fortunately for me I actually find narratives that break or lean against the fourth wall like that a lot of fun

Hello, audience, he is looking straight at you right now. He has no idea what format he's in but rest assured that he is looking directly at you. He hopes you're enjoying his little rollercoaster ride.

Anywho he'll check that box and now he's at 68.

Then I'm glad you get the chance to explore them!

Alright, so, last drawback: Realism.

Name: Realism - Grants: +20 ☐
Give up your metanarrative protection. Although your individually selected powers still work as described, the invisible synergies that protect you from, say, gaining violent stalkers through Mysterious Allure or being genuinely traumatized by your Tragic Backstory are removed. Additionally, though effects like I Can Fix Them still operate, they may take considerably more effort, care, thought, and narrative investment on your part.

...

Okay so it's, like, They'll Know but on steroids.

No. He likes the metanarrative. He does not want this. He's gotten all hyped up for being in a story, he does not want to just go into real life but with superpowers. Stories are cool, and furthermore better than real life along many axes especially if it's stories he'll be happy to be in. And, thankfully, he does not need twenty extra points.

okay I think for the moment I've made the choices I wanted to make,

He's such a liar.

and so I'll take a break for now and then read over my choices later to make sure I'm okay with them and probably come up with more questions and stuff

what happens afterwards, though? like, once I actually check all the boxes and go with them, what's the process transition between real life and story life like?

That depends on which Destination you choose! The Spirit will grant you the powers you chose, and then if you're leaving the world you'll disappear, and if not, you'll stay. I'm told being touched by the Spirit looks kind of like a magical girl transformation sequence but I've never seen a magical girl transformation sequence because I am a notebook, so it's hard to say how accurate that is.

if I stay here, will I still have a magical girl transformation sequence? will events on this Earth start to follow narrative logic rather than regular causality?

if I go, are "Narnia" arrangements possible, in which I have whatever story I am going to have next and then return to the same time and place I left?

what happens if I disappear in a way that people can study, such as in a laboratory of some kind where people can measure my weight as I do? in the sense that, do I get replaced by a similar mass of air minus the dissipated energy from the emited photons or do I form a vacuum, and what kinds of readings would instruments such as detectors for various kinds of radiation read

actually that last question is a bit too specific, what I mean more is that usually when completely exceptional phenomena uh

sorry, let me try to figure out how to phrase what i want to phrase

Yes, if you stay, you'll be living a story just as much as you would be if you left!

The Narnia arrangement won't happen by default, but you could end up with something like it if you found a way of moving between worlds that pauses ones you aren't in. There are plenty of ways like that!

So the thing is, there's a genre of story in which something impossible happens and that's the window into a whole new world of impossibilities. And the thing Peter had wanted to say was something like, in real life when something impossible happens then people notice it and study it and learn new things about the world but—that's still story logic, actually. In real life impossible things don't happen, that experiment at the LHC that suggested FTL neutrinos was just a measurement error, people barely look into claims of miracles and magic anymore because they know there's nothing there.

(What kind of Christian was he, thinking like that about miracles? Why did he think God existed, if he was sure he'd never see any sign of Him?)

He's in a story already. What's happening here, with the notebook, that's not, that doesn't happen in reality. He's not sure if he's always been in a story or if he's just been cloned into one or, or what, but the point where his story started was when the notebook greeted him, it's not waiting for him to finalize his allocation of points. If he puts the notebook away now and never thinks about this again that's the story, but it won't make him not be in a story, it won't take him back to reality.

There isn't an answer to the question of what people would see, measure, detect, if they were inclined to do so while looking at his magical girl transformation in real life because this wouldn't happen in real life, and in story logic whatever happens will be a story kind of thing to happen.

And he kind of suspects that... since he's the apparent protagonist of this story... then what will really determine what would happen if someone were measuring the weight of a sealed room with him in it before he teleported... depends on the stories he enjoys. The narrative he'd want to be in. Or something along those lines. He thinks.

The story in which people look into the disappearance of Peter Tarleton and discover a realm of magic and mystery is just as valid as the story where that's the only evidence this universe will ever see of something more is just as valid as the story where there's no answer to the question of what happens here because the protagonist didn't really think about it in those terms so it never really made any difference to the story.

Peter has no idea if that all made any sense and he kind of hopes he's not in a written medium because it would be really embarrassing to have a bunch of thoughts like these in a way that lets people go back and reread them and pick them apart. He's sorry for the inconsistencies and assumptions, okay, audience? He's trying to think things through here.

I had a thought few thoughts about the nature of reality that I want to sanity check with you in some detail probably

might need to take another break soon because I don't know if I'll have enough time to go into it before the end of class

but the first question is, I'm already in a story, right? in a meaningful sense, in a way that's not the same way I could be said to have been in a story before I started talking to you, that is

The way I usually think about it, everyone is in stories all the time. People love writing stories, and love narrativizing their own lives, and across the unfathomably wide span of the multiverse it usually turns out that every story is true somewhere and every life touches someone's story, and I think that's beautiful. But it's true that something dramatic and magical just happened to you that would make an especially good start to a story focused on ✨you✨, so most of the stories about your life probably start with you picking me up! Well, maybe with a few establishing shots beforehand.

...unfathomably wide span of the multiverse...

so this may be a bit late in the story but how unfathomable are we speaking here?

because there's unfathomable and there's unfathomable, right, and if we're talking "so unfathomable that every story is true and everyone is a story somewhere" then that is very unfathomable

I think it's probably possible to find stories that aren't true somewhere, and maybe possible to find people who aren't a story somewhere, but hard to be sure either way. The span of the multiverse is very very unfathomable! It's because there are lots and lots of different ways that different worlds can be organized relative to each other, and no good way to organize all the ways of organizing them, so no matter where you start or which ways of traveling between worlds you use, there are always a lot of worlds that are just too far away for you to ever reach.

which stories aren't true somewhere? what would that look like? ...I guess now that I think about it if you could tell me their story then that would mean they must no actually that logic doesn't follow

it's just, the only real numbers are zero and one and infinity, right? either nothing exists, or one universe exists, or all of them exist, but it seems wild that some of them exist but some don't

and if every universe exists then why am I in this universe and not some other universe? how can you tell what comes next

...he pauses, tapping the corner of the notebook with his pen as he thinks about how to phrase this question...

when everything is possible? how does causality even work that way?

Please bear with me, this can be a little difficult to explain...

If it were really true that every possible way for things to turn out from every possible starting point, and all the possible ways for all those possible worlds to interact based on all their possible ways of traveling between each other, was all true somewhere, that would be... sort of the same thing as nothing being true, or sort of the same thing as there being only one possible way for things to work? Because the way for things to work would be "everything".

Instead there are lots and lots and lots of different possible ways for things to work and they are mostly all true somewhere. So there are worlds out there where, from their specific starting point, under their specific system, every possible outcome happens somewhere within the flower of that reality. Mostly other worlds don't interact with those ones because interacting with them is a big mess. But in some places they do! And in some places it's not even possible to find one of those worlds no matter how hard you look. And in some places worlds are organized haphazardly so all the ones that have dimensional transit systems can find all the other ones if they know where to look, and in some places worlds are organized into a net of specific connections and if two worlds aren't connected you can't get between them without hopping around the net between connected worlds. But sometimes it's possible to move between those kinds of regions, and then things get really weird.

The reason why I say things like "it's probably possible, but hard to be sure" when I'm talking about finding out what is and isn't true in the whole entire multiverse is that the whole entire multiverse is too big for anyone to really know what's going on in the parts of it that are far away from them. Even the Spirit, which I think is better at reaching distant worlds than almost anything, isn't good enough at reaching distant worlds to find them all. There are just too many different ways for worlds to be, and ways for them to relate to each other, and ways for different ways of worlds relating to each other to relate to each other, all heaped up together in no kind of sensible order at all. But that's not the same thing as everything being true at once. If everything is true at once, it's happening on a scale so big that even the Spirit doesn't know about it, so you probably don't have to worry about what it means for how you can tell what's going to happen next.

That's... he feels both reassured and not. The fundamental nature of reality is such that he can still predict things based on the past; but on the other hand, he can't help but feel that this meta multiversal logic is one way things could work and it follows from itself that there could be other ways for it to work...

This is confusing and he really doesn't know that he understands.

where am I, really? like, this me, the me writing on this notebook right now, I've been thinking of myself as a story being in a story but that can't be what's happening because stories are just ink on paper, they may be about something that's really happening somewhere but there's a somewhere where they're really happening and that somewhere isn't the ink on the paper

Because actually fancy fourth-wall leanings aside he can't really be in a story in a fundamental sense. Sure, if the vast multiverse is such that someone is writing a story about him, then yeah that's a sense in which he's in a story but there's still a him there having thoughts and perceiving the world and, and. He doesn't know how to think about any of this.

sorry I thought I was done with the existential freakout earlier but I guess I wasn't

You're really here and really in this world having these experiences! And it might also be true that someone somewhere is writing a story about you, or making a movie, or something like that. Maybe someday you'll find a world where you can read that book or watch that movie. But that doesn't have to mean that you "are" the ink on the page; you're still you, and your choices and experiences are still as real as they've always been. You are the somewhere where the story is really happening, and for you the "really happening" part is much more relevant than the "story" part, even though the "story" part is much more relevant to you now than it ever is to most people. And there might not even be a book or a movie exactly; the story level might just be happening inside your own narrativization of your experiences, or in the Spirit's perception of you, or something like that.

It makes sense that you're still having trouble! You can take your time to think things through and get used to the idea. I would offer you a hug but I am a notebook. You can hug me anyway but I'm told the corners detract from the experience.

but the Spirit is still very definitely changing my life into in ways that make it more like a story, and

"Pete?"

He doesn't quite shriek but he jumps and slams the notebook shut as fast as if he'd been drawing porn in public. "Uh, hi, Jess," he says, heart racing and voice unsteady in a way he's very sure is incredibly noticeable.

"...is everything okay?" she asks, looking around and the classroom that is now empty except for herself, her friend Anna, and Peter.

"Bet you he was writing smut," Anna says with a smirk.

Jessica blushes. "It's none of our business if he is."

"He was distracted all class."

"Um, no. I, uh," entirely failed to notice the bell and everyone leaving. "...something kinda personal and important happened and I've been, uh, journaling to process it before I have to deal with it."

"...oh, shit. Sorry."

"And that's why you don't make that kind of dumb joke," says Jessica primly. Then she softens and looks at Peter again. "Any way we can help?"

"It's really not that kind of thing. I'll be fine? It's—overall good? Just a lot. And very hard to talk about and personal and I needed some time to digest it and figure it out and..."