Essence ofQuantum Clones

A blurry vial reflecting your appearance, it tastes of potential and infinite what ifs. By drinking it, you gain the ability to make quantum clones.

• Basically you are the Schrödinger's cat, when being unobserved you can be at any state, and the same is true for any change you make to your environment.

• The Quantum Clones are clones that exist in potential timelines rather than the one you exist in. A Quantum Clone is capable of anything you can however if you or they are perceived by any sapient being then you get the option to collapse the observed one's timeline (moving your consciousness to an unobserved one if it is you that got observed), or collapse all the other timelines and be unable to make new clones until you are away from the other sapient being's sight.

• Once a clone is dismissed, you have the option to have the changes they make to the world and themselves overwrite the timeline you exist in. A clone can learn how to draw at night while you sleep, in the morning you collapse their timeline and pick to gain their memories of painting, and none of the tiredness of drawing rather than sleeping for a night will be passed onto you. Or in the main timeline you keep writing a story on your laptop rather than closing it and going to sleep like you send one clone to do, when morning comes the clone is refreshed and rested, and you feel like shit, so you dismiss your timeline and shift your consciousness to the clone's, refusing to bring over the tiredness you gained since you made the clone, bringing along the story you wrote to your laptop, and refusing to bring the decreased battery of your laptop too.

• The picking and choosing of what to keep from the collapsed timelines works by stopping the time from your perspective, letting you decide on what to keep and what to refuse at your leisure. You can even pick a more conceptual and vague thing like 'only the beneficial things from eating this apple', and you will get them. However, there is one thing this Essence doesn't do, and that is item duplication. If you set your clones to digging up the gold in an abandoned gold mine, and they dig up a mountain worth of gold, then you collapse their timeline while refusing the evidence of someone digging there to cover your tracks of illegally gold digging, the gold in the ground will still be at your feet and not in the ground, thus there will be empty spots that will cause a cave in.

• The thing that collapses the timelines is observation of you, not your actions, so you can turn up the volume of the TV up high, but you can't sing loudly in your apartment if the noise travels to the neighbor. Even small things like indistinct noises, such as footsteps on a flat in an apartment complex or being seen from a far distance in your balcony by someone watching the scenery of the city, are okay, what wouldn't be okay is loudly laughing at the TV (where your neighbor hears your voice) or if you are seen doing something distinct regardless of the distance, it is okay if they cannot pick you apart from the scenery but not if they can.

• You can make an infinite amount of clones, each with an intense single-minded inhumane focus on their task, however when you set multiple clones to the same task you find that something special happens. Their timelines will merge partially.

• A Merged Timeline is different to potential timelines, though technically they are also potential timelines. In a Merged Timeline, the clones will be able to interact with each other and gain a sort of hive mind link between each other. Each one's action will be perceived, and understood the reasoning of, by the group, and each improvement will overwrite the mistakes the others made. An example would be setting a large group of clones to drawing a simple bowl of fruit while you are sleeping, to learn how to paint. There will be one canvas, and each clone will do a different stroke, some will use the tip of the brush while some will use different colors, some will start at a different point than the consensus, some will look at it from a photography perspective and reposition the bowl and try to create different lighting, some will search for better tools than what the group has, and one simply won't do anything at all to keep a blank canvas at hand to use as an eraser for any action they take, the other clones using it to restore their canvas to starting condition the moment they make a mistake. The end result will be the clones each picturing the best drawing possible of the bowl with their level of dexterity, eyesight, and capability, then they will vote for which is the best painting and then keep that as the final result of the drawing.

• The only thing holding this power from becoming too broken is the fact that everything the clones do will happen in real time, so that perfect fruit bowl painting? That will take all night to draw rather than the shoddy drawing you can do of it that would take one or two hours, even with infinite at hands at work, however if you choose to keep the memories of the clones painting then you will find yourself infinitely more knowledgeable at painting than you had been before.

• Using this Essence's power does not in any way damage or harm you. When you accept the gains of a clone doing combat training, you do not gain their scars or damage. When you accept a near infinite amount of clone memory, you do not fry your brain or forget anything due to 'not having enough memory capacity', you simply have more. Even muscle training when done by clones won't decrease your flexibility as much, of course the arm muscles will obstruct you from bending your arm like a snake, but the added durability and strength should more than make up for the loss. No personality deaths or later reveals of 'you are killing yourself each time!', nor anything else. It works as intended and there won't be any horrific reveal later with this power.

• There is also a slight normality aura to the things you do and accomplish with your clones' actions, so you might do the work of an army as a single man and no one will bat an eye other than becoming much more favorable to you for saving them the work, nor will anyone find it weird that you wrote a hundred books in a month while also as a nighttime security guard, working out at home, researching and doing multiple theses, doing editorial work for someone, doing commission paintings online, and ten other things. You are just a diligent hard worker with a peculiarity of not being able to perform as well when being observed, nothing supernatural here.

• Optionally, you might unlock a power that lets you detect people's attention. Your sight will shift to show glowing lights displaying people's senses and attention. There will be a cone-shaped light shooting out of their eyes, to show their sight. There will be an intense glow on their skin, showing their sense of touch. There will be an aura around them, showing their presence even through walls, showing their sense of hearing. Finally, there will be a glow that interacts with the air around them, showing their sense of smell. If they have an additional sense, then you will quickly notice it when you activate this power. The exact details of this power might show variations between people, their unique personality, sensory abilities, and expectations all might cause differences to this power's default way of working.