A/N: J: *wants a small lightweight update, goes and writes a whole CYOA* oops
You have fifteen Physical points, fifteen Cognitive points, and two Soul points to allocate. This update will be handled as Ranked Choice Plan Voting.
Generic Characteristics
[] Given Name (write-in)
[] Designed Gender
-[] Male
-[] Female
-[] Other (write-in)
Physical Characteristics
[] Humanity: By default, your child is little more than a box with mechanical arms in terms of appearance. Investing Physical points into Humanity alleviates this.
-[] 1 Physical point: While still blatantly mechanical, your child now sports a humanoid body plan, along with an expressive face in the form of a video screen.
-[] 2 Physical Points: Your child now sports flexible skin for huggability, a face with full physical features, and similar. That said, your child is still cartoony enough to sit safely on the far side of the uncanny valley.
-[] 3 Physical Points: You got your child's human appearance almost perfect. But that almost in the way they move and look lands them squarely in the uncanny valley.
-[] 4 Physical Points: Unless your child outright tells someone (or is subjected to detailed medical analysis), they will pass for human. Perhaps a weird human, but a human nonetheless.
[] Endurance: Your child runs on a battery which must be recharged every three hours without fail, or they will shut down. Investing Physical points into Endurance will significantly improve your child's autonomy.
-[] 1 Physical point: A sugar-powered fuel cell is considerably more energy dense than any rechargeable battery. Feed your child a plate of sugar cubes every day (or a similar quantity of saturated sugar solution), and they'll be good to go.
-[] 2 Physical points: It was rather difficult, but you've managed to considerably increase the range of fuels your child can safely run on. Ethanol, Methanol, Starch, cellulose, fat, Kerosene. If it burns, your child can probably eat it to refuel.
-[] 3 Physical points: While it does have some disadvantages, a radioisotope power supply will be able to provide your child with steady base-load power for decades to come. Coupled with some extremely reliable batteries for energy storage, they won't need to worry about energy (barring over-exertion).
[] Reliability: Complicated mechanical systems are notorious for reliability problems, and your child's body is no exception. At base, your child will need two hours of maintenance from a qualified technician every day to avoid breakdowns. By spending Physical points, you can improve this.
-[] 1 Physical point: You've managed to refine things significantly; your child should only need a tune-up every week or so now.
-[] 2 Physical points: Barring damage, a monthly tune-up should be sufficient to spare your child from breakdowns.
-[] 3 Physical points: Only needing a tune-up every six months would be impressive in any mechanical system, let alone one as complex as your child's body.
-[] 4 Physical points + 1 Soul point: You've managed to include significant self-repair capabilities. Barring significant damage, your child will never break down.
[] Toughness: By default, your child's body is rather more fragile than a human. There are tight temperature tolerances, and joints are highly prone to seizing up if hit. Perhaps you can improve this?
[] 1 Physical point: You can now confidently state that your child will be unharmed by anything that won't significantly injure a human.
[] 2 Physical points: Your child is now significantly more resilient to thumps, bangs, and extremes of temperature than humans.
[] 3 Physical points: In addition to even further ruggedized systems and structure, your child now sports internal armor capable of stopping pistol rounds and all but the most destructive of melee attacks.
[] 4 Physical points + 1 Soul point: Your child's ability to withstand harm beggars belief; they can handle temperatures all the way from cryogenic to the average house fire, and any force short of an anti-tank weapon will be insufficient to significantly damage them.
[] Performance: By default, your child's physical capabilities are rather below the human average in terms of both speed and strength. If you wish, you can do some work on that by spending Physical points.
-[] 1 Physical point: Your child's speed and strength is now on par with an average adult human.
-[] 2 Physical points: Your child's speed and strength is now on par with a very athletic adult human.
-[] 4 Physical points: Your child's speed and strength can now reach highway speed and moving (though not necessarily lifting) two metric tons without issue, respectively.
-[] 6 Physical points + 1 Soul point: Your child's physical capabilities are thoroughly superhuman. You're fairly certain they could dodge bullets, jump multiple stories in the air, and several other ridiculous feats.
Physical Quirks
[] Sensors: At base, your child has visual-spectrum cameras and microphones to perceive the world with, along with basic touch sensors. You can significantly enhance your child's sensory abilities by spending Physical points. This category is an ala carte menu.
-[] Improved Vision (1 Physical point): LIDAR, thermal vision, seeing in the UV, and similar.
-[] Improved Tactile Sense (1 Physical point): Your child will now be able to feel the world with as much detail as any human. More, perhaps.
-[] Taste and Smell (1 Physical point): Chemical analysis hardware is still rather specialized, but you figured it was worth it to let your child fully appreciate all the little things in life.
-[] Mage Sense (1 Soul point): It was difficult, but you managed to directly incorporate a perception of magic into your child's sensory suite. They should far outpace any human mage in proficiency, once they figure out the basics.
[] Thrusters (2 Physical points, incompatible with Humanity 3 or 4): Why should your child be a prisoner of gravity? You've incorporated a set of thrusters that will let them fly for short period, or perhaps just significantly increase their mobility in other ways.
[] Lethal Concealed Weapon (1 Physical Point): You sincerely, desperately hope your child never needs to use it. But just in case, you've incorporated a concealed 9 mm handgun with thirty shots into your child's arm.
[] Less-Lethal Concealed Weapon (1 Physical Point): You sincerely, desperately hope your child never needs to use it. But just in case, you've incorporated a canister of pepper spray into your child's arm.
[] Futuristic Concealed Weapon (2 Physical Points): You sincerely, desperately hope your child never needs to use it. But just in case, you've incorporated an electrolaser capable of both stunning and lethal shots into your child's arm.
Cognitive Characteristics
Cognitive purchases with a listed Soul cost can be taken as Potential, omitting said Soul cost. Though your child does not start with Potential capabilities, they can unlock them as their soul grows and matures.
[] Processing Capacity: By default, your child will have a very hard time processing big ideas or dealing with abstract concepts. You can improve that by spending Cognitive points.
-[] 1 Cognitive point: Your child can now process complex abstract concepts, though it takes them significantly longer than a typical human to do so.
-[] 2 Cognitive points + 1 Soul point: Your child's ability to process complex ideas and abstract concepts is now on par with a typical human.
-[] 3 Cognitive points + 2 Soul points: Your child's ability to process complex ideas and abstract thoughts is now on the upper end of human capabilities.
-[] 4 Cognitive points +3 Soul points: Not only does your child find processing regular complex ideas and such trivial, but they can near-instantly comprehend concepts that would make even the smartest of humans twist their brain into knots trying.
[] Memory: Given that your child can only hold a decade of autobiographical memory and two working memory chunks by default, spending some effort optimizing that seems like a very good idea.
-[] 1 Cognitive point: Improved memory handling permits 20 years of autobiographical memory and four working memory chunks.
-[] 2 Cognitive points: Even better memory optimization extends autobiographical memory to 40 years, and allows eight working memory chunks.
-[] 3 Cognitive points: Memory optimizations are getting progressively more impressive; your child can now retain 80 years of autobiographical memory, and handle sixteen working memory chunks at once.
-[] 4 Cognitive points: 160 years of autobiographical memory and thirty two working memory chunks. Your child's memory skills will be truly impressive.
[] Learning Rate: While factual recall is all well and good, it doesn't help much with improving practical skills or truly internalizing new knowledge. By default, your child takes three times as long to learn anything compared to a typical human.
-[] 1 Cognitive point: Your child is now only 25% slower at learning compared to the average human.
-[] 2 Cognitive points: Your child's ability to learn new skills and knowledge is now on par with the average human.
-[] 3 Cognitive points + 1 Soul point: Your child can now learn twice as fast as an average human, and significantly better to boot.
-[] 4 Cognitive points + 2 Soul points: Your child learns ten times as fast as an average human, and significantly better to boot.
[] Imagination: By default, your child is nearly incapable of imagining... just about anything, really.
-[] 1 Cognitive point: Your child is now capable of roughly predicting outcomes to situations, but still has a lot of trouble coming up with original ideas.
-[] 2 Cognitive points +1 Soul point: Your child is now quite capable of coming up with novel ideas, and can vividly visualize scenarios with some effort.
-[] 3 Cognitive points + 2 Soul points: Your child's creativity is on par with the top tier of artists and other idea-heavy professions, and their mental modeling ability is similarly impressive.
-[] 4 Cognitive points + 3 Soul points: Your child's creativity and ability to mentally model possibilities know nearly no bounds.
[] Emotional Intelligence: By default, your child has all the tact of an anvil and nearly no ability to process their own emotions. Investing in Emotional Intelligence will alleviate this deficiency.
-[] 1 Cognitive point: Your child is now capable of identifying sensitive topics, and has a basic understanding of emotion in themselves and others.
-[] 2 Cognitive points: Your child is capable of spotting typical emotional cues from others, and also has a few effective coping strategies for strong emotional episodes.
-[] 3 Cognitive points + 1 Soul point: Your child is very perceptive of others' emotional states, and is highly competent at managing their own emotions.
-[] 4 Cognitive points + 2 Soul points: Your child can nearly instantly clock onto others' emotions, insecurities, and traumas. In themselves, they have near-total mastery of their emotions. They feel, but do not let that control them.
Cognitive Quirks
[] Administrative Sectors (2 Cognitive points)
A highly parallel processing and communications module specialized for management, this will let your child boss around well over a hundred dumb robots at once without breaking a sweat.
[] Ingrained Critical Thinking (1 Cognitive point)
Installation of this module will compel your child to verify a piece of information's authenticity (or just basic sanity) before assimilating it into their worldview. This will slightly slow learning, but make your child very resistant to propaganda, manipulation and misinformation.
[] Personality Predisposition (1 Cognitive point)
By default, your child's personality development is almost totally up to their upbringing and environment. But with a bit of extra work, you can ingrain a few core personality traits that can guide their path through life.
-[] (Write-in up to three adjectives for your child's personality)
[] Sleep Requirement (Refunds 3 Cognitive points, increasing total to 18)(Cannot be added after child creation)
Something about the way your child's Soul interacts with their hardware means they require regular downtime very similar to sleep. However, this also means your child is able to run their brain significantly harder during their waking periods without incurring damage.
Soul Quirks (cannot be added after child creation)
[] Heavily Taxing: You put altogether more of yourself into your child than was strictly speaking safe or recommended. Gain three Soul points to spend elsewhere (bringing the spendable total to 5). This will have Consequences.
[] Rapid Growth (1 Soul point): Your child's soul is very vigorous in its growth. You estimate they'll reach full soul maturity in about two years. (By default, it will take five years)
[] Magically Adaptive (1 Soul point): Your child's soul will rapidly adapt to magic it is exposed to. This not only means rapidly growing resistance to magical attack, but also rapidly gaining an affinity for working with magic they're exposed to.
[] Safety Tether (2 Soul points): Your child's soul is curiously mobile. If their body is destroyed, their soul will spontaneously appear in a safe computer capable of housing them. They'll still need a new body built, but they won't necessarily die all the way.