A funny thing happens when he uses the Wite-Out! As it dries, it somehow absorbs into the page, leaving the paper bare of ink except for the lines it was printed with.

...huh. This is some good quality Wite-Out, he can barely see it.

Anyway.

Geometry                                      xx/yy/zzzz

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

...huh?????

This is a more elaborate prank than he'd thought. He has no idea how that works, some kind of pressure-activated appearing ink? He writes on the next line:

If Joshua wanted me to use this as a journal he shouldn't have put it in my locker

He has no idea what kinds of things a notebook like this might appear on the following lines, the manufacturer obviously can't make the stuff that appears conditional on whatever he writes. Maybe it'll be something that's the kind of non-sequitur that could reasonably be mistaken as a continuation of many possible responses? Like "Anyway! My name is xyz." or something.

Also, props to Joshua for this, it's definitely distracting him from Geom (not that that's very hard). He wonders if all of the notebooks in his locker have this nifty trick in them.

I don't know who Joshua is, but I was sent by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed to offer you its power! I can tell I'm supposed to talk to you because you're the first person who wrote in me.

What.

What?

What??

what

I have a metanarrative guarantee that the first person to write in me is always the chosen vessel of the Spirit! Or is that not what you were confused about?

no no i was confused about talking notebook W H A T

I guess I'm pretty unusual from your perspective. Hello! It's nice to meet you!

He stares at it for a few seconds.

Then he continues to stare for a few seconds more.

Then a while longer.

...

............

Yeah he's thoroughly distracted from whatever the teacher is saying.

nice to meet you too

you're not unusual you're impossible

magic isn't real

Magic is real! I'm magic!

no you don't understand

wait metanarrative am i in a story

that's kind of cool but also impossible

Of course you're in a story! Isn't everyone?

He stares at the notebook some more, again.

no? there's real life and then there's stories and stories are, you know, not real

Oh. That's not how I think of these things at all! To me it seems like everyone is in stories all the time. There are countless worlds out there and probably all of them are stories to someone somewhere!

aaaaaaaaa

Okay no. Freaking out does not help. What's happening here is that someone is writing a story about him and he's sentient inside it aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa no stop relax don't start hyperventilating in Geometry that is not cool.

please hold for a moment while I have a mild existential crisis

Okay! Take your time! ♡

aaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Don't hyperventilate. It's fine. He's fine. He's in a story and it's a story in which he gets a magic notebook that offers him the

...he rereads.

the power of the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed.

???

No, okay, deal with that later. Existential crisis first.

Does he feel storylike? Well, he has no idea how he could tell but—he remembers his parents. He remembers his siblings. He remembers what he thinks is a reasonable spread of memories of his life, that time he broke his thumb playing goalie when he was ten and that time his old friend dumped yogurt on his head and his first kiss and his first fuck and that time he fell and hit his head as a kid while playing cops and robbers—wait, maybe he died then and now he's in a story because of that—no he should be in Heaven—does this mean God doesn't exist, does this mean Christianity is false.

That's actually a very important question.

is God real?

There are lots of different gods in different worlds! I don't think this world has one, though? But it's hard to be sure, because I am a notebook.

okay back to existential crisis thanks

Now that he thinks about it he feels like he was at least halfway into being an atheist. He can tell by how he's not, like, shocked to hear that God isn't real and there's, like, basically no emotional reaction here other than "welp guess that's that".

He quietly reaches into his shirt and pulls the crucifix and the scapular he's always wearing above his head and puts them in a pocket.

Okay, maybe some feelings here other than that.

Okay!

The thing is he's really not sure how he could tell if he's in a story?? Like, maybe real people have more memories than he does, maybe a real person remembers perfectly faithfully every awake minute of their life and the whole concept of an eidetic memory (and the fact that most humans don't have one) was just made up by his author to justify not having to come up with an entire lifetime worth of memories for their characters.

...actually that makes a depressing amount of sense.

Fuck, he's in a story, isn't he.

.......

Well, he's in a story where he gets superpowers and he's, ah, metanarratively guaranteed to... be the one who... should be getting these powers? Whatever that means. What's a "meta" narrative, even? A narrative about a narrative? He's in a story that is about stories? A story about his story?

what's a metanarrative as opposed to a narrative? oh also i'm done with the crisis i think

Maybe he should have taken longer to have an existential crisis but maybe that wouldn't be so interesting to read/watch so he's written as a character who doesn't freak out for that long in order to not bore his audience.

He should not think like that, he's going to drive himself absolutely insane thinking like that.

Metanarrative effects are effects that operate outside of the story and govern its events without causal justification! If something is metanarratively guaranteed, it will happen regardless of whether that makes sense according to regular causality or narrative concerns!

what does it mean for something to be outside causality? you were in my bag because i put you in my bag because Joshua put you in my locker because he wanted to prank me, isn't all of that causal?

Yes! But relying on regular causality alone, it would've been possible for Joshua to decide to put a different notebook in your locker, or for you to drop me, or for you to let someone else write in me before you did. The metanarrative guarantee means that events will arrange themselves to make sure the right things happen, even if that takes wildly improbable coincidences or things not really making sense the way a story is usually supposed to!