"Noted.  I will try to remember that real people from my own world have feelings too."

"But, Gus--if you actually wake up others in this town, they may end up a lot less stable and predictable and simple than they used to be.  Some of them may end up less nice than they used to be.  Maybe the ones who were already not perfectly nice get much more unpredictable and destructive.  I genuinely don't know.  It may or may not be part of the price of waking people up."

"The world where people are okay and the town is okay and everything always stays okay--I don't know if it survives events already starting up anyway, like Jojamart, but waking people up is another layer of risk to that okayness on top of that.  It's what scares Leah, and an obvious reason for her to ask me to stop waking people up.  Which is why I haven't been telling you that Leah must be a bad person just because she asked that."

"I'm saying this because you have a very strong belief that everything will be okay, and I want you to be right, but the world of awake people--might, or might not, still be like that."

"That's a lot to gnaw on. Can't say I really feel prepared to grapple with all that and come out with the right answers."

"I still think it would be better to try, though. It's not fair if I get to wake up and the other people don't."

The issue is that defending his ethics has made Oliver be, in fact, temporarily more ethical!  And now he's thinking about how it would be sensible to propose waiting on waking up more people, until they know if Emily and Gus turn out to enjoy being alive.  The problem with blurting out this policy is that, if he and Emily don't get along, he needs to wake up somebody else to date them--it's an obvious guess that Leah does not need a man all that much.  And this is running into his recently poked Ethical Part noticing how big of a fucking deal it is to wake somebody up.

No, wait, that's okay, he has a rationalization that ought to sound good to Emily and Gus.  If that isn't exactly the same thing as "being ethical", the difference is beyond the level of mentation that Oliver currently cares to throw at it.

"I'm not saying the two of you ought to stay alone, that is a little too few awake people to be around each other.  But let's at least take it slowly and carefully and maybe wait a little to see how things develop with the two of you, and not run out and wake up everyone unless it's an emergency that only awake people can deal with."

"I would really like to wake up my friend Sandy, but I'm not sure I can actually do it with the bus broken down - she lives out in Calico Desert. So that might have to wait."

She could wake up Haley but would you even be able to tell the difference? Haley does not seem to be made out of very promising raw materials.

"Maaaybe I want to wake up Penny? I'm not sure. I can't tell if she'll turn out to be interesting, but I'm really pretty sure she won't turn out to be evil."

...Or someone to date. Who is the best person to date? Emily's not really sure.

"I think I might like to be able to talk to Marnie. About shopkeeper things. I'd like to get a better handle on how money actually works. How much of it do I need? How do I get it? What do I spend it on? I've spent all these years fretting about it and now I can do something about my worries -- but I'm more confused than ever."

"No rush, though. It's not like I'll starve!"

"Emily, to put this a bit bluntly, are you volunteering to talk Penny through the process of discovering that she has a body, figure out how to get her a farm or a fishing rod or some other way of making a living, talk her through the process of figuring out who she is and whether or not she wants to rethink her innate tastes in men, and give her a bunch of G to get started?  What if she runs into a problem that's different from the ones you've run into so far, and your own experience with being real doesn't cover it?"

"You are only a day ahead on being an expert at this. I am pretty sure I'll be able to figure it out."

"The body stuff is going to take some experimentation, but keeping it turned down low works pretty well. I am not yet sure that making a living is mandatory. I think you only need money if you want to pursue some kind of dream. I might need money to become a fashion designer, but I'm going to be okay either way. I'd be happy to share the G I have with Penny given that I don't know what I'm going to do with mine yet."

"You might have a point that it's tricky to figure out taste in men."

"I'm worried you're underestimating how much I've been drawing on several decades of experience in having a complicated internal life, in order to help with some of the internal crises you've been running into, and I am a little bit worried about what happens if Penny runs into a crisis like that and you make up something that sounds totally reasonable to you in order to handle it.  The stuff you've already handled, sure, there may be stuff that you already understand better than I do, but one day is really not a large amount of time at all in which to get practice with existing."

(If they're only going to wake up a few people, Oliver definitely wants enough of a veto to check if Penny is pretty first!)

Emily thinks back over their day to see if she believes Oliver about this or not.

It's true that he's the one who figured out that she was experiencing having a body, he gets the credit for that. But she's the one who figured out how to turn the sensation back down again. Admittedly that's still a work in progress and she doesn't have complete control, but she doesn't think Oliver should get any points for life experience with that; it sounds like he's never had control over that dimension either.

Oliver's the one who brought up criteria for liking men. Before she noticed that it was even a question, she liked Oliver for talking to her a lot and for giving her a daffodil. But once Oliver had raised the question, Emily was the one who had to do all the tricky thinking about what really mattered -- Oliver couldn't do it for her. Probably a lot of things in life are like that. Someone else can point out that there's a question, but once you've noticed, it's up to you to figure out the answer.

"It seems to me that it's mostly about noticing when there's a question, or an option. You can't just take for granted that things have to be the way they are. You have to think about what you want. And yes, you've had a lot more practice at that than I have, but I don't think that means you just get to be in charge."

"Yes, I've been carefully not telling you firmly all of the Correct Ways To Do Things.  Because I have life experience with that being a bad idea.  One of the things I was worried about--and I realize you may not have been about to do this at all, but from my own perspective, I don't know that--is maybe you get into your head that you know exactly the correct way of doing something and telling that firmly to Penny and carefully explaining how she's wrong if she tries to contradict you about how her own internal experiences work."

"There's just so many things like that.  I couldn't write them down if I had a year."

"No, that's not what I meant. I mean you don't get to be in charge of whether I wake Penny up or not. It's not up to you."

"Maybe Penny decides that her way is the right way, even if you don't think that you should tell Penny all the Right Ways yourself.  Penny goes and wakes up some kid, and firmly instructs him that everything he thinks is wrong and what he really ought to do with his life is whatever Penny tells him.  You're responsible for that, because you decided to wake up Penny, and then didn't teach her rightly enough.  What is your responsibility toward that kid that Penny woke up?  Should Gus do anything about it?  Should I?"

Emily starts to formulate her direct response to that, and then switches to a meta-response, and then realizes that she doesn't expect any of this to work. Oliver's dodged her main point -- that he's not in charge -- and there's no reason she needs to engage with his main point either.

She is feeling pretty done with this conversation.

She wonders what will happen if she storms off, though. Will Oliver keep talking to Gus, while Emily is just frozen in the hallway, losing time? That's not going to work.

Gritting her teeth, she's going to need to stick with Oliver until she can find someone else who'll walk around town with her, and she doesn't have that set up yet.

"Huh. I guess you're right. It's more complicated than I realized. Thanks for pointing that out, Oliver."

"I don't, actually, know the answer to any of those questions either.  I know that you don't have the right to wake up Penny, and I don't have the right to wake up Penny, because the only person who has a right to anything to do with Penny, is Penny herself.  So maybe we wake her up anyways, because if we just stay frozen, because we can't ask Penny, that's the same as deciding for her not to wake up, and it's not like anyone has that right either.  But if we do a lot of that, I'm pretty sure everyone in this town will be awake pretty fast, and you know, for all we know at this point, Leah was actually about to explain some excellent additional reasons why we should not do that, before I ran out on her thirty seconds into that conversation."

"I know that I can't stop you from waking up Penny, without turning into the sort of person I'm afraid Leah might be in the worst case.  If that seems to you like a fun thing, that you have power and that nobody can stop you, then--that wouldn't be a particularly good way to look at reality.  I won't tell you the Right Way but I'll tell you that one is wrong."

"Hearing you say that you know you can't stop me helps. You just kept telling me allll the reasons not to do it, like I didn't get a say at all."

Emily takes a deep breath.

"I think you and I have pretty different outlooks on life overall. I tend to think things are going to work out, and that we should just try things and see what happens. You tend to think six steps ahead down a very bad path and then fixate on that."

"And sure, you've been alive a lot longer than I have. Maybe when I'm as ancient as you are, I'll be that gloomy too."

"But I kind of doubt it? I think this is who I actually am? It feels pretty fundamental to being me."

"Anyway. I am not sure I agree with you about any of your logic. I think waking people up might be the right thing to do, and waiting is denying them something important. But I also see that it might be irreversible and that we might do a better job of it with a little more information. So I'm willing to wait, for now."

Emily doesn't say how long she's willing to wait.

"I'm sorry about dumping my gloom on you.  Hearing you already be that self-aware and doing correct psychological analysis helps with the awful feeling of impending doom I'm getting right now."

"I'd probably feel a lot more maybe-awful about all of this if I'd decided to wake up you and Gus on purpose, because then, see, if you just went around waking up everyone in town, or waking up people who woke up people, and it turned out terribly, that would all be my fault.  As it stands?  I didn't mean to do any of it!"

"I sort of want a hug, now, and I have a feeling that I don't get one.  I am the responsible source of hugs for other people."

Does Emily want to give Oliver a hug?

It was not very long ago at all that she wanted to know what was on his daffodil list so she could make him happy. Now he just wants a hug, and she's not sure. He's been so... weird and difficult... ever since he met Leah. Right before that, they were about to go plant a bunch of seeds and try to figure out the Junimo mystery (eeee, Junimos!) and everything seemed so magical and good.

But then he started suspecting Leah of murder and saying that he wouldn't murder Emily because he's so ethical and then the fight about whether Emily is too foolish to make her own decisions or not. It was maddening.

Why is he like this?

Emily begins to suspect that maybe Oliver is not really okay at all. He came from a very different world, and now he's here, and he seems pretty overwhelmed. She's not sure she actually likes him but she finds that she does care about him.

She gives him a hug.

"I want for Leah to be a nice person who never even considered killing anyone, and for nobody to get hurt in any way if the Pelican Town economy shuts down because everyone woke up, and for the whole Jojamart thing to be something that just hangs around not actually exploding until we fix the Community Center no matter how long we decide to take about that, and for the Wizard to be good or at least not a dangerous threat, and for nothing to go wrong because people are awake and quest lines involving them shut down, and I want to be safe and know I'm safe and maybe then I'll be able to live happily ever after."