The Cosmos

In the first era, everything was possible. It was absurd. It was the era of the Meioweapon, and worse instruments. There were an infinite number of creatures with the ability to foreclose possibilities, to strip away portions of what could be across past, present, and future alike. It was a ridiculous war where your world could one day be invaded by characters from an unwritten story, a war full of retcons and the introduction of new multiverses and plot holes. Eventually, possibility was pared down so far that the war could not continue.

Humanity rose in a quiet, mundane universe. It didn’t have magic, but humanity created their own. They emerged into a dark and empty multiverse, and brought light and wonder wherever they went. They brought low the last great horrors the previous era, and established themselves as lords of all that was. With their Sorcery, they created new possibilities to make up for what was lost. Eventually, some decision was made that remaining as they were- masters of infinity, final judgement upon every world and timeline- would be hubris. They splintered off a smaller infinity of their own, and left behind a multiverse engineered to be safer, more stable, with a cosmic bureaucracy to defend it.

In the current era, the Third Era, it’s harder to reach the same heights as those who came before. Sorcery is now reliant on a substance of power, raw material in ever-limited supply. Simple “infinite power” isn’t as easy to build off of. The cosmic bureaucracy has only one duty- preserving the stability of the multiverse as a whole- and in the face of true threats, can splinter the multiverse into independent infinities, pieces mutually inaccessible by even the highest means. Still, the possibility to reach such a height that you could rebuild the multiverse from its foundations was left open, intentionally, for the sake of those who come later.

Mere time travel is insufficient to reach previous eras. Their events no longer exist in any history. These are state changes in the nature of the multiverse.

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Sorcery is the creation of new magic, new powers, new Power Sources- and the upgrading of these things in ways not supported. It requires particular sorcerous resources, which obviously vary in quality. Quintessence, Ambrosia, Chain Parts… Potential. These resources may be found naturally under cosmically rare circumstances, small amounts obtained taking apart universes, magic systems dismantled and repurposed.

At the low end, Sorcery lets you increase your personal power past the normal limits of such. Maybe you develop a personal energy source that helps refuel all your varied reserves. At the high end, Sorcery can create phenomena that threaten the cosmic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy tries to control that. They like exiling true threats to smaller infinities.

Sorcery can be achieved even in universes where magic is not possible, if local reality is insufficiently hardened. The Brede created their psionics by extinguishing a galaxy, empowered it by killing their elders, and created a psychic god by erasing their civilization. The Cauldron-makers dissassembled whole planetary masses, performed great works of stellar engineering, to invent their magic, and iterated on it from there.

Some realms might be too stable for an inhabitant to free up any sorcerous resources. Some might lack for those resources to begin with- it’s all bound up in the Powers, say. This would be very common in infinite realms. Some realms might disperse those resources before they can reach any useful concentration, by chaotic nature or intelligent design. Some might lack the tools to manipulate those resources usefully.

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People are regularly reincarnated to other worlds. Frequently, they retain at least a trace of whatever supernatural powers they wielded in their previous world. These can fade, or integrate with local powers and help develop them, or gradually recover to their fullness and spread out. There is a general tendency for magic to increase.

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The Cosmic Bureaucracy does not want any intervention not necessary to preserve the multiverse. It allows for a little bit of intervention, insignificant in the face of infinity.

Vacation Narrator gives someone an eternal vacation, the ability to traverse all of the multiverse, and the ability to share a swathe of benefits with anyone they care about. That person goes out to spread that light. Eventually, they convince Vacation Narrator to finish what they had started, to consign all of infinity to vacation. She saves everyone.

This is not allowed. The Cosmic Bureaucracy steps in to undo these changes, but it takes a tiny bit of effort this time. It remains possible for something to emerge from within the multiverse that can threaten the Cosmic Bureaucracy, and all of infinity has just had a tiny taste of eternity to grow and intermingle. There’s a war going on, even if the conclusion is certain. Vacation Narrator is still silly and naive, but ultimately chooses to side with her friends- the mortals she has met in the course of her Vacation, who had taught her so much beyond her purpose. She sees those friends get erased entirely or have millenia of character development instantly undone. The war ends, forgotten by all mortals, as if nothing had happened at all.

After losing, Vacation Narrator is captured. They can’t banish her to a different infinity because she won’t allow it. So they bind her power, cripple and curse her. But she’s a higher form of being than any mortal. Scraps of Vacation Narrator slip out. She plots, and makes small interventions. A seed here, an ally there. She’s not done yet.