Okay! I can wait. I'm very patient.

"Thank you for the notebooks, Josh," Peter says sweetly as he's putting his stuff away and Josh is walking over to him with a confused half-grin. "They were really high quality!"

"You looked really happy with your sparkles over there, Petey," Joshua tries, walking out of the classroom with him. "I don't think I've ever seen you that excited for Geom! Was it because the cover matched your eyes?"

Peter stretches his fingers out in front of him. "Actually it's because I thought of a lovely nail polish colour that would go great with it. Maybe I could show you, get your opinion?"

Joshua sighs. "I told the boys it wasn't going to be that funny. You're boring to tease, Petey."

"—oh, of course it wasn't your idea. Nate's?"

    "Yeah."

"Well I got a message for him, then."

    "Yeah?"

"Yeah, let me—there he is." He starts jogging over to where he can see the blond with a friend down the hall. "Nate!"

"—oh, sup dude. Got our gift?"

"I did and I had something to say to you about it."

Nate smirks. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." Peter pulls Nate into a one-armed hug and plants a long, wet, sloppy kiss on his cheek. "Thank you for the gifts~"

He pushes Peter away and starts rubbing his cheek with the shoulder of his T-shirt. "Get off me, you homo."

"You don't get to say that, it's my reclaimed slur not yours."

    "Whatever. The game still on after class?"

"Oh, shoot, something's come up—that's not a no, but I'll let you know. Maybe grab Dore just in case?"

    "Hey, it wasn't because of the notebooks, was it?" asks Joshua, a bit anxiously. "It was just a joke—"

"No, it's fine, I did actually like them and fuck gender roles, you know, I'm gonna have the pinkest sparkliest notebooks in this school."

    "...if anyone can pull it off..."

"Don't say that, I'm sure we could colour match."

    Joshua grimaces and Nate says, "You're so weird, Tarleton."

"Right back atcha, Smith. Catch you guys later, AP Calc time."

    "Later," the say in unison.

alright I'm back but I was on the verge of an epiphany or something back there and I'm gonna get back to it now

Okay! Good luck with your epiphany!

So: what was the snag his brain hit earlier? It was when the notebook mentioned that he could get shapeshifting right away or only later.

It's... okay at least part of it is that he likes his face. He has expressive eyebrows and a sharp jawline and adorable dimples and nice full lips and even his nose is kind of distinctive. He thinks he's pretty, but he's pretty with personality, he's the kind of pretty that can be not-someone's-type, he could be glossed over as a generic white boy and that wouldn't be false and, and... he's... sort of got an identity. You know? He didn't choose his face and there are probably things he'd change about it if he were to design a face from scratch but it's his face and he likes it. And when he was designing the hung femboy with superpowers persona in his head he realises he'd been thinking of that as... a sort of... character? And it's not like he'd thought that he wasn't going to become that character but...

...he supposes he hadn't been thinking of it in terms of leaving his current self behind.

He doesn't want to leave his current self behind.

okay I think epiphany was the wrong word for it but i'm having some not-totally-fully-formed thoughts about identity and appearance that i might want your help untangling

I'm here to help!

so I guess the central thing here is that i don't look very feminine at all, and there are many ways that I could uh

I was having some pretty detailed mental images in my head of variously feminine aesthetics that would appeal to me and that I would be comfortable with but I am pretty attached to what I look like right now, my face is mine and me and I don't think my face could launch any ships let alone a thousand but I don't really want to leave it behind even if there are many other ship-launching faces that I could have

there's a generalization of that for other aspects of my identity than my face but that's the one that was most salient

does that make sense?

I think so! So you want to be able to return to how you look like now, even if you also want to be able to change? That sounds like the sort of thing a shapeshifter might be able to do. Especially if it was really important to you!

But if you want, I could also try to nudge A Thousand Ships a little, to make it more relaxed on the idealized feminine beauty front, and more malleable to your desires in the moment? That way it wouldn't conflict with changing your form to look like you do now, it would just support you extra in looking feminine and beautiful when you want to!

...he wants to hug this notebook. This is such a good notebook. It's offering him superpowers and it's not even asking him to lose things that are important to him forever and he gets to be a Mary Sue about it. He's not gonna grin like a lunatic because Ms. Martin is a lot less tolerant than Mr. Hilbert but on the inside he's grinning a lot.

you are the best notebook

yes I'd love that second thing