A N O T H E R C Y O A
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Congratulations! You've won a one year all-expenses-paid experience on Thalassa Cruises' premier transmultiversal vessel, the Galaxia! As our guest of honor, you have the extraordinary privilege of not only joining us for a whole four seasons free of charge, but even choosing our course for the year! Unfortunately, due to prior arrangements we are limited in what options we can offer, but rest assured that all of them have plenty of opportunities for fun!
For each season, select one or two destinations. If you select a single destination, you have time to participate in all activities and acquire all souvenirs offered there. If you select two, you only have time to participate in one activity or obtain one souvenir from each (or an activity in one and a souvenir from the other), as the Galaxia must spend time traveling from first to the second.
[ ] The House of Angels - Certainly the most ancient of the destinations available for this cruise, the House of Angels houses Creation's Keyhole, the largest stable Luminous Fracture in the Star Ocean.
-[ ] Activity: Listen to the whispers of eternity through Creation's Keyhole - You have a remarkable affinity for the Light. The whispers grant you the barest glimmer of Knowledge. With time and dedication, you will eventually develop the power to let the light of creation pour into the momentary world, to nourish your soul with its revelatory light, and to awaken to your true reality as if from a dream.
-[ ] Souvenir: A treasure map hidden by a previous guest - The House of Angels is not easy to negotiate access to, but we aren't the first. It seems someone has left something behind for you. The map is strange and shimmering, its nature uncertain. Choose a Souvenir from a future season's destination. The map will show you the way to a secret cache where that souvenir can be found, without having to change your cruise schedule.
-[ ] Souvenir: A cast-off angel feather - Angels don't have any inherent physicality, but especially powerful ones can sometimes leave artifacts like these in their wake. Gossamer and translucent, almost not there. If you hold the feather and wish to send a message to someone, anywhere and anywhen, a diminutive angel will be dispatched to carry it out. The feather has the strength to do this twice before discorporating, but as long as it still exists it will slowly regain strength.
[ ] Goldenvale - A place of home and health, in the bosom of a still-young world. The story of this place is still being written, its legends happening here and now. Great potential lies untapped in every corner.
-[ ] Activity: Feast with Thunder and Sea in the Immortals' Longhouse - Two jolly immortals, the progenitors of mortal humanity, built this longhouse for their burgeoning family, including you. The food isn't exactly gourmet, but it's a good meal. Taking your place at the immortals' table and spending time with your mythic ancestors plants the seed of a Mythos in you. Each Activity you choose during the cruise after this one, as well as any epic feats you achieve after returning home, will contribute new powers to and bolster the strength of your Mythos.
-[ ] Activity: Practice the air-dance with the young Samarites - The green-skinned Samarites are favored by Sun and Sky, and teach their children how to traverse the heavens. If your pride allows it, you can learn with them. The dance is as exhausting as it is invigorating. Air-dancing is a powerful and versatile movement technique, as well as a beautiful one. By the end of your stay, you'll be skilled enough to circle the globe in an afternoon, with reflexes and wits to match your speed.
-[ ] Souvenir: A divine creation from Fate or her nameless brother - Fate is a powerful witch and masterful weaver, while the nameless brother commands fire and metal with peerless skill. Anything within these immortals' remit is on offer. Even advanced technologies may be possible if you describe what you desire well. Whatever you request, it will be of the utmost quality, and perhaps more importantly, will expand in power and magic alongside you, always worthy of its place in your panoply.
[ ] Dreaming Tree - Every world in the Star Ocean contains reflections of that self-same ocean, however warped or shadowed. The Dreaming Tree is one such looking glass, and one of the brightest.
-[ ] Activity: Watch auroral dreamscapes shimmer among the Upper Boughs - All the dreams across the Star Ocean find their way through the branches of the Tree. It's strange to experience whole-body sensations through just your sight. By absorbing a portion of the oneiric power of the Tree's branches through your own eyes, an oracular connection is made. Initially, your visions will be wild and confusing, but with time you will gain control and clarity.
-[ ] Souvenir: A low-hanging Fig of Fantasy - The Dreaming Tree bears many fruits, only Figs of Fantasy carry their parent's power within them. It tastes like anything you could imagine. Eating the Fig will grant you a small portion of the Dreaming Tree's power to conjure fantasies, allowing you to project simple semi-real illusions of whatever you can imagine into the world around you. With practice, the reality of these illusions, as well as the complexity of what you can conjure, will naturally increase, though they will never become independently real without outside influence.
-[ ] Souvenir: A dose of reality venom from the Green Dragon - One of the few of its kind, the Green Dragon searches the boughs for dreams worth realizing. Black speckled with glittering points of light, like liquid night. Injecting the Venom will provide you a holistic and comprehensive ontological magnification, an experience which is difficult to describe. The Venom can also be injected into illusions, such as those that the Fig allows you to create, in order to give them true, independent reality.
[ ] Three Circles - Named for its eponymous three concentric rings of urbanity, each dedicated to one of the Three Arts. The outermost and largest ring to Alchemy, the middle to Theurgy, and the innermost to Astrology.
-[ ] Activity: Study the Three Arts under the tutelage of the First Master - The builder of the rings, the founder of the city, the codifier of the Arts. There could be no better teacher. The classwork is grueling, but your progress is rapid. Following the First Master's lesson plan for your stay will ensure that you are adept in all three Arts, including competence with a respectable repertoire of spells.
-[ ] Souvenir: A flask of Perfecting Elixir - One of the greatest miracles of the Arts in concert. Once a treasure of exceeding rarity, now the focus of Three Circle's industry. It looks like liquid gold, and smells like brimstone. Imbibing the Elixir will induce a rapid but not unpleasant transformation, idealizing your physical form and unifying it with your immortal soul, as well as perfecting your talent for all endeavors, greatly improving the speed with which you acquire skills.
-[ ] Souvenir: A personal Homunculus - The essential spirit is a shared material between Alchemy and Theurgy. In concert, two Arts can create a miracle. Even when you can't see or hear it, you'll know it's there. A great master of two Arts will reweave your essence into a semi-autonomous spirit to serve and aid you in your travels. Whatever form it takes will be an echo of your essential nature, but its abilities will always be both useful to your goals and scaled to your general power-level.
[ ] The Great Gate - Once, this was a land of war and chaos. Petty gods squabbled for land, for men, for treasure. Then, the Demon of Law came, and with them an end to war, to chaos, to gods. Where the last god fell, they built the Great Gate.
-[ ] Activity: Witness infinity from the parapets of the High Tower - The Demon of Law built a tower to survey their lands. It is a very tall tower. Mere exposure to the infinite land-and-seascape that sprawls beneath the High Tower will expand your mind, allowing you to contain its endless vistas and more with perfect clarity. You can even spot your own homeworld, and likely many other worlds you might recognize.
-[ ] Souvenir: A protective starmetal amulet - The High Tower stretches through fathomless heavens, where stars are as common as grains of sand. An innocuous bumpy little silver ball on a silk ribbon. Wearing the amulet extends inviolate protection from unwanted divinations as well as shielding you from all curses and other malevolent contortions of fate. It also provides a lesser but still significant degree of protection from anything else of a magical nature.
-[ ] Souvenir: A binding contract from the office of the Demon of Law - The Demon's army of clerks embody and operate the vast majority of the organs of the Law, including all ordinary contracts. You, however, are hardly ordinary. The parchment has a golden sheen to it, and the quill is hot to the touch. As long as you and one or more other people are touching the contract's parchment, you can conjure a least avatar of the Demon of Law, who will aid you in writing a contract which satisfies all parties. Once drafted and signed, the full force of the Demon's magic enforces the contract.
[ ] The Shining City - All across the Star Ocean, people are trying to make their worlds a better place. After numberless generations of struggle and progress, across the vast gulf of time, lies their final victory: the Summer Empire and her capital, the Shining City.
-[ ] Activity: Have your potential unlocked at the Ministry of Possibility - The Summer Empire's existence is predicated on their control over the foundations of reality, and that extends to the potential of its people. The sheer lack of bullshit and red-tape is honestly the most surprising part. After being screened for potential catastrophic instability, the limits on your ultimate potential will be removed, allowing you to pursue any skill or technique to superhuman, supernatural heights.
-[ ] Souvenir: A free copy of The Classic - The Classic is the story of the Summer Empire. It is a step by step guide on how to build the Summer Empire from scratch. It is the best argument ever made for why you should do exactly that. It looks like a book, but it's definitely more than that. This innocuous leather-bound tome contains the total of the Summer Empire's wisdom, refined and summarized for perfect digestibility, allowing you to bring about its achievements in any world you might visit. If you pursue it, the Summer Empire could be built well within your lifetime.
-[ ] Souvenir: An imperial badge of approval from the Summer Emperor - The prosperity of the Summer Empire extends far beyond its borders, and so too does the emperor's approval. A silver pin with mirror finish and a little sunburst etched into it. Once you've worn the badge, no force of natural essence or lawful character can harm you, even after you take it off again.
[ ] Labradoris - The grave-earth of the Giants, those great builders and sowers of the holy land now long-dead, yet grasps their venerable power. This power flows up, from farmer to Earthbound, from vassal to liege, into the miraculous garden of Labradoris.
-[ ] Activity: Dine on miracles and blessings with knights of the High King's court - The power of the High King is vast, but so is her kingdom. Her knights carry that power out, and ensure her vassals do not forget to whom their strength is owed. It's difficult to describe how delicious the food and drink is. Ambrosia and nectar don't cut it, this stuff is good. Consuming the fruits of the High King's garden and the meat of her blessed beasts provides a truly gargantuan benefit to your physicality, the earth-power eager and obedient to your will, ready to explode in knightly transformation at the first sign of violence.
-[ ] Activity: Befriend a Blessed Beast of the High King's menagerie - Blessed Beasts, like the Earthbound and their knights, possess the earth-power, and likewise each possesses strange, magical traits and abilities. Not all of them can talk, and not all of the ones that can talk are great conversationalists. Engaging with a gregarious beast as an equal has earned you its secret gift of language, allowing you to speak to any flesh-and-blood animal, and allowing those creatures to in turn provide you their calling name, if they so choose, letting you summon them and invoke their blessings (if they have any).
-[ ] Souvenir: A pot of holy soil from the Royal Garden, full of earth-power - Normally, it requires the cauldron of an Earthbound's body to refine earth-power into holy soil in which miracles may grow. This is one exception. It smells a little funky, but you guess that's natural. Any seeds, sprouts, or rooted cuttings planted in the holy soil will grow with great speed and vigor, even without tending, even without water or light. Products of this growth will be of the highest quality, and may take on supernatural attributes depending on their source stock and growing environment.
[ ] Sunsleep - Shielded from the apocalyptic wrath of the Storm by its tall mountain walls, the Gardel river valley is a haven of relative peace on the Island, and through that peace, the city of Sunsleep on the river's mouth has grown great.
-[ ] Activity: Gain the Spirit Tongue and become a Spirit-Talker - Long ago, the spirits of men betrayed their kin and earned the Storm. A free spirit has chosen to forgive yours. You can hear them, now, if you listen, and they can hear you. Receiving the spirits' forgiveness opens your ears to their secret commentary on the world's stories, as well as allows you to speak to them yourself, to barter or beg for their aid. Note, while many spirits have, broadly, let go of their grudge, spirits of the Storm very much have not.
-[ ] Activity: Find a tutor and achieve superskill in a field of your choice - The fruits of betrayal, uncommonly sweet. The spirits of men knew they could be more, and so they did. You know there's so much more to learn. Studying under an expert teacher brings your mastery of any single skill you possess to its absolute peak, the furthest reaches of what could have been possible for you before, and removes any limits on your continued progress, as well expanding the conceptual remit of the skill, allowing for outright magical results to be achieved.
-[ ] Activity: Get a souvenir upgraded by an elder supercraftsman - The oldest, most advanced artisans of Sunsleep can work with just about anything. You don't know how they managed to pull this off, frankly.
--[ ] Treasure Map - Restore its shimmer. The map now illustrates the ways to new and unknown treasures, revealing endless secret corners and crevices and corridors. What you find might not be useful, but the hiding place you find it in might be instead.
--[ ] Angel Feather - Eliminate its fragility. Holding the feather now allows you to dispatch angels without limit, and by mustering all of your will, allows you to fly with the eternal alacrity of an angel yourself. Do not underestimate the toll this takes.
--[ ] Divine Creation - Awaken its intelligence. Wearing or wielding the creation allows you to commune with its governing intelligence, allowing you to shape the character of its growth. This intelligence is initially rather limited, but will grow with time.
--[ ] Fig of Fantasy - Broaden its scope. Illusions projected through the fig's power have far greater range than before, extending all the way to whatever limits your senses have, if any, rather than being bound to your immediate surroundings.
--[ ] Reality Venom - Concentrate its potency. Injecting the reality venom now provides an additional amplification of your ontological magnitude, elevating a limited domain beyond the holistic baseline, with narrower domains receiving a greater elevation.
--[ ] Perfecting Elixir - Extend its reach. Ingesting the elixir now allows you to permeate the physical world with your immortal soul, sharing your invincibility with it, as well as providing you a sublime and intimate understanding of whatever your soul encompasses.
--[ ] Personal Homunculus - Subvert its flow. The homunculus is transformed from merely a reflection of your essential nature into a tool for self-modification, allowing you to alter your own essential make-up, a dangerous but powerful avenue for growth.
--[ ] Starmetal Amulet - Strengthen its sympathy. Wearing the amulet now grants an intuitive sense of the astral plane, and how forces and forms therein act on the material world, as well as the ability to interfere with them directly.
--[ ] Binding Contract
--[ ] The Classic - Increase its utility. The Classic gains virtually limitless minor functions beyond serving as a repository of knowledge, greatly hastening uplift in worlds which lack advanced technology or magic, as well just being generally useful.
--[ ] Imperial Badge - Expand its authority. The badge now allows you to give rudimentary commands to natural orders and systems of law, so long as they don't contravene their inherent nature, as well as extend the baseline protection of the badge to whoever you deputize.
--[ ] Holy Soil - Multiply its blessings. Alterations to plants grown in the soil now breed true and are retained by child plants, even when grown in common earth. Highly magical plants may require special care when not grown in the soil.
--[ ] Vessel of Your Own - Enlarge its cabin. The vessel can now comfortably accommodate you and five guests of approximately human scale, along with space for additional storage and ontomediation equipment to ensure any possible guests will be comfortable.
--[ ] Antediluvian Scripture - Taste its truth. A single fragmentary prayer of the scripture is translated into your native tongue. With experimentation and persistence, you can complete its formula, allowing you one reliable way to petition or propitiate your god.
--[ ] Sound Stone - Release its voice. The stone can now play any sound stored within it. Beyond providing a superb sound system, the stone can now perfectly reproduce any magic anchored to its music, including providing access to echoes of the deceased it contains.
--[ ] Lost Treasure - Embrace its aberration. By meditating with the treasure, you are able to enter an altered state of mind which is better able to understand its new abyssal perspective. This improves your ability to use the treasure, but can also involve some personality changes.
--[ ] Immortal Steel - Ignite its fire. With effortful training, you can now cultivate the magical ghost-flame which motivates the steel, hastening its adaptation and allowing you to enkindle that spiritual fire within any child of forgecraft, animating and immortalizing them like the steel.
--[ ] Master Key - Attune its entitlement. The key no longer has a physical form, eliminating the possibility of it being lost, stolen, or destroyed, allowing you to enter or exit the Tenement at will, and ensuring that your status as Owner can only be altered with powerful magic.
[ ] Heaven's Raft - Once upon a time, long long ago, all worlds were one. Then, the heavens wept, and the tears were more numerous than the stars, and they drove the world apart, scattered across this dark new Star Ocean.
-[ ] Activity: Exchange stories and souvenirs with fellow cruise-goers - Heaven's Raft is a frequent partner organization to us, so you may encounter other guests of ours during your stay. Many other travelers on Heaven's Raft are happy to trade tales and trinkets. You can exchange souvenirs with other players of this CYOA who take this Activity. The details of the exchange are for you to decide. This is one of the only ways to receive multiple instances of the same souvenir, alongside the Treasure Map.
-[ ] Souvenir: A small Star Ocean-faring vessel of your own - The Galaxia has an internal docking bay for smaller vessels, for just this sort of situation. It looks a bit jank, but the previous owner swears by her quality. This vessel isn't powerful enough to meaningfully alter your options with regards to this voyage, but once you've returned home, it will be an unbeatable ride, able to take you anywhere in your universe or its embedding manifold with a brief, easy trip, and even further afield given time and effort. It's not quite big enough for guests or cargo, though.
-[ ] Souvenir: An antediluvian scripture - Ancient words, spoken by a forgotten god. No one knows what messages may be contained within, though not for lack of trying. When you hold it close, you can feel something in the back of your mind. Studying the alien markings of the scripture will initiate you into the mysteries of a forgotten god, their sole acolyte in this present world. Trust for trust, and faith for faith, you will come to know your god.
[ ] Hall of Echoes - There is a world that refuses to forget. Numberless multitudes are destroyed every passing moment, and the Hall of Echoes captures their shapes and their stories in its stone, so that what is lost might still be remembered.
-[ ] Activity: Search for the echo of a lost ally or loved one - The Hall preserves echoes of all who pass, great or small. If they cannot be found here, you can know they still live. A part of you isn't sure that you're ready to see them again. Finding the idol of your lost one in the Hall will allow you to speak to their echo. This isn't a true, whole continuation of them, nor is it merely a recreation, but something in between. This echo lacks an indescribable thing, a nutrient spark, a growing-living-striving motion, a vital heat, transfixed in stone and song as it is.
-[ ] Activity: Resonate with the song of a fallen hero - For some, the story of their life has a power of its own, strength enough to struggle on even after its hero has died. Are you their reincarnation? Their successor? A kindred spirit? Finding the idol of a dead hero whose story aligns with yours reveals new paths for you, to follow or forgo. Find another CYOA or CYOAs and use them to construct this hero, then continue their story until their death. With effort and not inconsiderable risk, anything they had could be yours.
-[ ] Souvenir: A Sound Stone from one of the Hall's shrines - The bones of the Hall reverberate with songs, not only those of dead men, but dead worlds. Just holding it makes you want to start humming. The stone holds within it a small fraction of the songs that echo through the Hall, but even so its library is larger than any ordinary human lifespan could contain, and filled with many powerful magics. Fortunately, accessing its well of knowledge is supernaturally intuitive, as are its other functionalities of recording and editing songs (or other audio, or audio-like phenomena) .
[ ] Star-on-Horizon - The Star Ocean stretches across infinity, but even so, it is only an infinitesimal droplet in comparison to the greater Abyss. Star-on-Horizon is the last safe harbor for those brave or foolish enough to test its vastness.
-[ ] Activity: Help guard the World's Edge - Abyssal incursions are common at the World's Edge, though one's this powerful are much more rare. A worthy cause, and a worthy opponent. Whatever resources and abilities you commit to the edge's defense, the Abyss will provide an appropriate challenge. This provides an excellent opportunity to train your skills in combat, impress the warriors you fight alongside, and if you overcome the incursion, a chance to become touched with the power of the chimerical darkness of the Abyss itself - granting you powers over obscuring and blurring things and the opportunity to change and adapt yourself and your abilities into a stranger, more esoteric form.
-[ ] Activity: Learn to navigate the Star Ocean by eye and ear and hand - The people of Star-on-Horizon have an ancient and expert tradition of navigating the Star Ocean. There's more to the world around than you ever thought before. Training under a master navigator provides you the awareness of the subtle signs of the Star Ocean that are nonetheless apparent to even mortal eyes and ears, and the skill to utilize these signs to find your way. This is best suited to guiding vessels through the Star Ocean, but it is functional for navigating mundane vessels, or to traverse the Star Ocean without a vessel.
-[ ] Souvenir: A Lost Treasure retrieved from the Abyss - True abyssal artifacts are too alien to be understood, but some treasures lost to the Abyss find their way back. There's something off about how this thing looks, how it feels. Choose an artifact from myth, fiction, another CYOA, or even simply your own imagination. This Lost Treasure was once that artifact, or something like it at least. Time submerged in the mutagenic darkness of the Abyss has warped it into something unfamiliar and unwieldy, with greater power leading to greater change.
[ ] The Black City - Not everyone agrees with the principles of the Summer Empire. Most dissenters are happy to create their own utopias and peacefully coexist, but not all. It's a testament to the Shining City's fitness that even its direst opponents mirror its form.
-[ ] Activity: Attend a massive mixer with guests from all across the City - High society parties are quite exclusive, but as our guest of honor you're more than qualified to attend. You can only barely remember what happened last night. Aside from the pleasant afterglow of the supernal delights you experience during the party, you will also retain a charismatic mien and marginal psychic empathy. You'll also make at least one new valuable contact, and possibly many, depending on how popular you are with Black City socialites.
-[ ] Souvenir: A limb of immortal steel - The legacy of a wandering mage-smith who traveled through the Black City, a long time ago. Expensive, but worth the price. It's warm to the touch, pulsing gently in time with your heartbeat, and flickers with ghostly flames. Undergoing the attachment surgery is quick and painless, and the arm itself is just as dexterous and sensitive as one of flesh and blood. It is also very indestructible, and as you use it, it will steadily adapt to whatever tasks you put it to, growing in strength or precision or beauty or any other attribute as needed.
-[ ] Souvenir: The master key to an untouched, abandoned Tenement - There are many Tenements in the Black City, but most are worlds of squalor and poverty. An unassuming key. Clean carpets, bright lights, bare rooms, endless hallways, bottomless stairwells. The key allows you access the interior of your new Tenement through any door with a usable keyway (and through the Tenement's exit, access to the Black City, even after you return home). Inside is an infinite array of empty apartments, ready to be furnished and inhabited, equipped with HVAC, electricity, internet, and all other modern necessities. Being the keyholder also grants you recognition as the Owner, allowing you to magically propagate any renovations you make in one apartment out to all of them, or any simple subset of them, and to grant or remove the status of Tenant to anyone you can soundly identify.
After a very long, exciting year, you return home, just where you left it, or the nearest safe place if it's become unsafe while you were away. How has the world changed since you left? A year is a while, and while it seems you're the only one who had such a fortuitous encounter with Thalassa Cruises in your world, you aren't the only one who has had an interesting year. Feel free to speculate what sort of chaos that being exposed to the Star Ocean and its many constituent multiverses has caused. More importantly, what will you choose to do, with all you've gained?
