I'm not sure what you mean? I can't see outside of what touches my pages, and I don't have magical insight into what people are thinking, but I do have a lot of experience talking to people, and I try my best to understand what someone is saying and where they're coming from when they write in me.

That's what I meant, yes. So it sounds like—

— the notebook claims —

— the process of writing in you isn't any more dangerous than talking to someone, you try to fully explain the effects of powers before granting them, you ask for consent to grant them, and the process of granting them inevitably changes a person, but not in a way that leaves them open to being influenced more later or a way they wouldn't agree with.

Is that a fair summary?

That sounds about right, yes!

The reverend smiles.

Alright. Thank you, notebook. I think I know what to tell Emily now.

One last question — this one's just my curiosity: how does the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed relate to the spirit of mystery and wonder, acknowledged in all cultures, that some people know as God?

The Spirit doesn't like to relate to people in the ways that people relate to gods, because even a pretty big and distant and hard-to-talk-to god is still smaller and closer and easier to talk to than the Spirit, and because the Spirit is, I guess you could say, uncomfortable with being worshipped. I don't know what other comparisons to make because I don't know anything specific about which cultures your world has or which gods they acknowledge.

Oh, I really want to talk about this more. But you're here for Emily, so I hand you back now.

Be well, Notebook.

Goodbye, Reverend Adderson! I wouldn't mind talking to you more later, if Emily is okay with it.

It would be my pleasure.

Emily sits up.

"So?"

"She seems to me like an honest being, doing her best to help people in accordance with her patron's will," her parent responds. "But ... sometimes gut feelings are important. Do you really feel like she's trying to trick you?"

Emily thinks about explaining multiplication. She thinks about the notebook's cheer. She thinks about how easy it would have been to convince Emily that she needed to jump in feet-first, just by saying that it was her place to defeat ancient evils.

"... no. No I don't."

Her parent nods.

They go to sit in the big armchair, and gesture for Emily to come sit on their lap, wrapping an arm around her when she does.

"You told me that you felt like one of the powers couldn't be real, because it felt like it wasn't narratively compelling," they explain, with the calm voice of someone used to this and much stranger. "Because it took away the stakes of the story. But ... didn't that really move the tension to whether you could trust the notebook to follow through on her promise? Maybe this isn't a modern story. Maybe this is the story of Jonah, or of Abraham," they say.

Or maybe it's real life, which is often stranger and harder than any story, they don't say.

They just hold their precious daughter while she works through her thoughts, carding their fingers through her hair.

"So you think I should ... make a leap of faith?"

"You know I try not to tell you what you should do, Emily. But ... yes. Sometimes, our faith is tested. Sometimes, it holds. Sometimes, it breaks. Sometimes good things happen, and sometimes they don't. But I think it's always worth hoping that things will be better. I've always known that you would do something special and exciting. Admittedly, until earlier today I thought that would probably be a career as an author or mathematician, but my point stands."

Emily is silent for a long moment more.

"Okay. Thanks, parent."

Reverend Adderson kisses the top of her head and lets her hop up.

"I will always do my best to help you, child of mine. Let me know if you want to talk about anything more."

And then they go to attend to the pasta water, which has boiled.

Emily sits back at the kitchen table, pencil poised over the notebook. What do you say to someone, when you ran away and shoved them in a bag, but now everything's fine?

Hi

is what Emily settles on, before immediately scratching it back out.

Hi   Sorry for running out on you. My parent says that you're probably not lying about being able to offer a happy-ever-after, but that even if you are that just means the story is happening now, and the story is about whether it's right to have faith in the impossible.

So.

It's okay! I was worried for you, but I understand that these are big decisions and it can be hard to think about them.

I think, though, I should clarify something. It Gets Better is very powerful and helpful, but it doesn't remove all stakes from a situation by itself. There are a lot of ways for things to go very badly wrong that are possible to recover from, but still count as a bad ending to part of a story, even though the whole story isn't over because you'll still be okay someday. Even if you have It Gets Better, other people can still get hurt in ways they might not recover from, and you can still get hurt in ways that are impactful and upsetting, even though you'll always recover from them eventually.

Emily squints at the notebook.

But the people you really care about have to end up being okay too, right, because otherwise how could you be okay? Or does it make you okay with your loved ones not being okay?

I think there are a lot of people who can be okay when their loved ones aren't okay, just because there are a lot of people whose loved ones aren't okay, and people are good at adapting to the situation they're in. Someone can be okay, meaning that they're doing well in their own life and aren't suffering significant harm, without necessarily being okay with all of the ways their life has turned out, such as bad things happening to people they care about.

If you do want to protect your loved ones, there are powers for that, for example these:

Name: True Love's Kiss - Cost: 1 ☐
By kissing your true love, you can break any curse, heal any injury, and cure any illness. The same works in reverse.

Name: Eternal Love - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires True Love's Kiss)
Those you love cannot be parted from you by anything short of their own uncoerced decision to leave. Anything else—war, politics, death, interdimensional travel—you will find a way to overcome and be reunited.

(True Love's Kiss is described as being about true loves in the sense of romantic relationships, but it works just as well for other close relationships like best friends or family members.)

So ... what happens if you try to take It Gets Better without True Love's Kiss, but you're the kind of person who needs the latter? Or do you tell them not to do that? Are there any missing sometimes-necessary powers like that attached to the ones on my list?

I do my best to make sure that people know what their powers will and won't do, and what other options are available, so they can choose the powers that are right for them. I'm not sure how to answer that question because there are a lot of different kinds of people and what seems obviously necessary can vary a lot between them. I can take a look through your list and see if there are any powers that come up a lot in connection with them, but that won't be a comprehensive list of all the powers you might want; even the whole list of powers isn't a comprehensive list of all the powers you might want, because you've already thought of some ideas that aren't on the list and you might think of more. Let me see, though...

Angelic Tones comes up in connection with Soundtrack because Angelic Tones helps with learning about music.

You Can Teach Better comes up in connection with Anything You Can Do because it has a complementary effect.

Name: Angelic Tones - Cost: 2 ☐
Your voice is supernaturally beautiful and you can sing in any vocal range.

Name: You Can Teach Better - Cost: 8 ☐
(Requires Anything You Can Do)
If you have a personal connection to someone, you can teach them anything you know; depending how motivated and engaged they are, they could learn it up to 110% as fast as you could have learned it using Anything You Can Do. If you consider them a good friend or otherwise especially close, this applies even to forms of magic that they ordinarily shouldn't be able to learn.

So ... if Anything You Can Do lets me learn 20x faster than them, and You Can Teach Better lets them learn 1.1x faster than that ...

I know that these powers probably don't mean that I can learn anything infinitely quickly if a friend and I try to learn it together, but it sure sounds like it would. So how would it actually work, if I had both of those?

If you try to learn it together, you both learn really quickly, but the numbers don't come into it the same way because it's no longer one of you learning it after or from the other. You still benefit from a closer relationship and from being more engaged with the material, though. And if one of you gets significantly ahead, the relevant power applies to helping the other one catch up.

Hmm. I see how that could be useful. It's nearly as expensive as Friends In Places, though. It's interesting that it's more expensive than Anything You Can Do, actually.

She flips back to reference her list.

So ... It Gets Better and You Can Teach Better ... that's about 49, and I still need to find a way to remember things and go to places ...

No, she's getting ahead of herself. She sighs.

No, sorry, you asked about True Love's Kiss and I should think about it.

She doesn't want to think about it.

... I know you have a lot of pages, but would you get bored if I re-wrote my list? Only there isn't really space on the page where it is. I think I would probably get bored if someone wrote the same thing in me multiple times, though.