"…you asked about ability to make plans. That's … I don't see how it wouldn't be testable? The brain makes the soul work better and the headband makes the brain work better at making the soul work better and there's plenty of ways to check if the brain is working badly, why couldn't you check if it's working better? I know a lot of merchant guilds aren't the most open but I'm sure somebody's published stuff at some point, you could ask Bar for that."

"I'm using 'plans' here as - synecdoche, for ability to model things and successfully enact change to the world thereby, to come to novel conclusions, to actually hold more than seven to fifteen things in your head at a time without cheating.

"If you can demonstrate, in a meta-timed test...

"No, that brings us back to the 'and why would the author let us construct a proof of our own fictionality' problem!  Fuck!"

"Well, they definitely help with working memory, that's really easy to test. There is a market in these things, if someone was selling headbands that didn't help with really obvious metrics like that there's no way their competitors wouldn't point it out."

"You're missing the point?  The claim I am making is that all boosts will push a person to one particular maximum of capacity and hard-stop such that no more bonus-stacking increases it!  If the game's in real time, anyway; there's ways to cheat working-memory tests if you can 'pause time' like a table doing round-by-round combat takes hours for seconds."

"…so your prediction is that there will be a hard limit, unless there isn't, and even then only under a circumstance we can't check for."

She huffs out a frustrated breath.  "I mean, you aren't wrong, but it's not impossible to get a collusively-minded author to do something indicative.

"And if my author wouldn't want to get in on this then I don't know why I'm being allowed to consider the idea.

"I think that the question is whether yours would?

"Do you think that the sort of person who'd dream up a you, is the sort of person who'd be willing to collude with the sort of person who'd dream up a me, to introduce evidence that there's - something strange going on, in a manner that I can produce predictions about?

"I have a test in mind, actually, if you're willing to try something a little bit strange."

"What's your test."

"I ask you for some 'random' data, but write down what I expect that data to be beforehand.

"Then, we see whether what you came up with matches my prediction.

"Admittedly, this only works if your author cooperates, but it's not nothing, even if it's not providing proper falsifiability - but it's hard to do that when you don't know the medium you're being simulated in!  Seeing if I can glitch through the walls only works in videogames, for example, whereas the working memory limit test only works in live voice RP, and I'm not sure what I could possibly concoct to prove myself against an adversarial book author writing asynchronously!"

Griffie gets out a piece of paper and scrawls 'Are we fictional?' on it in big, blocky letters while asking "How is your idea different from me writing 'Are we fictional?' on this piece of paper, putting it off to the side, and seeing if the word 'yes' appears on it, aside from using more of my time on rolling dice?"

"Because asking you to say the first nonsense sentence that comes to mind actually uses in-character capabilities instead of requiring Obvious Shenanigans that break suspension-of-disbelief beyond recoverability. Though I suppose Bar could do it. Still, what've you got, if I ask for a nonsense sentence?"

She has written something on her own (concealed) paper slip.

"There's a stock one that comes to mind, 'more people have gone to Axis than I have'."

"...That's a garden-path sentence even if it's also meaningless.  Wasn't even in the category of things I was expecting, so...I'm guessing somebody defected.

"Oh!  Oh oh oh I have a test that might actually probably definitely work!

"Because we know my author probably won't cheat!

"And we can also assume that there's some factor of time dilation occurring!

"We measure my cognitive capacity moment-to-moment, probably by math-explanation quality, and see if it has a weird fucking zigzag because sometimes the author's half asleep, when I'm not supposed to be!"

"Why do you think that you're being written by a different author, do you have some good reason to think we're in a role-playing game? Really, if this is a story, what makes you think this part isn't 'Jane tries to convince Griffie they're fictional, Griffie provides many counterarguments and isn't convinced' and no more detailed than that? Or for that matter that it wouldn't just include me convincing you as an atomic action that took a few hours for me but no time for the reader?"

Ey pulls out a book labeled "Murderous Maths: The Fiendish Angletron" and gestures with it. "Actually, mathematics books interspersed with stories to catch the reader's attention when they're distracted are a common genre! We sure haven't circled the conversation back to calculus in a while, so this is even pretty likely to be a brief summary, under your theory!"

"I'm having too much internal experience for someone to not be simulating this at some point, and 'are we fictional' is too much of a non-sequitur.

"Also, this conversation, funnily enough, doesn't have math in it!  So if the math is actually happening, and I want to point out that you continue to miss that my theory of this being a human narrative suggests that the math's more likely to be glossed than the whatever-this-is is...Well, this wouldn't be useful as part of a math-with-stories-in book, because the story parts should've tried to involve the math you just learned!"

"But wouldn't you… I don't know what to say to that."

"Yeah, I regretted it the moment it slipped out of my mouth.  But like.  I'm pretty sure I've displayed too much complexity to be readily glossed as 'cloudcuckoolander math teacher'?  I dunno.  Maybe I am actively being glossed that way right now.  Still, I don't think the meatballs came up for no reason.  And - it's a Chekhov's Gun; even a brief moment of discussion of fictionality is going to have readers going 'why's this here?' and absolutely panning the book if it's not actually explored.  Because characters having arguments about things that could shake their world's foundations are pretty weighty?"

"This is all a digression from your original argument that teaching me story logic would be relevant to my life. We could cut that short and I could give you my analysis of how you've done so far on that exercise?"

"Gods, yeah, that is probably better than letting me keep going like this; I'll perseverate for hours if you let me."

"The nature spirits taking pride in beekeeping has absolutely nothing to do with time travel, the village is just really good at beekeeping and a successful druid beekeeper interacted with them recently. No jealous wedding shades show up at any point. Tenzekil has no interest in time travel either. The marrying couple and the officiant are not to my knowledge evil. Nobody impersonated Tenzekil. Fae beekeepers are a thing, but if any of the fae we interacted with during this incident were beekeepers it didn't come up. Rhoswen knew at least the theory of charm person but it wasn't her primary tool with us. If she used it well with Tenzekil we wouldn't know, though. She's not the source of Tenzekil's swarms, he Awakened them himself. There is not a sealed bee realm that I know of. We found Devarre alive. And Rhoswen's army serves her out of loyalty, not fear, she can and has raised them from the dead. Gods killing her and them doesn't stick, so why should they serve an inferior master? They take a lot of pride in her."

She pinches the bridge of her nose.  "I forgot to adjust for you existing.  Obviously I still missed more than I hit, and I'm certainly not disputing that, but I think I can trace that flaw back to not correctly going noblebright."

“I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.”

"It's - you signify a more hopeful genre than my priors for your rules-space suggest.

"Where problems can actually be resolved with peace and love and care more often than not.

"Where there aren't apocalyptic threats around every corner, and Good, cooperation, has a decent chance of outright winning.

"And I'm from a shitty store-brand cyberpunk dystopia that doesn't even have the cool bits; my optimism circuits are busted.

"So I just...flubbed it, assumed the base rate of Eeeeeviiiiil was way too high.

"That's the root of the fuckups I made in my predictions.

"Does that make sense to you?"

Griffie isn't really trying to maintain a neutral expression at this point, and looks sort of amused in a sad way. "So! Under that theory, what happens when we confront Rhoswen?"

...Yeah.  ♪It would be funny / if it weren't so sad♪, alright.

"Talk-no-jutsu."

"...Excuse my half-baked reference, but...you want an equitable solution.  And you're damn well going to try and talk things out.  So you try.  And maybe you need to punch a bit, but unless Rhoswen has an unsettleable grudge against the world...

"Honestly, I'd still give 20% odds on things somehow ending in her permadeath, because pathos or bathos or Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan," which she pronounces with an actual seemingly French-ish accent, " - that was a joke - but...

"I almost hope that there's a way to bring peace in your time, between Rhoswen and any inheritors of her seal.

"Without, I should add, any fucked-up sacrificial rituals being utilitarianly mandated.

"But that's only a hope.

"I still kind of expect there to be a fight you can't escape or talk your way past in this."

"Couldn't talk our way past despite having a really, really good case. Couldn't reseal her without a fight. Couldn't make her stay down without harm to her after the fight, she can fight while her body's unconscious. I basically unilaterally decided to go behind a party member's back – she was Geased to protect Rhoswen, couldn't make a rational judgement – to smash Rhoswen's brain, with the understanding that this probably wouldn't destroy her soul, but that it might, and that would probably be preferable to the attack having no effect at all. It didn't even damage her enough to stop her interfering with us. We kept fighting, thought we'd pushed her to the point of expending all her power, and the wizard got started with the resealing ritual, and she hit him with an enhanced Dominate effect so we had to knock him out, Dispel it, wake him up, and start again. And really, we only won because she called in her army to stop us waaaaaay too late to matter due to some combination of pride and underestimating us. But once we did the ritual we were able to use it to keep her and her minions stuck a little while, take our time to loot the place. And also take home the guy who didn't turn us in because we were sincere admirers of his art."