Hello! Are you all right? I noticed you put me away very quickly so I shuffled out all my pages with writing on them just in case.

Thank you! I appeared in front of a mad scientist wizard lady and I was worried she'd ask how I got here and I didn't want her looking at you. But it turned out she was trying to summon someone at the same time so she wasn't surprised at all. (Does that usually happen, people appearing somewhere there was already a reason for a person to appear? It's pretty neat.)

It happens a fair amount! People often like that kind of story. I'm glad you're safe! ♡

Do you want to tell me about your crazy day?

I do, yeah. The mad scientist wizard was simultaneously skeevy and very nice, she gave me a ton of books I haven't had time to read yet and some magic items including a headband that makes it easier to hold a lot of information in my head at once (it's like the opposite of being groggy, I love it) and then teleported me to a cool fantasy-world city after explaining that it was about to be attacked by demons and I needed to warn them. I told the mayor(?) who was a dragon shapeshifted into a human and she said the demons were the mad scientist wizard's fault in the first place but I guess she got cold feet or something. I met a guy who was part angel and then we all got attacked by demons and it turns out Battle Maiden is--deeply weird but kind of amazing but also--it's complicated, more on that later. 

Anyway the giant bossfight demon showed up and I stabbed him and he dropped me and some other people into a cave and then closed it on top of us, which I guess is what happens if I fight someone I legitimately cannot survive against, is narrative causality making me stop trying. So Seelah and Anevia and Camellia (the other people I met who fell in the cave) went looking for a way out and found an entire underground city full of aliens! They're called Neathers and the ones we met were looking for an angel's lost magic sword, and I found out and it, liked me? and showed me a vision of the angel healing his friend and dying in battle which I am still not over apparently. Angels are really good.

But the reason the Neathers were looking for the sword was some of their kids had gotten lost in a maze of tunnels full of demons and demon-worshipping cultists and we had to go rescue them before the demons killed them or mind-controlled them. And we succeeded and got everyone home safe but I have killed people and helped people kill people and Iron Will is helping me not be messed up about it but I need to talk to someone who thinks of me as a kid from Iowa and not a fantasy protagonist.

Oh my goodness! That sounds so intense! I'm glad the kids are okay. I can't hug you because I don't have any arms so I'm going to draw you several hearts instead. ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

Thank you! ♡ Is it okay if I hug you?

Please do! Just try not to poke yourself with my corners, I can't do anything about them.

Hug hug hug. Alpina is uncomplicatedly kind and doesn't need anything from Brenda that it's effortful to give and Brenda appreciates this so much.

Thanks. Your corners weren't a problem at all. 

A lot of what's bothering me isn't even that I killed people, it's the lack of rules about when it's okay. That sounds looks really stupid written down. When I was waiting for the city to be attacked I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to fight or if I would just stand there being too scared to try, and then it turned out I could fight, and  that I was really good at it, which I guess I should have expected, but I didn't think in advance about how that meant I would be able to kill lots of demons and decide I was okay with that, I just did it. And then in the caves it felt like everyone had a set of norms where it's okay to kill people to save other people, or because they would kill you if they got the chance, or because they're awful (the cultists were pretty awful) or because they're demons and demons are supposedly always evil every time (it's not that I have any evidence against this it just sounds like something people who are wrong would say). And it's not that I disagree with any of those reasons exactly but I don't exactly agree with them either? I don't want to just start killing people because everyone around me thinks it's okay, or not kill people who it would be better to kill just because the society I grew up in, not even "thinks it's never okay to kill people", thinks fourteen-year-old girls should never have to decide that sort of thing. I want to do what I think is right but I don't know what that is.

That makes so much sense! I think this is a problem a lot of people have when they suddenly become much more powerful than they were before, and I hope it's all right to say that I really admire you for how much thought you're putting into it.

Do you think it would help if you had a list of questions more narrowly defined than "what is the right thing to do"? You mentioned not being sure whether demons are always evil; maybe you could make a note to look that up and see if you can find better information about it, and then it would be easier to decide how you feel about demons when you understand them better?

I should look that up, yeah. The vision from the angel's sword made him seem really kind and heroic, like--either like the best kind of human or truly good in a way that humans never are, I don't know enough about humans to say. So if Lariel was really like that, and if angels are all like that, then maybe demons are all the opposite and it makes sense to have a different rule for dealing with demons than with humans. But I am definitely imagining Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. looking at me sternly and saying "that's a lot of ifs". 

If I write to-dos like "TODO: [stuff]", can you copy all of them onto a to-do list page so I can see them all at once and check them off and stuff?

Absolutely, and I would love to! ♡

Thanks!

TODO: Research demon psychology, ideally including at least one source who doesn't hate demons

TODO: Figure out what my ethics are? And possibly also what's legal in Mendev

TODO: Read all the books in my bag of holding

TODO: See how feasible it would be to translate my textbooks into a local language

TODO: Get a wizardry teacher

Also, I still want to use Dragon Fairy Elf Witch to become part notebook. It won't be my first one--I copied Terendelev to get a healing spell to help Anevia, she got caught in a cave-in--but I'm excited.

I'm excited too! ✨

Alpina is such a good friend. She writes

Okay, here goes!

And then discovers her notebook heritage.

This is really cool!! I can make ink appear and disappear and move around on myself and sense where it is! Also it doesn't need hand-eye coordination so I'm way better at drawing things from memory. It's really neat knowing what it feels like to you to have ink on you. I'm going to use this for maps and helping with mental math and possibly keeping sneaky notes of which face goes with which name and maybe cool tattoos if I have any cool tattoo ideas.

✨ Oh I'm so glad! ✨

Can I make what might be a silly request? Can you write something on your hand and press your hand against my page so I can see it? I just think that would be really neat. ✨

That does sound neat! Here's my hand!

Her handwriting with a pencil is pretty middling; with her new power it's much neater, almost but not quite computer-font perfect.

It is very silly of me to write "eee" when I have never been able to make sounds, but, that said: ✨eeee✨eeee!✨

All words are representing sounds so I think eeee is a perfectly reasonable word! Also you are adorable and I'm so glad we're friends.

Whoops turns out when you're appearing words on your hand it's easier to say things without thinking them over first, but whatever, it's the truth.

Alpina draws excited little hearts right under the sentence in question, and it turns out Brenda can perceive that directly with her notebook senses, a not-quite-visual impression of the exact arrangement of colour and material pressed against her surface.

! I can read your hearts with my hand! That's so cool. And it means we can have conversations while you're in my pocket if I'm worried about taking you out for some reason!

(Also she can legibly italicize now and that's awesome.)

Ooh, italics! Fancy!

(Am I going too fast for you?)

Nope, you're good!

My turn to ask for something kind of weird--can you transcribe the things I say like this so we have both sides of the conversation recorded for later? 

Of course! ♡

Awesome! I don't seem to have your ability to hide stuff and then take it out again exactly except by remembering it, or perhaps it's better to say we can both only store stuff in the amount of surface we have plus the amount of memory we have and you have more of them. I do seem to have an unusually good memory for things I've perceived with my writingsense, though!

She is absolutely not going to mention the possibility of storing information in her large intestine. Or think about it until she has to store something too long to memorize and extremely secret.