He still doesn't think it's likely he'll need it, but he takes it anyway because it would be really sad if his true love ended up being someone he would need it for and he had to tell them that he didn't think it would come up. He feels fine skipping Just the Way You Like It, especially because he'd need to take Laugh Together and he doesn't particularly vibe with it.

Nothing on the next page jumps out to Elan, but he does laugh at the "this applies especially well to boys kissing each other" part of Before Your Eyes.

He likes Fated Lovers and Fated Friends but decides to take just the latter because he bets that one of these Friends will be someone he can be with!

The first half of Sorry About That is tempting, but then he reads the second part and it puts him off the whole power. He could probably ask for a replacement but it seems like that might still… make him be a little meaner, in the long run.

He doesn't get the point of either of the style powers. Like a Mirror, though…

Is there a version of Like a Mirror that lets me meet evil mes? I think the whole point of running into yourself from an alternate universe is meeting someone who's just like you except maybe with a goatee or leather jacket and then finding out that they're actually evil.

96/73

The Funhouse drawback does!

Elan peeks ahead.

Do I not get to run into other Elans if I don't take the power?

96/73

It might be less likely, but you definitely aren't prevented from it.

I think it should be a surprise, then!

Self-Reflection and Chaser Six When are confusing even when the book explains them to him. He doesn't really feel like he needs to stay in touch with friends who are also him any more than friends who are not also him. He doesn't think he'll need Severance; he's taking A Thousand Faces for fun, not because he wants to stop being Elan.

Popular seems kinda like Mysterious Allure. Famous needs Popular and he's not sure he really wants to be famous anyway. Approachable is pretty tempting because he definitely wants to maximize the number of potential friends he has; he'll come back to it later.

Undiplomatic Immunity confuses him just a bit.

How do I know how much crime makes me look like an invading army? What happens to make people ignore it? I really don't wanna go to jail but I do have It Gets Better and that lets me escape from jail if I get sent there. Most of the crimes I know are mean things like killing and stealing but there's probably lots of things that are crimes in some places that are actually fine.

96/73

I think the invading army thing was partly phrased that way to sound funny and memorable, but it also gets at something meaningful about how the people who enforce laws see you. I don't know a lot about how most societies work but I think that if you commit a crime and a government tries to punish you for it normally, it's because they see it as their job to keep you from doing crimes. If someone invades with their army, fighting back isn't because it's illegal to invade, it's more like fighting back when someone attacks you.

Does everyone just look the other way if I do a crime with Undiplomatic Immunity? Or is it just the government?

96/73

It depends! Sometimes Undiplomatic Immunity works by making you extremely important, or by making it clear to people who would normally enforce the law that it would be impossible to arrest you, or by making it so that reports of your crimes never reach the relevant authorities. Usually people will still be individually upset if you kill someone they love or steal from them or make a huge mess of their shop, and may or may not try to do something about it, but they won't be able to get legal backup until you cross the invading army threshold.

…He thinks maybe this feels like the thing he didn't like about Not Like Other Girls and Sorry About That. If he ends up in some Lawful Evil dictatorship, he doesn't want the government to make excuses for him because he's a special magic notebook person, he wants to stop the dictatorship from hurting people.

Friends in Low Places and Friends in High Places seem fun; he wants friends in all the places he can go! Although…

Does Friends in High Places make me act all fancy and high society and stuff? Like I know what fork to use at the fancy dinners where there's a dozen forks?

96/73

That kind of etiquette rule is definitely the sort of thing that Friends in High Places gives you an understanding of! It doesn't force you to go along with politeness norms, it just helps you know what they mean. You'd be able to read the signals that people send that way and know how they'll interpret the things you do.

Oh no now he has the Omniglot feeling.

I think I'm actually scared of that. Because… I do a lot of really silly things. Part of it is because I think it's fun to be silly but a lot of the time I do something that I think is completely normal and it turns out that it's silly. And I actually really like that! It makes me feel more like me! It isn't always easy, sometimes I get embarrassed or get into trouble or hurt someone's feelings. But I don't want to give up the not knowing. Because if I know that holding a teacup wrong hurts someone's feelings then I'll always feel bad about… probably most of the stuff that I do. I don't even know how much of the stuff that I do would suddenly feel bad. And I know that it says that it would feel natural and easy to follow all the rules but I think I would still always be overthinking things.

Unless he took Blackout Binge, but that feels like a really bad idea.

96/73

It definitely sounds like you wouldn't like having Friends in High Places! It would do its best to work in a way that you found nice but if you don't like its effects then there's only so much that niceness can do.

Does Friends in Low Places do that too?

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The specific things Friends in Low Places and Friends in Strange Places do will be different from what Friends in High Places does but they'll all give you knowledge about the kind of social cues and signals someone who spent a lot of time in those specific circles and knows how to navigate them would pick up.

Huh, Elan didn't even know about Friends in Strange Places. He flips ahead to give it a peek.

Wow, apparently he's really close to the end of the Power of Friendship section already! Cool. He's already pretty sure he won't be taking Friends in any Places so he can just go ahead and read the last one.

Vending Machine is super weird! What would I even use that for?

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I think you could use it in any sort of situation where you want to make there be a specific person somewhere! You could use it if you really wanted to meet someone or if there was some sort of problem that you were pretty sure a specific person would be good at solving.

That's still super weird!

96/73

I think a lot of people would not want to have Vending Machine in their best lives.

Elan is definitely one of them!

It's time for another break. He spends a lot of it thinking about the powers. He's definitely excited about all the music-related ones, as well as all the ones that will let him meet a bunch of cool people. He still feels a little sad about a bunch of the social ones he's gonna miss out on, but he thinks that Backchannel will give him the things that he would have wanted those powers for without any of the things that scared him.

He's pretty sure that the powers are going to change him anyway. And he's—a little bit afraid of that. But he thinks that the powers he's picked so far will change him in the I Can Help Them way. A way that means that if a time portal opened right now and Elan from five years in the future stepped out, they would agree that they were still the same person and liked being themselves.

He wonders what the drawbacks are like.

He gets back after dinner and opens the book. The description seems pretty straightforward! He turns the page.

He definitely doesn't want to be Decorative! That would cut down on so many stories that he could tell. He doesn't really want Beauty is a Curse and Even Worse is mostly unfun but there's a definite appeal to being pursued by greedy villains.

Do drawbacks do the same thing powers do, where they work in ways that I'm okay with? Or do they not do that because they're supposed to be bad?

96/73

I think the answer is kind of complicated.

There's a pause, as if the book is thinking, but it's not long enough for Elan to start writing again.

So drawbacks are less about "being bad" than they are about letting the Spirit use the portion of its magic and attention set aside for you more efficiently. They make powers work less, or less flexibly—you'll notice as you make your way through the section that a lot of drawbacks specify that you can't turn their effects off, for example. That's because the Spirit spends more magic and attention on the metanarrative protection than it does on the powers themselves, because it cares more than anything that you're able to trust that your powers will work the way that you understand them to and that they won't backfire in ways you didn't sign up for. Drawbacks let you sign up for ways that your powers can backfire. And so you can't necessarily pick and choose ways for your drawbacks to work, because in a sense when you take a drawback you're giving up some of the ability to pick and choose how your powers work in exchange for more power. But you can definitely steer some of the drawbacks. Was there a specific drawback you were thinking about here?

I was thinking about Even Worse. I don't really want any jealous rivals, that would be annoying, but I think that if a greedy villain targeted me with greedy villainy that would be fun. Maybe not specifically about my looks?

96/73

I think Even Worse is a really good example of a drawback you could steer! If you mostly wanted to run into jealous rivals, you could take Green With Envy and it would focus the effects of Even Worse that way. And if you wanted the greedy villains, you could take Hot Commodity. Neither of these would guarantee that you'd never encounter the other, but they would set the tone.

If you want to be targeted for greedy villainy, there are a lot of drawbacks that can steer the flavor of Dramatic Damsel storylines!

Elan decides to skip Even Worse for now, then.

The next three don't appeal to him; he turns the page. Aha, here are some good ones! He likes There's Another One a lot and Makes the Dream Work is even better. He tries to think of ways it might backfire…

Makes the Dream Work only applies to main plots, right? Will I know right away that I'm in a Makes the Dream Work plot? What about if something starts out looking like just a sidequest?

96/76

That's right. I'm honestly not sure about the side quest thing! I think it might depend, but it'll always be in full effect by the time it becomes clear that you're in a central plotline.