Essence ofEden's Twin Legacies

By imbibing this Essence (loosely based on certain parts of Nobilis/Glitch), you gain the following:

• The power of the diametrically opposed forces centered on Humanity from the time of the Garden of Eden, The Rules and The Game. You are like a quasi-Imperator rather than simply a Noble under those factions, with the elevated authority that entails.

• You possess versions of all eight Divine Attributes of The Rules and The Game. Anything stemming from these Divine Attributes is Miraculous and thus cannot be directly opposed by any non-Miraculous actions, not even super advanced science or magic. Use your discretion in deciding what is and not Miraculous. If it does not feel like bizarre conceptual no-limits fallacies that rely on narrative logic and the idea that physical reality is not the "real" basis of reality, then it probably does not have the vocabulary to oppose Miracles. If a Miracles lapses, then mundane action can do something about it. For instance, if you have a Miracle to "grow to giant size" then there is nothing a non-Miraculous person can do other than deal with it, but since the Miracle did not specify "and stay like that" they can then bring you back down with a shrink ray. Remember that when you word a miracle.

• You can treat the world as if everything is alive. You see the spirits that underly all instances of objects and concepts. You can use your authority to ask a door to fulfill its function and open for you despite its lock, or make attacks on you like bullets or insults turn on their former masters with a mean look.

• The Rules are the divinity that was once part of Humanity when it still lived in the Garden. We were born to be gods, but made into mere animals. That skein of divinity became its own creatures and was given rulership over us. They wish to raise us up and ensure Humanity's survival at all costs (in their convenient telling of things), but how can something so far removed from the human element truly do that? You have grasped that lost divinity and gained the following Divine Attributes while still being able to act as a human:

• Holy: You are intense, more an experience than a person. A guard's attention might naturally falter for a second, but a Holy being assigning themselves that role would not. Being more of a plot point than a character, lower level mundane actions are effortless and graceful. You can know when something threatens human interests in some abstract way, always appear where you are needed (even multiple places), get into people's heads, inspire them to greatness, and even throw up a ward which passively makes enemy Miracles harder.

• Gardener: Anywhere settled by humans or are suitable for human habitation are now putty in your hands. You can reshape it to your will and even grow supernatural wonders from it like a gardener with the earth. Make entire self-sufficient cities sprout up from nothing and even retroactively integrate it into the world economy. You can even manipulate fate and dharma, declaring how things must now function in relation to those places. Do your cities now host the world's only openly supernatural citizens, like Academy City from A Certain Magical Index? Does it have rain that reverses aging? Does it have impossibly stable conditions despite sitting right on a fault line or tornado alley next to places that regularly get destroyed by natural disaster?

• Deepness: You become an abstract being (e.g. an idea, a story, a math equation) who is merely projecting an avatar to act on physical reality. At any time you can dissolve into nothing (from the perspective of mortals), bring physical things into the world of your "true" self (offensively or for storage), bring thematically appropriate wonders from your true world, or otherwise still act on the physical world from the safety of another world. You can even mess with things in your abstract world and have thematically appropriate things resolve in physical space as if by sympathetic magic, This abstract nature means you are also immortal, simply reforming when harmed...if anything but the greatest of forces can even scratch you.

• Architect: You can grasp the grand design of existence and finely manipulate it to your will. You can communicate with anything and nothing is hostile against you by default. A mad scientist seeing you messing with his doomsday device might innocently ask what you are doing and wave you off if you do not outright say you are seeking to undermine him. More impressively, you gain a vast prescience, being nigh clairvoyant (spatially and temporally) for all places applicable to Gardener and possible threats to Humanity. You have the intellect to form absurd schemes from all that that look like the Path to Victory to mortals.

• The Game is what we played as wretched mortal flesh once our birthright was taken from us and we were thrown out of the Garden. Do not be so naive to think it is simply "evil", but rather the "human condition" rooted in our temporary animal nature. Our folly, our temptation, our weakness, our instinct. If you ever stand at a cliff and have a sudden thought of what it would be like to jump off..that is the Game. Despite this self-destructive nature, it is also "freedom", the right to self-determination, and the will to power. Whether it is self-destruction from over extending or self-determination, it is Humanity's right alone to destroy itself, no one else's. They are sort of emo, but we can ignore that part for how grandiose and glorious they can be. In the end, they "love" you all, laughing in an ambiguous way when you find your own voice. You gain the following Divine Attributes:

• Wanderer: You can be call yourself away to distant lands. You care not for normal routes or requirements for entry, you may enter through any appropriately symbolic way. Take others with you on a fantastical transformative journey, or return with impossible treasures from impossible places. Interactions with you become so intense you can conceptually implant things in people, retroactively declaring it was always inside them. Is it a "seed of evil", "actually being the long lost heir to a magical kingdom", or "the Innate Dao of the Ultimate Kung Fu Master"? Time with you is never boring at least. Once you have attuned yourself to an otherworld, they become yours and you can shape them much like you do with the Rules' Gardener trait.

• Monstrous: There is something indomitable about you, something that will never give in no matter the odds. Not only does one of your specific traits (e.g. strength, speed, intellect) become limitlessly potent to the point you always have enough to pass any mundane "test" of it, but you also have many powers out of nightmare. You can assume inconspicuous forms, paralyze even seemingly emotionless things with fear, touch even intangible conceptual things, curse others with terrible fortune, and paradoxically even purify things or "make them right" with powers that are troubling in origin. Finally, if you suddenly find yourself in some eldritch landscape where nothing makes sense and nothing even "exists", you are still able to perceive and nominally "swim" back to safety even if those actions have no meaning in a place with nothing to see of kick off of.

• Prophet: You become empowered by various concepts, such as "justice", "love", "sin", and "fire" by your own interpretation of them. You gain inspiration and evocative arts thematically based on those. Enact instances of those things onto the world, manipulate the conceptual boundaries of what those things mean, and embody them to solve problems as they would. Use "knives" to cut to the front of a line without anyone thinking anything of it, or "famine" to make credit card debt wither away as if properly paid.

• Hunter: The cruelest of their traits, you are now manifest your gnawing hunger or commitment to hunt some conceptual "prey". Mimic the appearance, mannerisms, and voice of anyone you have interacted with. Force others to feel whatever emotion you want. Twist fate to simply declare your prey was lured to you. "Free" someone to truly express what they feel in their heart. Cut their soul to deny them (potentially permanently) of a sense, talent, or power. Retroactively declare that something of a situation advantageous to you was hidden all that time, possibly by partially blocking a sense. Your enemy did not stab you, their friend took the hit instead! That was not the off switch, you just telepathically switched "hit off switch" and "turn up the power knob" in their mind!

• As a human who reclaimed their divinity, you are uniquely suited to rapidly respond to situations better than a normal Imperator. More like a Noble, you can finely act on the human scale and within a human framework. If you are familiar with Nobilis, ignore any stated issues of Imperators and keep any things you consider good.