There are some options like that later on!

Oh, good, she didn't see anything unambiguously like that in her previous skimming but maybe there's something like "taking all three Friends In X Places options just makes you socially competent in general".

In the meantime: Best Friend and Bestest Friend are awfully tempting but the "their loyalty is infinite" bit is messed up. Maybe it works off coincidence manipulation such that--nope. No. If she imagines an actual human being in the Bestest Friend situation it becomes obvious that it's just totally messed up. Maybe there's a way someone else could make it work out okay but if Brenda took either of these options it would be for bad reasons and she should just move on instead of trying to justify it. Unless it's just--moving on.

Generosity: fake and weird. Even if all it does is prevent her from making friends with anyone who doesn't like presents, she has enough things preventing her from making friends on her own. Also she's terrible at figuring out what her relatives want for Christmas and usually ends up asking a bunch of them for hints about each other, so no. The next four have similar problems, and then there's--

It would not be correct to say that Brenda reads the text of Agree to Agree, considers the implications, and decides against choosing it. It's more that the words enter her brain and trigger an automatic reaction of fear and revulsion, like when you see that your next step will bring your foot down onto a dog turd or a rattlesnake and swerve away to safer ground at the speed of Yikes.

Love Interest and followons: dating is a thing that happens to other people and she doesn't want the prerequisites anyway, so she can skip those.

Time Enough For Love: potentially interesting? Not the sort of thing she would expect to end up having a use for, but if she does end up with multiple friends and a magic job that involves working long hours it would be great to get extra time in the day. Checked with a low priority.

I Can Fix Them is whatever the opposite of tempting is. Clearly useful, clearly exploitable for great good if she could choose to love people on purpose, but also ugh, she doesn't wanna. Especially because technically-not-mind-controlling people into not being horrible is still super questionable even if it's one of the less awful applications. She can imagine situations where it would be very important to make someone stop being horrible for her own health and safety, but she can also imagine dating someone who's just kind of immature and accidentally forcing them to grow up differently than they would have. No, all in all it's not worth it. Skipped, with a little sigh of relief.

True Love's Kiss: Yes, definitely. Dating is still something that happens to other people, but it's healing magic and it costs one point, she's not gonna not take it.

Planned Parenthood: Absolutely. Checked. Wait, hang on.

Question about Planned Parenthood: when it says "your partners will understand this and not worry too much about it", what does that mean? If I explain the relevant bit of magic to everyone I sleep with will that obviate any mental effects?

(There is, she admits to herself, basically no way she's taking Stay Put and trying to hide all the magic at this point. There are too many awesome things on here that can only reach their full potential by combining with another magic system, and now that she knows there's an entire multiverse out there she can't not go exploring.)

The Princess and the Dragon: . . . weirdly tempting. She hasn't thought a ton about what kind of sex life she'd have if she had one, being fourteen with the romantic prospects of a lamp-post, but "a sex life so complicated and exotic that she needs magic to make it physically possible" is . . . cool. Let's go with cool. Also maybe her romantic prospects would be better with alien boys than with human boys. Human boys are pretty alien already.

Also, The Princess and the Dragon won't affect anyone's willingness to sleep with me, right? Just their ability?

She really hopes that's right.

Planned Parenthood does have those mental effects, but I can alter it to leave them out, with a little help from a drawback later on that makes the mental effects of Powers of Friendship less universal.

The Princess and the Dragon doesn't have any mental effects at all unless mental effects are required to allow a potential lover to communicate with you in the first place, like if you wanted to seduce a being that couldn't ordinarily perceive material reality! In that case it would just facilitate interaction and not otherwise do anything to them.

Thank you. In general, I would prefer anything that would have mental effects on another person that they can't notice or can't stop to instead not do that. If I make/have made any selections that inevitably do that, please tell me.

And then she scrolls down to the drawbacks, checks Incomplete, and makes a mental note to discuss There's Another One later. 

Can you make Incomplete work completely for everyone? Or steer it so the people who would most object to things that might happen to them get the full immunity, or something?

Incomplete is the drawback I was talking about! If you take that and let me tinker with things a little, I can take the mental effects out of a few options, such as Planned Parenthood, and making extra sure Disney Princess won't be directly mind-affecting for the animals. I don't see any other potentially mind-affecting powers in your list so far but I'll let you know if you take any more, and of course you can ask whenever you aren't sure!

I figured that was the one you meant but good to be sure! Thanks for checking.

Do Best Friend and Bestest Friend have mental effects and are they fixable?

By default, Best Friend and Bestest Friend don't have to have any mental effects besides selecting a companion for you who will feel very naturally loyal (and enabling communication between you). I could use Incomplete to make really sure of that, though! It might trade away a little of the "infinite" part of infinite loyalty, but it sounds like you wouldn't mind that?

I would the opposite of mind that, yeah. I want them to be able to get sick of me and leave if I'm not a good friend to them.

(Everyone does, eventually. But it would be really great to hang out with an intelligent magical creature for a while. And maybe with a whole multiverse of people out there, some of them are enough like her that she could be a good enough friend.)

Also Bestest Friend doesn't create a new person, right? Just causes me to meet someone who already exists who I'd get along with?

It's sort of difficult to say! It might create someone new, or introduce you to someone you'd get along with, or it might do something that's sort of in between those, like finding you a world where magical companion eggs that hatch when picked up by the right person for them are a commonplace occurrence.

Creating someone new who wouldn't have existed otherwise is scary but I don't know if that's the kind of thing you can steer.

She feels bad about how much extra steering she's asking the notebook to do to accommodate all the things she's afraid of, but not bad enough to actually stop doing it.

I'll try to give it a nudge, if you take it! I want you to have the powers that are right for you.

You're really nice. Are you going to come with me to the universe I go to, or will you go somewhere else to empower the next person?

Oh no, that was probably too clingy, wasn't it.

I usually move on, but if you want me to come with you, that can be arranged! ♡

Which do you prefer? It'd be cool if you stuck around but if you're excited about moving on I don't want to make you wait longer than you want. Also I don't want to interfere with anyone else getting magic but I don't understand how the multiverse works, maybe it's like Narnia and you can go to the next person at the same point in their timeline no matter when you leave.

Taking me with you wouldn't interfere with giving magic to anyone else! It's not really meaningful to say that I go to any specific girl "before" or "after" any specific other girl; I don't experience time that way. And I would like to stay with you if you'd like that! You seem like a thoughtful, careful, curious person who I would be happy to call a friend.

That sounds really cool! In that case I would love to bring you with me and be friends.

(The true nature of time in the multiverse must be amazing. And she's going to get to explore said multiverse and learn magic and maybe eventually if she goes enough places she'll be able to understand the underlying physics! Getting chosen for magic is the coolest thing ever in the history of cool things.)

Looking back at the options list . . . GGG and Before Your Eyes are just weird. Fated Lovers, on the other hand, is really tempting in a similar way to Bestest Friend, and that turned out to be probably okay, so:

Am I right that Fated Lovers can work in a way where it just makes me meet people I might be able to date and if I mess things up the magic just moves on and doesn't try to force it?

Yes, that's right! And I can make sure of that for you if you like.

That would be great. And also, it's okay if the narrative takes a while to introduce me to anyone. It doesn't need to happen right away or anything, just eventually. I don't know how much you see about people before you meet them but I'm only 14.

She checks off Fated Lovers. Marks it low priority. She's running low on points, but she's also getting close to the end of the options that cost points and some of the other drawbacks might be worth taking.

Sorry about That through Tragic Backstory: slightly tempting, deeply embarrassing. She wants to get better at making and keeping friends, but--not like that. If the only way for the Spirit to fulfill the terms of Fated Lovers is by introducing her to someone with really low standards then, well, that's really embarrassing too actually, but she's still not going to request it specifically.

Sense of Style: what a weird thing to have on here. Why does it cost more than Omniglot? Would it even do anything if someone with no fashion sense took it? There are so many more important questions than those questions.

Bonus Style Points: ohhhhh that explains it, it's a weird hack to let her share some of the shapeshifting magic. It would use up almost her entire remaining point budget, and she's planning to explore the multiverse and learn lots of kinds of magic that might include teachable shapeshifting, and she doesn't even know if her fated lover will want shapeshifting or for that matter already have some, so it's probably not worth it, but at least she can see some kind of a point.

Popular: aaaaaaa.

Undiplomatic Immunity: there is no way to do this without either mind control or immensely contrived bullshit. Also, while she can imagine lots of situations (mostly involving evil governments) in which it could be very useful to do crimes, the thought of explaining to someone that she has a magical power for getting away with crimes but you should definitely still trust her is--yeah, no. Tempting but no.

Which brings her to Friends In X Places. Yeah, looking at these again it sure makes it look like they'd fix the thing where she never knows the unwritten rules and can't tell when she's annoyed someone until they make it super obvious. It'll use up basically the whole rest of her points but it's the last set of options before the drawbacks so that's perfect.

The thing you said earlier about an option to understand people better--can you make the Friends In Places options work entirely by giving me skills, will that do it?

The narrative does take its time on these things where taking its time is appropriate, don't worry!

Yes! The Friends in Places options already do more giving you skills than anything; it shouldn't take much to nudge them into not doing anything else.

She checks off all three and then stares at the page for a while. This feels like by far the biggest change she's decided to make to herself so far, including the choice to leave the universe. What will it be like to be a Brenda who understands people and how to get along with them? Will she realize she wasn't so different from everyone else the whole time? Will she start becoming more like everyone else as it becomes possible to know and act on other people's opinions of her? Will she discover that under the ignorance she is also separately an inconsiderate jerk? Or will it be something different from all of those?

Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there. She's not going to turn down the knowledge.