Essence ofCool

Drinking this pure sparkling water, delicately infused with the finest trace of the vapors from the legendary Font of Cool, will forever leave you functioning on a higher, more conceptual level.

• Upon first drinking this Essence your body, mind, and spirit all become infused with the essence of elemental Cool. Cool is not a consumable resource, but more of a fundamental quality like temperature or gravity. It is a localized alteration of fundamental logic that, as the degree of Cool increases, grants greater and greater freedom from mundane or practical limitations.

• Even at the most minimal level of Cool, you will have your inherent limits raised and the normal complications of your existence mitigated. Your doubts and hesitations become easier for you to overcome when you try to, you gain greater results from the same amount of effort put into an activity, you take less damage than you otherwise would from hostile conditions, and things just seem to be that much easier around you.

• The more Cool you become, the greater this boost becomes. What should be body-destroying training instead produces positive results, research that you perform produces results previously believed impossible by physics, your combat skills start to evolve into supernaturally effective styles, etc. A sufficiently Cool archer could defeat a platoon of gunmen, and a sufficiently Cool artisan could build flight-capable powered armor in a cave from a box of scraps. Conceptual enhancement of the body or mind, rapid mastery of skills or abilities that should logically have taken years of expert instruction to learn, even developing new and fantastic abilities or evolving past normal mortal limitations, all these things and more are possible to those who are Cool enough.

• The simple act of living your daily life and engaging in any degree of activity at all above the most deliberate efforts at moldering away into insignificance will allow your degree of Cool to have a slow passive growth, but rapid gains of Cool are produced by overcoming significant challenges (which includes completing sufficiently Cool and difficult training), or achieving significant milestones. The overall rate of these gains also scales to your environment; it might take only a moderate degree of Cool to outshine everyone around you on a mundane Earth, but when you are in more fantastical or legendary settings the stakes and challenges around you are greater and so your own infusion from the Font of Cool will rise to the challenge.

• At higher degrees of Cool you cease being even remotely realistic and enter the ranks of legend. A massively Cool enough person could build a fortress overnight while stranded on a desert island, or become a master of kung-fu capable of dodging lightning and punching people through mountains. Even in places not Cool enough to already have magic systems of their own, sufficient Cool would allow you to begin to see the secret ways of manipulating reality through symbolism and concept (i.e., magic).

• The more Cool you are, the harder you become to harm. This can manifest in any number of ways – whether it’s because you’re harder to hit, harder to hurt when you get hit, or just that damn lucky isn’t really important, because Coolness may manifest in any number of ways. Even the most minimally Cool drinker of this essence is still notably tougher to permanently injure or kill than a normal person, and at higher levels of Cool you become exponentially more so. A sufficiently Cool person could survive a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator… and if they were really Cool, they could even make doing that look good. Aging, infirmity, sickness, curses, etc. are also considered ‘harm’ in this context.

• Indeed, you embody the expression ‘too Cool to die’. Even if you take enough damage to where your standard Cool-infused resistance to harm isn’t enough to save you, you can still evade death or permanent destruction of any kind at the price of lowering your degree of Cool. (After all, few things are less cool than overusing a trope.) You will never become entirely unCool by doing this, even if you are repeatedly knocked back to the absolute minimum degree of Cool you gained from the initial consumption of this Essence.

• A sufficiently Cool existence can with suitable time and/or effort raise the degree of Cool in things around them if they choose to. Spells you cast and things you enchant will still function in mundane environments in your absence, super-advanced technologies you create and/or master will still be teachable to and useable by other people even in places unCool enough that they never invented such things themselves, supernatural martial arts styles or magic systems you master and then teach others will still be super-effective when they go on to each others in turn, etc, etc. Places you reside in for long periods of time or significantly invest yourself in can grow more and more Cool and grandiose – the mountains becoming taller and more majestic, the forests becoming older and deeper, natural resources become richer and more fantastic, even the local wildlife could start having otherwise mythical creatures return.

• Likewise, people who train with or adventure with such a Cool entity like you for sufficient periods of time will themselves start to become Cooler, etc, etc. Indeed, with enough time and effort you could leave entire worlds significantly more Cool than when you found them. This effect may be voluntarily or selectively toggled, although you cannot control all the exact details of another person’s growth in Cool, merely whether or not they are and how much. Coolness is ultimately an expression of one’s individuality, after all.

• Lastly, you can learn how to slip in-between the edges of reality to enter the legendary Cool Mine, an infinitely deep conceptual chasm that lies between reality and the actual Font of Cool. Although you could descend into its depths for a quintillion years and never draw close to your destination, adventuring in the Cool Mine allows for even greater gains in power and Cool than you would have otherwise. If you go deep enough into the endlessly branching fractal labyrinths, passageways, and dead ends of the Cool Mine you can find almost any conceivable fantastical environment, creature, or challenge to test yourself against, and in such a variety and profusion as to be beyond counting. And as Cool is a transfinite and omniversal force, with sufficient exploration a person passing through the Cool Mine could find his way to virtually anywhere or anywhen, even if they were not already Cool enough to have created/learned other travel methods of their own.