"Yeah, and also I don't know what a high school student handbook in a world where everyone is immortal even looks like. There would be a lot of implied worldbuilding."

"I mean my first try would be to just write 'everyone is immortal' in it and see if that did anything."

"That might work but it might just. I don't know, change the school motto? And also, like, death is bad but there exist some problems people are solving with death and I'd want to try spending a while working on those before I thoughtlessly, I don't know, resurrect someone's abusive parents or whatever."

"I don't think the solution to abusive parents is to kill everybody but since this thing is retroactive I guess it doesn't really matter how long it takes us to come up with an actually good solution."

"Unless the handbook stops working at the end of the school year." 

"--Okay, yes, unless that, but we should probably have something workable figured out by then!"

"Yeah. Cautious but not a multi-year time horizon. I'd just like to make few total changes in case I am obliterating timelines or something like that? Which means getting immortality and something about abusive parents and everything else in one swoop and then making smaller revisions from there as necessary."

"Right, makes sense. And probably coming up with backup plans in advance, like, 'this is what we plan to implement, here are X ways we've thought of that it might go wrong and the Y first things we'd try to do to fix them." 

"I really wish there was some way to experiment to find out exactly how much harm this thing was capable of without doing that harm--like, that one guy was dead regardless, it might be that the book can't change what people currently exist, which seems important to know."

"It would be good to know but I don't want to, like, add teen pregnancy policies and see who has a baby now."

"Yeah absolutely not! That would not be in my first five experiment ideas honestly." 

"What would be?"

"Find someone who recently died of a disease we don't have a vaccine for, add a vaccine for that disease to the required vaccine list, see if they're still dead or not. Find someone whose parents getting together was dependent on some factor we could definitely change, change that factor, see if they still exist. Eliminate the Holocaust and see if our family tree suddenly expands massively. Eliminate malaria and see whether this results in increases in charitable spending elsewhere since the Against Malaria Foundation is no longer taking up charity dollars. Check the efficacy of possible anti-bullying policies."

"The vaccines idea is a good one. I need to read this thing cover to cover this afternoon."

"Yeah. Good thing the non-magic copies have the same contents so we can all do that..." she drums her fingers. "Since the print quality timeline already sort of exists, what do you think of the idea of having people switch between this timeline and that one to prove to them that we're not joking, more brains could be an asset as long as they're sensible ones, and most people are not Emily, to believe without proof on account of crazy twin trust..."

"Nervewracking but possibly a good idea."

"My first thought is our parents--Emily's and mine, I mean, no offense to your mom but I don't have the impression that she's all that natively interested in large-scale world improvement projects, whereas our mom would definitely go on sabbatical immediately to start brainstorming how to change the world via high school handbook. I admit I know less about your dad and could easily be wrong about Renee."

"I think she'd like to know on general principle and wouldn't be actively a hindrance - and she might know more than we do about how school handbooks are generated - but I agree that she will not immediately go on sabbatical to brainstorm. I can come over to your house today maybe?"

"Sure, sounds good. Directly after school or after talking to your mom?"

"I'm thinking get on your bus and call her."

"Sounds good." Edie's parents would definitely want to have that talk in person but Renee Swan is a completely different person. "I'm going to start a list of important problems, possible interventions, and possible unintended consequences of those interventions."

"Same here. Emily, you should too, we don't want to miss an idea because we were all too full of each other's..."

"Yeah. Should we put some kind of moratorium on looking at each other's ideas for, like, a couple days or up to a week? For eye freshness purposes." 

"I think probably at least over the weekend."

"Yeah, I'd be in more of a hurry if it didn't change history but as it does the only real deadline is the end of the year."