"From the vague stuff I read that seems to have created the office from my having read it, it seems to vary per city how exactly it works, and involve stuff like appointing department heads like police or firefighters or education, or having veto power over legislation. On the one hand I don't want to read a lot more in case more stuff comes into existence, but on the other I'm starting to wonder if we could affect what structures come to existence by, like, expecting them to exist or something while we siimgle.

"Or even worse, just by editing the damned Simpedia page."

"...fuck."

"Yyyyep," he says, popping the 'p'.

Is there a Simpedia page about Elspeth herself.

There does not seem to be.

Peter makes an inquisitive noise.

"I was checking if there was a page about me. There isn't." She refreshes in case.

Still nope.

The default page for the lack of a page says that she can add a new page so long as it meets the website's notability and verifiability standards which can be found in detail by clicking this link.

No that's fine. Is there a page about the mayor.

Nope, not for the mayor of San Myshuno at least. Nor is there anything so useful as a page with a list of mayors per town or city or other small place that may exist in the United States of Simerica.

Huh. San Myshuno itself?

The city does have a page! It has demographics like size and urban density and local population and greater metro area population.

...just to be real sure she's going to write down the population figures in case they change those drastically somehow.

"You know," he says, contemplatively, "I've been here for a bit over a year and somehow never ran into retroactive reality editing. This does not inspire me with a ton of confidence about how much I understand about anything here."

"It'd probably be harder to notice with just one person. The tallest building in San Myshuno is the Thirteenth Street Office Tower, it has forty floors, I'm going to try to add one."

"Sounds like a safe enough test."

"It feels weird editing a falsehood into Simpedia but..." She adds The tallest building in San Myshuno is the Thirteenth Street Office Tower at 41 stories.

It doesn't take very long for the edit to be undone and the history page to mark that edit with the polite Simpedia editor version of "wtf?" and for her IP to receive a warning for editing in verifiably incorrect information.

"Didn't work." She doesn't compound the inaccuracy by claiming it was a typo but she does put in the correct statement and add a "sorry!" comment.

"Okay, that's... reassuring."

"Yeah, but it doesn't give me a good model of what things we can affect and how."

"Well... there's the thing I suggested about what we expected I guess? And maybe something about... we can only, ah, 'change' something we haven't already observed to be a specific way?"

"Maybe. How would we test that?"

"My immediate idea would be maybe trying to create a Simpedia page that doesn't already exist—maybe one for the current mayor of San Myshuno? But I don't know if that'd fail because we in a sense already observed that no one seems to know who they are..."

"And that might create a new person, and we don't know yet if newly created people tend to be like us or like NPCs."