Weighing in at just over 4.4k words, here's the promised CYOA! Those of you who were on the discord a few months ago might find this familiar, though it's not identical to its mini-CYOA predecessor. Color theory provided by the always beautiful and generous Lealope!
All who respond in this thread will exist together, in the same world, having awoken in their beds on the morning of Friday, October 13, into a world almost exactly like our own, except each of you will be equipped with the magics you select here and an intuition for what's possible to do with them. Those who choose the magic of Shadow Blend in particular will remember a dream which foretells the presence of other magi, including their approximate number, and the other magics that you have not chosen. Otherwise, the only remnant of the dream that clings to you in the waking world will be its magic.
Choose two of the following:
[ ] Earthbound - The magic of your dream binds you to the land, and the people who live on it, and through them, a great and growing power. You gain a Territory, a metaphysical claim on a parcel of land, generally starting at around 2,000 square kilometers, which expands out from your location upon waking, growing to fill the nearest geographical boundaries and political borders. Within your Territory, your rule is as natural a law as gravity, bound to reality regardless of whether you choose to lead in public or allow for another to be your figurehead, a force of nature whose strength is proportional to the inhabited area of your Territory. Astral Rank serves as a useful, if imperfect, analogy for the power afforded to you by this. Initially, you will benefit from effects comparable in power and character to having Rank 2, though its effect will stretch across your entire Territory rather than just your immediate presence. Additionally, your Rank will naturally empower the functions of your other magic, and if combined with Necromancy or Wyrmling, the necromantic or draconic power you accrue will contribute to your Rank in a manner similar to Territory, though it will also bend the nature of your Rank to suit its own nature. When you travel outside your territory, you bring a cloak of power with you, granting you the benefits of your Rank even outside your Territory and which you can allow to soak into the places and people you visit, permeating them in proportion to the degree which they 'recognize' you as their rightful leader (political, economical, or otherwise), allowing you to expand your Territory over time. On its own, the speed of this process is harshly limited, requiring you to become personally familiar with the land and known to its inhabitants, but can be hastened significantly by your other magic, depending on how you develop it.
At an area of 5,500 square kilometers (approximately equal to the developed land area of the Washington DC-Baltimore metropolitan zone), your Territory will grant you just shy of Rank 3. At 32,000 square kilometers (approximately equal to the land area of the state of Maryland) it will grant you a little under Rank 4. At 600,000 square kilometers (a bit less than the combined land area of California and Oregon) it will grant you just over Rank 5. At 70,000,000 square kilometers (approximately equal to the area of all human-occupied land in the modern day) it will grant you just under Rank 6.
Getting to the equivalent to Rank 7 would require controlling an area of human-inhabited land roughly equal to three times the surface area of Jupiter, and thus will require a significant undertaking to achieve. If you do manage it, however, one of the other major differences from conventional Rank will manifest, as your Rank will begin to develop its own subordinate magic system whose parameters are defined by the culture and mythos of your nation, and which can be accessed by any loyal citizen (though your own skill with it will always be the pinnacle, raised up by the progress of each other practitioner). Conversely, if you somehow reach Rank 9, you will be disappointed to find no Shroud forming, though your magic system does grow in scope as your Rank increases, so it may be able to achieve some similar effects at that point.
[ ] The Weave - The magic of your dream reveals the hidden structure of human thought and society, the cognitive threads which connect people to each other, and to the places and things around them, as well as instilling within you the power to pull on and rearrange the eponymous Weave. This power can be used to alter interpersonal relationships and social constructs, but also to directly influence the minds of others, or even to tinker with the structure of a magus's magic, all by carefully reweaving the threads which form them. The Weave is extremely difficult for most other magic systems to detect or affect directly, though all of the ones on offer here can potentially overcome individual weaves you craft if there is a great enough power discrepancy between you and your target.
Initially, your intuition for navigating and manipulating the Weave will allow you an incredible understanding and mastery over yourself, as the nature of your own cognition (and your other magic) unfolds before your weave-sight as effortlessly as a blossoming flower, as well as a similar understanding and mastery over those who are near to you in the Weave, including both those you have close social ties to as well as those you are physically close to (so long as you or they are aware of the other's presence). As you continue to explore the Weave and practice making alterations to it, your capacity to traverse it will grow, allowing you to observe parts of it that are only connected to your indirectly, by about one degree of separation for each week of dedicated practice, letting you reach the vast majority of humanity after about a month. Your capacity to form complex structures in the weave will also improve as you practice and research, rising from simple and basic manipulations like stoking or suppressing emotions, directing people's attention, and subtly altering the expression of your other magic, to manipulations that are both much further reaching and much more nuanced, such as transplanting memories, skills, or personality traits between people, creating dynamic illusions that fool all of the target's senses (possibly even including new, unfamiliar senses gained by other magi), tinkering with the cultural memeplex of an entire community, significantly reworking the functionality of your other magic, tying someone else into your magic to grant them limited access, or striking out at another magi's magic to hamper or disable it. In the long run, even greater feats are possible, such as reshaping society on a global level or analyzing the magical weaves of several magi to synthesize all of your magics together into something grander than the sum of its parts.
[ ] Necromancy - The magic of your dream infuses your breath and blood, allowing you to animate human corpses with blood sacrifice and conjure loyal ghosts with dread incantations, as well as creating the opportunity to grow your power further by digesting the lifeforce of others. These undead will be fairly limited in nature, initially at least, with the corpses slow and shambling and the ghosts capable of little more than whispering in your ear, but as your pool of necromantic power grows, you will be able to expand their capabilities in an incredible variety of ways, as well adding new, grotesque abilities and attributes to your other magic. Combined with Earthbound for example, your necromantic power will naturally also contribute to your Rank, and combined with Wyrmling, your necromantic and draconic powers will naturally unify into a single pool usable for either purpose and through either means. Growing your power will take considerable time, given that it initially can only be cultivated by consuming living flesh (though not necessarily of living humans, though human flesh does provide roughly ten times as much power per pound than most animals, with only other great apes being anywhere near as efficient) and is slow to digest, but just like with your undead minions, your own capacity to feed is subject to evolution under the influence of your necromantic power, and can be further accelerated with the help of your other magic. Your sense of taste will also be adjusted to make this process more palatable than it might otherwise be.
Every mouthful of flesh is worth something, and as you eat, your health and physical condition will steadily improve. By the time you've eaten twice your bodyweight in flesh, your entire body will have been remodeled to more in line with your ideal, and will count as one of your animated corpses for the purposes of further necromantic developments. In addition to that, here are a couple general benchmarks to get an idea of what sort of developments will be within reach at different levels: after you've eaten half a ton of flesh, you'll have enough power let your corpses repair themselves from damage, including from grave-rot and decay, by consuming living flesh (though this doesn't add to your own power the way eating it yourself does), as well as to break them apart into smaller to corpse-parts, meld them (back) together into corpse-constructs, and to give your ghosts a bit more substance and autonomy, becoming pale shadows (still invisible to mundane humans except for when they choose to manifest visibly) rather than bodiless whispers, and able to sense the world around them, mostly through hearing but also through a sort of life-sense, allowing them to serve as scouts to a degree; after you've eaten fifty tons of flesh (which might plausibly take over a year of dedicated eating), your capacity to animate corpses will have expanded to include almost all life-forms, even most microbes, and your command over their biology will have deepened to match, allowing your horde to be something more akin to necromorphs than simple zombies, and your ghosts will have gained much greater ability to affect the physical world, being able to apply force to objects with similar strength to what they possessed in life, as well as the ability to possess living things (aside from other magi). With even greater consumption, higher heights are possible, including the eventual ability to resurrect other magi as loyal minions who retain access to their magic, or to 'reanimate' things that were never truly alive, such as restoring a ruined building, broken machine, or even a deleted digital file to its prime condition.
[ ] Skinchanger - The magic of your dream frees you from the shackles of physical form, giving you the ability to change your shape. The more different the initial and final forms of a given change are, the longer it will take to complete it, including potentially extended periods of awkward intermediate forms, though as you gain more experience with a specific transformation (with a particular starting and ending point), the faster it will be, with potentially even massive changes becoming near-instant, slowed only by fundamental limitations of your underlying spacetime, such as the speed of light. Generally, when you are still far from reaching this underlying limit, a week of dedicated practice will be enough to cut the time it takes to complete a transformation in half. Different forms also possess differing levels of initial difficulty to learn: changing to mimic the form of something familiar, such as a close friend, beloved pet, or cherished object will always be easy and intuitive, as well taking on forms that are simple variations thereof; combinations of familiar forms are more tricky, but still doable, as is mimicking the form of unfamiliar things which can still be related to familiar forms through some sequence of minor alterations and combinations, a remixing process that is ultimately only limited by your experience and mental agility; entirely novel forms are possible, though they will likely require extensive (and potentially painful) testing to discover the necessary underlying physical (or magical) structures to make them work. With access to relevant academic resources and a couple years of research, you can even achieve forms that exist at the very limit of humanity's science (and, consequently, push that science forward considerably, assuming you're willing to share your results and work with a team of professionals).
The process of changing itself also greatly aids in the healing of physical, mental, and spiritual trauma, including ones that would normally be permanent or fatal. Even total annihilation on all levels is potentially recoverable, as the nature of a Skinchanger lies both beyond and behind mere reality. Relatedly, you possess a sort of store of energy and mass that is likewise irreal, and which both grows sourcelessly at a slow trickle and can be freely used to withdraw or deposit motive energy and body mass to or from your real existence, and which naturally and passively encodes an impression of your essential character. The nature of this irrealis peri-existence also allows you to detect whenever your mind or magic are being influenced from the outside, such as by a weave or umbral emanation, and to subtly shift your shape on an esoteric level, 'retracting' relevant portions of yourself into irreality and avoiding the undesired portions of the influence.
Finally, the fluidity of your skinchanging will naturally spread to include the facets and functions of your other magic. With Earthbound, your capacity to change will naturally expand out into your Territory, allowing you to alter it in the same way you alter your own form. With The Weave, in addition to your capacity for both mental and spiritual regeneration making self-modification much less risky, the weaves you tie will be both more responsive to your touch and more stable, shifting and changing as easily as your body at your direction but being much more resistant to perturbation, whether from natural wear and tear on the social fabric or from the interference of other magi. With Necromancy, the boundaries of 'living' and 'dead' will be blurred significantly, allowing you to enhance the bodies or summon avatars of the living as easily as you animated corpses and conjure ghosts, as well as allowing you to derive necromantic power by eating dead flesh (though the power it provides will still be more and more degraded the further from 'alive' it is). With Wyrmling, the necessity to carefully and cautiously melt down your treasures in order to reclaim the draconic power stored within is no longer necessary, as your changing allows you to transform your draconic power and its vessels as easily as you transform your body. With Shadow Blend, you can bring umbral matter into your peri-existential store, and in so doing shield it from the harshness of the waking world, allowing you to sustain functional umbral duplicates that would normally degrade into useless lumps, or even to transform into fantastical shapes that could never be borne by mere mundanity alone, though doing either steadily burns through your stores of umbral matter for as long you maintain them and in proportion to the volume of umbral matter you deploy.
[ ] Wyrmling - The magic of your dream instigates a dramatic metamorphosis of your body and soul. When you awaken, your skin will be covered with a coat of shining armor scales as strong as steel, your strength, endurance, durability, and agility all raised beyond peak human by over an order of magnitude, the flex of a new muscle will allow you to exhale a gout of fire comparable to an oxyacetylene torch in terms of temperature and flow but producing a much larger and longer flame, immense wings (with a span of at least 30 feet, and possibly as much as double that depending on your height) which in combination with your newly enhanced strength are sufficient to fly with grace and speed, as well as numerous and less obvious alterations to your organs and tissues to optimize your biology, especially with an eye towards synergizing with your other magic. These abilities are only the beginning of a much grander long-term draconic evolution, the steady accrual of draconic power which flows into you, a natural and inevitable consequence of the passage of time which has supplanted any kind of senescence you might have previously been subject to. Without direction, this power will naturally reinforce and expand your bodily transformation, heightening your physical enhancements even further and allowing for mutational developments such as increased size or density, blade-like fangs and claws, or new varieties of breath weapon (potentially even outright supernatural ones, with enough power), as well feeding into your other magic (including contributing to your Rank if paired with Earthbound or fusing with your necromantic power if paired with Necromancy). With an exertion of will and an exhalation of glittering gold pneuma, you can take this power from your body and invest it into a mass of solid gold to create a magical treasure, capable of expressing a virtually infinite variety of supernatural effects once a sufficient investment of power is made. The purity of the gold limits how much of your power it can hold per volume before melting, releasing the power invested and returning it to your body, though even atomically pure gold can still only hold so much, and thus as your pool of draconic power grows, the most powerful effects your treasures are capable of manifesting at a given time will demand greater and greater quantities of gold. Melting down the gold is also the process by which draconic power can be reclaimed from treasures you no longer wish to maintain, and which if done too quickly causes the power to become permanently incorporated into your flesh, no longer available to be reinvested. There is also an element of skill to shaping the effect of a magical treasure, but it's still a primarily intuitive process, guided by your new draconic nature, with even extremely complex effects only taking a few hours to figure out the first time, and afterwards recreating them will be no harder than implementing the simplest enchantments (those beings magical treasures whose effect is merely to alter the physical properties of the treasure's substance, especially to improve its durability and resistance to change along various vectors).
After about a month of accruing draconic power, if you keep all of it in your body, your strength and agility will be sufficient to fly with top speeds comparable to modern civilian airplanes and your exhalation capable of taking on the characteristics of essentially any modern fluid- or dust-blasting tool, while if you invest all of your power into a magical treasure, its effect will be on par with a 2nd level D&D spell (though, as your power grows and comparisons are made to higher spell levels, treasures with effects that depend on spacetime manipulation, such as teleportation, will generally be much more harshly limited than spells at that level, while effects involving interdimensional travel, like planeshift, will not be possible at all).
After about a year of accruing draconic power, if you keep all of it in your body, your strength and agility will be sufficient to fly from Earth to Mars in a matter of days (accounting for how the vacuum of space both limits the utility of wings but also eliminates the concerns of air resistance, and with your durability and endurance likewise sufficient to manage such extreme conditions) and your exhalation capable of manifesting outright magical effects similar to those of 3rd level D&D spells (though always with an offensive bent, and with the same proviso as magical treasures regarding spatiotemporal and interdimensional effects), while if you invest all of your power into a magical treasure, its effect will be superior to a 9th level spell, comparable to the lower end of epic magic. Alternatively, you could divide your power between as many as eight treasures each with an effect comparable in strength to a 9th level spell, while still retaining a single month's worth of draconic power in your body.
[ ] Shadow Blend - The magic of your dream, unique among the six magics, brings you into alignment with its source...or at least, with the pathway it followed from its source to find you here, in your bed. So aligned, you gain the ability to phase into and out of the Umbral Plane (or simply the Umbra), the great dreaming darkness which enshrouds your universe, hiding it from (most) outside attention and shielding it from (most) outside influence. Internally, the structure of the Umbra is psychical in nature, shaped in spaces and flows by the perceptions, thoughts, dreams, and collective unconscious of all beings in your universe which possess even a cursory awareness. Realms of perception are closest to the 'surface' that is the waking world, just beneath the skin of the Umbra, while realms of thought, imagination, and dream lie deeper below, requiring further navigation to reach. Just stepping into the perceptual layer allows you to disappear from the view of anything other than the 'owner' of the perceptual space you entered (which can even be you, if you don't want to be visible to anyone else). Navigating the Umbra is different from navigating the waking world, since there are always at least three extra dimensions to navigate through (and sometimes more, as you descend into the deeper Umbra and travel to realms unbound by conventional spacetime) but your magic provides a powerful intuition for it that makes it nearly as easy as navigating a familiar place in the waking world. When returning from the Umbra to the waking world, depending on the specific route back 'up' that you take, you might appear in the same location that you left, a nearby place that you could perceive from your initial vantage point, or in the presence of an entity whose perceptual space you resurface through.
You can bring umbral artifacts with you back into the waking world, but they're often 'hollow', filled with undifferentiated umbral matter that simply emulates their 'expected' behavior, and which transmutes into unsophisticated base matter in accordance with the material of the object's outer shell when exposed to the harsh reality of the waking world, unless specifically taken from an umbral realm borne by real knowledge of the make-up of the object in question. For example: a smartphone taken from a random person's perceptual space might be functional while in the Umbra (though it'll be connecting to strange, dreamlike psychic replicas of the internet and phone networks rather than the real thing), but will become a useless brick of glass, metal, and plastic once taken into the waking world, while a smartphone taken from the collective human understanding of electronics manufacturing might still be perfectly usable after resurfacing. However, acquiring such a prototypical smartphone in the first place might be significantly more difficult, and risky, than the mere perceptual replica, on account of how much more vast the deeper layers of the Umbra are in comparison to the perceptual layer, and how its umbral terrain (and even inhabitants, in some cases) can be significantly more hostile. Delving deep enough can even allow you to find artifacts that appear magical or like the products of science-fiction, but once removed to the waking world these will all be reduced to mere mundanity.
Just like how your appearance in an entity's perceptual realm produces an illusion of your continued physical presence, interacting with the Umbra on deeper layers can also have impacts on the minds of people in the waking world. Stealing the prototype of a given object doesn't have a large effect, since there's often numerous virtually identical conceptions of the same thing that can easily backfill the gap (just like how stealing a duplicate from someone's perceptual space just causes it be to be instantly replaced when their physical eyes observe the physical object again, overwriting the absence of the stolen copy with a new instance), but doing something more symbolic, like killing the conceptual identity of a particular person, can have wide-reaching (and traumatic) effects on the minds of real people, which you can even eventually learn to wield with surgical precision (as long as you're willing to practice on potentially unwitting subjects). Additionally, while you don't possess any ability to independently detect the influence of weaves, diving into the Umbra does protect you from being caught up in them, and more so the deeper you dive.
Notably, your capacity to stay in the Umbra is not infinite. The analogy of diving is appropriate, as you need to periodically resurface to the waking world for 'air' before diving back down, though the frequency of resurfacing, and the consequences for persisting despite the need, are more like missing sleep than drowning: irritability, difficulty maintaining trains of thought, failures of memory, physical weakness, and eventually death (though all of these can be potentially ameliorated to varying degrees by your other magic, depending on what magic that is). Likewise, when returning to the waking world, sleeping is the best means of recovery, and when you do, you'll find your dreams are naturally lucid, and that you can even take control of the umbral realm in which your dreams play out and pilot it around the broader Umbra like a submarine through the ocean's depths. Doing so doesn't allow you to teleport or create duplicates the way that bodily entering the Umbra does, but grants a much safer means of exploring the deep without risking bodily harm, and a much larger platform with which to influence the Umbra to try and sculpt people's minds and society's memetic structure.
Finally, just as there is an upper skin between the waking world and the Umbra, there is a lower skin as well, the outermost limit of the Umbra. It's no more impermeable than the upper skin is to your magic, but on the far side lies realms of true inconceivability. The nearest portions of that far realm might not instantly annihilate an unprepared traveler, but are nonetheless much more dangerous than even the deepest layers of the Umbra proper. However, should you decide to brave this Abyss, and avoid the destruction it promises, worlds strange and terrifying and wonderful might be found. Beware, though, for your emergence from the cocoon of dreaming darkness might likewise draw attention to the world you left behind, and doubly so if you try and return to it from across the Abyss's yawning expanse with the plundered miracles and magic of the worlds you found. Undead timelines, bullet worlds, gray wanderers, and worse things all lurk somewhere out there, though fortunately not all equally close.
