Huh. May will put writing her a letter on the to-do list but it is lower priority than reading the next book. Masquerade!

The Masquerade book contains: 

-Hyperplanar math about how being at the center of the hypersphere works aethernautically and speculation on how the monomyth relates to this structurally.

-A study of anecdata collected from gods and other powerful critters about the masquerade and the monomyth and what kind of wiggle room exists (random people getting curious about body art being out of character for her is probably not a serious risk). 

-A study of divinations from variously powerful witches regarding various prospective masquerade-related actions. 

What do the divinations say about what actions?

-If a lot more people started going around unveiled, and this started a fad for weird costumes among mortals, this would pretty much be fine. 

-Using magic to make money (in the ways that are already known to be fine) and then donating lots of money to mortal charities is fine. 

-Starting a supposedly-mortal charity and keeping all the chains of command complicated enough that nobody can tell that the reason they don't know who's in charge of Thing is because Thing is being done by magic instead of using donated money is fine, and actually that big vaccination push that wiped out malaria a few years back was one of those. 

Ooh, that was witches? Awesome. May will relax some about masquerading.

How does the monomyth connect to the structural integrity of the multiverse?

The author is not totally clear on this in the same concrete mathematical way as they are sure about how the planar hypersphere is structured. They can however correlate a lot of upsets in the magical world--natural disasters on other planes, spikes in violence and accidental injury and death--with periods of upheaval in mortal epistemics, such as the Industrial Revolution, the Conquistadores, and the Communist Revolution (separate but overlapping bumps for the rise of the Communist Party in Russia and China), the Protestant Reformation, the rise of some but not all major world religions (things that take a long time to spread have either less effect or at least less specifically isolatable effect). 

How do they know it tracks belief and not, like, sharp changes in material conditions?

The author does not comment on this specifically. 

Maybe the other masquerade book will say...

...after dinner, May has just read two books in one sitting floating and it is time to eat. She will poke her head out of her room to see if her suitemates want to join her but if they're not in evidence she will just zoom to the dining hall on her own.

The twins will join her but Ava is good with her blood apples. 

"How'd your reading go?"

"Apparently it was witches who put malaria in the ground!"

"Oh, that's cool!"

"Shame cancer's not tractable in the same way infectious diseases are. I mean, there are upsides, you're never going to get a cancer epidemic, but still." 

"Hmm, I bet you could do it if you had the right technobabble."

"I'm sure cancer can be eliminated somehow, but if you cure all the cancer in the world now without doing anything else, this will not prevent all future cancer from occurring, so the research doesn't--parallelize as neatly." 

"Actually, just curing all of a disease in humans doesn't necessarily wipe it out--the witches must have done something about, I dunno what species, anything that was a malarial reservoir."

"Do all diseases have reservoir animals?" 

"Probably not all? I dunno. ...I guess an STD had better not."

"Some of them do, though they probably at least sometimes, uh, jump the species barrier in other ways, most STDs aren't magically incapable of getting from point A to point B in any other way and it's just how they usually do. - anyway! Also Lucasta seems cool, and used to be a witch and is now somehow simultaneously a witch and a god, I might write witch-her a letter."

"Well, that's neat. Did it say anything about how she got that way?"

"Natural awakening involving Outsider contamination, she got more powerful and turned into a god, a contaminated god would be bad but then the thing that decontaminated her happened, now there are two of her, I'm not sure exactly why this caused there to be two of her."

"...Huh. Good question."

"That sounds...awkward...but potentially workable."

"What, having two of you? The book did not leave me with the impression it was common but yeah I would get along with myself if it befell me somehow."

"I mean, the thing I think specifically would be awkward isn't having two of me, it's going evil-crazy and then when you snap out of it then there are two of me. And one of me has an obvious advantage over the other in like...hugging my family about the inevitable trauma."