The top notebook in the stack is really unusually nice for having been in the 50% off bin. The cover is hard and has that classy matte sheen; the paper is smooth and beautiful.

What will she write in it?

It has plants on it so it's going to be Freshman Bio, Mr. McKinney, M/W/F blocks 3&4, room 130. (The one with triangles on it is Algebra 2, the one with calligraphy-esque swirls is Honors American Literature, the yellow one is Honors World History, etc.)

I'm a journal, you know! It says so on my cover!

Aaaaaa?! Talking notebook? Is it going to make her open the chamber of secrets? Seriously though what the fuck.

She stares at the page for a good thirty seconds trying to think of a reasonable explanation for this, then writes:

How does this spontaneously appearing words business work?

(while carefully not touching the next line, because all her best guesses involve something activated by pressure or her skin oils or something).

By magic, of course! ✨

I'm an avatar of the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed, and you've been chosen to bear the Spirit's power! Isn't that ✨exciting✨?!

It's certainly a surprise! To check whether this is all pre-recorded or responding to what I write, would you mind saying what six times eight is if you can understand me?

(There's obviously no way it can understand her (right?), but demonstrating that will get rid of her sense of vertigo so she can enjoy the weird puzzle game notebook for what it is.)

Well, let me see. Six times eight should be eight plus eight plus eight plus eight plus eight... plus eight, right? So it's forty-eight! ✨Neat!✨ I don't think I've ever multiplied before!

Oh nooooooo the book is intelligent and maybe conscious and also possibly an adorable child???

Math is fun! I'd be happy to teach you more if you like! Also are you aware of your own awareness and capable of thinking about your own thoughts?

I think so!

I probably shouldn't get distracted by learning math, though. I need to focus on my very important mission of telling you about the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed and the power it grants you!

Afsjjddjsadk* it they? She? Turns her own pages! Also possibly wants Brenda to become a magical girl? 

What is the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed?

*there is no keyboard present in this scene, merely the keyboard-mashing emotion.

The Spirit of Femininity Unleashed

is there whenever a girl daydreams of a better life, or wishes she had superpowers, or imagines herself in a whirlwind romance with a fictional character. The Spirit wants girls to be free and beautiful and powerful, like Sailor Moon or Matilda. (Movie Matilda, not book Matilda. I can't believe the book took away her powers at the end!) (Oops, was that a spoiler? Sorry.)

The Spirit isn't awake like me so it can't explain why it chooses people, but it's chosen you as the next bearer of its power. That means you get to decide which manifestations of the Spirit feel right for you, and then you get to keep them forever!

You have correct opinions about Matilda and that wasn't a spoiler. Am I going to end up needing to fight  miscellaneous evil? Is it going to be a problem that I'm not very good at girl stuff? Is the Spirit going to change my brain to make me good at girl stuff? Or in any other ways? Sorry, I'm not sure which set of genre conventions I should be working off here if any.

The Spirit doesn't have to change your brain if you don't want it to! It can make you better at girl stuff if you want. Or not if you don't! Why shouldn't your stuff count as girl stuff? I think you should get to be good at whatever you want to be.

There isn't very much evil around here to fight, as far as I know. I've heard something about taxes? I don't really understand what a tax is. If you're into fighting evil, though, you can go to a different world where there's plenty of it and it's very fightable!

I would really prefer not to fight evil! Unless the other option is that the evil wins due to nobody fighting it probably. How many worlds are there? Is it possible to go to other worlds and then come back?

Some worlds have ways to travel between them! I don't think this one does. But you could pick a world that did! You can use the Spirit's power to travel to any world you can imagine, to start the ✨Story of You✨ off in just the right place! (More specifically, you can do one of three things: stay where you are, go to a fictional world or one you imagine or ask for, or let the Spirit choose for you from all the possible worlds to try to find one that's even better than the one you'd pick for yourself.)

Does that mean that every imaginable world already exists?

Because the other option is that this book can in some way create new worlds, or more likely very immersive hallucinations.

Sort of! If you asked for a world where, I don't know, everything is exactly like your world except bees are green instead of yellow, there might not be a world like that. But usually, if someone writes a story, and puts passion and imagination into the story, it'll turn out that somewhere out there the story is real. And there are a lot of worlds, so a lot of things you could ask for will be possible. If all you wanted was green bees you could definitely get a world with green bees, it just might not be exactly what you wanted in other respects.

Okay, that's--probably still impossible according to her understanding of physics, but not totally blatantly impossible actually, and anyway her understanding of physics is mostly from miscellaneous textbooks people have put on the internet, and anyway anyway none of her understanding of anything expected an intelligent self-modifying book so it's all pretty suspect at this point. At least some things that everyone thinks are impossible are possible and the only question is which. And whether the book is wrong or lying or correct. And whether she wants to go to another universe, which is scarier than any of the other questions.

It's not that she hasn't had hundreds of daydreams about going to, or being in, other universes. And it's not that she has a particularly amazing life here. Objectively speaking, she has nothing much tying her to this plane of existence at all. But her parents would be sad if she disappeared, and she'd never get to read the last Harry Potter book--unless the Harry Potter books are accurate descriptions of a parallel universe and even then that's probably not the best possible universe to live in. And going to another universe doesn't necessarily come with a house or a job or a legal identity, which is never a problem for fantasy protagonists but could still be a problem for Brenda.

She should write something. She doesn't know how to put any of that stuff into words, so she writes

Would I be able to come back here if I left?

If the world you went to had good interdimensional travel, you could use that to come back! Lots of worlds have good enough interdimensional travel to get back here with.

That's objectively good but makes the decision harder.

Could I hypothetically go to a world that has good interdimensional travel and also knows about the existence of other worlds and has procedures for getting people from other worlds oriented and integrated into society and stuff? And can I hear about the other decisions I need to make before I make any of them?

Yes, there are lots of worlds like that! And don't worry, you can take all the time you need to learn about your options before you decide on anything. Well, I guess I would be sad if you took so long that you died of natural causes first. Please don't do that? You can if you want, though!

I will probably not do that. I will probably need to go away and come back a few times to eat and sleep and go to school and stuff though.

It's very reassuring that the book isn't trying to pressure her to hurry, or even pressuring her especially hard to choose at all. Also the mention of dying of natural causes makes her think about possible worlds that have some way to not do that.

That's okay! I'm very good at waiting.

Do you want to talk about your other decisions now or do you want to go away?

I have a while before my parents call me for dinner. What are my other choices?

There's lots of them!

To simplify things I'm supposed to present everything with point values attached and let you have 70 points to distribute among a list of options. (That's why I know how to add and subtract!) But that's really just a simplification and the power of the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed is a lot more complicated than that, so if you reeeeeally want something that doesn't quite work with the standard list, I can try to figure out how to get it for you!

Would you like me to just write out the whole list for you and keep track of the points while you check boxes for which things you might want, or would you rather I list the options a few at a time for you to read and ask questions about? (I can still answer questions if I write the full list! We'll just be writing our conversation after the end of it.)

Awwwww what a considerate thing to ask about. Her first instinct is to ask for the whole list at once so it's all in a block and can easily be referred back to; her second instinct is to get it piecemeal so discussion of each section is next to that section. After a bit of deliberation she goes with:

If you don't mind my copying parts of the list to later pages for easy reference, I'd like to get the whole thing at once to start.

Then a moment later she adds, in smaller handwriting:

Also does anything bad happen if we run out of pages?

because the notebook has a lot of pages but Brenda has a lot of capacity for dithering over something this important.

I never run out of pages! Indexing and shuffling them gets a little tricky after a few hundred though. But as long as you don't mind me replacing old pages with new ones I can just keep doing that forever, no problem at all!

Just a moment while I format that list... ⏳

Oooooooh. It's like the magic notebook equivalent of watching someone do gymnastics: she has no idea how difficult this is for the notebook but Brenda sure can't do it so she's impressed. If the stylized hourglass is indicating that the wait will be on the scale of single-digit minutes she'll just watch the whole time.

The wait is on the scale of about ninety seconds before the hourglass finishes loading and the notebook scribbles a quick (All done!) next to it.

These powers are offered under an aegis of metanarrative protection. Anytime you might expect a power to have obvious negative side effects, like glowing eyes making it harder to see, it simply won't—you'll be able to see just fine anytime it actually matters, while having dramatically hazy vision at cool, narratively appropriate moments. This doesn't apply to your own preferences about the explicitly described effects of the power; if you don't want to be Well Endowed, the metanarrative cannot protect you from choosing that option and having to live with it.

After that it gets long. (The point counter is included on every page for easy reference.)

Interestingly, the font in these sections is different—more like something you'd get out of a printer, less like the notebook's usual elegant and beautiful but still visibly humanlike handwriting. The voice it's written in is pretty different, too. From the beginning of the preamble paragraph to the end of the Drawbacks section, it's like the notebook is copying all this from elsewhere rather than composing it independently.

Brenda starts reading the "Yourself" section and realizes two things approximately simultaneously. One: a lot of these options kind of require going to another universe unless she wants to deal with some seriously awkward questions in this one. Two: she would not have described herself as particularly happy with her body before this, but apparently it's the devil she knows or something, because the ideas of replacing her face, changing her voice, letting her eyes or hair be determined by a magic algorithm she can only partially control, or becoming "well endowed" all make her go "aaaaaaa" internally.

Okay Brenda, relax, let's think about these one at a time. 

A Thousand Ships: no. It's not that her face is all that great but it's her face, she wants to be recognizable as herself.

What's In A Name: either does nothing or is a useful defensive power, depending on what magic systems she encounters. Tentative yes unless she runs short on points and/or decides to stay in this universe. Actually make that "unless she runs short on points" full stop; she clearly doesn't know about all the things that are in this universe.

Angelic Tones: some of the same problem as A Thousand Ships, but less so, and being able to sing would be really cool. She goes to the end of the list, trying not to get distracted by later options and only failing a few times, and writes

Would Angelic Tones make me good at singing, or just give me a good range if I learned how myself?

Emerald Orbs: Okay, once she's had a chance to chill out about potentially looking totally different, this is actually pretty awesome. It probably isn't exploitable for eagle eyes or night vision or shrimp colors, but even if not: pretty cool. And it's worth checking, so:

Does Emerald Orbs affect vision in positive ways, like getting better night vision by swapping to cat eyes, or is it 100% cosmetic?

It might be rude to use percents with a person who isn't familiar with multiplication, oops.

Perfect Hair: potentially amazing if it means not having to spend ages washing and brushing her hair every day anymore, but Dressing Room is the same thing with better control and also freedom from clothes shopping forever.

Size difference: could be handy but not a priority.

Dressing Room and Personal Hygiene: yes unless there are really amazing things she needs the points for.

If I take both Dressing Room and Personal Hygiene, can I use that to always have clean clothes without needing to do laundry?

Can I check all the boxes that seem potentially interesting and then uncheck some of them later?

Angelic Tones will make it much easier to learn to sing but you'll still have to practice if you want to get better!

Emerald Orbs can sometimes improve your vision but only if it's very narratively appropriate. You might try Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, later on! That can give you all sorts of interesting benefits, and if you have it and Emerald Orbs then you'll definitely get all the eye-related benefits you want!

Yes, with Dressing Room and Personal Hygiene you and your clothes will be ✨free from laundry forever✨! If that's what you want. You can still do laundry for fun if laundry is fun for you.

You can check any boxes you want, and either erase checkmarks you don't want or scribble over them and I'll clean them up for you! Your choices are only finalized once you tell me very clearly that you want to finalize them. Before that, you can try out whatever you want and see how the points add up!

No more laundry or clothes shopping or tangled hair ever again, YEAH! Checkmarks go next to Personal Hygiene, Dressing Room, What's in a Name, and Emerald Orbs, the latter of which also gets a little asterisk which means "only if she's leaving the universe".

Next batch!

Like Roses: Meh.

Just A Little Longer: depending on implementation details this is either deeply cool, or will lead to her spending way too much time unconscious after getting too in the zone about random shit.

How long would I be able to work on something without triggering the unconsciousness from Just A Little Longer? Is it however long I could have worked on the thing without magic help, or a set time, or something else?

Immunity System: YES. Checkmarked.

My Ears Are Burning: NO. Horrible bad option for secret agents and people who hate everyone especially themselves.

The entire Well Endowed/Hollow Leg/Inner Strength sequence: very all-or-nothing; Well Endowed sounds weird and bad but Hollow Leg apparently fixes it and Inner Strength sounds deeply cool. 

Just to check: if I took the whole Inner Strength sequence I could look like I do now, be really strong, and not accidentally crush things due to being really strong?

Just A Little Longer won't make you collapse from exhaustion until the point where you would have collapsed from exhaustion naturally!

If you took the whole Inner Strength sequence you would look like you do now for as long as that's what you most truly want to look like, and then you would start looking a different way! The metanarrative protection stops Inner Strength from having bad side effects like accidentally crushing things unless they're things it would only be a little inconvenient to crush, at moments when it's narratively appropriate to crush something a little inconveniently. So you could accidentally crush pencils or soda cans, but not anything valuable or important!

Awesome, thanks!

She checks off the whole sequence plus Just A Little Longer, on the theory that she can uncheck whatever is lowest priority if she runs out of points by the end.

Battle Angel seems uncomplicatedly good; the other two are maybe a problem because of the temptation to get into fights (or temptation for the universe to put her in fights). 

If I take Battle Maiden or the prerequisites does that increase the probability of situations where it will be relevant? I'd rather never need them but if I ever need them I'd rather have them.

The next set of options are . . . complicated.

I don't understand the money options at all. Are they creating money from nowhere or taking it from someone else? If the former, is that going to cause inflation if I spend too much? Will the government want to know where I got it? I understand that the metanarrative will make it work but not what it means for it to work.

Taking Battle Maiden doesn't make getting in fights more likely unless you're the sort of person who will want to get in more fights if you're better at fighting!

Where you get the money from the money options depends on the needs of the narrative and which option you selected. With Making Ends Meet, whatever job or inheritance you get will just happen to show up in a convenient form that works for your story. Maybe you'd land in a world that has a fund for helping interdimensional visitors! If you take Motherlode then you won't need to do anything special to get your money, and it won't necessarily come with an explanation, but if you really need an explanation for your own peace of mind, maybe you'll find a map leading to ancient buried treasure, or invent something so useful that people will pay you a lot of money for it. Similar things can happen with Four Star Daydream but at this point I am running out of economic speculation because I am a notebook.

"Maybe you'll invent something really useful" ought to sound awesome. It . . . doesn't. She would love to invent something really useful and get rich off of it, but having it be because of a magic notebook feels like cheating. She tries telling herself that it isn't any more cheating than having gotten lucky enough to be born in the 20th century in a first-world country. It doesn't help. She tries telling herself that maybe it would be something she was already smart enough to come up with and the magic would just provide the equivalent of Newton's apocryphal apple at the right moment. But maybe doesn't feel like enough. The buried treasure option would be fine on an emotional level if it was possible to guarantee it would be something like that--but does she really want to specifically avoid inventing a useful technology to satisfy her sense of pride? Probably she should just take Making Ends Meet and not try to exploit things she doesn't understand, but that feels like giving up.

She needs to know more about how this magic operates in general.

Have you done this before with other people? Do you remember what they picked and how it turned out?

I'm not supposed to say too much about who I've worked with before, but let me think for just a moment... ⏳

All right, I've remembered some people who took those options and wanted them concretely justified and how those turned out!

• Someone took Motherlode and Isekai Roulette and landed in a world that hadn't invented the wheel yet and they were really happy to pay her lots of money for telling them about wheels.
• Someone took Motherlode and Somewhere In Mind and chose a destination world with lots of fairy tale kingdoms, and when she arrived, a princess who looked just like her was coincidentally being impersonated, and mistaking her for an attempted impersonator led to finding out about the real impersonator, and the king gave her half the kingdom for rescuing his daughter even though she hadn't done it on purpose.
• Someone took Four Star Daydream and Stay Put and the next day she stumbled across an abandoned Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday and learned how to do interdimensional arbitrage and anytime she wanted to buy something she could afford it as long as she spent a little while getting things for cheap in one universe and selling them in another where they're valuable.
• Someone took Four Star Daydream and Isekai Roulette and landed in a world that was suffering under an ancient curse that forbade all forms of art, and they were so grateful to her for freeing them from the curse that they declared her an honorary goddess.

Thank you!

All of those things sound totally reasonable and fine as descriptions of things that happened to other people, and ridiculous and terrible as descriptions of things that might happen to her. Except the interdimensional arbitrage, which would be okay except for how it requires keeping the shop secret from everyone to maintain the advantage. 

Maybe that's the problem, actually. The options that involve having more money than people normally do require some reason why she has that money and everyone else doesn't, and she isn't actually different enough from other people for most possible options there to make sense. But this whole Spirit of Femininity thing has a lot of options for becoming different from other people, and she's starting to see the outlines of some possible solutions she'd actually like.

If I took Somewhere In Mind, or Isekai Roulette with a bunch of parameters specified, and proposed my own mechanism for how Mother Lode could work, would I get that mechanism if it was plausible enough? Would you be able to tell me in advance whether I had come up with something plausible enough?

I think I could get you a pretty good guess about that!

Awesome. I'm thinking of going somewhere where there's magic I could learn by being clever and working at it, with some kind of synergy where one of my other powers makes me really good at it--Just A Little Longer for a kind of magic where what matters is how much you can do in one sitting, or maybe combining two kinds of magic with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch from farther down if I end up taking that, I'm flexible on the details--and then I can get a well-paid job doing useful magic stuff.

That sounds lovely! I think that's very achievable. Maybe even both of those at the same time, magic that combines usefully with other magic and also benefits from being able to do lots of it in a row!

Brenda draws a little smiley face next to this statement and checks off Making Ends Meet, Mother Lode, and the three Battle Entity options, with little "L"s for "low priority" next to the latter set.

Alright, so: Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. This is awesome, with one potentially fatal ambiguity.

Does Dragon Fairy Elf Witch actually change my ancestry in the sense that a specific e.g. dragon will find themselves to have had more kids than they thought they had, or does it just edit my own biology and leave everyone else alone?

It changes your biology, and there are some situations where it's narratively appropriate to turn out to be related to someone in particular so it changes your biology that way instead of making you descended from an imaginary person, but it doesn't actually create any people who didn't exist before and it doesn't change anything about who you are or how you grew up unless you're the sort of person who specifically likes having your memories rearranged to make the story better, and most people aren't.

I am very much not that kind of person!!

If it makes me related to someone in particular does it mess with that person's memories or just copy their DNA (or whatever dragons have instead of DNA)?

It'll just copy their DNA or equivalent.

Cool, great, worries resolved, Dragon Fairy Elf Witch gets the heck checked out of it.

Omniglot and Anything You Can Do: Also get checked with extreme emphasis. Oops, she may have pressed hard enough there that in a normal notebook she'd've left an impression on the next page.

Sorry if I poked you too hard there. Those are some really awesome options!

(It's possible she isn't good enough at making friends to get much mileage out of Anything You Can Do, but it says it also works on rivals and anyway she has to try. Is it unwise to ask magic she doesn't understand to dump knowledge directly into her brain? She does not care.)

Would Indelible make me immune to, like, caffeine and painkillers, or only hostile stuff? Does Iron Will interfere with being persuaded of things the normal way? I assume no but there's kind of a spectrum from good arguments to bad arguments to propaganda to brainwashing.

Don't worry, it wasn't uncomfortable! I appreciate you checking, though!

Indelible has the same style of exception as Immunity System: it lets you deliberately use things to get their intended effects. Iron Will makes you a little harder to persuade by bad arguments and a lot harder to persuade by propaganda and impossible to persuade by brainwashing.

That it covers bad arguments at all is honestly delightful; she takes the entire mental defense stack. Now, onto the Power of Friendship section.

"In general, effects that describe others' reactions (like their attention being drawn to you by Mysterious Allure, or their sympathy being provoked by Tragic Backstory) operate on a metanarrative rather than a causal level. They are not mind control, and are not blocked by effects that block mind control."

What does that meeeeeeaaaaan. Brenda does not trust it. Looking over the options and trying to figure out what each one does might clarify the overall situation.

Mysterious Allure: no.

Captive Audience: this could have been put here to tempt her specifically, but she really does not believe it isn't something with the same ethical implications as mind control so instead of tempted she's just mildly queasy. No.

Blackout Binge: No. Why. 

Disney Princess: Not an efficient use of points but it's super tempting. 

Can you please explain in as much detail as possible the causal mechanisms involved in Disney Princess?

There isn't really a specific causal mechanism, but for someone like you I expect you would get the ability to understand animals and their behaviour and communication really clearly, or the ability to communicate telepathically with them, or something like that, and some extra metanarrative luck to make sure things worked out right—you'd only happen to meet animals who were going to have a friendly disposition toward you, that sort of thing.

Yeah if it's going to be potentially come with telepathy or more magically implanted knowledge she's going to give in to temptation and checkmark it.

Can I buy the ability to understand humans and their behaviour and communication really clearly? Not in a mindreading way, just the thing that most people already have. For understanding things that people actively want me to understand.

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.

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.

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?

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==]