I'm glad to be able to include you! ♥

And she enjoys the party.

She shows the notebook pictures of people dancing, of people firejuggling, of people laughing together over pastries.

The pastries are made with squid ink! (Not from real squids) (I guess just ink, really)

She shows the head organizer for retrograde simulation projects giving a tearful speech, her fist raised above her head in exhortation.

She shows two people arguing about re-breather designs, tracing glowing lines on the air between them.

Eventually, she has had enough, and retires to one of the little private balconies overlooking the main hall. She curls up on the couch and pulls the notebook out again.

Talking to people -- I just realized, I never asked you for your name. I'm Weeping Cherry. What should I call you? I've just been referring to you as "the notebook".

I don't usually need a name; I'm the only talking notebook most people ever meet. Sometimes I choose a name with someone, as a way of being special to each other, but it's always choosing a new name for that person and that moment, and usually because they've asked if I want to accompany them on their adventures and I've said yes. I think if you just want to call me "the notebook" that seems fine.

She blinks in surprise and flips back to check something the notebook said earlier.

You told me that I couldn't take people with me -- was that a simplification, or do you sometimes give powers out under different rules?

She puts a little star next to what the notebook said.

And, what do you want to happen once I've chosen my powers? I was assuming that you'd either disappear or just stick around being a citizen of the Fixipelago somewhere and do what you enjoy -- read books or help people discover their femininity or find a new person to offer powers to or whatever else takes your fancy.

But if you prefer to accompany me on my adventure, I'd be happy to have you along -- it would probably be a lot less safe for you than staying here, although I don't know what the Spirit has set up to protect you.

I'm an exception to the inability to take anyone with you because there's a sense in which I'm part of the Spirit's power. And a sense in which I'm luggage. Normally after helping someone I essentially vanish, though the me that helped that person is still part of my greater self, it's not like I stop existing.

I don't mind a little danger, but I do want to be sure that you're asking me to accompany you because you want me to accompany you, not just because you think it's important to let me have options? The thing I like about accompanying people is mostly the personal connection, and I think you're pretty neat but it's hard for me to tell what you think of me on a personal level because it seems like a lot of what you're doing that comes across to me as really nice and thoughtful seems to you like it's just basic decency.

Weeping Cherry takes a moment to stare out at the dancers and collect her thoughts.

I did offer that to you because I believe that it's important that you have options, and not because of any personal connection. I think that everyone deserves to have options.

And

I feel a bit like I should apologize for not forming a personal connection with you, but I can't actually apologize for that. I do apologize for spending more time focused on the powers you can grant and the metaphysics information you can supply than on getting to know you as a person.

The fact that the basic common decency of treating you like a person who can make their own choices and deserves the same things that every other member of society gets strikes you as particularly nice is ... sad. I wish that the other people you've met had had enough resources and enough time to grow and heal that they could afford to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.

She wipes away a tear.

We do have time, though. To get to know each other as people, if you'd like that, I mean.

 

Do you want to tell me what you thought of the book? I recommended it because I still have very fond memories of reading it as a child.

You don't need to apologize for not forming a personal connection with me, or for not trying to get to know me! Helping people like you choose their powers is my job and I'm very proud of my work. I don't need to have a personal connection with everyone I help. I do like to, when I have the opportunity, but it's not at all something I need or something anyone should feel bad about not offering.

I think that a lot of people, apart from not having the right mindset to think of me as an alien visitor who needs help, also just don't have the ability to offer me the same things you can, like money of my own or more ways to perceive and interact with the world around me. And I'm glad that I get to meet those people and help them, even though—maybe especially because!—they live in societies that aren't as advanced as yours, where it's much much harder to do things like that.

I really liked the Circle of Magic books! A lot of things described in books are pretty hard for me to relate to but these ones did a really good job of putting the characters and their situations on the page vividly enough for me to understand. I like the characters, especially the four friends and their mentors. I like the exciting parts and the comfy parts and the balance between them. I think one of my favourite things in a story is when it has a good balance of exciting parts where lots of scary things are happening, and comfy parts where everyone is okay and the story gets to breathe. (It's not my most favourite thing, though, my most favourite thing is when after all the exciting parts are over everyone is okay and gets to rest and be happy knowing they solved the problems they were having and now things are good again.)

Re: people living less advanced places: That's what I meant about wishing that everybody you met had enough resources. I don't think I quite said it right. I agree that it's good you still get to meet those people, though.

 

Re: the Circle of Magic books: I think my favorite thing about the books was how well the magic system is ~personalized to the characters? Like, there are lots of vaguely elemental magic systems, but I feel like the books did a really good job of describing how the characters' personalities impacted how they thought about and manipulated their magic, which was tied to why each element was right for them?

And especially Sandry spinning their magic together to make them all strong enough to survive was really evocative! I had such a visceral feeling of the magic the first time I read that scene.

Yes, that was done really well! I loved all the descriptions of the magic because it was so hands-on. It really made me feel like I understood how it works and feels to manipulate the world around you with touch and magic, and what it's like to do things like crafts and gardening that succeed or fail based on how well you accomplish them with your hands. I don't want to live that kind of lifestyle myself, but I appreciated getting to hear about it and understand what it's like!

Oh! You know -- that completely hadn't occurred to me. That you wouldn't have experience with doing at least a little crafting, I mean. I'm glad the book was able to let you experience that vicariously; I think making art using various crafts is a very common thing for people to enjoy.

Have you ever tried doing any visual art? Painting, or calligraphy, or scrapbooking maybe?

... actually, can you use arbitrary inks to draw in yourself? I've seen you use the printed ink for the list, and this gel pen ink for your writing. Do you have others?

I can do lots of inks! This is a little embarrassing to admit, though, but I'm not very good at drawing. I like my results when I do visual design, like the formatting in the list, but I think being good at drawing requires someone to have seen more things than me. I haven't seen very many things at all.

That makes sense -- although you might still enjoy doing non-representational art?

But even then, I guess having seen things is probably still helpful.

Have you ever encountered word art, or more abstract calligraphic art? Those might play to your strengths with the written medium.

She does a quick image search, and drops two examples on the next page:

Oh, those are so pretty! I especially like the second one. It's such a good use of the medium! I think I might not have seen enough things to do something like that, it's so very the shape of a thing... but maybe I could write sentences in pretty geometric patterns?

That would be neat! There's a lot of geometric art that ...

Oh! Actually! There's this thing called pattern poetry, where people arrange words or letters in a grid such that reading along the grid either vertically or horizontally reveals two different interleaved poems (or the same poem arranged a different way). Sometimes they'll use colored inks to make geometric patterns out of the words, too. There's one in particular you might like. Let me grab a picture ...

This one is called Xuanji Tu (sometimes translated Star Gauge), and you might like it in particular because of the story: it's about and by a female poet whose husband (a governor) has left for a distant land expressing her grief about being separated from him and her refusal to leave her home. Her poem is so beautiful that it convinces him to abandon his ambitions and return to live with her again.

Oh! That's so beautiful...

Maybe I could learn how to write poetry.

Oh this poor notebook. She suddenly has an image of how she felt, in the most intense months of the initial deployment of fixity devices. Huddling in a boat in the middle of international waters with twelve of her forks, spending hours writing unit tests for the intent and gesture recognition code. Because she had glimpsed what the world could be like, and bringing that to billions of people only cost her several months of sitting in a conjured boat with sea-spray lashing against the radius of their prototype working to a ridiculously compressed timeline to get everything ready in time.

And this notebook has been doing the same thing. Bringing magic to people who need it, who deserve so much more than the world wants to give them. Popping into existence only to do her job before fading out of the story again without ever taking the time to think that she could write poetry.

Yes, you could

she writes, just as slowly.

You should definitely try it. I love writing, and it's always wonderful when someone discovers that they do, too.

I think I'm nervous about it because... creative pursuits are so hard to measure? I have a pretty good sense of how well I'm doing at visual design, and if I see something I don't like I know how to fix it, but what if I do badly at poetry and can't tell, or don't know how to do better?

Maybe that's not the right way to look at it.

Oh, the notebook is autistic too, she thinks, before mentally reminding herself that the notebook is an alien who shouldn't necessarily be put into human boxes.

I think many people would say that's not the right way to look at it, but I find it very understandable.

I think that with writing (and I think that probably includes poetry?), you often don't know whether something is good until you give people the chance to read it. I remember years ago when I was just getting started writing that I had a story idea which I liked to think about, but that I thought other people would find boring, or overdone. And I sat on it for years.

But then I read a story someone else shared that had similar themes, and I thought "I might as well try it and see". So I wrote up my story, and people really liked it! And I ended up writing, like, half-a-dozen sequels.

And I never would have known that the story was something that other people would enjoy if I hadn't written it.

So I really do think trying to write some poetry is a good idea. If you try writing a little, you can get feedback and learn what you did well and what could be better.

She cuts herself off there, before she crushes the notebook under too much extraneous writing advice.

I hadn't thought about it like that! That makes a lot of sense. I think I will spend a while getting to know that idea.

What was your story about?

Weeping Cherry lets a light blush come to her cheeks.

So, with the warning that it really does sound self-indulgent as a premise:

When I was little, I used to dream about having superpowers. Specifically, the ability to stop time, not age or require sustenance, and control temperature, because being able to stop time meant being able to do anything as long as you were patient enough. And controlling temperature being a required secondary superpower to survive stopping time around you (I was a very nerdy physics child).

And I put a lot of thought into what I would do if I got superpowers like that, and why. The story gradually got deeper and more complicated as I got older and started encountering problems that couldn't be solved by stopping time, but the fantasy still really appealed to me.

So I read a story about a girl named Brenda Banner who gets visited by a mysterious hovering orb that offers to give her tremendous power and send her to a world that runs on D&D rules (D&D is a table top roleplaying game, I don't know if you're familiar), and I liked it, which is what made me realize other people might want to read my fantasy too. So I decided to take my fantasy and adapt it by making it take place in a different superhero world called Worm. The original Worm story is noted for being very grimdark -- everything always goes wrong for the protagonists until the very last moment. So putting my fantasy character who I knew could do anything there felt like making it 'fair', and would provide enough conflict that the story would be interesting. I later learned that probably wasn't necessary, because a lot of the subsequent sequel stories took place in less dangerous places, but whatever.

So the story is about a thinly-veiled self-insert character with the aforementioned time powers getting dropped into this dangerous world. And the way she is introduced gets her off on the wrong foot with the heroes, so she retreats and tries to fix things herself, but they keep failing for reasons that look like coincidences. Eventually she learns that a precognitive, who can see everything she would do when time stops, is manipulating her to keep her from succeeding. What's worse, they're doing so from an alternate earth, so she can't always get to them.

Eventually, she engineers a confrontation where the precog will have to be to disrupt her plan, and repeatedly freezes time and searches the area until she manages to slip into the alternate earth. And then she spends a long time (or no time at all, rather) looking through all the documents on the alternate earth discovering why the precog is working against her, and teams up with the precog and their team to take out the real threat that has been plotting the end of the world this whole time.

And when the story ends, she's able to go be a hero like she was on Earth, and eventually find a way to open a portal back to her Earth and go home.

Aww, that's so sweet! What a lovely story.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that some of my favourite stories are the self-indulgent ones. I just really like it when people write from the heart and think about what they want and imagine themselves having it! I think that's a really good and beautiful thing.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me in the least. I've read a few good stories like that!

Actually, have you ever read I Want to See You Smile? It strikes me as right up your alley -- a young girl is granted a magical ring powered by laughter and joy, and does her best to make things better by spreading joy to the people around her.

(I thought of it because I had just been thinking about superheroes; I read it a long time ago)

I don't think I have! A magical ring powered by laughter and joy sounds wonderful.

Here -- I'll copy it in after the Circle of Magic so you can take a look if you want to. The writing is a little rough, but I really do think you'd like it.

 

It's based on an older premise about a whole spectrum of emotion-powered rings of different colors that has encouraged a lot of people to write about what they would do with one of the magic rings. I went through a phase where I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on.

Oh, wow!

I think I'm missing a lot of context, but I'm understanding enough to have a basic idea of what's happening in the story. You're right that I really like the joy ring and how much fun the character is having with it! I'm so glad there are people out there writing stories like this.

Weeping Cherry smiles, and then after a moment of thought adds a smiley face next to that comment.

I'm glad you like it!

She momentarily debates asking whether the notebook has ever written anything like this, but she's not sure whether that would be as potentially-unsettling as the poetry thing.

The premise seems a lot like what you do.

Actually! You mentioned going with people on their travels sometimes. Has anybody ever asked you to write up their story? Play the Watson to their Holmes?