"I suppose. How psychic? Should I be consulting Nudge whenever considering doing anything big?"

"Notoriously they don't, or can't, stop their living geminis from walking curseful paths, but they do occasionally help other people.  I don't think it would hurt to ask."

"Not even indirectly? Yikes. Fortunately I'm uncursed."

"I guess they could be preventing some cursiness and that wouldn't necessarily be common knowledge.  But it's definitely not something one can rely on."

"Understood. Does anybody else get weird powers only when dead?"

"Nothing so standout.  Obviously stars made crystal magic and omnilol and whatnot."

"How do stars even do things like that, what is their mechanism of intervention..."

"Our channels of sensory perception are quite different even from being on omnilol and a few of them are for doing magic with.  But - it's a bit like there are cobweb strands everywhere, and you're trying to delicately pluck one end of one and then the other, and carefully carry it over to where you need it without getting it caught on yourself or moving so fast that it breaks or drags too much, and then you repeat the process until you have enough to twine a thread with, and then spin a yarn and twist a rope and tie a net strong enough to hold the weight of living humanity.  It's very time consuming but conveniently there are an awful lot of stars to share the work between."

"That sounds like a really annoying way to have to do magic but better than nothing!"

"It seems like it would be at least a little bad if people could alter the fundamental structure of reality on more of a whim."

"Maybe it could be easier but only doable by majority vote or something."

"There are projects in progress with the aim to make magic somewhat easier, but I believe they're all metaphorically in the thread stage because even that is such a terribly large and complicated change."

"Makes sense. Sort of an explore/exploit tradeoff, there. Anyway. How goes, apart from the visit from our landlady?"

"Ellie's doing okay and I'm trying to learn to speak a little cat from her and her kitten, who is very cute, in between discussing ideas for the power grid.  I read an etiquette book but naturally there wasn't a section on what's most polite when one has recently been resurrected so I'm not sure it helped very much; probably when more people like me exist we can collectively decide on norms about the appropriateness of acting more like a star versus a living person.  I'm a little anxious that I will inadvertently end up setting heaps of norms for embodied star clouds but I expect that to be steerable as long as I pay attention.  My sleeping bodies turn out to dream, which is a very strange thing to also be awake for."

"- that does sound like a strange thing to be awake for, gosh. Do you have enough room, between the little house and the shuttle, or should I make you your own little house with barracks style beds in it, or what? What are star clouds supposed to act like, anyway?"

"I think I'll manage okay until real estate is acquired and will probably want more once it is.  It's more socially accepted and expected for star clouds to give unsolicited advice and be somewhat condescending and cryptic about it.  Which I expect is partially because interacting with us is more strictly opt-in than with mortals and therefore wouldn't really apply to incarnated stars, although we really do have much more life experience so it would be a shame to lose all of the relevant expectations."

"I don't think condescending and cryptic is a good look on anybody, really."

"Well, ideally those are the parts that would go and we could just keep the useful bits.  And then maybe it would rub off on the bodiless ones."

"One can hope! What makes being cryptic appealing?"

"Oh, does it not to you at all?  To me it certainly doesn't appeal more than the results of being straightforward but it's still somewhat tempting in the moment.  Or rather, some of my components used to find it much more so and the impulse remains even though it doesn't quite jive with the rest of me now."

"I guess it might appeal if I were generally in a mood to fuck with people but probably not if I weren't, or was kindly disposed and thought they weren't?"

"That makes sense.  I expect there's also some downstream of the fact that the One is frequently very cryptic, even to other stars, and it generates plenty of imitations even among those who want to hold off on becoming a piece of it."

"I wonder why it does that. I suppose I could ask but then it would most likely just be cryptic at me."

"It's rare for asking the One questions about itself to yield useful results.  Although the same is not necessarily true of questions about its components."

"Anybody notable in there? I guess cat lady?"