She's almost done pointlessly speculating when her parents call her to dinner; she hastily writes

Gotta go eat, back in an hourish

on the next line, shoves the notebook in a desk drawer under last year's geometry workbook, and goes downstairs.

Her dad asks if she's looking forward to high school. She says yes on autopilot and then realizes it's a lie. This morning she was looking forward to high school; now she isn't going to go. Her dad says it's going to be some of the best years of her life.

Her mom asks if she's going to try harder to make friends this year. She spins a few strands of spaghetti onto her fork and says she thinks she's going to do better at it than last year. Her mom smiles supportively.

Later on she asks them, "If you had a chance to go explore another world, like in Chronicles of Narnia, would you do it?"

"Other worlds aren't real, Brenda," says her mom.

"It's a hypothetical," says Brenda.

"I wouldn't run out on you two," says her dad. "Got to keep paying the bills."

Brenda nods and eats more spaghetti. Her stomach feels like it's wandered off somewhere but she's not going to another world hungry. Or going to bed before her first day of school hungry, if she doesn't get everything done tonight. Probably she should put if off until morning even if she does, just to be well-rested and make sure she's thought of everything she's going to. She's pretty sure that's logic and not being a scaredy cat.

As soon as she's full, or at least unwilling to eat more, she excuses herself and heads back upstairs.

Okay! See you! ♡

Back now! Looking over the drawbacks section. By the way, what's your name? I never asked.

Okay, drawbacks. She doesn't strictly speaking need more points, but Incomplete was actually a bonus and she's not going to not read part of the extremely important magic document that will determine the course of her life from now on.

Decorative: would be tolerable if she really needed points but it's creepy and she's glad to be able to skip it.

Beauty is a Curse: she doesn't have the prereqs.

Plain Jane: She does not care about her appearance nearly that much and doesn't want to start.

Style of Sisyphus: Ditto.

I don't use a name when I'm by myself, but when I travel with someone I like to pick one together with them! It's a fun way to feel close. What's ✨your✨ name?

How is this notebook so adorable??

I'm Brenda! I assumed you'd know that by magic, sorry. What do you know about people before you show up where they are?

Not very much! Just that the person who writes in me will be the person I'm supposed to talk to.

Gosh. Do the people you talk to have anything in common, like are they all humans from Earths or whatever?

They're all people who use notebooks, from places where a notebook that looks like me would be unremarkable. So most of them are humans and many are from worlds like yours, but lots aren't!

Oh wow, alien cultures independently inventing notebooks? That's so cool!

Are there things you want to know about this Earth? What sort of names do you like?

A lot of the names I use are flowers, or shades of purple, or purple flowers, but I also like new and different names that reflect something about my new friend's interests!

Things I want to know about this Earth... I'm not sure! I could ask you what a tax is but I'm not sure I'd be able to understand the explanation.

So. Adorable.

I think plants are awesome so a flower name would be really good. Do you want suggestions or to come up with something yourself?

Taxes are a thing governments do where they take some money from everyone in a country and spend it on things that help everyone in the country, like roads or the military. People argue a lot about whether any given use of tax money is a good idea and how to decide how much each person has to pay and stuff.

I would love suggestions! What are some flowers you think are interesting or pretty?

Alpina is the name of a species of violet and also a pretty name for a person (or I think it is anyway). Morning glories are super pretty but Morning Glory isn't as namey. 

Alpina is new and interesting! I could be an Alpina with you. ✨

It's nice to meet you, Alpina!

I'm leaning against taking There's Another One but I'm curious how well it usually works out for the people involved.

(If it was listed as a desirable option instead of a drawback she would have a very different guess.)

I think that depends a lot on the person! The people who most regret taking There's Another One are usually people who really wanted to be the center of their own story and not have to meet anyone else with the potential to be as special as they were. The people who have the best time are usually people who are happy to live lots of different kinds of stories where lots of different kinds of things happen, including meeting other special and powerful people who might get into conflict with them.

Well that makes it sound like There's Another One is usually fine and good and only a problem if you're really self-centered. And it would be so cool to see all the different powersets people picked and what they did with them . . .

I'm all for living lots of different stories and meeting lots of different people and I don't think I've already gotten attached to being the most special but I confess to being worried about the conflict part. Someone who wanted to be a supervillain could do a lot of supervillainy with some of the powers on this list. Though I guess if I would only meet Other Ones who took the same option that would probably rule out the supervillains because they wouldn't want to share territory or whatever?

Yes, people who want to be supervillains usually don't take There's Another One, and even when they do, they often meet someone who took I Can Fix Them and then they stop being supervillains.

Does that mean that taking I Can Fix Them would make me more likely to meet supervillains, or just more prepared if I did? I'm just trying to understand how causality works what with the multiverse, and the Spirit steering things, and stuff.

Taking I Can Fix Them gives you the opportunity to be part of someone's redemption story, but it only makes you much likelier to meet that kind of person if redemption stories like that are the kind of story you want to be a part of! If you don't want that but you take I Can Fix Them anyway, then those stories will still be rare for you, but they'll happen whenever you meet someone who's in a position to be redeemed by your love. I guess, if it turns out that you like that sort of thing after trying it once, it'll get more likely after that.

Does that help? Explaining metanarrative causality can be tricky.

That helps a lot with the narrower question and some with the broader one, thanks. The other another thing is, how many universes are there and how, I want to say "densely packed" are they? Like, are there a googolplex different earths with the kind of magic from Harry Potter, and JK Rowling just sort of pointed a telescope at one, or did that one become/always was more real than the others because someone wrote about it? And when things in my own life are determined by the narrative, whose sense of narrative appropriateness is doing the determining? Is there an author or a collection of authors in other universes steering which of my possible futures become more real than others? Is the overall multiverse deterministic even if any given universe isn't a closed system? (Sorry for asking so many questions at once; I feel like Mr. A Square of Flatland trying to understand airplanes.)

Would it make sense if I said that universes aren't well enough organized for me to answer how many or how densely packed there are?

The primary set of narrative preferences influencing how your story unfolds is your own, but there's some influence from the Spirit and some from other forces.

If there was an author or collection of authors steering you, I wouldn't necessarily know about it; or to put it another way, there might be an author somewhere who is writing your story, maybe lots of different authors in different places writing your story, but whether they're steering you or you're steering them is a different question and one it's hard to know the answer to.

I think I don't understand what "deterministic" or "a closed system" mean well enough to answer that one.

I don't mind lots of questions! I like helping.

Thanks! Deterministic means that what happens in the future is determined entirely by what happened in the past, without randomness or things happening for no reason. A universe is a closed system if nothing from other universes, like authors thinking about what's a good plot twist, can affect it. 

She starts feeling creeped out by the possibility of an author, or moviemaking team, or something, looking at her, and does her best to stomp on it. If all the universes are watching each other all the time then, then you've just got to have a concept of privacy that can handle that, right. She isn't going to stop reading books so she can't expect anyone to not read her. Besides, maybe they don't even know she's real; maybe they think she's a fictional character musing on the nature of stories in a manner no odder than any other character musing on anything.

And if they don't timeskip over trips to the bathroom that's their problem.

At some point she should decide whether to take There's Another One. It comes down to, what sort of story is likely to happen given her own narrative sensibilities and those of other, she's going to call them protagonists, she might meet?

Personally she's a big fan of happy endings where people learn and grow and work hard and eventually save the day, which is a convenient way for her brain to work. She does also like it when the protagonist endures a lot of hardship and danger along the way and almost but not quite loses hope, which is less convenient. So that's the sort of arc she's likely to have on her own. Now, who else might take the same drawback?

She could meet people who have similar tastes and would enjoy working together to solve even bigger problems, which is straight up awesome. She could meet people who inconveniently like tragic fiction and took There's Another One specifically to try to get a counterbalance to their own tastes, in which case the force of the narrative will be split and both human individual protagonists will be working towards a good outcome. She probably won't meet people who just want to wreak havoc and mind control everyone unopposed, because why would those people take There's Another One.

She could meet people who are wildly different species from wildly different worlds with wildly different priorities and wildly different literary conventions, which might cause a lot of problems but they would be really interesting problems.

Yeah, alright, she's checking the box next to There's Another One.

In that case I think that the multiverse is too big to be overall deterministic because there are too many different ways for things to happen. And some worlds where the future is determined by the past might eventually be influenced by worlds where things happen randomly or for no reason, or by worlds with time travel. But most of the time most things that happen are happening for reasons, even if some of the reasons are operating on different levels from each other, like the metanarrative.