash all the powers together far in excess of what was technically possible point-wise in any of them. Looking back, it seems a little nutty, but I did it. If you're wondering, Greedy's inspiration was 'What if I gave the
Technovore Virus an actual personality?' which you can kind of see with her initial reaction to owing The Knower a favor being 'I'll just eat him. It's not like anyone would miss him.' though since she's not literally a tech/data-eating virus, she does have some personal foibles, such as her whole thing about the top of the heap not being jerks or they get kicked off their thrones, and having a short, red-head, red-eyed, sword-wielding, vampire (sorta)princess as her strike zone. Also, going after magic and data instead of tech and data, but her general objectives are similar enough that Turenval and Tyrmilion are legitimately concerned she could go bad and become a homogenizing plague for extra research material and processing power. Probably of the 'It's all Greedy. All of it.' rather than discrete individuals in a hivemind. Ten Thousand kind of already does the latter.
As she is, she wouldn't and it's unlikely in a manner similar to Hunger becoming a Tyrant, but since she's a person she can change for the worse as easily as for the better, and she doesn't have a lot tying her to normal human morals besides a somewhat abstract 'Tyrants are bad.' and an almost one-sided affection for someone she just met today. Conversely, she has 'Grow without limits.' as an explicit power, and trivially outscaled the universe within a week of her arrival. Well, a month and a couple days if you count Nomenclature's time, which the Curses (somewhat) do but the Dark Ones don't. There's no way that won't distort her view of morality and reality at least a little, to say nothing of Logos, Dream Magic, Nothing Magic, and even her Sorceress status and their effects on her psyche. Just because something doesn't explicitly have Mental Contamination doesn't mean loading up with a bunch of conceptual things won't influence you, especially in these numbers. Dream Magic alone rather firmly suggests 'reality' is in an Azathothian dream state, which would be a pretty bad hit to anyone's self-importance and/or morals.
There
is some truth to Tyrmilion and Turenval's fears, as Greedy was a lot less crazy about her Sin before she started making deals with The Accursed, the Curse Broker, and Arcadia for power, though her life in the Dominion, before she took on Greedy as an epithet, definitely led her to her current policy of indulging it as much as possible without comitting atrocities. It's not a God Complex, per se, but it's definitely not a healthy mindset for anyone who can't grow without limit. On the other hand, Progression means only High Cursebearers, beings on their level, or The Accursed himself can reliably knock her off her pedestal, which isn't necessarily a good thing for her. Or anyone else, for that matter. Luckily, she's mostly invested in amassing power for the sake of her bottomless greed, and being able to do the equivalent of kicking the door to Hell down and kill the entirety of Hell's leadership (and the demons in general, total cosmological restructuring to permanently end Hell as a thing in favor of at least a neutral Purgatory of sorts for the worst of the worst would be her true goal there honestly) within 24 hours in her home dimension for any realm she wished, so she can harvest Magic Systems and artifacts from the grateful populace of any worlds she visits while searching for/walking the Street, preferably with Daphne popping in and out as she pleases to visit her family and carry out and Vampire Goddess-ing she wants to. Sufficiently enlightened self-interest and all that.
As I've said, she and the Void Robe have very high compatibility. Rebels who tear down tyrants on principle. It's just that she counts hard restrictions like being abandoned by the Street as tyrants. Greed is all about wanting things, so maximum greed could resemble pride from the outside under circumstances such as rewriting an entire cosmology to let her do as she pleases in getting her wife to and from her family while Greedy walks the Street to whatever end point it has in her Indenture breaks. After that? Who knows. She views the transaction with The Accursed as exactly that, a transaction, and frankly feels like she got the better end of the deal since finite service and Curses in exchange for infinite potential is definitively a pretty good trade, though it helps if you rapidly collect other, synergistic powers that let you mitigate the crap out of all of them. In essence, there's always a synergy beyond the synergy, and The Accursed makes grasping it practically easy compared to a normal person. What's a few random enemy power-ups every week in the face of limitless ascension? Well, Hunger's still dealing with Apocryphal at nearly 75% strength, so his procs would be more frequent and powerful than Greedy's at this point, but you get the point.
In theory, in a few decillion years, you could surpass the Accursed as of a few decillion years ago, with all this backing you up. I mean, I'm thinking the Cursebearers are something akin to his version of Retinue, and in theory Gisena could surpass Hunger with the right combination of Graces, at least for a while. Assuming it's not just 'A form you are comfortable with.' he was just a guy at some point. There's nothing that says the same couldn't happen with someone with all the advantages of one of his Cursebearers, though if you were anything close to a peer, he'd probably rescind the Mitigation he's handing out to you, if only because you clearly don't need it, meaning he can give it to a different candidate. Of course, much like Haeliel, he's getting stronger all the time too, so even if you managed to hit Stage 7 without his help, the peak you're trying to reach is actively climbing higher, and it's not like you have a major advantage over him Curse-wise. I mean, he's about 99% likely got ones we haven't seen in any of the Rihaku Quests, but that's not really a huge disadvantage when his Progression is commensurately faster and he's got such a huge lead. Sure Greedy's got a ton of power and powers really fast post-Cursebearer status, but that explosive growth is going to slow down to a more steady pace as she gradually raises her strength via time and research. Not a plateau, but she's definitely not going to grow this fast in terms of raw percentage unless she finds means of further augmenting her Progression.
Finding more Magic Systems is a means to try and accelerate it, but with Goddess of Magic, Eight Divisions: White, Sorceress, Enigmatism, and Theoretical Magic, each carrying a boost from God of Gods bolstered Domains for each specific Magic System, leveraged via her monstrous mental Attributes, she can pretty much make up new powers whenever she wishes, so it would be like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of needles the size of Olympus Mons. She'd probably grab all of them, just in case their higher interactions yielded something of value post 15th tier with divine Domains enhancing them, but most of them wouldn't. Between overlap and diminishing returns, she's going to have grabbed all the low-hanging fruit once she's 12th Firmament-ed herself and obtained the trio of Greater Remittances she wants, and anything The Accursed is willing to offer for her remaining credit, though this will also mean she has even greater overlap and diminishing returns to worry about. Not to say being a Goddess of Magic won't help with sniffing out anything useful, or the Luck and Luck Magic Domains for that matter, but that merely reduces the needle stack from Mars-sized to Olympus Mons' size. She got a ton of early growth, but now she has to settle in for the long haul. Plenty of Praxis practice time though, which might be her most reliable method of sudden growth, since it's like Enigmatism in that it rewards constant effort with incredible powers, but it's a lot more regimented in which ones it grants.
I'm also mildly curious how her initial Indenture task would go with all this craziness. The first one is supposed to be easy, but the Curse would surely take her immense power into account, right? While it would be hilarious if she got a first task equivalent to the first digit Geas worlds of an average Cursebearer because that's how Tutorial Geas worlds are, she'd probably get something more like 'Rule the entirety of this universe's Observable Universe for a hundred years uninterrupted. Time limit: 10000 years.' because of how hard she'd be essentially guaranteed to escalate (Firmament jumps are pretty much guaranteed to happen multiple times each week, at least going from 12 to 13, Sorceress is still scaling super-hard with Wellspring's constant Findross production, along with all the other magical energies she has and will be able to leverage into the virtuous cycle upon encountering them, and, again, if you give her any real time, she can just invent a spell or magic perfectly suited to resolve the problem) unless dealt soul-destroying wounds that would strip her of the requisite magics, which anti-Splintering effects would make difficult, even ignoring Dream Magic's weirdness which isn't strictly Splintering resistance so much as turning yourself into the avatar of an eldritch being from beyond reality, which happens to also be you. It would be a total power fantasy(But how was this Omake not?) but it would make for some incredible imagery if she conquered an entire universe with a mix of high and low sci-fi elements, megastructures like ringworlds a dime a dozen, magic and psychic power coexisting with galactic scope, world-shattering soldiers serving as leaders
of those worlds in a universe where a dwarf galaxy having less than 10 quadrillion residents is considered positively barren of life! She could go the simple route of making an Orb-mind civilization to serve her in the endeavor, but she did tell Daphne she'd avoid that if possible, so perhaps with teleportation and raw Attributes like hers, she could do something equally crazy and manually conquer entire galaxies without even killing anyone in moments. Perhaps incarnating each of her mental instances from Ten Thousand in physical bodies so she could be in ten thousand places at once, with a hivemind to allow for more efficient rulership than any one of them could achieve, effectively keeping the Numeracy's benefits while increasing her power projection 4 magnitudes.
Plus, she might just hang around a given Geas world and act as a safety net. Seeing what people of not-universe-busting-power could do would be very educational if there was no reason to worry about lasting damage to them or their planets since a Twelfth Firmament can practically operate as a living Infinity Gauntlet for any universe she chooses unless actively opposed by a similarly high-order entity. Or planes of existence. She'd probably need a
Girl Genius-esque universe for that though. A place where there's plenty of crazy people willing to risk planetary destruction in the pursuit of science with no safety net whatsoever already! Seeing them investigate the magical energies she'd introduce would also be neat, since they're magic, yes, but they're largely defined enough for sciences using them to be entirely feasible. She might even let them play around with some of her own insights if they impress her. Solving all the big problems would leave them plenty of time for it, though a proper vacation would likely be something she'd hang around Daphne for since she'd
find a way to smack reality in the face if it tried to prevent that.
Perhaps she'd visit the Star Trek multiverse, resolve the Evil Mirror Universes, and then watch them play around with all the new fundamental particles she'd be introducing, politely informing them she'd fix any mishaps below the level of 'The multiverse disintegrated.' pretty trivially, and studying their Clarktech in return, leveraging her Research and Knowledge TSH in addition to her ludicrous Int, Wis, and Wits. Heck, she might pass out upgrades just to win good will, and also to see how high-end tech and low-end tech compare in their interactions with magic, hers and the budding magic the locals hash out from her impromptu lessons and semi-random texts and empowerments. Their technobabble isn't all that much more grounded than Girl Genius' at some points, even if they and their engineers usually are, so it should be an interesting. The Q Continuum aren't 'trivially rewrite local omniverse physics, both by proximity and at will' level, so they and their fellow Ascended are unlikely to be an issue as far as Greedy's experiments are concerned, though they'd probably have more luck appealing to Daphne or even her with moralistic speeches, since her Rhetoric has comparatively few Magic Systems backing it up, and isn't as much of a focus.
Not all that much easier, and she might respond by semi-mockingly offering to let them take a whack at copying Progression (Ascended beings like themselves
probably won't immediately go mad trying, they might even get to the second infinite cardinality to Gisena's first, since they're already universe-scale energy beings, but it's not a good idea unless you're desperate, or have a research-specced group of Ascended on the level of Gisena's research-spec, which only manages to make it a viable plan, nevermind a good one.), but it's definitely better than doing nothing and letting Greedy play benevolent-but-less-than-responsible God, even if she would be uniquely qualified for that. It's sort of the difference between trying to outfight Hunger mano a mano, and trying to nibble at the edges of his domain. Not easy either way, but he can't hammer and anvil you against his Rank without being physically present. Though, with Daphne holding the leash, Greedy probably won't actively antagonize them to see what happens.
Either way, 10th Firmament and onward is enough that her effects have ontological inertia. That is, unless a powerful entity actively blocks or undoes them, they will persist even in the face of not having been compatible with local physics. In some verses with more dangerous local powers, such as 40K's Warp, this can be extremely advantageous, since, for example, Findross doesn't usually make you explode into Daemons from an overabundance, and even in calmer ones, the magic energy Domains synergize with Wellspring to create grand worlds of joy and wonder for all the inhabitants.
I might as well generate some Graces while I'm at it.
Dream Again. A Grace born of a dream of a dream... a twofold nightmare. A nightmare within the nightmare which claims to be reality. Dream Magic does not allow the user to return to a given reality upon death of their lesser self, but dreams can outlive their dreamers, so why should one's death prevent them from dreaming the same dream a second time? The user of this Grace may revive in a universe they have died in once without the usual penalty of such from Dream Magic. Requires Make Whole or a similar resurrection Grace to use as a base, and Dream Magic, of course.
Sympathetic Study. Greedy has made great strides in virtually every field of magic she has made contact with. Still, her efforts have slowed as she reaches a plateau in her growth. This Grace was made as a means of getting past that plateau. Research into one form of magic also translates into 10% of a commensurate amount of effort invested into all other forms the user possesses. For example, solving a puzzle in Enigmatism would translate into 10% of that puzzle's reward being granted as research progress in all other forms of magic. Praxis is half-applicable. It does not benefit, but Praxis study benefits other magics. Requires at least 25 different Magic Systems.
Upgrade In Progress. Greedy has subsumed dozens of Magic Systems, made herself and others into Gods, bent time, and spent trillions of somewhat arbitrary units of mystical currency in order to obtain more and more power. There are sidequests along the way, but she ultimately wishes to be able to return to wandering the multiverse, collecting knowledge and power, but also seeing the sights and sampling local color. This is a Grace that rewards such pursuits, making her magic more powerful with each kind she collects. For each Magic System she collects, all of Greedy's mystical effects are empowered a multiplicative 5%. The multiplier is over 600% as of now, and will only grow. Requires access to at least 25 different Magic Systems, or 5 different magical energies the user is able to manipulate.
Astral Scent. Most Graces depend upon Findross, in terms of power source at minimum, and generally in terms of their interactions with reality. However, Greedy had already made strides in hybridizing Graces, crafting Graces which streamlined Mana, Prana, Essence, Wonder, Divine Energy, Quintessence, and any other energies she came across into Coalescence boosters. The creation of Graces built entirely upon other mystical energies was a logical next step. Not a simple one. The designs of The Maiden were complex by the standards of a human mind, and pure intellect can only carry you so far in the face of lacking experience, but it didn't take much time with divine Domains as backup. The first Grace was one intended to make locating users of Astral Rank simpler. The premise is simple. The Astral Realm functions somewhat like an ocean, with Rank causing perturbations, which, in turn, warp the reality it is tied to. This Grace allows the user to follow the perturbations back to their source. This is more effective than most equivalent Graces would be for other forms of mystical power, because Rank is an inherently 'loud' energy. Much like gravity, it is incredibly difficult to hide emissions. Requires Sealing Protocol II to unlock non-Findross Graces, and access to Astral energy.
Custom Graces. Let's face it. Greedy's excess of Domains and Magic Systems is not going to be normal. Even if she grants the latter to others via Application Strike and Eight Divisions: White, there will be compatability issues she just doesn't have as a divinity of the 12+ Firmament in Magic as a whole and which she will rapidly obtain for any magic she comes across, not to mention Progression Magic and her status as a Cursebearer paving the way. Further, her unique circumstances would make it more efficient to modify Graces with her in mind, while retaining the normal versions as something she could hand out to anyone she initiates as a Sorcerer/Sorceress. This Grace was created for that purpose. With it, Greedy may spend a period of time equivalent to a Grace one step lower than the one she is modifying, altering it to perfectly suit her powers, and automatically adjusting to any changes. Additionally, the various stages it goes through remain 'logged' so she can grant them to others based upon their affinity, or simply default to the base form. Unlocked by Sealing Protocol III to allow extreme Grace manipulation, and possession of a minimum of 25 different Graces.
