Essence of theTrickster

This Essence tastes like the jubilant joy of watching a successful prank.

• By drinking this Essence, you take on the qualities of one of the Omniverse's most prolific pranksters, Loki himself.

• Once you drink this Essence, you will gradually attain some of Loki's handiest abilities and an assortment of items known for their trickery. Over time, after you imbibe the Essence, you will awaken and find that you possess new abilities, but by training your existing abilities or using your existing items, or by being a tiny trickster yourself, you can speed the rate at which you gain new abilities.

• You start off possessing a vastly enhanced wit, a robust cleverness and trickiness that allows you to be highly persuasive and charismatic, and with just this you can often talk yourself out of an incredibly vast array of situations. This cleverness grows as you grow in experience and as you grow familiar with your powers and items.

• The item you start off with is the special ring known as Draupnir, a mystical gold ring that produces more gold rings, eight specifically, every nine nights. You can, at will, change the rings into other metals if you have a large enough sample to sacrifice first, with the rarity of the metal scaling proportionally to how much of the metal you need to sacrifice first.

• As you start to gain more experience as a trickster you begin to intuitively understand various trickster-themed magical spells and disciplines. You will quickly become an incredibly powerful shapeshifter, able to do feats like shapeshift into another sex and either bear or sire true, persistent children, as well as shapeshift into other species and mimic their abilities such as the supernatural flight of a dragon or the poison of a spider, though this itself does not make you any stronger than you would otherwise be.

• One day you will awaken and find the Brísingamen next to you. This enchanted jewelry will stunningly increase your charisma and perceived attractiveness to absurd degrees, and has a second, equally powerful use: the Brisingamen can be given as payment and it will serve as payment for any services or goods you may wish to acquire. If used in this way it will come back to you, taking a period of some time proportional to the strictness and overall value of the price it was used as a substitute for. So if you pay a year's worth of rent with it it may be gone for a few days, weeks, or months, depending on how much your rent is, but if you use it in lieu of giving someone your immortal soul, something uniquely yours and also which is one of a kind, it'll take some years to return. No matter what though it'll never take longer than nine years to reappear. Once you have used it in this way you'll know, roughly, how long it'll take to reappear. Those you give it to will never question its eventual disappearance and will accept it as valid currency no matter the stipulations of the deal you struck with them.

• Once you've gained a moderate amount of experience with your abilities and items you will gain a fantastical new ability, something many people wouldn't expect a trickster to have... You gain the ability to move reality itself to enforce deals made between people, even ones where people made the deals in jest or intending to swindle the other party/parties. This means if someone drunken offers someone else their entire kingdom in exchange for more beer, and you choose to use this power, they will have to give their kingdom to whoever gives them more beer. You can use this power on yourself, or you cannot, and you can break even magically binding contracts with an act of will. When this power is used the universe will move to enforce deals that people attempt to renege on, subtly at first, but over time the efforts become less subtle, to the point that the celestial beings will attempt to see to it that the terms of the agreements are fulfilled.

• One of the mightiest items you will get are the terrifying Gleipnir binding, the tool used to bind even mighty Fenrir in place. You have three unbreakable chains and bindings that can bind any being, even supposedly omnipotent ones, in place so strongly that only you can free them. These items can be used in a range of ways, and they can inflict pleasure or pain on those they are used on. You can undo them at a distance, meaning these devices can be quite handy in the right hands.

• As you gain a potent level of experience with your powers and items you earn a truly immense power. You have simultaneously gained a multiplier and a divisor, one that always works to protect and help you. It functions based on the power of threes. As an example of how this Essence works, let's say that a motel room costs forty-five dollars a night. In order to get to sleep there one night, you'd only have to pay five dollars. The basic math here is that the cost of the room is reduced to fifteen dollars, and each dollar YOU pay has the same value as three dollars. If you paid forty-five dollars, you'd be able to stay in the room twenty seven nights (since the end results of things ALSO get multiplied by three, so it goes from staying nine nights (the base math) to multiplying that initial nine by three) without anyone finding it odd. As a further example of this, in order for you to make one meal, you'd only need one-third of the ingredients, one-third of the time, and any meal you'd make would be three times as good and could feed three times as many people.

• This functions for EVERYTHING, not just things you buy, sell, or make. You'd only need to study or train a third as hard as anybody else, and you'd see greater gains from it then they would. You only need a third as much sleep, food, or water, and every bit of sleep, food, or water you get is three times as potent and sustaining as it'd otherwise be, effectively reducing your needs to a NINETH of their base. So a human adult male, who normally needs (roughly) 2'500 calories a day only needs 277 (roughly) calories a day with this Essence. Adult human men need about 7 hours of sleep a day... you only need forty five minutes.

• You get three times the stuff when you purchase something, and that's only if you purchase something at the third of a cost you'd pay. If you pay the full price, the three times becomes nine times, given how this maths out. This does not negatively affect the original owners of the things, so if you buy one packet of noodles your noodles will multiply post-purchase, effectively instantly producing the two ADDITIONAL packets from nothing. No one will question this unless you yourself point out how odd it is.

• Additionally, you can tell anything's exact value with a glance and you can buy it even without being able to find the owner and even without the owner's consent. This means you can buy something like a national park, or one's house, BUT you do have to pay the cost. The money paid will transfer over to the owner, or in the case of something unclaimed like a tract of land that belongs to no one, the money will vanish.

• If you make a deal that requires something more esoteric then exact, literal money you can substitute stuff, so long as SOME effort at equivalency is made. A deal that requires a human soul? Have some lifeforce instead. You need to give up your freewill for a bit? How about they can command your servants to do something basic once a day for a while instead? There has to be SOME effort at an equivalent exchange, but this is real loose. Things that are YOURS are known to be yours and people can determine not only that they are claimed but who they are claimed by at a glance. You will know who stole something of yours if they dare to do so, and can track them unerrringly. Things lent to you function at their full power, and are considered YOURS for the duration of the loaning period. This means that if someone loans you a weapon but does not set a "Return by" date, the thing is yours and can even be used against them to its full effect.

• This multiplier does work on your Essences, be they this one (tripling the items you've gained along this journey) or not, with it having a notable effect on Essences that grant items, or Essences that require training to master.

• The next item you gain is a mythical weapon, shield, or other martial instrument made of wood from the world tree. This unique item is a living, dancing arm, shield, or other sort of martial tool that can act of its own volition to protect and aid you and has a number of other abilities. You can use it to strike someone down no matter their location or power, or to revive a deceased person, and if you use it this way you will get a new one of your design in nine months. These items are also incredibly responsive to magic, being able to be magically enchanted with terrific ease and empowering any methods to enhance them. These weapons are handy phantom tools that fight with as much skill as you do, floating and sailing through the air freely to strike down those who oppose you.

• As you gain further experience with your powers and items you will gain new abilities associated with tricksters. Eventually, you'll gain the knowledge needed to embark on Multiversal journeys so you can meet new tricksters and befriend or fight them as you wish. On these journey's you may find new artifacts and maybe even other Essences you can use to trick and scheme throughout reality.