Essence of theReality Warping, Time Transcending Supervillain A.I.

The flask looks like a hologram, a low pixel image of a vial of a test tube from some early 90s videogame. You find that you can touch it, and it has real weight. Pinpricks of static stab into your hand where you hold it. Whatever is inside sloshes unnaturally, like whoever was rendering it didn't quite understand liquid motion. When you drink it, it tastes like pink and the sound of dial-up modems.

• Your mind expands in scale, no longer being restricted to your physical body. You now exist also inside any technology around you. Any insufficiently secured computational devices may be subverted to 'run' you. If you wish, you may move along these axes instead of physical ones, abandoning your physical body. If you do so, your body will enter a kind of coma, until you return.

  • Your range starts out a couple meters, but will grow with intelligence with diminishing returns.

• You become unnaturally talented with developing technology, with a focus on computers and robotics. You could easy write sophisticated viruses to subvert systems and create botnets.

  • You are also good at using that technology to support the above. You could use those botnets to prototype robots, and code 'smart' programs to run on those robots.

  • Such technology is bound by the laws of physics. You can make improbably leaps and design improbably refined specs, not make impossible mad science.

  • These abilities grow with your intelligence, with diminishing returns.

• You generate a 'charge' every twenty-four hours. Such Charges may be used in a number of ways.

  • You may spend a charge to double your intelligence along a limited, focused axis. For example, you may double the size of your minds eye, or how fast you think, or your raw ability to do brute force calculations, or your ability to track abstractions, or any other focused, limited mental attribute that falls under 'intelligence.'

  • You may spend a charge to grant yourself a 'power.' Such powers start out very limited at first. A force-field might start out a plane of force a foot in radius that could take a couple punches (or gunshots) before breaking, that either can't move once created or exists fixed to your location. As you spend more charges, you may further empower an ability (making it bigger and/or stronger in a straightforward way), or make it more sophisticated and refined (most other changes).

    • Such abilities will start out looking like crude CGI inserted into reality. As they grow stronger, they will look more 'solid', and as they grow more sophisticated, they will become more detailed and/or 'natural.' This can, but does not have to result in them looking more real.

    • You may develop abilities to 'work together.' For example, if you develop a power that creates a kind of hunter drone, you might be able to add your force-field to that hunter-drone for a low cost in charges rather than having to develop that ability again.

    • As your intelligence increases, the initial strength of new powers, and how much a power gains with each charge spent, increases with diminishing returns.

  • You may spend a charge to warp reality in a broad unstructured way. You could move an entire city a couple feet to the right, or more drastically rearrange a smaller area like a neighborhood. You might cure sickness (or mitigate harder issue), or take a couple a couple months off someones age. Or you might warp a factory into producing new components of your own design, and inserting automation so no human is needed.

    • Your reality warping may incorporate any powers you've developed. A robot factory might use your forcefields to maintain cleanrooms with less infrastructure. Or maybe the robots it build have such forcefields. The more you develop a power, the more 'efficient' and 'easier' it is to incorporate it into a change.

    • You may use such reality warping to change or improve your physical form. Or with more effort create a new one if your original is lost.

    • Minds tend to be the hardest and most expensive thing to change in a lasting way. While some simple forms of possession (of people you have access to) isn't hard, it also isn't hard to break usually. More extensive and harder to reverse changes are possible, but not simple.

    • As you grow more intelligent, you'll find that you can stretch this further in ways related to how you have increased your intelligence, with diminishing returns.

  • Finally, you may spend a charge to reverse time 24 hours. You will do this automatically if you are killed and you possess any charges.

• The machine force that has possessed and enhanced you is antagonistic towards life, and you may harness this antagonism to generate additional charges.

  • You may grant living beings who are enemies of yours (even if they are unaware of the fact), whose actions have undermined you or who you have gravely harmed a mirror of your own ability to generate charges. You may choose to do this around any 'crisis' point, where you have harmed them, or they have undermined you. This will only work on people who are truly opposed to you, and will not 'take' on the weak or meek.

  • Such people gain the ability to generate a 'charge' every five days.

    • They may use a charge to grant themselves powers.

      • Such powers tend to be 'broader' or 'more complete' than your version. A single charge could create Sentai-style armor, for example. They also are somewhat (but not greatly) more powerful than your initial powers.

      • They may spend charges to upgrade a power, with diminishing returns. Their powers are less modular than yours, and don't combine as easily or cleanly as yours do.

      • They may only have a limited number of powers 'ready,' based on their intelligence. An average person could have three powers 'ready', with another for each standard deviation above average. They may switch out an active power for an archived one with a few hours of focus. They may be able to increase the number of powers they have active with long practice and hard work, but it will be a slow, soul-draining effort, and will take a minimum of a year for the first 'extra', which each additional one taking even longer.

    • They may also use their power to warp reality, but only to restore 'recent' 'damage'. They might heal a crowds injuries, but they couldn't cure a disease (though they might wipe an exposure that 'just happened' if they wanted to gamble a charge that way). Recent counts as 12 hours. Your reality warping almost always counts as 'damage', so they might turn a robot factory back into a car factory. Their reality warping starts out bigger than yours, but doesn't really grow (they may be able to refine it somewhat over time).

      • Any time their reality warping undoes your work, you gain progress towards a charge. If they just directly restored a robot factory to a car factory, for example, you would get the charge back. But if they started undoing things your robots did - for example if your robots had started converting the surrounding areas into more factories, than you would get a charge for each factory they 'undid', even though you only spent a charge on the first one. Injures and deaths undone tend to be worth a relatively large numbers of charges.

    • Lastly, they may reverse time by twenty-four hours. They will do this automatically if they die and have any remaining charges. When they do this, only the person who reversed time will retain memories. Other people you've empowered won't remember the 'lost' time, with the only evidence they will see being any charges they spent on reality warping or time reversal are still gone. You will gain at least five charges every time one of them does this, plus more if they undid any accomplishments of yours.

      • You will also remember the time that was not. There may be other beings who remember. Don't expect a god of time to miss anything, for example.