You can still ask me questions as long as I'm with you! My answers might get less useful, because I can tell you how powers like yours tend to work and what sort of thing usually happens in situations of one kind or another, but I can't actually predict the future and you might run into situations that are unusual enough for me to not have a good guess.

The powers and the traveling happen all at once simultaneously! I'm told it looks kind of like a magical girl transformation sequence but I can't personally see so you should probably not take my word for which things look like other things.

What senses do you have, besides being able to read stuff written on you? If I drew a picture, would you be able to "see" the picture? (I am really bad at drawing) Can you tell when you're being moved?

I can tell what things look like if they're part of me, like things drawn on my pages or the pattern on my cover. I can tell when things are touching me and I can tell where all my parts are relative to each other, so if someone picks me up I can guess that I'm being picked up but I wouldn't be able to tell where they were going if they carried me somewhere, because I can't tell where I am relative to the outside world. I've heard I can see stickers stuck to me or papers tucked between my pages the same way I can see writing and drawing, but I haven't tried those things personally that I can recall.

That kind of sounds like not enough senses. But I tend to think the human set of senses isn't enough either so maybe that's a me problem. Want to test the papers thing?

If Alpina responds in the affirmative, Brenda will look around her room for cool pieces of loose paper, spot the photo of a snow leopard on her wall calendar, and stick that between some later pages (the other side is a calendar of July).

Yes please!

Goodness, is that a cat of some sort? I've heard cats described but I've never seen one before! It looks fluffy, is that right?

It's a snow leopard! They're related to domestic cats but they're bigger and live on snow-covered mountains. They're extremely fluffy; it keeps them warm. (Do you have any sense of temperature? I have no idea how to explain what having a sense of temperature is like if you don't.)

Being warmer makes my pages a little softer and being colder makes them a little stiffer and more brittle. It's very subtle, though. I think you probably have different senses about temperature than I do.

Yeah. There's a fairly narrow temperature range humans find pleasant and a wider range we can survive in but don't like. When we get too hot we sweat and when we get too cold we shiver and in either state it's more aversive to move around and do things.

It's starting to become obvious even to Brenda that she's stalling on making a decision and she should pack her bag and either get off this planet or go to bed. Probably the latter, so she can arrive wherever she's going well-rested, but she feels like she won't be able to fall asleep so who knows.

That sounds uncomfortable!

Would you like to write down a packing checklist in me, or are you not a checklists sort of person? I like checklists, personally. They're so tidy and helpful!

I am also a checklists person!

- Alpina

- Food

- Water

- Books

- Regular blank notebooks

- Pencils

- Rope

- Flashlight

- Matches

- Tent?

- Leave note for parents

The last four items are going to necessitate a shopping trip and therefore the delay of her departure until after school tomorrow*, but she has a lot of her allowance saved up and it's not like she's likely to be able to use US dollars where she's going.

*It has not occurred to Brenda that she could skip school (being isekai'd doesn't count). Also her town is small enough and she's obviously-fourteen enough that turning up at the hunting and fishing store during school hours would be a dicey endeavour anyway.

That sounds like a good list!

(Just so you know, I'm happy to keep track of anything you write in me and I'll never run out of pages. But bringing blank notebooks still seems like a good idea if you want to be able to write things down that are private or that you want to be able to tear out and give to other people! I still don't run out of pages if they're torn out of me, but it's uncomfortable and I don't like it.)

That makes sense. You mentioned being a journal when we first met, and I'm happy to tell you about my adventures. How okay are you with my telling other people you exist and are a person and stuff?

I am okay with that! But please don't let anyone else write in me without asking me first? I'm always really nervous that I won't be able to tell the handwriting apart and it'll be frightfully embarrassing.

That's super reasonable. I have a hard time identifying humans by looking and it's the worst!

She chuckles as she writes this because it really is not surprising that she finds the talking notebook extremely relatable, is it. Probably if you took a poll of everyone she's ever met on the question, "If books could talk, would Brenda find them more relatable than humans?", the yes votes would be a majority usually seen only in motions to adjourn meetings that have overrun by an hour.

That sounds troublesome! Can humans normally tell each other apart by looking? I think I've heard that they can but it's hard to be sure.

Generally speaking yes we can; I'm just bad at remembering which face goes with which person.

How many points would an eidetic memory cost?

Oh, I'm not sure! It's not the sort of power the Spirit usually offers. But it should be easy to pick up with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch if you meet someone who has it!

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch is such an amazing power! And it gives me a practical reason to try to meet lots of kinds of people, which I want to do anyway.

What would happen if I pointed Dragon Fairy Elf Witch at you? (I won't unless you're okay with it!)

I'm not sure, I can't recall anyone trying it! You would probably become more notebook-like in some way, and maybe be able to arbitrarily add and remove ink from your surfaces?

If you want to try it, I think I would be touched! It would be neat to have a friend whose experiences are a little more like mine.

It would be really cool to understand how you experience the world a little better! I'm excited to see how it will go.

Having one (1) specific action she plans to take in the next universe makes the whole thing feel a little less like going over a waterfall in a canoe.

I'm excited too! ✨

I should go to sleep soon; my plan is to buy the things on my checklist that I don't already have tomorrow afternoon, write a letter to my parents explaining everything, and be ready to go either tomorrow evening or the following morning. See you in the morning!

Okay! Sleep well!

Brenda takes a long time to fall asleep, and dreams of trying to slay a dragon with a checklist as her first piece of high school classwork but she's lost in the high school which looks like the public library but huge and she isn't wearing pants. When she wakes up she assumes that the whole thing with Alpina was more of the same until she opens the cover and to check and there it all is, list of absurd powers and conversation about the true nature of reality and everything. 

She has a long debate with herself about whether to bring Alpina to school or leave her at home. Eventually she decides on the latter, because if Alpina's going to disappear or turn back into a blank notebook she'll do that from anywhere, whereas "Brenda gets caught writing in Alpina and there are awkward questions" can only happen at school. She explains the risk to Alpina before breakfast and hides her deep in a desk drawer even though her parents haven't snooped in her room for years, and spends the entire school day thinking about tonight. She goes to the hunting and fishing store and spends the last several years of accumulated allowance on all the camping gear from her list plus a sleeping bag and a big backpacking-across-Europe style backpack to carry it all, and stashes it in the garage in the pile of miscellaneous crap where nobody will realize it's new.

She writes a letter for her parents, explaining the whole truth, because once she's gone they won't be able to stop her. Maybe they'll be angry at her if when she comes back but at least they won't have been lied to in the meantime.

She sleeps again, with an alarm set for well before her parents will be awake, and puts on her sturdiest clothes and her big soft jacket and the backpack with all her camping gear and food and books, and sets the camcorder her mom used to make home movies with recording on top of the letter on top of her desk, and smiles at it as she tells Alpina,

Alright, I'm ready. Let's go!

[Final build: https://no-vices-for-you-to-exploit.netlify.app/#BAEEFAIGDA4SFBgaHB4gIiQmKiwuMDI0CwYICh4iJCowQkRGAwgKFA==]