There are definitely worlds where things happen randomly? Or are you just speculating?

A connoisseur of handwriting might notice that Brenda's is significantly faster and worse this time, though it's still clearly from the same person.

There are lots and lots of worlds where things can be more or less likely to happen, usually because of people's decisions but sometimes because of other reasons. I think there are some worlds where things don't usually happen for reasons at all, but I don't know very much about them because the Spirit doesn't think they're interesting, since they're so hard to make stories out of. Are you all right?

Aaaaaaaaaaa she did not realize how important things not happening randomly was to her until she considered sharing a reality with not-that. If things can just happen for no reason, not because of interference from a logical mechanism somewhere else but just totally out of nowhere, then anything could happen and no amount of knowledge of the physical laws and starting conditions could even in principle make it possible to predict what would happen next!

I'm fine, I just need a minute.

Why the fuck does this even freak her out as much as it does, it's not like she was actually using the possibility of in principle predicting the future from the present on the atomic level for anything

but the possibility was an asymptote to strive towards

It sounds like most things still happen for reasons most of the time in most universes and the metanarrative is on her side about wanting to avoid the exceptions

she liked living in a cosmos built on a foundation of math stronger than any stone

There could still be regularities, randomness drawn from a knowable distribution, usable for probabilistic predictions, there could still be something it would mean to understand how everything worked.

but what if there isn't 

Gödel proved that no system can prove its own consistency, but this did not destroy the usefulness of logical systems. Just because there are places you can't reach from any given set of axioms and rules of inference, doesn't mean that there are no places you can reach. A physical system that evolves according to known rules can be pushed into an unreachable state by interference from a source of randomness--and then it will keep evolving from that new state according to its rules. And it remains possible in principle to say what will happen in the absence of randomness, and therefore to detect randomness when it happens and return to making predictions based on new observations after it passes.

Is that enough to carry on with and stay sane? It's going to have to be. Whatever is true is already so, finding out about it doesn't make it worse.

She still has mathematics itself, and the experimental method. As long as a mind can look at the chaos and observe that it is chaos there is still order. There are dragons in the cornerstones of the world and they cannot be slain but they cannot devour everything. 

Okay! Take your time! I'm happy to answer more questions when you're ready.

Apparently the magic talking notebook is going to be her source of comfort and sanity. Okay. That's better than Alpina freaking out about Brenda freaking out. (It's kind of nice to have a friend who can't see her at all and therefore can't even be too sure she is freaking out.)

And now she's going to stop freaking out, or at least freak out in the background instead of it being the only thing she's doing, and look at the next drawback.

Any minute now.

She flips back to the giant list, and stares into space for a bit, and finds the drawbacks section, and stares into space for a bit, and finds the next one she hasn't looked at yet, and stares into space for a bit, and reads it. It's Green With Envy and it's terrible in a hilariously ordinary way that causes her to giggle madly for a solid minute and then feel a lot better.

You Ruin Them: terrible!

Jilted Lovers: terrible!

The Crazy Train: less unadulteratedly terrible but she still very much does not want it.

They'll Know: It is absolutely vital that she take this option. Checkmarked immediately. She does have a question about it, though.

Thanks for being patient! Does They'll Know automatically inform people about my powers, or just let them notice me using them the same way they can notice anything else?

It doesn't inform them automatically, just lets them notice things that would normally be happening outside the narrative, like a lot of the mind-affecting powers and some of the subtler effects of the appearance customization powers.

Then it really is pure upside as far as I'm concerned, nice.

Realism . . . is either quite bad or quite good. It being a drawback that grants 20 points suggests the former. It  presumably can't fix the thing where some worlds are totally random but it might make her own surroundings more predictable and sensible? Actually she's not sure she has a model of this at all; it's possible that taking Realism will bring reality more in line with what she's been implicitly expecting and going on without taking it will result in seriously weird shit.

Can you give some examples of the effects that taking Realism might have given the other things I've picked? Or some example effects of not taking it, if that's easier.

Taking Realism will mean that instead of the story of your life being heavily influenced by your narrative preferences, it'll be lightly influenced by your narrative preferences and mostly follow local causality, whatever local causality happens to be. There won't be metanarrative protections making sure of things like that nothing bad happens to you most of the time when you collapse after using Just A Little Longer, or that the Iron Will trio won't block purely communicative telepathy, or that no matter how much you use Dragon Fairy Elf Witch you'll never end up in an awkward situation where you have some borrowed heritage giving you shadow powers and some borrowed heritage making you glow and now you can't use your shadow powers because you're glowing. It'll also be harder for the metanarrative to do things like steer you toward Fated Lovers, so you'll meet those a lot less often.

Okay, so from a practical perspective she definitely should not take Realism. Which leaves the question: would taking it quiet her internal screaming by enough to be worth the practical difficulties?

She quickly concludes that it would quiet her internal screaming a little but not enough. One, things being altered to suit her narrative preferences is not the kind of total chaos she has a problem with any more than, say, a simulated universe where some things are governed by an RNG built into the deterministic physics of the computer's hardware and tweaked to give slightly more critical hits during boss fights or whatever. Two, taking Realism won't remove narrative causality entirely, just mostly, and her emotions care about the difference between None and Any more than the difference between Some and Lots. Three, even removing Brendagenic narrative causality from reality entirely wouldn't remove all chaos from reality entirely, see previous bullet point about the difference between None and Any. Four, giving up an extremely useful set of protections just because she has existential angst about physics would be really stupid.

In that case I think I'll pass. Does it matter at all how many points I have left over?

Leftover points get saved up, and someday if you find yourself really needing a power that wasn't on the menu, they might spontaneously form one!

Oh, that's awesome!

So I guess the next thing is to decide where I'm going to go. If I have a bunch of criteria but don't have a specific fictional setting picked out, is that a really vague Somewhere in Mind or a really picky Isekai Roulette?

If you tell me about your criteria, I can help you guess which one will suit your needs better! But probably it'll be Isekai Roulette unless it's really, really important to you to be sure of something really specific that you don't trust the narrative to provide.

The important things I've thought of are:

- somewhere there's magic I can learn by studying it and get good enough at it to make enough money that the Mother Lode option won't need to do anything else

- somewhere where I can get another form of interdimensional travel that will work repeatedly, and ideally also some kind of life extension but if it looks like I'll be able to get that fast enough with just the interdimensional travel it doesn't have to be in the first universe I go to

- somewhere I won't need to conceal being from another universe and where people are basically okay with having someone from another universe drop on them

- I don't want to go somewhere something awful will immediately happen to me but I hope that's already built in because I think that would kind of suck as a story.

And then some stuff that would be nice but is less necessary:

- somewhere my powers will be useful to do some good in the world

- somewhere with both some humans and some interesting nonhumans

If there's anything you think I'm being really stupid for not specifying or if any of those things are really hard please let me know.

I think those all sound like the sort of thing that Isekai Roulette is good at, as long as you don't mind it potentially solving your problems in ways you haven't thought of that you might like better than the ones you did!

I am tentatively on board with that so long as--

Okay, analogy time, suppose someone stole a book from another kid and gave it to me for Christmas. I might be really happy about getting the book, but if I had known it was stolen I wouldn't be. Is the Spirit, when it's making Isekai Roulette choices, aiming for things I will experience liking, or things that I would like if I knew all the relevant information?

The second thing, almost always! It takes a very specific kind of person to genuinely prefer the kind of narrative dissonance that comes from being persistently deceived like that.

Okay, good. I just wanted to be sure because the Spirit isn't human and might have weird priorities I don't understand.

There is, of course, always the chance that Alpina is lying, or has herself been lied to, or is extensively technical-truthing. But if Alpina/the Spirit is actively malicious the only way to defend against that is to shove Alpina in a drawer and never finalize her choices and die of old age, and even that might not work, and Brenda isn't going to do it. So she'll check for innocent misunderstandings when they occur to her and beyond that whatever happens happens.

Now that she's basically figured out all her options, it's starting to hit harder that she might be about to disappear to another universe. Some part of her is still convinced this is all a dream or a joke or a hallucination and nothing will happen when she says she's done and high school will commence as normal--but the rest of her is staring at a near-total unknown. She doesn't know what she'll be doing next week, can't form any but the vaguest mental images of it, and it makes her feel like the future just cuts off at some point tomorrow.

She'll find out what it looks like when she gets there. She checks the Isekai Roulette box.

I want to sleep on it for a night before I commit, because I'll probably think of a bunch more questions. Do you have any recommendations on what I should pack? You, food, water, I guess I won't need a change of clothes or a toothbrush, some science and engineering books in case I go somewhere low-tech, some regular blank notebooks and pencils . . .

Those all sound like good ideas! I'm not very good at knowing what to pack for trips, because I am a notebook. (I guess I would make a good place to keep a checklist, if you want!)

Sorry, I keep thinking as though you've already done this loads of times with other people even though you said that's not how it works.

Do you know whether Personal Hygiene and/or Planned Parenthood means I won't need to bring pads?

Some people find that menstruation is important to them and don't want to stop doing it! If you are one of those you will need to bring pads. Otherwise no.

What a random thing to be attached to. On the other hand, she's attached to keeping her same face even when going somewhere nobody will recognize her, so whatever.

I am not one of those people, conveniently.

What other power edge cases like that are there . . .

How much does Omniglot help with pronunciation? Will it let me speak tonal languages and ones with phonemes I don't know? What about the languages of beings that hear a different range of sound frequencies? What about beings that communicate by pheromones or radio signals?

Omniglot will let you learn how to understand any language you can perceive and speak any language you can pronounce, even if it requires skills you don't have yet like noticing different phonemes and tones. Other powers can help you become able to communicate in more ways, like Dragon Fairy Elf Witch or Princess and the Dragon.

What a cool synergy! I hope that becomes relevant eventually but not immediately.

Will I be able to keep asking you questions like this after I go to the other world and get the powers, if there's something I don't want to find out by experimenting? Will the powers and the traveling happen all at once simultaneously or does it take a while?