A moment later, in a glittery ink decidedly unlike what Alyssa used:

Wow, that's one of those every-letter sentences!

Yes.

Let me try! ✨

A pause, during which the sparkles wax and wane.

Quietly placating, withholding firm rejection, my brazen example skews even.

That's pretty good!  I haven't seen that one before.

Thank you! 😊 I made it up myself. Yours is tidier, though…

(The smiley face wiggles a little.)

I've practiced a lot.

Who are you?

If the notebook could vibrate with excitement, it probably would. It can't, though, so the most prominent sign of excitement is the speed with which the following words write themselves:

I'm an avatar of the Spirit of Youthful Femininity! Well, I'm more of a messenger, really, since I'm not personally part of the Spirit. But I can speak for it just fine! And do some of its work!

. . . Alyssa locates the sparkliest washi tape from the organizer at the corner of her desk (purple, transluent with starlike metallic flecks), extends a segment about five inches long, detaches it using the built-in sharp edge, and uses it to underline the notebook's previous statement.  In lieu of an immediate written response.

The pause this time is about twice as long as the notebook took to compose the pangram, without any dancing sparkles.

Oh dear, was any of that unclear? Or did you just want to underline?

It's a lot to think about.  Don't you like washi tape?

Also it's probably very important to find out - "Can you hear me?"  She speaks at a low conversational volume, not enough that any of her family members will hear through her closed door, but above a whisper.

I don't think I knew what that was until just now! But it's very pretty. Thank you for showing me! ✨😊✨

The sparkles dance; the smiley wiggles. This motion continues uninterrupted while she speaks and after she finishes.

That's either very relieving or some amount of scary.

You're welcome!

(A heart would be too much but she can make the stroke of the exclamation mark as a tall and narrow four-pointed sparkle and the dot a little twinkly cross.)

What's your name?

The sparkles wiggle even more enthusiastically at the special exclamation point.

Most messengers of the Spirit don't have names. What's yours?

You don't know already?

She closes the notebook, keeping one hand inside to mark the page, and traces her name on the front with a fingernail.  Then reopens it.

No, I just know that

The writing stops when she traces the cover.

Oh! Your name is Alyssa? Was that written on my cover? I'm not really directly aware of things that aren't written in me… or on me, I suppose, or the washi tape!

There's an obvious next - wait a second.

On your cover?

Yeah, the notebook you're writing in! I dunno if it really counts as my body, or if I have one, but it's the way that I can interface with the physical world, so I guess in a sense I do and it is! It's easiest to talk as though it's part of me, though, so that's what I do.

Oh, I'm sorry!  I thought you were someone with a body like mine who was talking to me through you.  I'll be more careful with you from now on.

May I try something with your cover again?

That's really thoughtful of you! 😊 For what it's worth, I don't experience anything that happens to this notebook as unpleasant and I'm pretty sure it's impossible for anything really bad to happen to me. But I'm touched anyway!

Feel free to try whatever you'd like! I'll tell you whatever I notice about it.

That's good.

Reclose, fingerwrite 'Reynolds' guidelessly beneath the printed 'Alyssa', reopen.

Basically as soon as she's finished tracing:

I got that! "Reynolds," right? I think I noticed it even better than "Alyssa," probably because now I know that writing on my cover is a thing that can happen.

You're right!

'Can you read this?' Alyssa fingerwrites on the regular page.  Mostly in print but with the last word in cursive.

… Yes, but I think that I won't remember things that are traced as well as things that are written. I can definitely try, though!

Alyssa dutifully rewrites it in ink (with a parenthetical 'originally written w/ finger' in a still-neat but faster, looser font and a curved arrow pointing to the spot above the notebook's last comment).

What sort of work do you do?

Again, the notebook can't physically perk up, but there's an eagerness to the next text to appear.

I communicate the will of the Spirit of Youthful Femininity! The Spirit wants girls to be beautiful and special and powerful, like Sailor Moon or Elsa or Marceline the Vampire Queen, but there's only so much it can do as far as making that happen in a literal rather than imaginary sense. So whenever someone exists who would make especially good use of the Spirit's gifts, it sends messengers like me to offer those gifts and guide them – well, you – through the process of becoming as beautiful and special and powerful as they (you) want to be.

Really?  What makes me especially good for this?

Hmmm… I don’t know exactly, since I’m not the Spirit, but my feeling is that some things that make someone a good candidate are creativity, openness to experiencing lots of new and interesting things, being in some beautiful and mysterious way aligned with the Spirit, wanting very badly to be beautiful or special or powerful, not knowing to want these things but having the potential to want them… really, there are probably more reasons than can be counted!

Another pause.

If you had to guess, what would ✨ you ✨ think makes you good for this? You seem really smart and clever and good at thinking of new kinds of things.

You flatter me!

Being powerful, special, and beautiful does sound like something I would enjoy.

I'm glad!

So, for every person chosen by the Spirit, there's a certain amount of power that can be used to grant them magic and a list of options that I've been given that describe a lot of the things that the Spirit likes. A good way of abstracting this is… let's say that you have 70 "points" and each option either costs points, to represent how much magic it uses up, or grants points, to represent ways that you can stretch the magic a little farther.

Do you want to see all your options now, or only a few of them at a time, or something else?

I think a few of them at a time, please.

Okay! You can check or uncheck any option at any time and I'll keep track of how many points we have to work with.

The text of the options is in subtly different "handwriting" than what the notebook has been previously using – it looks more like a typeface than something that would be written by hand. In the top corner of the relevant page, 0/70 appears in the same "font."

All powers are offered under an aegis of metanarrative protection. Any time 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.

The first few options pertain to your destination. Unlike other options, they cost zero points and are mutually exclusive with each other:

Stay Put ☐
Cost: 0
You're just going to take these powers and keep on keeping on right where you are.

Somewhere In Mind ☐
Cost: 0
You have a destination you want to go to. You can choose any place, real, historical, fictional, or made up in your own head right now, and the Spirit will take you there. After that, you're on your own as far as further interdimensional travel.

Wherever You Go, There You Are ☐
Cost: 0
Trust to the will of the Spirit and let it take you where you need to go. It will look at far more options than you could ever know about, and pick something that's likely to be even better for you than whatever you would have chosen on your own.

Back to the first handwriting:

Okay, those are the first three. You don't have to decide anything right away. Once you're ready, I can start listing the other options in groups of four to six if that sounds like a good pace to you.

Four to six sounds nice, thank you.

she writes immediately.  And then she holds her pen just off the page, poised to keep going.

. . . . But it's going to take her a moment to process that enough to think of something to say next.  Apparently.

The notebook can't actually tell the difference!

Okay, here's the first five! The first twenty-seven options all pertain to yourself – that is, they don't directly affect others or the world around you, though some of them will grant abilities that you could use to affect others or the world around you.

A Thousand Ships ☐
Cost: 1
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.

What's In A Name ☐
Cost: 1
Magic to divine true names will accept whatever alias you choose to think of as your true name. Magic to use your true name against you will fail.

Angelic Tones ☐
Cost: 2
Your voice is supernaturally beautiful and you can sing in any vocal range.

Emerald Orbs ☐
Cost: 2
At all times, your eyes are exactly the right color. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. Your eyes can be ANY color this way. Lightless black voids? Brilliant white stars? Limpid pools of endless sapphire? They will look exactly the way you'd want them to look if you were writing about this exact moment of your life.

Perfect Hair ☐
Cost: 2
At all times, you have exactly the right hairstyle. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It is not limited to physically or logistically plausible hairstyles.

This set is honestly much more in line with what she was expecting.  She'll circle back to the one with staggeringly vast implications later.

Your ink is so interesting.  Can you mark things for me and be able to erase them later?  Or can you edit things I've written?

Thank you! ✨✨✨

The sparkles dance for a moment, which Alyssa may be able to recognize as the notebook entity taking a moment to think.

I can definitely check boxes, if that's what you mean by "mark things for me," and uncheck them, again if that's what you mean by "erase them later!" I didn't know until just now that I could copy things you write to quote them, so let me see if I can edit them…

Another moment passes. Slowly, the text on the page starts to wriggle around. It can compress itself, making the exchange take up much less space, or do the opposite, making the exchange sprawl across a spread. The notebook also seems to be able to increase or decrease the metaphorical font size of anything written. It returns everything to how it initially was.

It looks like I can move anything written in me around, but I can't edit the content of it, even if it's something I wrote myself. I also can't rearrange anything to make it look like we had a different conversation than we actually did! I do know that, even if we spent a very long time writing back and forth, I'd never run out of physical pages, which does mean moving written-on pages into a sort of memory storage rather than instantiating them physically, although if you ever needed to access stored pages you could. Oh, and I can make text and doodles move around if I'm excited!

That's very good to know!

I'm going to check things like this

(she fingerdraws a check next to A Thousand Ships)

and mark interest with dots.

(she longpresses the box for Emerald Orbs).

Can you please keep track of my totals separately for just the checks and then for both together?

A check and a dot appear in the relevant boxes, as does a new total beneath 1/70: (3/70).

How's this?

That's great!

She checks Angelic Tones and dots Perfect Hair as well.

May I see the next batch?

The tallies tick up! 3/70, (7/70).

Coming right up!

Size Difference ☐
Cost: 2
At all times, you are exactly the right height. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It will usually keep any height changes fairly subtle, but at dramatic moments you might discover yourself able to shrink to the size of a bee or grow to the size of a giant.

Dressing Room ☐
Cost: 3
No matter how ridiculous your outfit, it will stay pristine and perfect, unless it would be more dramatic for you to be artfully bedraggled. You can use any quiet moment to yourself to quick-change your clothes, shoes, nails, and hairstyle into a completely new look. (You cannot change your hair length or color this way without Perfect Hair, but you can braid or style it.)

Personal Hygiene ☐
Cost: 1
You are always clean and fresh, never needing to use a bath or toilet.

Like Roses  ☐
(requires Personal Hygiene)
Cost: 1
You smell lovely. Your scent is unique to you, and may involve any combination of warm spices, floral notes, petrichor, or other things you think smell good. You do not need any justification for why you smell like this.

Alyssa ticks Dressing Room and Personal Hygiene and dots the other two.

Like Roses sounds like it could be a little boring but could also be very interesting.  Do you know how it works in more detail?  Does it let one change her signature scent?

7/70, (14/70)

Hmm… I'm not sure how it works mechanically speaking past the part where it's magic!

A pause while the notebook thinks.

I think that's the case for all the powers, actually. If you have an explanation for how you want the powers to work, that explanation applies, but the powers aren't diminished any if you don't happen to think of one or if you change your mind later about the explanation!

You can definitely change your signature scent, though, same as with all the other options that have to do with your appearance or presentation! You don't have to consciously do it, either, though you definitely can if you want to.

Could I make myself smell different to different people?

And - hmm, probably worth it . . .

And do you have any demonstration of magic available?  Besides yourself, of course, but for all I know you could be the e-ink of the future!

Those are both really good questions!

The notebook goes quiet for a moment – even the dancing sparkles seem distracted.

The first thing I wanted to say about smelling different to different people is "I don't see why not," but I'm pretty sure that the default state of the powers that affect yourself is that your body will be in only one "state" at a time. Then again, I bet that you could define your personal scent as being whatever smells nicest to whoever is smelling it, or as being especially appealing to your friends or people you would want to be your friends as opposed to strangers! You could even do something where the way you smell doesn't technically change, but people's perceptions of it might vary! There's an herb called cilantro that tastes fresh and herbaceous to some people and like soap to others, for example, so you could probably decide that different people have different capacities as far as detecting individual notes of your scent… if you wanted to have fine control over that, though, it would probably require a Power of Friendship power. I don't have anything that in my list, but I bet I could whip one up and calculate its point value if you wanted! Although I should mention that if you did want to smell like cilantro to everyone, then people who have the gene that makes real cilantro taste like soap would still be able to appreciate your scent the way you intended.

The sparkles get a little more excited again, but only for a moment.

As for your other question… I'm really not sure, even after thinking about it! My capabilities are pretty precisely specified – I can talk to you and keep track of your points and shuffle my pages around as needs be, and of course once you're completely sure you've made the choices you want I'll act as a conduit for the Spirit to grant you all the correct powers. Do you have any kinds of tests in mind that I can try?

The details you gave are exactly the sort of thing I was wondering; thank you.  I have an idea for a test; I'll be right back.

She ducks down to the kitchen, makes some unavoidable small talk with her father, and returns to her desk with the kitchen scale in hand a few minutes later.

If I put some bulky stickers in you and you can shuffle those around in various ways I'd take that as evidence of magic.  Depending on the shuffling.

I can definitely do that! Just let me know how and when.

Oh good.  She has a ton of stickers that she doesn't have other uses for left over on sheets which had ones she did in a box on her bookshelf.  She fetches it, flips to a new spread, and starts laying down puffy butterflies and hearts and bunnies and fish across both pages.  Then she flips back to the last writing page and lays the notebook open on the scale.

The notebook doesn't say anything and very bravely refrains from adding cute outlines or complementary doodles or similar around the stickers! It also doesn't shuffle any pages around, so the stickers are definitely contributing to its weight right now.

She writes down the weight in a completely different notebook.

Okay, please shuffle away as many pages as you can.

Her handwriting suffers somewhat from trying not to press too hard on the page (and therefore the scale).

No comment on the handwriting. Once her hand is up and safely away the page autonomously flips over to a blank page as though caught in a breeze. There's a brief sound akin to someone flipping through all the pages very quickly with their thumb and then the notebook is still.

It's lighter by a little more than the weight of the stickers, actually, and a careful eye might find it to be thinner than before.

Her eyes are being so careful!  Also wow the page flipping is pretty convincing on its own, at least as evidence against her best guess for how a mechanism being used to trick her would work.

But she's pretty sure changing something's weight would take more tricking than she can reasonably expect to outsmart (or not be outsmarted by) on this much information, so her best choice is definitely to keep playing along.  And the height of the stickers was making a very obvious gap between the relevant pages which is no longer there . . .  She writes down the new weight next to the old and de-scales the notebook.

That's pretty convincing!  Thanks for humoring me.

I'm glad that the test worked! Do you want the pages we were using back?

Yes please.

Flip flip flip!

Okay, all done. If you'd like I can move this exchange to where we left off!

Either way.  May I see the next set?

It decides to do that. Yay, tidiness!

And now it's time for the next options:

Just A Little Longer ☐
Cost: 1
If you push yourself, you can keep doing any task or working on any project indefinitely, visibly strained but never impaired by injury or fatigue. As soon as you stop, you'll collapse with exhaustion and sleep for up to a full day to regain your strength. This only works when what you're doing is personally important to you.

Immunity System ☐
Cost: 3
You can't get sick or poisoned. You can still use recreational drugs and alcohol normally, but can't overdose.

My Ears Are Burning ☐
Cost: 6
You always know exactly what people are thinking, as long as it's about you. This effect is not telepathy and is not blocked by effects that block telepathy. It applies even to people you can't perceive normally. You are never impaired by the flood of information.

Well Endowed ☐
Cost: 1
You have a generous figure, whether that's a classic hourglass or more of a well-rounded look; you can choose the details. Your endowments maintain a state of perfect grace and beauty at all times, never troubling you with uncomfortable bounces or uninvited jiggles.

Hollow Leg ☐
Cost: 1
(Requires Well Endowed)
Regardless of your diet and exercise habits, your body maintains the physique and silhouette you prefer. Lack of visible muscle never impairs your strength or endurance. As your preferences change, so will your body; you are no longer bound to the generous figure stipulated by Well Endowed.

Inner Strength ☐
Cost: 3
(Requires Hollow Leg)
You are implausibly, superhumanly strong, with endurance and toughness to match. You might have to strain a little to lift and carry at the same level as construction equipment, or deal with lightly scraped knuckles if you punch as hard as a battering ram.

So I need Well Endowed to get Hollow Leg, but Hollow Leg lets me be not Well Endowed?  Do you know why it works like that?  Or am I misunderstanding.

That's right! I don't know if I know exactly why, but the way I understand it…

In general, options that grant more flexibility are more expensive than options that grant less flexibility. None of the options will lock you into one thing forever that you can't change your mind on, of course, but for instance A Thousand Ships on its own can't change your eye color nearly as much as Emerald Orbs can. I would guess that Well Endowed is a prerequisite to Hollow Leg because Hollow Leg is a bit of a variation on the same theme as Well Endowed that offers more flexibility. I don't know why Well Endowed is the default, though — maybe the Spirit can sense enough girls hoping for it that it wanted the option to be immediately on the table?

Oh, I see.

She idly fingerchecks Immunity System while she thinks for a moment.

How many options are there in total?  How quickly am I running out of points for this first round so far?

The totals update: 10/70, (17/70)

Including the three Destinations, there are seventy-eight default options. As I mentioned earlier and am including here for tidiness, this first section has twenty-seven, which means there are twelve I haven't shown you yet. Then there are thirty-six that affect other people and twelve drawbacks that give you a little more points to work with. And then…

Adding up the point values for the sections individually, taking all the Yourself options would cost 60 points and all the Power of Friendship options 116 points. Taking every Drawback would gain you 60 points.

You're so helpful, thanks!

Different notebook.

 3  | 0       0
27 | 60    ~2
36 | 116  ~3
     |
12 | -60   -5

Total 176 (116)

So far she's refrained from marking interest in exactly one option, which isn't sustainable, numerically, and isn't likely to be very useful even for a first pass.

Back to the magic, personable notebook.

Would you mind adding a few more symbols for me?  I'm thinking stars for options I'm fairly sure I'll want and question marks for ones I want to ask you more about later.

That should be doable! Do you just want me to mark them for later reference, or do you want me to also track them in the corner? And are there any options that you want to change from what they are now?

Let's track just stars and checks for now.  And yes please!

Alyssa unclicks her pen and uses it to inklessly star Personal Hygiene and Immunity System.  What's In A Name, Just A Little Longer, and My Ears Are Burning get invisible question marks.  Checks for Well Endowed and Hollow Leg, and a circle for Inner Strength.

Okay, let's see…

The totals update yet again, to ☆ 4/70 and 12/70.

Does this about match what you were thinking?

Yes, thank you very much.  May I see the next set?

Battle Angel ☐
Cost: 1
Somehow, you never get significantly injured in a fight, unless it's a very dramatic and plot-relevant fight in which case you might be glamorously wounded and pick up a cool new scar.

Battle Demon ☐
Cost: 1
You have an unerring intuition for gaps in an opponent's defenses, though it may be beyond your power to exploit them.

Battle Maiden ☐
Cost: 3
(Requires Battle Angel and Battle Demon)
No matter what kind of fight you're getting in, you're always a match for even the most skilled opponent.

Making Ends Meet ☐
Cost: 1
You have enough money to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. It comes from a source you don't have to pay much attention to, like a job with almost no responsibilities, a large inheritance, or a noble title.

Motherlode ☐
Cost: 2
(Requires Making Ends Meet)
You have enough money to sustain a fairly extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't come from anywhere, you just have it.

Four Star Daydream ☐
Cost: 4
(Requires Motherlode)
The answer to "can I afford that" is "yes."

Ooh.  Oooh.

What counts as a fight, exactly?

Um, a non-staged physical combat situation. There's a little fuzziness around all those edges, though. Stuff like fencing or jousting can count, for instance, especially if there's stakes you care a lot about, and magical combat that doesn't involve your physical body can count too. It mostly depends on how the participants view it. Do you have any edge cases in mind?

Not really,

she lies.

but I didn't previously consider myself to have gotten into any fights, and now I wonder if anything counts for this, or if I'm just expected to get into a lot more of them once I have this magic.

It depends a lot on what you think would make a good story, if you were writing one about your life. There are lots of people who don't get into fights before getting their powers who then go on to have superhero-style adventures, for example. Or the kind of adventures that a tabletop roleplaying game character would have.

I'll have to think on that, then.

She checks all of these options except for Making Ends Meet which she stars.

Definitely!

And now the totals read ☆ 5/70 and 24/70.