Essence of theArmorer

The fluid within this helmet-shaped bottle is an opaque, metallic gray, shot through with glowing red. It coats the tongue and throat for a little while after drinking.

• Taking this Essence grants you both the knowledge and ability to create power armor of any aesthetics and capabilities. Given enough time and resources, you can create any armor. The armors may be made in the following styles: High-Tech, Biological, Mystical, or any combination thereof.

• Universals: No matter which style you pursue when crafting armor, they will provide these benefits: While wearing one of your suits, its power will slowly mold your body into one that is ideal to your sense of personal aesthetics, as well as granting you peak human fitness. All armors will also work to heal you of any injuries and purge you of any diseases or illnesses. Your memory storage and retrieval capabilities will become infinite, particularly where mental blueprints and methods for armor creation are concerned.

• Evolution: The armors can be created capable of evolution, but this ability must be consciously included at the time of creation. Any stages of evolution or self-upgrading can be consciously guided by you, or set to follow a path that you think might be necessary, creating more unexpected upgrades.

• Armor Command: Your armors can all be commanded mentally by you, whether it's to move, activate a feature, or dismantle or collapse into a portable form. All armors can be banished to another dimension, which only you can access, where any damage to them will be repaired over time, up to a week. From there, they can easily be retrieved with a thought. All Armors by default will be durable enough to stop small arms fire at minimum, and can further assist your movements, enhancing your speed and strength to superhuman levels. Any magical or otherwise supernatural abilities you may possess will likewise be strengthened.

• Workshop: As your power grows, it is possible to turn this pocket dimension into a workshop, within which you can obtain the tools and materials necessary to craft new armors, so long as you have encountered them in the outside world at some point. However, at first, you will only be able to create hyper-realistic illusions/holograms to test your ideas as proof of concept.

• Weaponry: Of course, one may argue that it makes little sense to be able to make armor, but no weaponry to go with it. As such, your crafting expertise will extend to creating weapons of power to go along with your suits, which can be controlled and stored similarly to Armor Command. However, due to the theme of this Essence, any abilities that these weapons have instilled into them by your crafting will only be exhibited by wielding it with one of your armors. High tech weapons might require your armor's power source and/or attaching to it. Biological weapons might be part of that armor and require at least a partial manifestation. Mystical weapons might likewise take the form of a spell/psychic construct.

• High Tech: Armors made with this style are easily the most intricate, formed of various motors, servos and other mechanical parts. These armors must always be built around a power source (whether it's one central source or several scattered ones is up to you), which you will have to gain inspiration to devise/incorporate. Because of these power sources, Tech style armor has the easiest time incorporating new weapons and upgrades. Similarly, these armors have the greatest ease for being crafted at various sizes, from skin-tight nanosuits to massive mechas. Do not worry about following the laws of actual physics/engineering; with the power of this Essence, what form of technology you want to see surpasses real life concerns, especially as your mastery of the Essence's power grows. Tech armors tend to have the highest physical defence, but can have decent defence against energy depending on their construction. However, as a result of being the most grounded in reality, these armors take the most time and resources to create, requiring active assembly. Automating infrastructure can reduce this time, however. Not to mention, they are likely to need the most maintenance and repair (the pocket dimension helps of course). This style will strengthen and heal your body the most slowly.

• Biological: These armors can be some of the easiest to create, but unpredictable if you don't put in some effort. All you need is some DNA from any living thing (this is NOT limited to just creatures) to get started. Ranges from fluid semi-sentient symbiotes to large, muscular full-body sleeves. Unlike the other styles, Bio-armor is best suited to enhancing the wearer's body directly, and the default enhancements will be accomplished fastest. As an additional option for doffing the armor, Bio-armor can be commanded to hide within your body, where it is completely undetectable until you call it out. Similarly, when inside the armor, your true body is indistinguishable from it, allowing you to take advantage of shapeshifting-capable suits. If grown from the DNA of races that possess their own innate abilities, these armors can easily grant you those abilities as well. In addition, Bio-armor will heal both itself and the wearer at a greatly accelerated rate, keeping them alive through even the most grievous wounds and turning aside most instantly-fatal attacks. These armors are by far the easiest to create with the ability to evolve and self-upgrade. Minions for this style include drones and various androids. As a downside, this style is one of the weakest in terms of attached weaponry. A lack of innate power sources means that most of the time it is nearly impossible to mount energy-based weaponry on these armors, instead relying mostly on various forms of melee (This assumes that you haven't elected to pursue a hybrid style, of course). As a trade-off for the highest regenerative/healing capabilities, Bio-armors consistently have the weakest durability. It will still stop most modern fire-arms, but enough 50-cal rounds and explosive ordinance will throw you around and tear you up. However, even if you manage to shore up physical durability, it's extremely difficult to improve energy defences without the right DNA. In addition, this style has the most difficulty achieving flight without dedicated anatomy. Minions can be in all shapes and sizes.

• Mystical: In some ways, mystic armors can seem even easier to create. The Essence will instill in you a mental archive of spellforms, psychic patterns and runic arrays that can be infused via your will into any substance or object you focus on, the latter allowing you to generate a more traditional suit of armor. The actual process, however, can be hideously complex, requiring a great deal of meditation and simulating how the arrangements of magical patterns will manifest once implanted. The smaller the object, the more involved the process of infusion and planning, though afterwards it will then serve as a focal point for collapse into a portable form. On the flip side, even an ordinary set of clothing can be infused, making this the most subtle style (though when active there will almost always be some form of glowing design on said clothes). This armor's specialty lies in supernatural energy manipulation, whether that be magic or psionics (or both). Mystic armor sports by far the highest defence against energy attacks, deploying various types of barriers to protect you. Of course, this armor can also be used as a medium to cast and boost spells and psychic powers, as well as finer manipulation of them. The finer or more inherently powerful the material you infuse, the more abilities you can get out of the armor and the greater its defences will be. Minions will tend to be animated suits of armor and golems. A lot of this style's weaknesses come from its construction. The spellforms/patterns that you use to weave its power is rather akin to programming. You may use magic systems from fiction to inspire or inform how yours works, but otherwise, you can expect a great deal of headaches as you attempt to create a cohesive network of spells to infuse. Similarly to Tech armor, Mystic armor has a store of energy for its abilities and defences, and these are liable to run out, particularly in the early days as you develop your magical abilities. This is especially problematic if you start without one; be wary of running out of power. Mystic style armor is ill-suited to creating something along the lines of a mecha.

• Combination Styles: The above styles are by no means rigid in their capabilities. Your imagination and ingenuity will be able to push them past their limitations, given enough experience. In addition, none of the styles are mutually exclusive. You can synergize two or more disciplines, creating biotech, magitech, living magic, a combination of all three, or whatever other crazy things you can think of.