Aww, I try! ♡ Let me see... ⏳

...okay, I needed to adjust the point cost up by one but I think I've got it!

thank you! do you have a more

He stops writing there for a second, tapping the edge of his notebook with the corner of his pen like a nervous tick, trying to figure out how to phrase what he means.

"Mr. Tarleton, since you've been paying so much attention to my class, why don't you take a stab at the answer?" asks the teacher, interrupting his train of thought.

"—sorry?" he says, blinking up at her.

She just gestures at the blackboard.

He blinks again, looks at the blackboard for a few awkward seconds with his jaw slightly slack, then shrugs and says, "Ill-defined. Or I guess you could say it doesn't exist. Positive infinity from the right, negative infinity from the left, but you didn't specify which so there's no answer."

...she was not actually expecting him to know the answer. "Correct," she says after a couple of seconds before turning to the rest of the class and trying to hide her annoyance. "As Mr. Tarleton said, for a function with such discontinuities the limit is undefined at the discontinuity and so you need to specify a direction from which to approach it..."

Peter doesn't actually try very hard to hide his smugness before turning back to the notebook. He probably left it hanging for a bit there, whoops, that was impolite.

The notebook is waiting patiently for him to finish that sentence!

Oh cool okay uh what was it right yes he adds

thorough or detailed description of what exactly changed about that power?

to the end of that line.

Let me see about that... ⏳

Name: A Thousand Ships - Cost: 2 ☐
Your face is simply exquisite, an ideal of feminine beauty. There are many possible ideals of feminine beauty, and yours is whichever one speaks most deeply to your soul. Others may match your beauty in their own way, but never exceed it.
It's less important that your face be an ideal of feminine beauty and more important that it be yours. You look how you want to look, based on your in-the-moment preferences and your sense of aesthetics and identity.

best notebook ever

Okay, 45 points spent, time to look at all the rest of everything.

Power of Friendship! Let's read the cute fluffy fun preamble...

These powers affect how others see you and how you interact with them.

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.

Your "true love" is anyone you're pursuing a serious romantic relationship with. You can have as many of these as you like, but your feelings for all of them must be genuine.

THAT WAS A VERY CONCERNING PREAMBLE. HE IS ONCE AGAIN VERY CONCERNED. HE IS NOT SURE HE WANTS POWERS THAT NEEDED THAT PREAMBLE.

heyyyyyy so what exactly is the distinction being drawn here between metanarratively making people drawn to me and mind controling people to be drawn to me

The metanarrative has a lot more freedom in how to act than a mind control power! A mind control power can only change people's minds in the moment, but the metanarrative can decide before you ever meet them that they will be the sort of people who are naturally drawn to you, or arrange events so that they're coincidentally drawn to you because of things like lighting and timing and how well your voice carries.

oh that makes a lot of sense and is reassuring

is there a way to ensure that these effects are only of that kind and not, for example, metanarratively causing neutrinos from the sun to knock someone's neurons in a specific direction or anything like that?

I'm not sure! If you have strong preferences about that sort of thing, the power should try to follow them, but it might be hard for it to do that because the things it does might not be things you've thought of enough to have opinions about them. And if it can't make the right things happen without doing something you would have dispreferred, it will make the right things happen anyway. If you have your heart set on some powers like that, but you want them to only work in ways that you're okay with, I could try to alter them in that direction but it might bump up the cost like it did with A Thousand Ships.

I'm probably okay with cost bumping, some of the powers i've picked so far i'm a lot less dead-set on than others and can manage point conservation plus I assume if you are sufficiently similar to a certain genre of fiction you pattern-match to from my world there will eventually be options that give me points rather than cost them

He stares at this sentence and teachers talking about run-on sentences show up in his head admonishing him for them so he adds some extra punctuation:

I'm probably okay with cost bumping, some of the powers i've picked so far i'm a lot less dead-set on than others and can manage point conservation. plus I assume, if you are sufficiently similar to a certain genre of fiction you pattern-match to from my world, there will eventually be options that give me points rather than cost them

There, that's clearer. And then next line:

I can try to better articulate my objections if that would help

Yes, there's a Drawbacks section at the end! And I would love to hear more about your objections so I can help you find the powers that are right for you! ♡

He doesn't want to write out his thoughts while he works through them because they'll probably be pretty unformed so he just keeps them in his head. After some thinking he's confident he's got it down and he starts writing, slowly and thoughtfully.

in theory there are circumstances that could make roughly anyone do roughly anything, but those circumstances can range in plausibility and let's-call-it "forcedness". at one end of this scale you have things like being tired or hungry, having had a fight with someone, having received great news and being in a good mood; at the other end, you have things like having your brain and memories and senses literally edited or your limbs and emotions literally controlled. somewhere closer to the middle you have things like someone going out of their way to upset someone else in expectation that that'll make them more snappish later in some important meeting or something.

then even within a given circumstance there are things one is more or less likely to do. I am in a certain sense more likely to shoot up the school if I slept badly but it's still not at all likely and would require a wildly implausible set of thoughts and feelings going through my head to actually cause that, but on the other hand me having less patience with Nate's antics and biting his head off (metaphorically) for a mostly-innocuous comment is well within my typical behaviour.

so perhaps a way of conceptualising some of that from within the framework of narratives that the Spirit seems drawn to is the concept of something being in character or out of character: it would be IC for me to snap at Nate when sleep deprived and OOC for me to shoot up the school in that situation. and stretching the definition a bit, it would be OOC for the setting of mundane Earth to have neutrinos randomly causing people to act in strange ways but it would be IC for it to have some loud construction work happening near someone's house in a way that makes them sleep badly.

the kinds of things I'm not okay with are the kinds of things that are OOC. people holding the Idiot Ball, people being into me despite their existing preferences and not in a way that's related to how they've always had some latent leanings in that direction, people finding me inherently mysteriously alluring at all times even if in most situations they wouldn't have—flattering lighting and so on makes sense as a sometimes thing but if literally every single time someone sees me I'm in flattering enough lighting that they'd find me alluring while in every other kind of lighting they wouldn't then I'd call foul play

and I understand that within the genre the Spirit seems to want to move me to a lot of similarly implausible things kind of happen to the protagonist and I'm mostly fine with that. but while I could see Nate turning it to have some latent homosexuality that was in him all along—dude's repressed as all hell—it really would not make sense for Gabe to be—he's actually tried being with a guy once to see and he's empirically determined he's not into guys, plus given his whole personality and disposition I would separately be really freaked out if he turned out to be into me despite it all.

does this make sense?

Yes, I think I see what you're saying! (Though Mysterious Allure isn't meant to necessarily be romantic in nature; it only governs literal interest, people paying you more attention than they otherwise might. The romantic options are listed later.)

(sure, i haven't actually read the romantic ones but i was just talking about them due to expectations about the genre. i would have been very surprised if there weren't any options later on about people being super into me romantically or sexually despite past leanings, it's just a part of this genre)

He adds the parentheses after writing the whole sentence because it's in response to the notebook's own parentheses and he doesn't want to confuse the main topic they're conversing about.

anyway, so I don't have a great cutoff for what's definitely okay and what's definitely not okay. i have those thoughts about likelihood of actions and what makes i guess a good story versus a bad story and while i do want to be the kind of character the Spirit seems to want me to be i still want my stories to be cool and good stories with that kind of character, you know? and would in general kind of freak out if things like the Gabes of the world turning out to be into me happened very frequently (though I'd buy them happening every now and then for strictly IC ways reasons that reflect who those people were all along and don't modify who they are or the way they act to achieve those effects, the world is vast and the genre is strong and it would be kind of hot)

He really wishes he could be typing rather than writing by hand. He assumes the notebook must have some magic to make sure that it can always understand the scrawl that he calls handwriting but it's a miracle it's taken him this long to outright make a mistake.

That's very reasonable of you! I think I can definitely alter the mind-affecting options you take to make sure they fit your narrative sensibilities that way. Just tell me which ones you want to change and I'll work it out and update the costs and descriptions accordingly!

i know i've said this before but: best notebook

alright time to actually read those options in more depth