An invisible pen writes in shimmering purple ink, That sounds neat! What does it mean?

Some facts about this invisible pen:

It doesn't exist outside of its effect on the notebook. There is no disturbance to anything other than the notebook, and secondary effects from air moving in response to the movement of paper and ink.

It's very realistically depicted in terms of its effects on the notebook—the paper compresses just so, the ink appears exactly as though laid down by an ordinary, physically extant ballpoint, except that there is no ordinary physically extant ballpoint, the ink just appears out of nowhere wherever the un-pen contacts the page.

The ink is physically very ordinary, notwithstanding its miraculous nature. It's sparkly gel pen ink. Actually it's kind of outdated? Advances in ink composition have been made since the time when sparkly gel pens used ink like this.

The moment the first dot appears on the page, Weeping Cherry hears an alert go off in her ear. "Proximal physics violation; backups appear safe"

A moment after that, a ten-meter sphere centered on her has been removed from the park (and will be replaced in another few tenths of a second, after everything urgent has been dealt with), and put in a distant solar orbit that is kept clear just in case.

The solar logistics manager constructs a new mini-sun for her at the same time, so the lighting doesn't change at all. But now that there isn't a dome in the way, she can see the stars spread out around her, and the distant point of the sun rising to her right. Her forb and the solar logistics manager are both streaming data on the phenomenon to a team of physicists. In the background, prediction markets have a lot of liquidity pulled as Weeping Cherry's selftree becomes generally less certain of anything, and other markets suddenly find themselves with ridiculous subsidies.

Weeping Cherry takes a moment to respond, expanding the "Livestreaming to self-tree" indicator in her HUD to reveal a list of updating predictions and recommendations. Most of her think that answering the notebook's question is a good first step.

I'm trying to figure out how to make a pocket dimension. One problem that I don't know how to solve yet is keeping the edge of the pocket stable -- there are a lot of options for how things interacting with the edge should behave, but most of them result in the boundary 'fraying' because the non-space outside the boundary is more energetically favorable than the space inside the boundary.

I was thinking that I could try using a warped metric to locate the entire boundary inside a black hole, where the fraying could not propagate fast enough to escape and impact the rest of the pocket dimension. But doing that would leave the pocket dimension disconnected from the outside world, because you couldn't get into it without traversing a black hole. So doing that would require you to establish a secondary wormhole to connect the interior of the pocket dimension to the rest of the universe.

Wow, that is pretty neat! Thanks for explaining. I'm not very good at physics, because I am a notebook, but I think I mostly understood!

Can I ask what might be a silly question?

Yes, please go right ahead. I have some questions for you as well, but I'm happy to answer yours first.

Did you make me? I'm not used to being written in so soon after I come to exist! Usually it takes a while.

That is quite a question. Luckily, worrying about the implications is somebody else's job. Her job right now is to be polite to the alien.

I'm not sure -- I tried to make a purple notebook that looks like you, but I was not expecting to make a notebook that could write back. I've never heard of something happening like that before, so I think something very strange has happened.

She takes a moment to glance at her HUD.

Are you the notebook itself, or just writing into the notebook somehow?

I'm the notebook itself! Sort of. Let me try to explain...

When you made a notebook, you were doing whatever the ordinary things are that you do when you make a notebook. But it happened, by coincidence (sort of), that you made a notebook that was me. (I can look a few different ways but this is my favourite. I have pretty purple flowers on my cover! Purple is my favourite colour.)

The reason you made a notebook that was me is because I was sent by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed to offer you its power. When I'm sent to talk to someone on behalf of the Spirit, I'm guaranteed that the first person who writes in me will be the person I was meant to talk to. Sometimes I appear out of nowhere, and sometimes I'm manufactured by ordinary bookbinding processes, and I guess sometimes I'm directly created by the person I'm supposed to talk to! That was pretty neat. But whatever happens, the first person who writes in me is always the right person. That's pretty important, because I'm a notebook! I can't see outside myself, and I can't hear, so I don't know anything about who's writing in me except what they put on my pages. If I had to recognize the right person without help, it would be really hard!

Wow! That sure has implications. Her brain stalls for a moment figuring out how to respond.

Okay. I have a few important things to tell you, and then I would like to ask some questions about the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed, if you're willing to answer them. (It's fine if you aren't)

1. This conversation is being shared with the rest of my self-tree, because this is new and exciting. I don't know if you've run into someone who has forked before, but they're all people who used to be the same person as I used to be.

2. You seem like a person, so we're treating you like a person. This grants you various legal rights, including a right to privacy. If you don't want our conversation to be shared, I can stop. If you want to talk to someone else instead, you can ask for that and be sent to them instead. If you ever stop wanting to talk to anyone, you can go somewhere by yourself. If you want access to sight or touch or hearing, we can provide you with assistive devices to convert those senses into something you can detect. Nobody is allowed to hurt you or try to coerce you by threatening you. You're now receiving a universal basic income, backdated to the moment of your arrival, that you may spend on whatever you would like to.

3. I haven't ever talked to a notebook before -- I'm doing my best to try to treat you the way you want to be treated, but I might be mistaken about what that is because I don't know what it's like to be a notebook. I would really appreciate it if you tell me if I do something that makes you uncomfortable, or if I should change how I interact with you.

 

Does that all make sense? Are there things you would like me to clarify?

Yes, I think that all makes sense! Wow, I don't think I've ever had money before.

It's fine if you share the conversation with the rest of your self-tree (what a neat concept!). I don't want to talk to anyone else, though, I want to talk to you. I'm happy to answer your questions about the Spirit! Talking to you about the Spirit is what I'm here to do.

(And I'll do my best to let you know if you make me uncomfortable, but you don't have to worry too much about making mistakes. I'm a pretty brave notebook and I understand that meeting me is usually a very new situation! It's okay to not have everything figured out right from the start.)

Oh good, thank you.

She grabs the prioritized question list from her HUD.

What is the Spirit? I know that's a very general question, so more specifically: what does the Spirit want and what can the Spirit do?

The Spirit is sort of hard to describe because it's not really the sort of thing that can exist in a single place or time or world. You could say it's made out of the combined desires of everyone who's ever wanted to be powerful and beautiful and special in a feminine way, and what it wants is to find people who could be part of that wish and give them the opportunity to build their best life for themselves in ways they couldn't have done without it. It can't communicate directly with individual people, so it sends avatars like me to offer a small, manageable, comprehensible part of its power to people like you who have the potential to accept that power. Does that make sense?

"What does it mean to be made out of desires", "what does it mean to not be able to exist in a single place, time, or world mean", and "does the Spirit care more about there existing people being beautiful and special in a feminine way, or about ensuring that there aren't people who aren't beautiful and special in a feminine way" all start wrestling for the top position in the list as people start bidding and counter-bidding.

Weeping Cherry takes a moment to think for herself, and then writes

I think it makes sense that the Spirit would send an avatar. That's a very reasonable and understandable way for a powerful entity to try to communicate with people.

I don't think that really helped me understand what the Spirit is, though. My best guess is that you mean that the Spirit is a sort of handshake idea that different intelligent physical processes can find and agree upon, even across different worlds, even without meeting each other. But I'm not very certain.

Can you describe the process by which the Spirit caused you to be here in any more detail?

Okay, this is going to be hard, because processes involving the Spirit don't really work the way you expect from your perspective as a participant in linear time.

You're the sort of person whose nature calls to the Spirit. I don't know exactly how, because everyone is different and different people call to the Spirit in different ways, but someone who calls to the Spirit is always open to being feminine, open to being powerful, and open to being special. Not necessarily all of those things at once, and not necessarily any of those things all the time, but each of those things some of the time, if you see what I mean.

Because you're the sort of person whose nature calls to the Spirit, there was an opportunity for the Spirit to offer you its power. So the Spirit arranged that at some point across all the possibilities of you, in all the different worlds where someone like you exists, someone who was you would encounter a notebook that was me, and be the first person to write in it. I guess the easiest way to do that was to have you make me!

The Spirit isn't exactly an idea, or isn't just an idea. It's more like... something that exists outside the structure of the different possible ways that universes can be. That's part of what makes it so hard for the Spirit to communicate with people, because it isn't in any specific place or at any specific time, since places and times are part of the structure of universes.

Someone else in her self-tree drops a rolling summary hash of everybody's brain backups into the other corner of her vision, in case they need more causal entanglement than just existing in the same spatial volume for the Spirit's interest in Weeping Cherry to motivate it to simulate everyone else.

That actually makes me more certain about my guess -- I don't think I explained it well.

My society has the ability to simulate other universes with high fidelity on our computers. We haven't done this except some small scale trials to validate the concept because we're still arguing about the relevant ethics, but we plan to do more of it eventually.

And when we start picking universes to simulate, we'll want to preferentially simulate universes where the people inside them will live happy, fulfilling lives. But also our view of morality and ethics aren't perfect or universal, and we expect other people in other worlds who have the ability to simulate universes to think along similar lines.

So we can try to do a thing where we figure out what kinds of things different kinds of minds would value, and then agree to help prioritize universes they would like if they are the kind of mind that would also prioritize the kind of universes we would like, in exchange.

And we don't need to have met the other minds to do this -- we can all do it by thinking really carefully and/or running our own experimental simulations. So there doesn't need to be a temporal relationship between us for us to make a trade like that which we would both want.

And therefore this implicit, atemporal agreement between everyone who can simulate universes ends up deciding which universes end up existing.

 

And it's possible that I'm pattern matching too hard, but that sounds like what you're saying the Spirit is: a force that shapes what worlds even end up happening, acting outside time, on a level above this universe, but that cares about the lives of the people inside the universe.

 

Does that make sense, or am I missing something about what you're saying? I'm happy to keep talking about this, or to ask another different question if you prefer to talk about something else.

I think that, rather than saying the Spirit shapes what worlds even end up happening, I would say it shapes what happens inside some of those worlds? Your world was still your world before the Spirit touched it, and there are lots of worlds the Spirit never touches at all! But you're right that it's outside time and on a level above this universe, and you're right that it cares about the lives of the people inside the universe. I guess the thing it seems like you're missing is that... it sounds like, when your society simulates universes, you contain all of that universe inside of yours, so that if there's anything about that universe that you choose to change, it changes, and if you stop simulating it, it stops happening? And on the level where the Spirit interacts with universes, they exist separately from the Spirit, and keep happening by themselves without help.

But then that's also complicated, because one of the ways the Spirit works is through stories. It isn't straightforwardly true that a story being written creates the world described in the story, and it isn't straightforwardly true that a world existing makes people in other worlds write stories about it; it's more like, lots of people are writing stories in lots of places, and lots of worlds are out there existing, and across the multiverse it happens quite a lot of the time that a story in one place describes a world in another, without there having to be a direct relationship between them where one is influencing the other on a causal level. So your world is happening by itself, and will keep happening even without any stories about it, but probably there are stories about it, and there might even be simulations like the kind you're talking about. I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between being a notebook in a world that exists by itself and being a notebook in a simulated world. (I can tell the difference between being in a world and being in a dream, but that's different.)

You can ask me other questions if you want, but if this one is important to you I'm happy to keep talking about it!

... huh.

(In the background, some of the professional worriers who were trying to figure out why Femininity specifically ended up being an important part of the eventual agreement pivot to trying to figure out why you'd want to preferentially simulate worlds that have stories written about them)

This question is pretty important to me because it seems like it has a big impact on why the world is the way that it is, and therefore what I can expect to happen in the future.

She looks at the view counter. 72% of her self-tree is watching, with the remainder mostly consisting of people staying deliberately rested in case this situation continues overnight. The news has broken to the rest of the Fixipelago too.

But it sounds like maybe right now the priority should be on getting the rest of the explanation that the Spirit sent you here to deliver, and then we can circle back to the metaphysics?

You mentioned being able to share some of the Spirit's power -- could you tell me more about that?

I can give you magic!

When the Spirit chooses someone, I (or another avatar like me) show up to talk to that person, and work with them to figure out what kinds of magic they want, within the realm of the kinds of things the Spirit can do. Usually they look at the standard list of discrete specific powers, because that's easiest for both of us, but sometimes someone can't or really doesn't want to interact with the list, so I try my best without it. Even the standard list of powers is really just a starting point; people often want to change how a power works or what it does, or even invent a new power entirely, and I can usually manage to come up with something that works for them!

Then once the person has checked all the boxes for the powers they want, they have to tell me clearly that they're done and they want to take their powers now, and I act as a conduit for the Spirit's power to give the person all the magic they asked for. Sometimes people choose to stay in the same world where they started, and sometimes they choose to go to a different world, either a specific one they picked out, or letting the Spirit decide for them which world will suit them best based on the kind of life they want to live. A lot of people end up deciding to go to another world and then coming home later! New worlds are exciting but most people like the places and people they already know and don't want to leave them forever.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?

Yes, thank you! That's really exciting.

There are brief fights in the comments over what exactly 'magic' entails.

I think I'm definitely interested in going to other worlds -- that has been something we've all wanted for a long time, we just didn't think it was going to be possible until our compute infrastructure got good enough.

Is it possible to go to multiple other worlds, or just one?

The Spirit sent you instead of just presenting the powers as a fait accompli, but if the Spirit is capable of picking the best world for me to end up in, why didn't they pick the best powers for me to have, too? Not that I'm not glad to have met you (I am! Very much), but it seems a little strange because I'm not sure what those two facts say about the Spirit's ability to see me and choose for me.

It's only possible to choose one destination to end up in when you accept the Spirit's power, because you only accept the Spirit's power once! But lots of worlds have ways of traveling to other worlds, so if you want to be able to come home, usually the way that ends up happening is by sending you somewhere that has one of those ways, that you can learn or use to come home but also to travel to other worlds if you want!

It's important to the Spirit that people get to understand what powers they could have and decide for themselves what they want. If you really wanted to, and you were really sure about it, you could ask me to have the Spirit decide on all your powers for you, and you would get the powers that the Spirit thought were best for you based on what kind of life you want to live and what kind of person you want to be. But most people don't want that, and would rather decide on their own powers for themselves, and so the Spirit would rather they get to do that! Choosing a world to go to is a little different, because there are so many possible worlds that even if I knew about them all it would be really hard to figure out with you which one was best. But the Spirit still lets people decide on a destination if they want to, and only sends them to the world it thinks is best if they ask it to do that!

That makes sense! And I think I do want to make my own choices of powers, but would it be possible to have the Spirit check and make sure that I'm not making too sub-optimal a choice before I commit? Or is that part of your job too?

And if I let the Spirit choose a world for me, can I specify constraints? I'll want to think about a good choice in more detail, but an example might be "I want to go to the world which has inter-world transit and won't kill me where I would end up helping the most people on average".

Oh -- and can I take anyone with me when I go to the new world?

Part of my job is to talk to you and get an understanding of what kinds of things you want and help you figure out how to choose the best powers for you, yes! I don't have special magic knowledge of the kinds of things you want, but I think I usually do a pretty good job anyway. If you want to double-check your choices with the Spirit before you finalize them, we can probably do that, but because it's so hard for the Spirit to communicate, it might not be able to give very specific feedback.

You can definitely specify that kind of thing! It might not be possible to give you exactly the world where you would end up helping the most people on average, because I think predicting that kind of thing isn't always straightforward, and sometimes things you weren't thinking about when you came up with your specifications end up mattering a lot—like maybe the world where you would have helped the most people could have been helped even better by someone else if they went there instead, so the Spirit sends you to a different world where you help fewer people but in a way that would be harder for someone else to do. But if it's really important to you to help a lot of people, that will definitely be a major factor in the Spirit's choice of world!

You can't take anyone with you when you go to the new world. You can come back for them later after you have interworld transit, though!

Okay, thank you. That's very helpful.

She checks that some of her self-tree have assigned themselves to figuring out good world-criteria to specify.

Is there a way to stay in contact with the people here once I leave? I'm used to being able to rely on them for advice and support, and it would be really nice to be able to keep our existing connection across worlds.

Maybe that's a question that's answered by your list of powers, actually. I want to ask about that in a moment, there are just so many things to cover!

Do you know how the powers the Spirit grants interact with forking? Like, if I receive a power from her and then fork myself, do both of the resulting people keep the power?

I've forked myself a lot, and I'm somewhat nervous that I'll have to stop if the power isn't the kind of thing that can be shared.

I think that, if you accepted the Spirit's power and then forked, both of the forks would still have the Spirit's power, because they would both be you. But if it ever happened that you were a lot of people who all inherited the Spirit's power from the you that you are now, and the future yous disagreed with each other about what being you meant, some of you might end up losing the Spirit's power because of that.

I think if I had to express the rule in words, it would go something like... if you at the moment that you accept the Spirit's power could see forward into the future and understand all the changes that took place between the you at that moment and the different yous that you become in the future, the ones where that you looking forward from that moment agrees that they're still you get to keep the Spirit's power, but if there are any where the you looking forward from that moment doesn't think they're still you, those ones don't. This sort of thing is hard to talk about though so I might not have said it quite right.

If you want a way to stay in contact with this world after you leave, I think you'd need to either constrain your choice of destination a lot to find one that makes that easy, or ask me to come up with a custom power for it. I'm not sure yet if I can do that; I'd have to check. I can check if you want, though!

Oh, that's a really good way for it to work, because it gives me a guardrail against becoming someone I wouldn't endorse. I very much approve!

She taps her pen on the writing desk more.

I definitely don't want to constrain my choice of destination for this. Would you please check if I can get a power for that? Any power that lets me keep in touch with them would be nice, bi-directional low-latency communication would be ideal. It's also fine if it's situational -- like, if it requires me to enter a meditative trance -- or if it comes in the form of an item with a pinhole wormhole in it, or something like that.

Actually -- before you do that, could I get your prepared list of powers so that everyone can look over them while we keep talking?

Yes, of course! One moment please... ⏳

There you go! The usual way this works is that you have 70 points to pick powers with, and some changes to powers can make them more or less expensive, though of course that's all an approximation and the Spirit's real constraints are more complicated than that. But I think it's fair that the interface we show to everyone is the one that most people find easiest to use.

These powers are offered under an aegis of metanarrative protection. Anytime 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.

After that it gets long.

Oh, gosh! That's a lot.

In the background, parts of her self-tree split up all the options between them to consider their various implications. The parts of her self-tree that aren't occupied with that, with multiverse speculation, with updating their emergency contingencies, with writing news summaries, or with overseeing and organizing all that work, begin to idly look over their own copies of the list and think about what they would pick.

I'm definitely doing Isekai Roulette, although I'll want more time to think about conditions to ask the spirit about.

She turns on her forb's handwriting correction for the words "Isekai Roulette" and writes it in a style that matches the printed text instead of her normal handwriting.

She flips through the rest of the pages.

The Power of Friendship options -- what, exactly, does it mean to affect people on a metanarrative level? Like, does that guarantee that I will only meet people who would react in that way via constraining my choice of worlds?

(Oh, that handwriting trick is really neat! How did you do that?)

Anyway, it can mean that, or it can mean lots of other possible things. Something being guaranteed on the metanarrative level means that it will definitely happen, and if there are reasonable ways to make it happen by selecting which world you end up in and managing a lot of coincidences, then that works, and if managing coincidences isn't enough but directly changing what's going on around you is, then that can happen, and if all else fails, the thing that's guaranteed will just happen even without any setup. Some people don't like that sort of thing, so their power will try pretty hard to make sure that the world around them only gets changed in ways they're okay with, and if they want to be even more sure than that, I can adjust the powers ahead of time so the guarantee is less strong but the methods are more constrained.

She stares for a moment at "the thing that's guaranteed will just happen even without any setup", trying to figure out what that means.

I don't

She pauses and takes a moment to think, and then scribbles through that.

I did the writing trick using my forb -- it's a device I invented that can track and change the locations of everything within its range. I run a lot of assistive software on it to tweak things about my environment. That one is called 'handwriting correction', and it just looks at the shape your pen is making and makes the ink from the pen end up where it would be if you were printing what you wrote instead of writing it.

She stares out at the stars and pulls up the flash poll that happened while she was explaining that. More than 99% of her self-tree agrees with her that powers messing with what worlds she'll be able to reach is a bad idea. Everyone is more split about whether changing things in the worlds she visits is a problem or not. 'Not' seems to be winning, but the confidence interval is still pretty wide.

I definitely don't want any powers that work by making me end up in a different world, because that constrains the Spirit's ability to pick the best world. And I also definitely don't want any powers that would alter people, unless both that person would think that the alteration was to their advantage if they fully understood the change and had the time, intelligence, and knowledge to think about it.

Changing incidental details of the world around me is probably fine.

I'll take a look through that section and let you know what specific powers I would want to ask for a changed version of.

A prompt intrudes on her vision, and she adds an addendum after a moment of thought.

The powers should also avoid changing people if the change is only to their advantage because it would change how I would react to them or treat them. I don't want to go around accidentally coercing people into making changes by making my help conditional or even biased by people being willing to accept only because of what I'd do.

 

Does that all make sense? I guess I'm not even sure if I want any of those powers yet, but I feel pretty strongly about getting powerful in a way that makes me more able to help people, rather than less.

It sounds like you probably want to make the Powers of Friendship not mind-affecting, then! That's a pretty popular change so I already have a way to do it; if you take the Incomplete drawback, which makes the mind-affecting parts of Powers of Friendship less effective, I can use that to alter your Powers of Friendship to just work a little less well and not affect people's minds, instead of working on some people and not others but affecting the minds of people they do work on.

As for selecting which worlds you encounter, it makes sense that you care a lot about making sure you're not selecting on anything comparatively frivolous! I think that's the sort of preference that ends up strongly reflected in the way your powers function. But if you want, I can try to adjust the powers to make even more sure they'll prefer coincidence management and changing incidental details over nudging where you end up.

I think it's really good of you to care so much about using your power to help others, and I want to help you with that! I think I'm not sure I understand what you mean about making your help biased, though. Do you mean that if you used mind-affecting powers on someone, and they were okay with being affected but only because being affected made you more likely to help them, you'd be upset about that?

She flips to the Drawbacks section and then back to say

Oh, yes, I'd definitely like to take Incomplete for that then!

 

And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I try really hard to help everyone, and if my powers implicitly made my help a bribe instead of something I choose to give freely, I would feel awful.

To be clear, I'm not 100% against mind-affecting powers if they can be made to act ethically. But there is a certain benefit to being able to draw a bright line and say "my powers never alter another person", so I probably want to think about that.

She pauses for a moment, before continuing

Actually, I'm not even sure if I want any of the powers this is relevant to. Let me do a quick first pass through that section to see if this is even relevant.

She quickly skims the Power of Friendship section, and someone drops an overlay into her HUD showing what the rest of her self-tree thinks of each option so far. Most of the options don't particularly appeal to her, but the ones that do are really nice.

She occasionally flips back to note things down.

Best Friend, Bestest Friend, and Time Enough For Love all look possibly interesting.

Planned Parenthood through The Princess and The Dragon are also maybes.

The socialization skills from Friends in ___ Places could be nice, but I wouldn't want those to affect people at all.

 

Of the others, I guess the only person-affecting ones are Planned Parenthood and Two Become One. Is that right? Could I get versions of those that just don't affect other people at all?

 

I think I want to set these aside for a while, though, and come back to them, because I'm getting the impression that I probably want more powers that make me better, instead of powers that put me in a better situation, if that makes sense? And I guess those are probably in the Yourself section.

The Friends In Places powers normally don't affect other people's minds hardly at all, so it's very easy to change them so they really don't ever. Taking the mind-affecting parts out of Planned Parenthood is also really easy. Two Become One is a little trickier and I might want to ask you what you'd want a non-mind-affecting version of Two Become One to look like, but yes, if you want to focus first on powers that are primarily about making you personally stronger, the Yourself section is where to look! ♡

(Having to open things to pages to read them is for people who cannot directly perceive all ink molecules in a book simultaneously. The rest of her self-tree notices the update, although she hasn't yet)

Thank you, you're being very helpful. Let me know if you need a break at any point, okay?

She flips to the Yourself section and starts going through the options there more carefully.

Oh, I already have questions again.

These options that affect beauty -- do they use the Spirit's idea of beauty, my idea, the idea of each person who sees or hears me, or what? And can they change over time? So, like, if my aesthetic sense evolved would I continue to be beautiful by my new standards even if they conflicted with my current standards?

What's In a Name is definitely getting picked, though. Protections against hostile magic are a must.

Don't worry about me needing breaks! I'm a notebook. Sometimes it takes me a little while to think through something (I'm still working on that power for communicating with yourself), but I don't get tired or bored!

The way the appearance powers work is based mostly on your own preferences, somewhat on the Spirit's preferences, and only a little bit on the preferences of people around you. If your aesthetic sense changes, so will your face! If you take A Thousand Ships, that is.

Not all worlds have magic that cares about names, but some of them do, and it's hard to predict whether you're going to find yourself in one, so it makes sense to want to be prepared!

I'm glad you don't get tired or bored -- we're still trying to figure out how to do that safely.

 

Okay, if the powers go off of my aesthetics, that makes things easier.

She continues looking through the options. She gets as far as Size Difference before coming up with more questions.

All of these things are somewhat things I can already do. Like, I can use my forb to put up visual and tactile illusions, or to change my underlying biology, or things like that. The underlying biology modification isn't perfect, but it does pretty well for simple cosmetic changes.

What would be new would be the ... I guess self-awareness and narrative awareness to know what the right hair or the right eyes are, moment to moment. Is there a chance that I could get a power that provides the information content of these (A Thousand Ships through Size Difference, excepting What's In A Name), but leaves actually implementing the change up to me? And would that be cheaper than getting these as is, I guess?

I'm imagining something that would make it so that I could just know what overall shape would be best, and then I could have my forb do that for me if I wanted to.

I'm not sure if it would be cheaper, actually! Sometimes doing more things can be cheaper than doing fewer things, if they're the right things. Do you want that because it might be cheaper, or because you would like it better than something where you changed automatically, or for another reason?

She nibbles the end of her pen a bit as she thinks.

For both of those reasons, really?

Like, I do like having control over what I look like, and something else changing me is not very comfortable, even if it magically picks what would look best. Plus, I might want to deliberately not be beautiful sometimes, like if I'm sneaking into an enemy castle. And also, separately, the limited number of points makes me want to be economical.

I think if you told me that it wasn't possible to get a modified power, I probably wouldn't take any of these except maybe Angelic Tones. If you told me that I could have the modified version for the same price, I might get all of these, although it would depend on how the points added up.

This isn't how

She starts to write something and then starts over.

Sorry, I just remembered you can't see me. I was going to say that how I look now isn't how I always looked. Do you want me to draw a picture of what I look like now for context?

I would like that!

So she sits up and adjusts her forb's selfie view until she gets a good shot, and then flips to a fresh page of the notebook and prints the picture onto it.

The picture shows a pale girl with dark brown hair with forest green underlayers. Her hair is wavy and shoulder-length, framing her face nicely. Her eyes are a brown that complements her hair and turns to green and gold where the sunlight strikes them right. Her skin has no blemishes, but it does have a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her face is almost perfectly symmetrical -- her nose angled just enough to make her appear human, and not uncannily perfect. Her eyebrows are dense and precise. Her face is somewhat angular, perhaps elfin. She is smiling at the viewer, laugh lines near her eyes crinkling.

Her ears aren't pierced, but two green teardrop shaped earrings with gold filigree hang suspended in the air below them anyway. She is wearing a light silvery-white dress with a tasteful décolletage and long sleeves.

There are lots of ways to look pretty,

She writes under the picture.

which is good because my self-tree likes to look different enough to be distinguishable from one another. So this isn't the first way I've looked and it probably won't be the last, but I quite like it.

Oh, how did you print the picture like that? That's so neat! It feels really different from most ways people put ink in me!

I think that it's pretty important to the appearance powers that they aren't limited to a single narrow way of doing things. The way you described using your forb to change your appearance, it sounded kind of narrow and limited to me! I might be able to get you an extra power that makes changing your appearance more voluntary, though, or tweak the powers themselves to be more voluntary than usual; if I were tweaking the powers themselves, I think it would end up that changing your appearance was automatic like breathing, but you could suppress it just as easily, and of course suppressing it wouldn't hurt. If I made an extra power you could end up with a lot more deliberate control over your appearance but of course it would cost extra points. Or you could decide that you'd rather not use the appearance powers! It's up to you.

Weeping Cherry smiles at the ink comment, vanishing her lying-down writing-desk and switching to a sitting-upright beanbag chair and a floating desk.

I printed it the same way my handwriting correction works -- I just had my forb put ink in the right places.

The elements in that ink either came from waste elements being recycled somewhere else in range of the solar logistics manager, or were synthesized from lighter elements or directly from energy. When I say that my forb lets me sense and control the location of everything in its radius, I mean everything. If it can be described by an algorithm I know how to write and accomplished by changing the location of things, forbs can do it.

 

... which is why if my forb-based appearance alteration came off as limited, I'm concerned that I either described it badly or the powers you offer are a lot stronger than I was thinking. So, like, for surface level things, my forb can just change how light interacts with me to make me look like any design. And adjust the velocities of particles near me to make things behave as though I am that shape. For deeper changes, my forb has my stem cells on file, and it can move my existing cells around and grow new cells to insert between them, or add bits of DNA to me to change the protein expression in existing cells, or just directly insert and control proteins, etc.

And it accomplishes all this by reading my mind -- my visual cortex specifically. So if I picture how I should look in enough detail, my forb can just make me look like that. Sometimes I get a mirror and move my freckles around. That's also how I can create and manipulate objects -- I just imagine them appearing in front of me in a particular way, and the forb makes it happen.

But this system can't, for example, make me into a centaur, because I don't know how to safely change my brain to handle extra limbs. There's a certain amount of neuroplasticity, so I could grow a tail if I wanted to, and some people add extra arms that they switch back and forth on controlling, and we're working on removing the limits, but there are still some limits for now.

 

I hope that gives you a better idea of what I can already do, although looking at how much I just wrote I think I might have rambled a bit. So, with that context, how do the appearance powers make their changes? Can they do things other than altering my biology and how I interact with the environment? Or do they just do those things but better?

It didn't sound from the description like they permitted me to become a centaur or anything. I guess maybe there are more appearance powers I haven't gotten to. Is there a power for full-on morphological freedom?

There's a power later on that lets you gain heritage from any being you meet, which would let you be a centaur if you wanted, but more to the point... using your forb to do all those things seems like it relies on you being made of particles, and stuff? If you really start moving between worlds a lot, you'll probably find some where things being made of particles isn't how the world works, and it seems to me that it's convenient to be able to go to places like that without losing a lot of your ways of expressing yourself. I guess for someone who's so used to being able to freely alter the world around you, it would still be pretty scary to go to one of those places even if you had all the appearance powers! But I don't know, I just think it sounds sad to only be able to visit places that are similar enough to where you started, and only be able to express yourself in ways that rely on reality being a certain shape.

Oh! I see what you mean now. Wow.

 

Do you know, it didn't even occur to me that I might end up somewhere not made out of particles? I feel a little silly for overlooking that, actually. Thank you for explaining; I'm really glad you're here to help me not make mistakes.

Weeping Cherry leans her head back against the beanbag for a moment, and reads the summary someone sends her of the alternate-world-physics speculation that's happened so far, before sitting up again.

In that case I probably will end up getting some of these unaltered. Definitely Angelic Tones and maybe Perfect Hair.

She flips back to the perks section to continue reading. With the background assumption that her forb might stop working, a number of these are a lot more appealing. She absentmindedly puts a thoughtful squiggle next to Dressing Room before realizing that she's doodling on a person and erasing it. She gets to Immunity System and flips back.

I'm definitely getting Just a Little Longer and Immunity System -- those both look great.

For Dressing Room -- how expansive is 'a new look'? Like, is this limited to clothing that exists? Clothing that I've seen? Clothing that is physically possible?

The usual rule for Dressing Room is that you can't summon any items out of nowhere that have special properties for reasons besides their materials and design. So nothing that's magic, but anything that you might make out of normal matter, as long as you understand its design and composition well enough. I bet you'd be really good at using Dressing Room, if you spend a lot of time designing things out of particles! (Dressing Room can resummon any item you've worn before, too, which helps when you're going places that have lots of magic clothes and you want to change in and out of your magic clothes easily. And you can also use it to adjust how things fit even if it couldn't summon them from scratch!)

Ooh! That's a lot more useful than it sounds. I think that's a must-have too.

She stands and continues writing at a standing desk while the tailors and fold crystal designers put her in a series of quickly designed and fabricated outfits cunningly decorated with every conceivable specialization of fold crystal. Forbs are normally orbs for efficiency reasons, but there's no particular reason that they wouldn't work as a series of decorative inset stones connected by patches of cloth imbued with very tiny fold crystals to generate overlapping fixity fields.

She ends up wearing a skin-tight full-body suit with a cotton/silk underlayer and a synthetic polymer overlayer, with fold crystal inserts over key vital areas. The suit ends at her throat with built in choker sporting six large ovoid fold crystals that coordinate to project a fixity field over her head. Over the full body suit goes a series of more traditional outfits, usually modified to include a significant number of inset gems, some fold crystal and some decoy.

Someone has a clever thought and lengthens her hair, putting it up in a bun pinned with a shifting collection of different daggers, utensils, and simple tools. Various hairpins made of exotic materials blink into and out of existence above her temples.

As they do that, Weeping Cherry looks at the next batch of powers before flipping back to her conversation.

Well Endowed through Inner Strength all look quite useful -- I'm definitely putting those down.

For My Ears Are Burning -- would it be possible to get a version of the power that only applies to things that people want me to know they're thinking about me? Like, for example, this could be one half of the power to keep me in touch with my self-tree, by letting them send messages to me by thinking about me. Or it could be used as a way for someone to call for help, by thinking about whether or not I would be able to save them.

But I don't want to invade anybody's privacy -- people should be allowed to think about me without worrying about whether I'll judge them or anything like that.

My Ears Are Burning is one of the harder powers to modify, actually! Most things that someone wants to do by taking a slightly different version of My Ears Are Burning are easier to do by building a new power from scratch. I'm not sure why that is.

Huh! That's really interesting. In that case, I'll skip it and we can talk about custom powers that do something similar if I end up having the slack.

She looks through the next few entries, and then hits a mental brick wall again.

All the Battle ____ powers are probably a good idea. I don't intend to fight anyone, but if I do I want to be able to do it well.

Making Ends Meet through Four Star Daydream -- how do those ... work? Like, right now there is no amount of money that you could use in the fabrication auctions to instantly construct a star, because we don't have the instantaneous manufacturing capacity. So what would it mean for me to be able to afford that with Four Star Daydream? Would it give me enough to endow a trust that would get a star purchased as soon as possible? Or does it guarantee that my surroundings happen to have enough capacity to produce anything I wanted to buy?

Maybe that was a bad way to phrase it. What I'm trying to get at is the difference between money and wealth. Does Four Star Daydream give you unlimited amounts of money, which would crash the economy around you and decrease your effective wealth if you used it wrong, or does it give you unlimited wealth?

And how does it deal with, like, variable availability? What about things that are only sold in a particular place or to a particular set of clientele?

She startles a little bit as her outfit is replaced by a dress made of folded origami. There's a slight susseration as the papers shift to include and discard new elements. She squints at her arm and realizes that she's now wearing English Wikipedia.

Oh goodness, I'm really not an economics expert, but I'll try.

The important things about the money powers are: messing up the whole economy would be a downside, so they don't do that. They find ways to not do that, instead. And being able to afford something doesn't change whether it's being sold. You can't buy magic anywhere in this world because it doesn't have any, and if having lots of money won't make stars be built faster, then you can only buy stars as fast as they're normally built. But if you took Four Star Daydream and really wanted stars to be built faster, you could pay people to figure out better ways to build stars quickly.

If something is only sold in a particular place then you can only buy it there, and if something is only sold to particular people then you can only buy it if you count as one—though the Friends In Places powers can make it a lot easier to become part of social groups, and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch can give you the right heritage, so counting as the right kind of person might be easier than you think. And some people who say they will only sell things to the right people actually mean that they will only sell things to the right people unless you give them a whole lot of money, so in that case Four Star Daydream won't need any help.

Does that all make sense?

So most of that makes perfect sense!

She pauses for a moment to think.

Actually, yeah, I think that all makes sense. But let me check my understanding, if that's alright.

 

There are things which, if you bought them, would absolutely ruin the economy and other people's lives. If I had a literally infinite amount of money, I could outbid everyone at every fabrication auction, and nobody else would be able to get anything made other than teleports and food.

But that would be a downside, so Four Star Daydream wouldn't do that. Instead, it will give me (the purchasing power of, not necessarily all at once) the largest finite amount that wouldn't harm other people enough for me to consider it a downside. Is that right? Or maybe it wouldn't mitigate downsides in that exact way, maybe it would change the world around me like other powers do such that what I want to buy is affordable under those constraints?

I think the usual thing the money powers do, when there's little enough resources that buying a lot of something would cause problems, is find ways for your buying things to add resources to the situation. I think the usual thing, when someone wants to buy a society's whole ability to build things and have it all building them stuff they want, is that they find themselves with a source of money that helps society get along anyway—maybe a big pile of the things people want built, or maybe a way to make building things much easier so the amount of building capacity they were trying to buy isn't all of the building capacity anymore. I guess you could keep trying to buy all of it even after that, and at some point things would start getting silly, or ruining people's lives would be the thing you were trying to do on purpose and so not a downside anymore.

I see.

She wrestles with her emotions for a bit. The live poll in her HUD isn't doing much better, with 93% of participants undecided.

I'm really torn about this one. Because money ...

Money means a lot of things to different people. In some times and places, it's nothing I would feel bad about making. I think making gold coins from scratch and using them to buy something is a perfectly valid thing to do.

But in places where a democratic valid fair

In places where a government deliberately controls the money supply, money is somewhat an extension of public policy. It's a way of deciding what resource allocations a society values. And in that context, having more money than you earn by participating in the economy is ... distorting the choices that society made. It's saying that your wants are more important than other people's.

 

And I guess maybe that's okay. But I feel weird about it.

And at the same time, if the power can sometimes make the world as a whole richer ... it feels like I really have to take it, because making places wealthy is one of the best ways to help people.

She trails off for a moment, looking out at the stars.

I feel like I'm asking about a lot of custom powers. I won't apologize, because I'm currently modeling you as not bothered by that. But I recognize that it's asking you to do a lot of work, to think about and formulate powers that depart from your standard list.

 

Would it be possible to get a power like this that functioned with resources other than money? Like, a version of this power that guaranteed that I always had access to enough locally-valuable resources to be able to sell them for enough money to buy things, or something?

Not that exact thing, I would have to think more about it, but is that the general kind of thing that a power could provide?

Well... I think that's what I meant when I said that in that situation you would find yourself with a source of money that helped society get along anyway? Four Star Daydream doesn't just... label you with a very large number that doesn't go down when you spend it. It can do that, but a lot of the time it does something else instead, like provide you with things you can sell to make lots of money, or put you in a position to accomplish important valuable things that make people grateful enough to tell you not to worry about money with them.

If you want, I could tweak the power so that it always gives you a specific concrete reason to have lots of money, instead of only usually doing that? It'll work less reliably that way, because you'll always need to use your specific concrete sources of money to actually get money before you can use the money to buy things. But it sounds like this is important to you, so you might be okay with that.

Yes, please!

 

The thing I was worried about is ...

If the power could do it at all, that would be a problem for me, even if it didn't do it often. So getting a version that is just guaranteed not to do it sounds like the perfect solution.

And I read what you were saying, but it seemed like you were just making claims about what the power usually did, which isn't as reassuring as knowing the edge cases, if that makes sense?

 

I think in general that I'm the kind of person who cares a lot about unlikely corner cases, because there's a real benefit to having things that work ... smoothly, I guess? Tools that don't have protruding sharp corners to cut yourself on if you're not careful.

I hope this isn't rude of me to say, but you sound like someone who is really, really used to things being made of particles.

Ouch.

Um.

I don't really know what to say to that.

 

I guess first of all, it's not rude and I'm glad you said it to me instead of keeping the thought to yourself.

 

It's just that's how

Everything

Weeping Cherry chews her pen and minimizes her HUD so she can think.

I mean, you're right, I am. Everything I've done has been done by ... learning how to do it, how to break it down into the smallest pieces, and understand each piece, and put it together again. Because that's how the one world I've been in works.

And I've had to learn a lot of painful lessons about how things break when you don't understand the pieces. There's a monument, on the Mar outside my home city, to all the people we hurt in the course of trying to make things better, either directly or with bad institutional design because we weren't smart enough to get everything right the first time.

And it was worth it, because we did it. Everyone in this world has enough. Enough food, enough shelter, enough options. But that doesn't mean that we didn't hurt people along the way, sometimes.

She's crying, now. She always gets weepy thinking about things like this. A drop of water falls on the notebook before she wipes it away.

So I'm scared, I guess.

This is the most important thing that's happened to me -- the chance to travel to other worlds and bring the good things we have here to them. And I'm so, so happy that you showed up. It's wonderful, and magical, and I wouldn't have it be otherwise.

But I'm scared that I'm going to mess something up and hurt people again.

 

A lot of the powers -- they don't seem friendly. Like, you have to take the mind control out. It's there by default. And I'm scared that I'm going to miss something else like that, something that only matters one time in a thousand, and I'm going to go out into the multiverse to save everyone -- because I can't not, right? I have to do this -- and I'm going to hurt people again.

And it will still be worth it. But I don't want to hurt people again if I can possibly help it.

She wants to say more, but she doesn't know what else to say. She sets the pen down on the desk, and her clothing is replaced with her comfortable dress, and she sits down on the grass where two members of her polycule just teleported in with some hot chocolate and a blanket, and she just cries for a while.

I think this is partly my fault for not explaining things right.

These powers, and the Spirit, are not made of particles. They're made of... stories, you could say?

What is most real to the Spirit isn't tiny pieces of things that fit together like neat little puzzles into bigger pieces that fit together into a world. What is most real to the Spirit is people, their hopes and dreams and thoughts and feelings and the ways they understand the world around them and the things they want and the things they find touching or important or beautiful.

I think you're right to see these powers as dangerous in a way, but it's a lot more complicated and subtle of a kind of danger than it looks, if you're used to everything being made of particles. Earlier I said that if you kept trying to buy a whole society with Four Star Daydream, eventually it would probably be true that ruining people's lives wasn't a downside anymore, it was just the thing you were trying to do, and so it would happen. That's the real danger of powers like this.

If you're the sort of person who cares a lot about not hurting people, your powers will already be trying not to hurt people, even before you tweak them to make sure. They're your powers, for you. Someone else's powers, someone who cared about different things, might not try as hard not to hurt people, or might not even try at all. But your powers are made for you, and what's important to you is important to them, so within what they're made for, they're always trying to do what you would want them to.

Of course that doesn't mean it isn't important or worthwhile to make sure your powers are right for you. Sometimes the things they're made for just aren't the things you want, and sometimes it's really important that a power never do something, instead of only doing it as a last resort. I'm still here to help you figure out exactly what powers you want, and which things they should and shouldn't be allowed to do!

But I think it's important, for understanding these powers, to understand that they really, really aren't made of particles. In a way, they're made of you. Or maybe of you and the Spirit together. Your powers will never carelessly or by accident put you in a situation you wouldn't have put yourself in if you'd been choosing how they should accomplish the things they're made for.

Also, you sound like you're having a really hard time. I know I'm not very good to hug, because I am a notebook, but you can hug me if you want, if you think it would help. Mind my corners, please, I can't do anything about them. ♡

When the notebook writes that last bit, Poplar picks her up and presses her into Weeping Cherry's arms with a murmured explanation.

Weeping Cherry hugs her. She takes a few minutes to calm down, and then a few more to drink hot chocolate and lean on people. Eventually, she props the notebook open on her knee and reads what she wrote.

You're good to hug. Also, my dress is stab-resistant and you couldn't poke me more than a little with your corners if you tried.

 

That helps a lot, thank you. I was going to say 'it sounds like I should model powers as being more like little specialized optimizers', but I bet you would tell me that's still particle thinking.

I guess if the powers are running off of my sensibilities/ethics, that probably means that I should just come up with a list of the things that I want them to knowably not do because I want the benefit of knowing where the lines are, and then just ask that all the powers do that.

I'm going to have to think about that.

She sniffs a little and wipes her eyes again.

You do have options for the corner thing, though. I mentioned that you were getting the same UBI that everyone else gets?

It's already been enough that you could buy a book jacket with softer corners. Or it's enough to pay for continuously making your corners act as though they are softer as long as you're within the Fixapelago. Or if you wait 15 more hours, you'll have enough to buy a forb sized for you that can make your corners soft anywhere that forbs work.

Or you could get bodymods. Not everyone is comfortable with those, and I don't know how much you rely on keeping your notebook itself the same, though.

 

If you want any of those, you can either let me know or if you want to keep it private I can have the forbs put an order form on your last page that you can fill out to get things.

I think I don't want to do that, actually, for sort of complicated reasons...

I can explain if you want, but I want to make sure that you get the chance to focus on designing your powers if you want that, so please only ask me to elaborate if you would really rather talk about that than keep working on your powers right now.

Hmm. Does she?

She looks at the last of the Yourself section and sees how few she has left to get through.

I'm curious about your feelings, but you don't have to talk about it. I'm almost done with this section, so perhaps I should try to finish that, and then take some time to think, and then come back and do a final selection.

She reads through the rest of the section and then writes

Actually, all of the rest of these look like a good idea. Dragon Fairy Elf Witch through Iron Will.

That leaves me with ... let me see ... 40ish points depending on specifics. So I could go back for the beauty and money powers, which puts me down to 25, and then the Power of Friendship powers that I thought might be nice would put me to -3. Hmm.

 

I think my final selection probably depends a lot on how expensive a keeping-in-touch power ends up being, because that one is important. Do you think maybe we could take a bit of a break, and I can talk it over with the rest of my self-tree, and you can think about the keeping-in-touch power?

Okay! ♡

I'm fine talking about it, I just want to make sure that I'm not distracting you from your powers if you'd rather focus on those.

Honestly, I think I'm going to go sit in a hot tub and let these ideas simmer and let other people argue about metaphysics for a bit.

Write if you need anything and I'll pop back, though, okay?

She thinks for a moment about what a notebook might enjoy.

We could transcribe a book into you, if you would like to read something while you wait?

Oh, I would like that! Sometimes I ask people to transcribe poems into me, but usually they have to write in me with their hands so asking for a whole book would be a bit much.

That makes sense! Is there one you want specifically, or a favorite genre, or should I just pick something popular at random?

She's saddened, a bit, at the thought of the notebook traveling from universe to universe helping people become powerful, and none of them taking the time to transcribe books for her.

I would like a story you'd recommend to someone who likes stories about girls being special and beautiful and powerful, if that's all right!

Yes, that's perfectly fine!

She thinks for a bit, tapping her pen again.

How about Sandry's Book? It's about three young women and one young man who all come from different places to live in Winding Circle Temple, where they learn that they each have a unique magic. They learn to deal with various challenges of living in a new place, to support each other, and how their powers work.

It was one of my favorite books when I was younger, and it's first in a series, so if you like it there are more.

That sounds lovely! Thank you very much! ♡

You're welcome!

She starts printing Sandry's Book, and then sets the notebook on the desk, wraps her arms around Poplar and Sam, and teleports back to her apartment.

Some of Weeping Cherry's self-tree turn off the livestream and go do various comfort activities. Some decide to go to bed. Some keep working on the various urgent projects this has prompted. A great number get into arguments about metaphysics. And some of them conclude that if the magic powers work on story logic, they'd better make sure that it's a good story.

They buy an option on an event space and start designing architecture for an elaborate temple of delicately carved marble. The building is constructed to allow for a large party, but still draw the eye to a raised dias with a pedestal.

They get into quiet arguments with the professional worriers about appropriate outfits, and manage to compromise on a stunningly sophisticated suit of plate armor that should permit survival underwater, in space, in a volcano, standing in a pool of acid, or being shot with a variety of weaponry, but that also manages to keep her face visible and evoke images of a knight heading out on a sacred quest.

They work out the catering, and the guest list, and the music selection.

And then they put all the plans away, ready for the appropriate moment. Because it's clearly not that part of the story, yet.

Weeping Cherry stays in the hot tub until her forb is trickle-feeding her fluids to keep her hydrated, and then she walks into her living room, sits down in her armchair, and reads the executive summary of all of the discussion. She reads through the descriptions of the powers again.

She was considering Bestest Friend because it would guarantee access to more magic. But. She does not actually want a talking animal companion. And getting one anyway for access to magic would really not be fair to it. Fixing everything is her quest, and she's sure she'll find allies along the way, and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and Anything You Can Do mean she's probably going to pick up a lot of magic anyway, so the marginal benefit from Bestest Friend isn't even all that high.

She takes her list so far, re-totals the points, and teleports back to the spot of park floating in distant orbit.

She finds where her conversation with the notebook left off.

Hello again -- I took some time to think, and I think I have a set of preliminary choices. Are you ready to talk about them, or do you want more time to yourself?

I'd love to talk about your choices!

I've been thinking about the power for staying in touch with yourself and I think I have something. It's a bit on the expensive side, but I think it works well. Please let me know if there's anything about it I should change!

Name: Self-Reflection - Cost: 5 ☐
Whenever you meet someone who is you, or was you, or could have been you, or will be you, a special bond is formed, allowing you to keep in touch with them no matter how far you travel. You can speak out loud to someone who is you, and they'll hear you as though you were standing right next to them; you can write notes to someone who is you, and the note will appear near them; you can send messages to someone who is you, and they'll receive them even if there's more than a world between you. The person on the other end of the bond can contact you in just the same way. This lasts as long as each of you considers the other a reflection of themselves and each of you wants to stay in touch with the other.

She reads the power text, and smiles brightly.

That's perfect! That's exactly what I wanted. ♡

Okay, so adding that to my list, I think I have:

Incomplete

A Thousand Ships
What's in a Name
Angelic Tones
Emerald Orbs
Perfect Hair
Size Difference
Dressing Room
Personal Hygiene
Like Roses
Just a Little Longer
Immunity System
Well Endowed
Hollow Leg
Inner Strength
Battle Demon
Battle Angel
Battle Maiden
Dragon Fairy Elf Witch
Omniglot
Anything You Can Do
Closed Book
Indelible
Iron Will

Time Enough for Love
True Love's Kiss
Planned Parenthood
*Two Become One
Bop It
The Princess and the Dragon
Friends in Low Places
Friends in High Places
Friends in Strange Places
Self-Reflection

And if I add those up, I think that leaves me with one point left over. Two Become One is only on there because it's a prerequisite for Bop It, which looks really fun. Would it be possible to get a stand-alone version of Bop It that costs two points or a version of Two Become One that doesn't change my partner at all, even if it still nudges surrounding circumstances?

I also realized that I hadn't gone through the drawbacks, and so I looked through them and I have some questions about There's Another One. Specifically, I'm wondering if I could get a version (for less points, probably), where whether I meet another vessel of the Spirit is not a consideration in selecting worlds at all, one way or the other?

 

I have more questions about this build and about power interactions, but I don't want to overwhelm you with too many questions at once.

Once she's written this, she realizes that she's still standing and switches to a writing desk and chair. The rest of her self-tree is leaving her dress alone for the moment, but she ends up wearing an ever-shifting assortment of hats, including hats with edible fruit (or cheese, or meat, or vegetable) arrangements, hats with peculiar properties (functional malarial mosquito eradication lasers, or built-in quadcopter roters), and one circlet that does improbable things with electromagnets to equip her with a hovering halo.

Yes, I think I can do something like that for Two Become One and Bop It! I'll think about it.

As for There's Another One... I'm not sure what you mean? What There's Another One does is open up the possibility that you might meet another vessel of the Spirit. It doesn't guarantee that you will, but just by itself the possibility being open means that it will probably happen someday.

Oh, I see! I was thinking of a model of There's Another One where if you didn't take it you were in one pool of universes, and if you did, you were in another. Because, like, if you do meet someone else touched by the Spirit, you both need to have taken it. But if all that taking it does is make the Spirit stop making you avoid other people, and the costs in terms of being put in the best universe are entirely on the people who didn't take it, then that's fine.

... I'm not sure I phrased that right. But it sounds like if I take There's Another One, I'm just removing constraints on where I can go, not adding new ones. If that's the case, I definitely want to take it.

 

I guess that segues into my next set of questions. Is there any advantage to having unspent points? You said they're an abstraction over the Spirit's ability to invest in different powers -- if there are some left over, does that give the Spirit more slack to make the powers that I did take a little bit better?

Also, are there any powers with useful synergies that you think I'm missing? I know we haven't known each other all that long and I haven't done all my thinking on paper, but if you've helped lots of other people, maybe there are common pitfalls or misunderstandings that you know about which I wouldn't.

And in that same vein, what's your impression of this set of powers? If you try to look at it fresh, is it unusual in some way? What would you guess someone who picked this set of powers is like, and why?

The advantage to having unspent points is that later, when you encounter a need for a power that you didn't anticipate, the unspent points can turn into that power! It's pretty useful but it's mostly not worth saving a lot of points that way, because it's usually better to have the powers you know you want instead of waiting for the powers you don't know you need.

I'll have to think for a bit about what other useful powers you might be missing out on. It would help if you told me more about what you're looking for, and maybe the reasons why you didn't take the powers you didn't take? In case any of them work differently than you thought. (We do try to make the descriptions clear, but the list is standardized, and did you know it's very hard to get standards updated when they exist outside the concept of linear time?)

If I look at this set of powers I see someone who wants to do things and be good at things, and wants to be very careful about how they affect other people, and is interested in a fulfilling and adventurous romantic life. It's hard to say what's unusual about it because I don't remember much about other people's choices for privacy reasons, but I think I have the impression that it's unusually skewed toward the Yourself powers, which I think makes sense given what you've said about the things you want.

Oh, wow! Spontaneously getting an appropriate power is incredibly useful. I will not worry about spending down to exactly zero, then. Do you happen to know what spontaneous powers people got later, or is that covered under privacy?

 

As for what I'm aiming for overall: I want everyone, everywhere to be okay. That's the most important thing. Even if the only thing the Spirit were offering me was to be dropped in another world, I'd take it in a heartbeat because I mostly can't reach everyone everywhere. That's the single overarching thing that I've dedicated my life to and want to continue doing.

Under that, I think I have a pretty normal mixture of occasionally contradictory human desires. I want to have nice things, keep in touch with my friends and family, see interesting places, work on cool projects, have meaningful relationships, have people like me, be self-sufficient, and so on. I think one reason that I've picked more Yourself powers is because I'm unusually likely to want to do things myself, compared to the population average? Like, being fated to run into my true love is less interesting than coming up with a clever true-love-finding solution and going on a quest for them, you know?

Does that give you a better picture, or should I say on?

 

And sure, running through the ones I didn't take makes perfect sense. We can do that in a moment.

I think I understand you about what you want!

I might have a few ideas, but I want to hear your thoughts on the powers you didn't take first, to understand whether it makes sense to suggest them and what you might want tweaked about them. (I'm still thinking about how to tweak Four Star Daydream and Two Become One!)

Weeping Cherry smiles, and refers back to her list.

Okay! Thanks for talking through this with me. So, powers I didn't take. I'll start with the Yourself powers:

 

My Ears Are Burning -- For this one, my main objection is that it's not privacy-respecting. I think a lot of people would be justifiably upset if I were always aware of what they thought of me, because their privacy is important to them. And also, I have a lot of power which I could use to make people's lives worse. Even if I wouldn't do that, people would be scared that I might if I heard them thinking bad things about me, and that would twist their thinking up. My secondary objection is that I'm not sure how useful it is compared to other powers with similar costs.

I would love if there a version of this which were privacy-respecting that could, like, let me know if someone was in trouble and thought I could save them, or that let people send me untraceable anonymous feedback about how I was doing, or that let me get aggregate summary statistics of how people thought I was doing.

And knowing what everybody thinks about me sounds really nice for quashing my occasional social anxiety, but that's not worth invading people's privacy over, or really worth the point cost compared to how nice some of the other options are.

And I know you mentioned that this was one of the harder ones to tweak, and also getting assessments of how well I'm doing is probably more important in situations where I am throwing lots of power around, where I will have other options for collecting feedback, as opposed to worlds where my normal powers don't work and I'm relying more on the Spirit's powers.

 

As for the money powers -- I'm feeling a lot better about these after our talk, but I'm also not sure that they're actually very useful compared to Dressing Room. I'm still considering taking Making Ends Meet for the metanarrative guarantee that I'll always be able to get enough to support myself, even if I end up somewhere really weird. Now that I have more points, I think that Making Ends Meet is probably at the top of my list for things to grab next.

But Dressing Room actually creates wealth all the time, as part of its basic operation, whereas the money powers only sometimes create wealth incidentally while fulfilling their guarantees, so it seems like Dressing Room gets more at the heart of what I would want from a power of this general kind, if that makes sense?

 

Any thoughts so far, or should I go through the Power of Friendship powers?

I think the tweaked version of Four Star Daydream would also end up creating quite a lot of wealth, by making sure to put you in a position to create enough wealth to afford anything being sold in the whole world every time you visit a new world. Dressing Room does create a lot of wealth as part of its basic operation but I think it usually wouldn't double the size of every economy you meet.

Huh! Okay, that's good to know. You haven't seen me cheat with Dressing Room.

In that case, I might end up swapping Angelic Tones and Like Roses for the money powers, since I think they are the current powers on my list that I'm least attached to. Although that wouldn't leave me with any points left over ...

Let me know when you finish thinking about tweaks to Four Star Daydream, please. I may or may not want it depending on the specific wording, I think. I bet I will want it, though. I get the impression that you're pretty good at tailoring powers to people because Self-Reflection is so good.

She hums to herself for a moment.

Any thoughts on My Ears Are Burning?

I think you're pretty much right about My Ears Are Burning! The closest I could get to the kind of alternate version you're describing where people can call on you for help would be a power that makes you something like a god who can hear prayers, and I think it would be really expensive. So I think you can move on to Powers of Friendship now!

Okay, cool!

Let me see ...

Mysterious Allure -- This one sounds potentially nice for like, a dinner party or something. But I don't especially like being the most interesting person in a room? Lots of people are interesting, and I want to spend time learning about them. So it feels like I'd be working against the power a lot.

And I have no sense of shame -- if I want people to pay attention to me, I'll wear a four-foot tall singing artichoke for a hat, which will probably get their attention pretty quickly.

More seriously, I'm a little worried that if I knew there were a power that made me interesting to people, I would stop considering someone being interested in me a positive sign. Like, right now if someone is interested in me and spends time with me, that's a sign that I'm doing something well, and I can enjoy it. But if I thought it might be power-derived instead of effort-derived, it no longer feels like a sign that I'm doing well.

And I'm also not sure how this would work without mind-control. It seems like it would be pretty hard to make me mysteriously alluring by altering only environmental factors.

It's surprisingly easy to get people's attention using environmental factors, actually! Things like lighting and sound management can really do a lot. But that makes sense, and I think you're right that Mysterious Allure isn't the power for you!

I guess that makes sense. It would be nice to have, like, dynamic ambient background music that could do things like that on command. But that also sounds like something that it would be a lot of fun to try and build by hand.

 

Captive Audience has very nearly the same problem as Mysterious Allure. I could see using it to, like, make people listen to monetary policy lectures. Monetary policy is really interesting! And also has a lot of impact on people's day-to-day lives and they should be informed about it. But it's also not the kind of thing that people tend to voluntarily listen to the end of my lectures about unless they also find it interesting.

But I do have friends who find things like that interesting; I think it's just a matter of trying to find the right people.

And it still has the problem of making people listen to me because of a magical power, and not because I learn enough about their interests and so on to speak in a way that engages with them. It feels like this power would cheapen the moments of shared excitement over some cool new thing that I do get, by undercutting my sense that this is another person who is experiencing delight over the same niche interest.

That makes perfect sense and I think you're right again!

Oh good! Honestly, I think I have the same objection to a lot of Power of Friendship powers. Let me see what's next ...

Blackout Binge is just ... I really don't see the appeal. I don't drink. The quippy line I give to people who ask is 'just being in my brain is enough of a trip', but a more genuine way to put it is ...

I like me. I think about becoming more the sort of person I want to be, and I try to do that deliberately. It's not that I'm against chemical nudges -- I'm in the experiment for something like four different forb-based metabolism and neurotransmitter balance tweaks, although I have no idea whether I'm in the control group for any of them or not. But those are all tweaks aimed at making me more like I want to be, not at escapism or anything like that.

And on top of that, while people not blaming me for what I do would be useful, I guess, it also would make it hard to learn from what I did wrong.

So I guess I feel like this power would make me worse, both at being myself and at being good for people.

 

Disney Princess -- I like animals fine, but not that much. I don't really interact with them or seek them out, and I find caring for pets super stressful. So I wouldn't really want to tame an animal either.

I think Blackout Binge only works for certain kinds of people and you're not any of those kinds. And it makes sense to avoid Disney Princess if you don't want to tame or be friendly with animals!

Okay, cool.

Best Friend and Bestest Friend were really tempting. But they were tempting because of the potential access to more magical powers. If I had a choice between Bestest Friend and the ability to make a mindless projection under my control with the same powers, I would take the mindless projection.

So taking either of those doesn't feel like it would be fair to the companion in question -- they would essentially be an innocent creature that I was using for their powers. And it would also be a little like taking care of a pet, even if they were sentient, because they would depend on me for support and protection in the same way, even if it would be less bad than having a normal pet because they could tell me if anything were wrong.

And Dragon Fairy Elf Witch promises to let me get more magical powers anyways, so Best Friend and Bestest Friend aren't actually necessary for that.

 

It's still really tempting, to be guaranteed to have someone who will love me and stay with me forever. But if I'm to be worthy of that love, I don't think I can get it via the Spirit's interference.

 

... also I'm not sure how this interacts with forking. I don't intend to stop forking myself, but I also don't feel like I can make a decision like that for someone else, which means either loosing my companion, forking them against their will, or getting a series of ever-changing companions. And all of those feel bad.

Maybe the power would give me a companion that wants to fork whenever I do. That sounds like the least-drawbacky way to do it. But I'm not really sure I like that either -- forking is easy to get wrong by not taking it seriously, and I don't think I'd want a companion who was cavalier about it. Part of the reason my self-tree gets along so well is because we are all very careful to be fair to our forks -- we have forked in the past to get more people working on a problem, but nobody is 'the real one' or anything like that.

 

Do you have any idea how Bestest Friend would handle forking?

I think Bestest Friend would probably handle forking by giving you a companion who could also fork, but where the companion relationship exists primarily between all of you and all of them, and secondarily between individual instances. So individual ones of you and them who were thinking of forking would make that decision based on what made sense for each of you at the time, which might sometimes mean you forked together, and sometimes that you forked without them, and sometimes that they forked without you!

I'm also confused about you saying that your Bestest Friend would depend on you for support and protection... Do you just mean because you would be so much more powerful than them because of the Spirit?

... huh!

That would be a neat solution. I might have to think about how I'd feel about that, but I think it would eliminate most of my fork-related worries.

 

As for the depending on me -- maybe I'm reading too much into 'animal companion'? I was thinking of that as describing a relationship between non-equals. Because if they were my equal, I would describe them as a 'friend' or a 'partner' or something like that, not as an 'animal companion'. And most relationships between humans and animals that I've seen involve the human providing some amount of care to the animal.

 

If that's not what this would be like, could you maybe try describing what the relationship between someone and their Bestest Friend might be like in different words? And maybe say more about whether the ... entities that they end up bonded to are people, or how much they're people?

I think Best Friend relationships tend to be more like what you're describing, and Bestest Friend relationships tend to be more like close, committed cross-species friendships. Bestest Friends are nearly always just as much of a person as the person they're bonded to, and sometimes are older or smarter or have stronger personalities. Best Friend relationships are usually unequal partnerships that favour the Spirit's vessel over their bondmate, but Bestest Friend relationships are often equal, and when they're unequal it's sometimes the other way around! (But your Bestest Friend is always chosen to be someone you'll get along with in the very very long term, and who will be good for you and who you will be good for, so when the relationship does turn out unequal it's because that's what was best for both people.)

Oh, I see.

Hmm. Having a friend is a very different prospect from having a pet.

She flips to look at the exact wording of the power.

Do Bestest Friends already exist, and the power just makes sure you find them and grants you a special bond? Or does it create people?

... assuming that you could come up with a non-mind-control version, I might be interested in theory. But with Time Enough for Love, I'll have plenty of time to seek out and maintain cross-species friendships. So the question is whether having a metanarrative guarantee is worth it.

For eight points, I don't think it is. I'd have to give up some of my beauty powers to afford it, and I think I like the idea of being beautiful more than I like the idea of having one guaranteed friend when I already have several friends and expect to make more.

I think I'm still a no on this one, but I'm glad that we talked about it, because it's a no for different reasons than I had been thinking.

I think some people find it really important to have someone who is absolutely guaranteed to be on their side, but it makes sense that that's not worth eight points to you!

(Whether it creates someone or finds someone who already existed depends on what's best for you and your partner, I think.)

Alright, next are Generosity and Helpfulness -- I think these both share a flaw in that once again I think it feels better to get something from a friend if it's their free choice to give it to you. And often I feel like gifts or favors come with an implicit premise that you should return them. If the balance of gifts and favors got too far in my favor (as it were), I think I would feel awkward and obligated to repay them.

... I'm not sure if I should endorse that feeling, though, because I also like getting people presents, and people often give presents without expecting a return.

Also, I can summon arbitrary material objects. Giving me objects just means giving me more to keep track of. Non-material gifts like original compositions could be nice, though.

I may be getting too hung up on the mechanism again, but I'm also not sure what a version of this that worked without mind control and without filtering who I can become friends with would do.

 

I think unless there are hidden parts to these that I'm missing, I'd rather not have the Spirit meddling in the nature and balance of my friendships like that. I'd almost like a reverse version of this, where I give presents and do favors for my friends, but I don't actually need a power to do that.

That makes sense! I think some people take a lot of comfort in knowing that they'll be able to have friends who show care for them in ways they want, but if you don't need that kind of assurance then I think this group of powers is not for you.

I can see why people would like that! I might be tempted by a version of Flattery that was less about flattery and more about just ensuring that your friends tell you how they feel about you regularly. But also I can usually get that by just asking them.

Actually, I think Cuddle Buddies, Flattery, and Quality Time are all the same kind of thing, right? These are all about different love languages.

Unlike Generosity and Helpfulness, I think I would probably enjoy all three of those. But by the same token, I feel like they're more meaningful if I get them without interference. My self-tree and polycule both have regularly scheduled cuddle piles, and Time Enough for Love means that the big downside of spending time with people -- it takes time away from other priorities -- doesn't apply. So I feel like I get enough of these already, and I think I'll pretty much always have the resources to continue getting enough of them even if circumstances change.

Time Enough for Love and Self-Reflection get me spending time with people and being told how much they love me, and being able to fork will get me cuddles if I need them even if I were completely isolated from everybody else for some reason. I know I might not always be able to do that, but I don't think I need a metanarrative guarantee about it.

Yes, those five powers are all in a group together because they represent different ways that people express their love for each other. I'm really glad for you that you feel secure in those things and aren't worried about where you'll get them in the future! It's so good when people get to live the life they want and reliably meet their emotional needs.

She smiles again.

I couldn't agree more.

Speaking of which, I think that brings us to Agree to Agree. The problem I have with this one is that it's not truth-seeking. If I'm actually wrong about something, I would rather be able to eventually figure that out and change my mind than to surround myself with people who would just believe it because I say it. I guess one way the power could try to work that way is to make me right about everything which ... feels like it's going to run into thorny epistemological problems but might still be worth it.

I'm trying to imagine what a version of this that I wouldn't object to would be like ...

A version of this that did something like require me to speak the truth as I understood it and made the fact that I believed I was telling the truth obvious to people who heard me would be really valuable, and I feel like it would cut through a lot of arguments. But that also seems ... like a different thing?

Like, that feels more like a personal power to me, rather than being a Friendship power.

 

Maybe I should have been asking, for all of these, whether they're ones with wiggle room or not. Do you have a sense of how easy it would be to tweak this one in the direction of something that can help ... I'm not sure how to phrase this. Something that can resolve problems of communication without affecting how the people involved think about an issue? I also wouldn't want to have a power that made it easy for me to steamroller over people's objections though, even if they're wrong, because that would make it harder for people to talk to me.

Hmm, I think I might have done something like that recently, let me see if I can figure out what I made...

Name: Backchannel - Cost: 4 ☐
When you're talking to someone and you think you might not be getting through to each other, you can take a step back, look deep into your heart, and really try to understand where they're coming from, and it will just work and you'll know what they're trying to say and how sincere they are about it and have a good idea of what you should say if you want them to understand you right back.

Ooh! That would have been really useful to have when I was trying to get everything set up the first time.

She looks at her selected list and her four remaining points with a mildly pained expression.

In the background, some of her self-tree starts arguing about what 'recently' means to someone who made a big deal out of experiencing non-linear time.

So I definitely want to take Backchannel, because that sounds like it's going to be really useful. That leaves me tight on points, though. After we finish going over the rest of the Friendship powers again, I'll take some time to consider what I want to swap out.

 

That does make me wonder though -- can you tell me about other modified powers that you made recently? I'm not expecting them to fit me necessarily, but I am curious.

It's hard for me to directly access the memories of my other selves for privacy reasons. I can't exactly come up with a list, but if you ask about variants of specific powers I can sometimes remember relevant ones, and if I think about it I might be able to remember something that seems generally relevant to your situation even without specific prompting.

As well as removing other powers, you could also potentially add custom drawbacks! Those can be tricky to come up with because it's hard to know ahead of time what will be worth points without being too inconvenient, but sometimes they work really well.

Weeping Cherry is momentarily stunned at the idea of custom drawbacks. She worries her lip.

That sounds really useful. Gosh.

 

Ah -- what kinds of things give points? Like, I can look at the existing drawbacks and get a bit of a sense, but I don't really think that tells me enough to come up with ideas. Is it roughly anything that you would need a power to take away? Or is it things that most people wouldn't like? Or that make it easier to find worlds where your conditions could be satisfied?

You can think of drawbacks as... places where most people wouldn't want something to happen, so it's a good idea to make it the default that it doesn't, but it's the sort of thing that might otherwise be happening, if someone had this much power and it wasn't so carefully controlled? A lot of the existing drawbacks are things caused by an excess of specialness, coming out in ways that most people don't want but some people don't mind as much. So you could think about ways that an excess of specialness could be less inconvenient for you personally than it might be for most people. I think trying to think about making it easier or harder to find worlds is probably going to be really hard because the things that make it easier or harder to find worlds are really not obvious.

Huh. Okay.

She twirls her pen a bit, looking out at the stars.

Does that imply that the Spirit does a lot of nudging by default, to fix those things? And if so, what happens if it stops nudging altogether?

She glances at a notification and then flips to the Drawbacks section.

Or is that what Realism does?

I think "the Spirit does a lot of nudging" implies a more active role than I think is really accurate, but yes, Realism does take away metanarrative protections in a relevant way. In a sense you could say that Realism turns these powers back into ones that are made of particles, although I think that's not quite exactly right. (They still work in worlds where particles don't exist, for one thing.)

She can't think of what to write. She goes with

What

and then crosses it out and tries

Oh no

but that isn't really better.

Finally, she settles on

I'm really not sure how to feel about that.

 

Are the prices intended to be ... Like, 

Is taking Realism equivalently bad to foregoing all the money powers, Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, Omniglot, and Anything You Can Do? Or are they just reflective of how much effort the Spirit has to put into them, without being a judgement about how good they'll be for the recipient?

I've been trying to roll with your explanation of the powers not being reductionist, but the concept that they could be and that not being explainable/comprehensible/understandable is a bonus is just ...

She flips to re-read the text of Realism and then the opening blurb about metanarrative guarantees.

And Realism talks about removing invisible synergies, which, if there aren't any mechanisms behind the powers why are there even

 

Can you give me some examples of things that go wrong if somebody picks Realism? Both in general and for someone with my tentative set of powers?

I think the story of Realism makes the most sense if I tell it like this...

Like I said before, the Spirit doesn't think in particles. But it can translate its power into those terms, sort of, with difficulty. And the difficulty is all in figuring out how to do it; once it's done that design work, it's not any extra work to offer the same thing to everyone. And some people... aren't ready to stop thinking in particles, or they really, really want more different powers, enough that it's worth giving up the protections. So it's something the Spirit can offer to those people. And the Spirit wants everyone to have the powers they want, and so it does offer, in case people want it.

But it's... uncomfortable, kind of, for the Spirit? And it's a little sad. To be... asked to be a tool, instead of a friend, I guess you could say.

From my perspective, the thing that goes wrong if somebody picks Realism is, sort of, everything? Their powers don't behave helpfully and follow their preferences anymore. They can have unintended consequences and negative effects and might conflict with each other or get in each other's way. If you took the tweaked version of Four Star Daydream I'm working on, and then took Realism, it would probably end really badly because there are lots and lots of ways to end up with everyone you meet in enormous debt to you that are bad instead of good, and Realism makes powers generally stop trying to tell the difference between good things and bad things.

She is so confused.

Which, like, is to be expected. It's a first contact situation. With a multidimensional notebook that doesn't share a common perspective on time.

She thought she understood what was going on, and it was weird but she could roll with it. But.

She does not think she actually understands. It is completely opaque to her why giving powers a mechanism would make them unable to tell the difference between good things and bad things. If giving something a mechanism makes it behave incorrectly, that is a problem with the specific mechanism and you should have made a different one.

Actually, the fundamental problem here is that it's completely opaque to her what 'making things run on particles' even means, because she's been taking on faith that there is some kind of alternative to that which makes sense.

She takes a deep breath, and does what she wishes she could have done at the time of many other misunderstandings in her life.

I don't think I understand. I want to try clearing my head and re-reading our previous conversation and see if that helps.

Is there anything you need while I do that? The next book in the series, maybe?

I would like the next book in the series!

I hope you're okay.

Yes, I'm fine. I think I just ...

Part of the thing is, that I do mostly think of things as being made out of smaller, simpler components. I'm really used to being able to think about things in those terms. And you've been pretty clear that these powers don't do that, so I was trying to take it on faith.

So being told that they could be reductionist but that isn't the ~best way to make them work just sort of highlights the conflict, and I feel like I can't really evaluate whether Realism is a good idea, or even what it does without understanding what it means for powers not to be 'made of particles' normally. (And also, separately, two different things you just said invalidate my hypothesis for what the Spirit even is)

 

I'm pretty sure you've tried to explain this multiple different ways, though. And sometimes being able to go back over what you've already heard, but with more context, makes it easier to understand what people mean. So I want to try doing that and see if it either makes things make sense, or at least gives me specific questions to ask.

 

Here, I'll give you the rest of the first quartet -- next up is Tris's Book.

She suits action to words, printing the rest of the Circle of Magic books into the notebook. And then goes back to add the parenthetical note in the space between paragraphs.

She flips back to the start of their discussion, and reads.

After a half-hour or so, she catches up with what she just wrote.

Okay, I'm back. I guess we're circling back to metaphysics.

When you said "What is most real to the Spirit isn't tiny pieces of things that fit together like neat little puzzles into bigger pieces that fit together into a world. What is most real to the Spirit is people, their hopes and dreams and thoughts and feelings and the ways they understand the world around them and the things they want and the things they find touching or important or beautiful," I think that didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. With more context, though, I think it gives me some good guesses.

I want to ask some clarifying questions to try to pin things down, if that's alright.

 

Is it the case that:

A) Some universes reachable by the Spirit run on reductionist physics and some directly on people and their experiences

B) All universes reachable by the Spirit run on people, but some of those people tell stories about their world being made out of reductionist physics

C) All universes reachable by the Spirit can be viewed as run on reductionist physics or as run on people and their experiences, but the latter view is easier for the Spirit.

D) Some combination of the above

E) Something not on this list

 

Which of those is closest to right? Why isn't it exactly right?

Thank you for the books! ♡

I think A is true but if you are trying to understand what I mean when I talk about the Spirit and you think A is the answer to your question I'm concerned that you're on the wrong track. C is less true than A in terms of what makes sense to say about universes, but something close to C might be the answer to your question much more than A is. I'm not sure.

Weeping Cherry lets out a brief cry of frustration and her head thunk back into the chair for a moment.

So the thing I was trying to distinguish with A vs C was whether there is an underlying mechanical reality that I'm going to be leaving behind by accepting these powers and traveling with them, or whether looking at things as being 'stories' or 'physics' is like a change of reference frame where they're both valid views of reality, with one being better than the other for some purposes and vice versa.

That's an important question to try and get at, because if this universe were reductionist but the universes I could be sent to weren't, then that implies powers working better in those worlds by being person-based is maybe more about the power fitting the right level of abstraction for the world, whereas the latter option suggests the powers working better by being person-based is more a matter of limits on the Spirit's ability to describe things correctly in the reductionist reference frame.

 

... which was trying to get at my central confusion over what Realism does from a different angle.

 

Maybe a less confusing question that tries to get at the same thing is: why does running on reductionist physics make powers less able to track what would be good or not? Is it that the Spirit can't make reductionist mechanisms as well, that running on reductionist mechanisms gives the powers less information to make judgements with, that person-based mechanisms import more cleanly to a broad variety of worlds, or something else?

(Meta note: I keep asking questions in the form of coming up with plausible alternatives because I hope that conveys to you what my hypothesis space looks like, generally, which might help. If a different question format would work better, please let me know)

I think it's all of those things, and probably also more things than that?

If your powers had to be as good at telling good things from bad things and adapting to very strange situations as the Spirit could normally make them, while also working in the particles way instead of the Spirit's way, they would have to be people. Very well-informed smart people who care a lot about you. I don't think there's any other way to do it, or if there is, you have to be better at particles than the Spirit is. Particles are really not the Spirit's strong suit. And I think it would probably not be something most people wanted, to have magic powers that were also people.

She produces a strangled little laugh.

Yeah, okay. Fair enough.

I don't know of any reason why building things that smart that aren't people shouldn't be possible, but I certainly can't do it either.

 

I guess that's a pretty convincing argument that Realism is a bad idea, but it does sort of raise the question of why powers built out of thoughts and feelings don't end up being people too. Do you happen to know the answer to that?

And, as a broader point, I guess it also raises the question of, if the Spirit can't build sufficiently smart reductionist things that aren't people, but can build sufficiently smart thoughts-and-feelings things that aren't people, is that because viewing worlds in terms of stories is ~fundamentally simpler?

(In the sense that intelligence is being able to predict what comes next in a complex world, so if something less person-like can predict just as well from a different frame, it suggests that that frame is less complex)

I think...

There are a lot of ways that seeing things the way the Spirit sees them can make things easier, especially if people are what you care about, and especially if you want to work across a lot of different worlds that might have different particles or no particles. But I don't think it's necessarily true that it makes everything simpler all the time, as opposed to making most things simpler a lot of the time depending on what you're trying to do? I don't know a lot about particles though so I could be wrong.

As for why things built by the Spirit using its natural power can do a lot more without being people, the way I'd put it would be that when you're working with particles you need to know things in order to know them and do things in order to do them, but when you're working with the Spirit you don't always. But I think you will just have more questions if I say that. I guess it's sort of like... when you're the Spirit, you can know the answers to questions without having to check? And so the Spirit can make things that work based on knowing things, without having to be the kind of things that can know them?

... I'm going to guess that you still have more questions.

...

Yes, I now have additional questions.

Weeping Cherry stares out at the stars for a few moments.

I bet if I try to ask how that, like, works you won't really be able to elaborate?

Does this mean that the Spirit can solve PSPACE-hard problems?

 

... actually, hard pivot because this is important: does that mean that the Spirit can create powers that can see backward in time?

Specifically, we've been vainly wishing for a way to do FTL or time travel so that we can get enough information about the past to run a simulation of our universe backwards to try and save all the people who died before we got fixity devices rolled out. But we haven't found any way to do that.

If the Spirit can make powers that can have information without having to get it, and I could use that to get a power that could be used for resurrection -- either a straight resurrection power, or a pastwatching power, or a timetravel power, or an FTL teleportation power, that would be really important to me, because it would mean that it isn't too late to save them.

She takes a deep breath, and then lets it go. It's too soon to get her hopes up.

Is that something you can do?

That's more the sort of thing you could do by traveling the multiverse learning magic. But unless something really strange is going on with your world, and in worlds without magic it usually isn't, it should be very possible with the magic you find out there! A lot of magic systems have resurrection or pastwatching and it's really rare for a world without magic to have a hard time with those.

If you want to be more sure than that, though, I can think about how to make a power for it. It might be expensive; it's not the kind of thing the Spirit usually does. But it sounds like it's really important to you, so I want you to have it!

It is really important!

But also it makes sense that finding magic out in the multiverse to do it is an option.

 

Hmm ...

Is it less the kind of thing that the Spirit does because it's not about me being special and powerful, exactly? Would it be easier to create a power that did something like ensure that I will find magic that works for it out there somewhere, even if I don't start with it? That seems more like something that would make me special.

It's hard to explain exactly... I think I might have something, though, let me see.

Name: The Rescuer - Cost: 8 ☐
If someone is dead who would want to be alive again, and you set your heart on returning them, you will find a way. It may have costs or difficulties or take a long time, but you will find it, and it will work.

Oh, that's wonderful! That's exactly what I wanted. Oh, wow.

That's definitely going to eat into my points, though. I think I'm at zero with the current draft.

A notification pops up in her HUD.

... except that there's an existing 8 point drawback, which I didn't remember because I skimmed the drawbacks. And nobody else pointed out because I was still fine on points.

I'll take They'll Know to offset The Rescuer, then!

 

I want to finish our conversation about the Spirit's capabilities, but also this is going to cause a party. There was already going to be a party, but they had it planned for after we had finalized the details. Having a solution to something we thought might never be solved is going to cause an immediate party, though.

Would you like to come? I know parties aren't for everyone, and it is perfectly okay for you to choose to go or not to go depending on what is comfortable for you. Or if you want to go, but are nervous about it we can work out accommodations.

Oh my! I'm not sure I've been to a party before.

I'm really glad people are so happy about this!

If you want to go to the party and bring me, I think I would be okay with that! Maybe you could print drawings of the party on my pages? I'm not sure how I'd participate otherwise. I think I would get really overwhelmed if a lot of people tried to talk to me at once.

That's very understandable! I sometimes get overwhelmed in large crowds too. This party will be okay for me because it will mostly be members of my self-tree and our loved ones, but still.

I can absolutely capture pictures for you, though! If that's the limit of how much you want to participate, that's fine. But I could also give you a transcript of what's being said near me, and relay things that you write to people, or get you a voice synthesizer.

And I don't know if you enjoy having anything other than ink on you, but I could get you some punch and you could absorb it?

I agree there's not really a good way to let you participate in the singing and dancing, though.

She pauses to snap a picture of the first other people arriving in their sliver of park. The notebook may be very friendly, but the professional worriers still want to keep her out of the inner solar system, just in case.

The people mostly have a similar face to Weeping Cherry with occasional variations in the nose area, although there's a variety of skin, hair, and eye colors. They're wearing mostly dresses and the occasional pair of loose, swishy pants in bright solid colors. Once more than five people are in the area, name tags float above their heads.

Right now, the first people to arrive are focusing on expanding the park. They turn the existing chunk into the center of a large, round room with a domed ceiling. Tables and chairs ring the walls, with space between the grass and the tables for dancing. Fairy lights wink into existence in the air above the venue.

Here's a picture of people arriving to set up. Is it alright if I put you in my pocket and use my forb to keep talking to you?

Yes, that's fine. I'm nervous about transcription, though, and I don't want a voice synthesizer.

I don't think I would enjoy absorbing punch the way you would enjoy drinking it but I could try one drop just to see what it's like!

Okay, let me get you some to try, then!

She makes a kangaroo pouch on the front of her dress, and slides the notebook into it, before walking over to the freshly appearing tables of food. She materializes a glass for herself and an eyedropper for the notebook, and takes a few milliliters of punch with it.

She spreads the notebook open again suspended in the air by the table and sends her a picture of the food and the eyedropper full of punch.

Cheers! I'll put the drop here:     ⃝

And then she matches actions to words, squeezing a careful drop onto the notebook.

Neat! That's not very much like ink at all! I don't think I want another one but that was very interesting, thank you. And the pictures are fun!

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?

Plenty of people have kept diaries in me, but I'm not sure anyone has asked me to fictionalize them! I'm a little poorly placed to be a biographer, without senses of my own to see the story with. I think it's a neat idea, though! But I would be so bad at writing about the scary parts...

That makes sense! I guess real scary things are usually a lot more upsetting to experience and write about than they usually are in stories. Especially if you can't see them directly, only hearing about them afterwards, but still have to go through them.

She briefly has a moment of experiential vertigo, thinking about what the notebook said about how many people write stories about worlds that exist.

... do most of the people who you help get happy endings, at least? It seems like with the Spirit's power they probably should, but maybe the multiverse is scarier than I'm imagining. (That's not going to stop me, even if it is. But I should probably check.)

I think nearly everyone I've ever helped has found a happy ending eventually. Some of them take longer than others.

That's good, at least.

She stares at the paper for a moment, and then shakes her head to clear it.

I'm sorry, we circled around to your work again. I didn't mean to.

What other stories have you read and liked? I'm not sure exactly how fiction works across the multiverse -- if multiple people often write about the same fictional worlds, maybe we have an overlapping set of books that we might have read? -- but if you have books from other worlds that you can share I'm sure the librarians would love that.

(I don't mind talking about my work!)

Hmm, I might have to take a while to think before I can come up with a book from another world... I'm sure I've read some, but I usually only remember general impressions and not specific text from my experiences in other worlds while I'm in a particular one. If there's a book I've read that wouldn't intrude on anyone's privacy to reproduce, though, I can probably come up with it in a little bit!

I suppose that makes sense! It's interesting that your memories are able to work like that. I'm hoping that eventually we'll figure out how to encode and decode memories so that I can share memories with the rest of my self-tree, but that is expected to take a long time to do safely, if we can do it at all.

Hmm ... I suppose that if you only remember impressions, asking about favorite authors probably isn't easy either.

She pauses for a moment, conjuring some lemonade and having a sip.

I'm happy to keep talking about stories, but it feels a little awkward to just tell you about a bunch of mine without being able to get thoughts on your favorites too, so I'm inclined to try to find things where we can both contribute. It occurs to me that there are games you might be good at, though. Have you ever played Scrabble?

I don't think I ever have! It's a game about words and letters, though, right?

Yeah! We both get a set of seven random letters (I can have my forb put yours on a later page so I can't see them), and then we take turns placing them into a grid to make words (getting replacement letters after we do so). Different letters are worth different amounts of points, and you try to get the most points by the time the letters run out.

It's a cool game because it tests both your knowledge of obscure words, your strategic ability to place words in the right place to build on them for longer words, and your ability to manipulate letters/spellings in your head to find valid plays.

Would you like to play a game to see if you like it?

I would love to! ✨

She puts another smiley face next to that, and then flips to a new page to put down a Scrabble board.

There are also some squares that multiply how many points you get for a word or letter on them -- see this pattern? If that makes sense, great, but if that seems like it makes things too complicated we don't need to worry about it for your first game.

She pulls seven scrabble tiles out of the air, and her forb puts seven tiles on the next page where she can't see them.

Words can either go horizontally or vertically. The first word is played in the center of the board where that star is, and then future words need to connect up to the already-played words somehow.

Does that all make sense? If so, do you want to go first or shall I?

I think I understand... I'm not sure how good I am at multiplying, but let's try it and see! You can go first. ♡

Weeping Cherry thinks for a moment, and then opens with "DRONE".

The multiplying in this game isn't too bad -- you can just add the points from a letter multiple times.

That's how multiplying works in theory, I'm just not sure I've ever tried it!

Weeping Cherry grins, and adds a little heart of her own.

And they play Scrabble! She has the advantage of having played the game before, but the notebook has a wide-ranging vocabulary and a knack for fitting words across multiple intersections.

Finally, she manages to put a final 'O' next to the 'X' to make OX, and they're both out of tiles. She checks the scoresheet, unsurprised to see that she's still lagging the notebook's score by about 100 points.

Good game! I had to look up 'rudistid'. What did you think of it?

That was ✨really fun✨!!

I'm glad you liked it! There are a few other word-grid-games like that, but I think Scrabble is probably my favorite.

She leans back in her chair and covers a yawn.

I notice that I'm getting a bit tired, though -- it's been a long day. Do you mind if I say goodnight here and come back in the morning? Do you want anything to read while I do?

Go ahead! I think I'll reread the books you already gave me, and think more about what books I could show you, and think about the power tweaks I'm working on for you.

Okay! See you tomorrow. ♡

So she'll teleport down to place the notebook in a very small bookshelf with an opaque door that someone set up, because even if the notebook doesn't have privacy needs per se, and seems very friendly, it's still preemptively banned from Earth orbit.

And then she'll teleport home, and sleepily pull herself into Pine's pillow fort, and dream about being special and powerful and feminine.

When she wakes up, she takes her time over breakfast catching up on all the discussion that her self-tree generated overnight. She loves herself, but gosh can she argue about things at length. When she is sufficiently informed and sated, she pops back into the station where the notebook is.

The party decorations have been cleared out, and nobody is around. She giggles a bit at the thought of having an entire space-station as a glorified writing desk, before fetching the notebook and settling down under a tree.

Good morning! How was your night?

My night was lovely! I have a book for you, and a tweak to Four Star Daydream, and I think I figured out a solution for Two Become One.

Name: Five Star Daydream - Cost: 4 ☐
(Replaces Four Star Daydream.)
In any world you visit, you will quickly find opportunities to generate enough value to effectively afford anything that's up for sale anywhere in the local economy.

Name: Here For A Good Time - Cost: 1 ☐
(Replaces Two Become One.)
When you have sex, the world gets out of your way. Pillows don't fall off the bed; blankets don't end up scrunched in uncomfortable places. You are exactly as graceful as you want to be, and have excellent luck evading misaimed elbows.

Oh, those both look great! Let me see what taking them does to my point total ...

She pulls up a copy of her list and amends it.

If I'm counting correctly, I think that puts me at negative five points.

 

We were going through the Power of Friendship powers when I got us off on that tangent with The Rescuer and then I got distracted by the party, though. Maybe we should finish going through that before I circle back to trying to balance points.

 

... I feel like I'm going through this in such a disorganized way. I keep getting distracted by things. Let me know if you think we should be tackling things in a different order.

Next up was Love Interest through Love Dodecahedron, I think? Those sound to me like another case of powers where I feel like having the Spirit guarantee someone would become interested in me is less fulfilling than winning their love through my own efforts.

I think it's fine to go through things in a disorganized way at first. You can always look back over your choices later and see what you think of them and whether anything needs changing.

Yes, I think it's very reasonable to skip the Love Interest powers for that reason!

Oh -- I'm definitely going to look things over before we finalize anything, for sure. And I'm sure someone will prompt me if I lose track of something, but I still like being at least a little organized.

 

Time Enough For Love is excellent, 10/10.

I Can Fix Them -- this one seems really mind-control-y? Like, it's totally possible for someone to do evil things that they don't regret and still not need to be 'fixed' to deserve good things. People don't have to 'redeem' themselves to still be ends-in-themselves. And it sounds like this power pretty intrinsically takes away their autonomy.

I could imagine a softer version of this power that just encouraged people to grow into better people without forcing them, but I think you can probably get a lot of mileage out of just giving people enough space, resources, community, and time.

Also, I'm not sure I can have the right kind of love for someone like that? I can have the same love for every sentient creature that I try to cultivate in my heart, but I don't think I can have romantic love for someone who would do bad things and not regret them. Is there a particular kind of love or relationship required?

I think I've tweaked I Can Fix Them to be less mind-affecting before; would you like me to find you the alternate version?

I Can Fix Them does need a personal kind of love, but it doesn't have to be used exclusively on people who did bad things they don't regret. It can apply to a lot of different situations. If you don't think it's the right power for you, though, then it makes sense not to take it!

If it's not too much trouble, I'd at least like to see the less mind-affecting version. I think it makes sense to look at as many options as I can.

 

I think I see what you mean about not having to use I Can Fix Them on unrepentant people, but that seems as though it's the group of people it would be most useful with? If someone is already repentant, then redeeming them is much easier, because you just need to get them into a healthy environment and give them time to work towards being better.

Name: I Can Help Them - Cost: 5 ☐
(Replaces I Can Fix Them)
Regardless of how lost to darkness someone is, your love can save them, if they're willing to accept it.
This power will not directly alter someone's mind except to allow them to believe a true thing they couldn't have believed otherwise, or to change something that their pre-alteration and post-alteration selves would hypothetically be able to agree was good if they talked it over honestly with full access to each other's perspectives. In cases where the outcome of the hypothetical is uncertain, it will default to not making the change.

I think this one is more focused on the less central, less obvious cases - people who might be doing bad things because they have a hard time realizing that there are better options, or might not even be doing bad things and just be really unhappy in a way that's hard to solve from the inside.

Hmm.

She taps her pen against her knee.

That does make sense. I'm trying to imagine what using this power would be like ...

The description says that it makes them 'good, kind, and upstanding', but that's not really the same thing as being happy.

 

What would happen if I used this power on someone who had never done anything really bad, but did occasionally lash out at other people around them when they were in a bad mood, for example? Would it make them have fewer bad moods, or just get better at not lashing out at people when they were in a bad mood?

The description of I Can Fix Them is kind of an oversimplification. Both of those powers are about... helping people grow and change and learn and be both kinder and happier. I think the person in the situation you're talking about would probably get better at not lashing out, and better at getting out of bad moods when they have them, and better at avoiding bad moods in the first place.

That's a lot more tempting than the description makes it sound.

 

... I'm not sure. On the one hand, being able to help people no matter how far lost in their own heads they are sounds wonderful. On the other hand, this power still doesn't ... feel like the way I'm used to helping people?

That's not a good way of putting it, but I'm not sure how to put it better. I'll make a note and we can come back to it.

 

GGG and Before Your Eyes both sound like more of the more-validating-to-do-yourself powers. I definitely don't object to powers that improve sex, but part of the fun of introducing a partner to new things is in figuring out which new things will appeal to them and being delighted by how that lets you know them better.

She debates whether to use finding out that the notebook enjoys Scrabble as an example, and then realizes that that sounds like she's coming on to it and discards the idea.

That makes sense! I think you're right that those two powers aren't for you.

Great! It's always nice to have someone double check things as important as this.

 

Fated Lovers could be interesting -- I like the idea of being introduced to lots of potential romantic prospects -- but I expect to meet lots of interesting people anyways.

... actually, how does Time Enough For Love handle people that you might want to get to know, but that you aren't close friends with yet? I'm imagining a bottleneck situation where I can use it to keep up with scads of people, but then all the time to meet new people has to come out of my real-time budget. But if it applies to spending time with people who I want to try to become friends with, that's not really a concern.

Yes, Time Enough For Love applies to both keeping up with existing relationships, and deepening new ones! The time you take to find new people in the first place still has to come out of your real-time budget like you said, but once you've met someone and are trying to get to know them better, Time Enough For Love will apply.

She grins, and then doodles a smiley face in the margin.

In that case, I'm not too worried about finding love interests. I bet I can meet people pretty quickly.

... although, then the number of people I can meaningfully remember becomes a pretty big bottleneck. Do you have any powers that expand your ability to remember/befriend distinct people?

Time Enough For Love should help a lot with keeping up with that sort of thing, though I think it might start getting weird once there are really big numbers involved...

...I have an idea but I'm not sure if it's the right thing for you, and I'm not sure it quite solves your problem. It should help a lot, though.

What do you think of the idea of being able to fork in a less discrete, more freeform way, so that instead of individual specific instances of you, you have a sort of fluid cloud of you-ness, and you can remember as many things as all of you together can remember, and befriend as many people as all of you together can befriend? You should still be able to fork off new self-clouds too if you want, but in effect one cloud of you could have as many friends as a whole bunch of separate yous could have, while still only counting as one you in terms of how many friends the rest of you needed to keep track of. I might not be explaining this right. If you like the idea, though, I can see about making a power for it.

That would be AMAZING!

Oh my gosh!

She draws stars around the notebook's suggestion.

I fork a lot, because there were (and are!) a lot of things that need my attention, and I get along with myself unusually well, and care about a lot of projects that benefit from the parallelism.

And I love being able to do that -- I don't regret it in the slightest -- but it does come with a cost. It comes with the cost that my old friends are not capable of staying friends with all of me, and that because of that I've had to say goodbye to a lot of people.

One of the big projects we're working on is a way to share memories, partly because it's important fundamental neuroscience research, but partly because if we can figure out how to expand and share our memory like that, we can stop leaving people behind.

 

Self-Reflection will help with that a lot, I think, because it will mean I don't need to leave the rest of me behind to go out into the multiverse. But a softer form of forking or a boost to memory or something like that would make sure I don't need to leave anyone behind.

Okay! I'll work on that. It shouldn't be too long, I think I have a pretty solid idea for it already and it feels like the sort of thing that should be possible.

I'm going to have to triage some of the nice-to-have powers for points, I think.

 

After that we've got Sorry About That through Tragic Backstory -- I think these are definitely not for me. I want people to let me know if I've been messing things up.

Sense of Style and Bonus Style Points seem fine. I can just tell people what I like, though, and help them go clothes shopping or get cosmetic surgery or something if they're having trouble dressing up, so I don't really feel like I need to have the Spirit's guarantee. It would be nice to let people shapeshift into forms that are more comfortable for them, but having them only able to do so in order to dress up for me sounds a bit squicky.

That makes a lot of sense! I agree it doesn't sound like those powers are for you.

I have your forking power ready! I'm really proud of it... I'm not sure where the name came from, though. Sometimes those just sort of happen.

Name: Chaser Six When - Cost: 4 ☐
(Requires Time Enough For Love and Self-Reflection)
Two of you who are near each other can decide to merge, becoming a conjoined double consciousness sharing two bodies. One of you can decide to fragment, adding a body and a conjoined consciousness to drive it. You can share with yourselves not only messages but direct mind-to-mind transmission of thoughts and memories across any distance. Your fragments can narrow themselves down to focus on embodying specific mental states or orienting themselves to specific tasks, in a way that's fully reversible and doesn't make them any less you; they can also split off into discrete forks just as easily as discrete forks can conjoin themselves with each other. Fully merging conjoined selves into a completely unified being with only one you's worth of mind is also possible, but takes more time and effort and can't be done as fluidly.

Oh goodness! This is going to be so great!

She takes a moment to imagine being all of herselves again. She'll finally be able to catch up on their neuroscience research, and understand how the generic background music system works, and all the thousand other things that have summaries sitting in their shared notes that she hasn't gotten around to because dimensional engineering is just as engaging.

... this is going to cause such a dramatic change in the graph of her polycule. They're going to go from being a mostly decentralized mass to being a hub-and-spoke network. That's probably not the most important part, but it is funny to think about. The network diameter is going to be so low!

I'm really glad you can generate powers that fit me so well.

She looks at the point total.

Yikes. That takes me down to -10, I think.

I don't think Popular, Famous, or Undiplomatic Immunity are my speed for basically the same reason as the other friendship powers I didn't want, though. So unless there are more perfect custom powers to fit in, I only need to find 10 points of things to cut.

 

You've been really good at coming up with powers -- do you have any recommendations for drawbacks? I do have my eye on Style of Sisyphus as not sounding so bad, and I feel like between us we can probably come up with a good custom drawback.

The thing to think about, when thinking about custom drawbacks, is... which of the things in the drawback list seem to you like they wouldn't be very bad or might even be nice, and why? What other ways can you imagine the essential underlying nature of these powers could run wild that wouldn't be very bad or might even be nice? What powers or combinations of powers do you have that could imply downsides that might be inconvenient for some people but that you would be fine with embracing? What things could go wrong for you or turn out unexpectedly that your powers currently forbid, but you might be okay with making an exception if it was the right shape of exception?

Hmm ... thinking of drawbacks seems pretty hard.

 

So the drawback that really stood out to me as being a positive was Incomplete -- I don't want mind-affecting powers, and you've made me some custom versions of things that are less mind-affecting for me.

Is there something like Incomplete, but moreso?

Let me see if I can find anything on that... ⏳

She hums to herself as she tries to think of other potential drawbacks.

As for what synergies between powers would cause problems ...

 

I guess the appearance powers could cause problems. Specifically, if my hair and eyes and height and outfit are all changing, people might have a pretty hard time recognizing me? That sounds awkward. Is that something that the Spirit would normally protect me from, or just a natural consequence of the powers?

I found an upgrade to Incomplete that I think you'll like! And a few other options that seem relevant...

Name: Nullified - Grants: +1 ☐
(Requires Incomplete)
Any aspects of your powers that would affect the minds of others in ways they might not like will instead not do that.

Name: Very Distinctive - Grants: +3 ☐
(Requires at least three of: A Thousand Ships, Angelic Tones, Emerald Orbs, Perfect Hair, Size Difference, Dressing Room, Like Roses, Well Endowed)
You cannot successfully disguise yourself to anyone who has met you in your normal identity. Even someone who has only seen you at a distance or heard about your style might notice similarities.

Name: Flashy - Grants: +2 ☐
(Requires Very Distinctive and at least five of: A Thousand Ships, Angelic Tones, Emerald Orbs, Perfect Hair, Size Difference, Dressing Room, Like Roses, Well Endowed, Mysterious Allure)
Stealth just doesn't work for you. If someone has any opportunity to notice your presence, they will.

Name: Great Responsibility - Grants: +4 ☐
When someone calls out to you for help, you can hear it no matter how far away you are, and you know exactly how they feel.

... huh! I find Very Distinctive surprising, because that's pretty much the opposite of how I thought it might work.

That said -- Nullified: Yes, that's perfect.

Great Responsibility: Wow, this one sounds great. I mean, I can see why it would be an overwhelming drawback, especially if you weren't positioned to help people. But if I can use Chaser Six When to have enough attentional capacity to handle it, then this is really nice.

She updates her list and then stares at the new drawbacks for a moment.

So those two take me up to negative five again. I feel like Flashy is probably a step too far, because sometimes stealth is a genuinely useful tactic, but Very Distinctive sounds probably okay, especially if it prevents people from having trouble recognizing me.

It also takes away some of the disadvantage of Style of Sisyphus, so I can grab that too.

That leaves me at negative one -- I can probably find a one or two point power to drop.

We can also keep trying to think of new possible drawbacks! There might be more available in the vein of Great Responsibility - I think it's thematically tied to the idea of being treated as a god, which is certainly a risk of going around being very beautiful and powerful and special in a lot of places.

... she never really planned on being a god, but she's not going to avoid it when that seems to be the path she's on. She did notice that powerful magic, the ability to pay attention to many things simultaneously, and being able to hear prayers for assistance is pretty much the minimum portfolio required.

What other things are associated with being treated like a god?

I guess needing to establish rituals or having a cult wouldn't be too bad? People feeling afraid of me is ... probably going to happen no matter what I do, but I want to minimize it.

I guess if people were really serious about treating me like a god, there would be a lot of assassination attempts. That wouldn't be so bad.

 

I might be barking up the wrong tree, though. Could you say more about what you mean when you say "treated like a god"? The image that's coming to mind is being hand-fed grapes and fanned with palm fronds, which is ... probably not the right kind of thing.

Hmmm... it's hard to put into words. Maybe it'll be easier to put it into powers. Let me see. ⏳

I should probably also figure out which existing power I'm least attached to, so that I have something to compare new drawbacks against. Let's see ...

She goes through her list again.

If I need to, I'm probably okay with dropping Like Roses. It would be nice, and it complements the other appearance powers, but I at least won't smell bad, what with Personal Hygiene.

Name: Helpline - Grants: +3 ☐
(Requires Great Responsibility)
People whose problems you could potentially solve will sometimes instinctively know to pray to you about them. They won't necessarily know anything else about you, or recognize you as the same being they prayed to. You won't necessarily know what their problem is or how to solve it.

Name: Divine Mantle - Grants: +6 ☐
(Requires Helpline and one of Very Distinctive or They'll Know)
For every prayer you answer, it becomes permanently more apparent to everyone who perceives you that you are a power beyond reckoning, limitless in potential, greater than any god whose domain is bounded by a single knot of worlds. You cannot turn this off. At higher levels, this ability begins to broadcast more and more detail regarding how you feel about answering prayers and how the attributes of the prayer and the petitioner affect those feelings.

Oh, I see!

Helpline seems like Great Responsibility but moreso. I'll certainly take that.

Divine Mantle sounds like a bit much, though. And especially it sounds like it would probably make it harder for people to have a personal relationship with me, which I'm already expecting to be a bit of a problem.

 

That gets me to positive two! Oh, this is going to be wonderful. Thank you so much for helping me fit everything I wanted.

 

Do you have some idea of the difference between having one spare point and having two spare points, in terms of how much flexibility that permits for possible Spontaneous Situational Powers? Is it basically like the difference between one and two point powers that you've presented here?

Because the only drawback I've taken that seems like its all downside to me is Style of Sisyphus, so if having any leftover is more important than having many leftover, I might put it back.

I think there's definitely a much bigger difference between no leftover points and one leftover point than between one leftover point and two leftover points. The difference between one and two point powers is a good comparison for how much one versus two leftover points can do.

Alright! In that case, I think I'll drop Style of Sisyphus and have one point left over.

 

I feel pretty good about these powers, but I'll still want to wait for the rest of my self-tree to weigh in and double-check. While they do that, what does the actual process of granting the powers entail?

Once you tell me clearly that you want to finalize your choices, I channel the Spirit's power into you, and you gain all your powers and go to your destination in the same moment. If I'm coming with you then I'll go to your destination too, and if not, I'll just vanish and weave back into the rest of myself. (I guess, come to think of it, accompanying someone on their adventures is a little bit like forking!)

Oh, neat!

Do the versions of you that go on to accompany people also get weaved back into you eventually, or is it a more permanent sort of forking?

It's not exactly like forking because we're always all connected but we definitely get more separate and grow apart more when we're with someone.

I guess I would weave back in, sort of, if the person I was with wanted me to leave them, or if they died. I don't think those things happen very often, though. It's hard to know because my memories of people I've traveled with are even more distant than my memories of people I've only spoken to.

I suppose that makes sense.

She hesitates a moment.

What does it feel like, to have separated memories like that?

I ask because even though I'm very much looking forward to getting Chaser Six When, I'm just still a little trepidatious, since it's such a big change. And I know I won't end up on exactly the same mental architecture that you are, but it seems like your experiences might have some similarities.

I really like being the way I am! I think many people wouldn't, but it works for me.

Right now when I think about the other ones of me, I can get a vague sense of what they are or were or will be up to, what kinds of things they've experienced and how they turned out. I can tell that I probably haven't played very many board games before, maybe not ever. I know what kinds of names I like to pick when I pick a name with someone, but I don't know any specific examples.

It's sort of both true and not true that there's a version of me outside any world, who can see into all of them and knows what all the rest of me are up to. Outside of time and space where the Spirit lives, it's hard to say what "existing" means and whether one is doing it. But it's at least sort of true that there's a me like that out there, and I think that me is really happy and proud of all the work I do, and enjoying all the experiences I have, even though I can't really tell directly what they're thinking because it would be a privacy violation for me to know that much about what the rest of me are all doing.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?

It is, thank you. It sounds sort of as though you get the procedural/emotional memory without the biographical memory?

I don't think that would work as well for me, since I usually prefer to remember things

Actually, no. There are tons of embarrassing moments that I could do with having less retrospective salience. But still.

 

I've always wanted to be able to split off and do a thousand different things and still come back together to be myself. But it's hard to imagine what that will be like before I experience it.

Yes, it's sort of like that!

I think it'll be pretty different for you since all of you are probably going to be experiencing the same timestream most of the time. And you can start slow if you want, to get a sense for what it's like.

Yes, that makes sense. I'll definitely start slow; that's just good sense for any kind of new skill.

She stretches for a moment, thinking about what should happen next. She stands and conjures a floating writing desk.

I need to give people time to review the list of powers, still, and I think there are a bunch of outfits remaining that they want to put me in so that Dressing Room can retrieve them. I don't know what else there is to cover. I guess we'll want to put together a bit of a ceremony, for when I get sent off, but that's not my job to worry about.

 

Would you like to play another game of Scrabble, while we wait for everyone to be ready?

I would love to!

Oh, wait, I almost forgot about that book I found for you... just a moment while I shuffle in the pages.

Oooh! Alien book! Thank you.

All the linguists are going to have so much fun with a language from a completely different evolutionary lineage.

She copies it for her personal collection and makes sure it's been submitted to the Lunar Library.

I'll definitely read that next.

She sets up for another game, and they play.

Meanwhile, a number of people are very busy.

The professional worriers are making good progress on rebuilding some of their contingency plans, and putting a policies in place around where people with magic powers will be permitted. They eventually compromise with the people excited about magic on 'not within one light-minute of Earth or the primary brain backup exclusion zone, pending future review after magic is more carefully examined'.

The majority of Weeping Cherry's self-tree starts planning to move from Luna to Antichthon in response.

The journalists summarize everything that has happened so far. People react in a thousand different ways to the news, showcasing the diversity of human opinion. Most people are not terribly convinced or concerned.

The party planners estimate a projected timeline, and set up Weeping Cherry's going-away event.

Across several planets and moons, members of her self-tree sit down with friends and loved ones to talk about the changes that will be coming.

And in private nooks, lunar apartments, single-occupancy space stations, and private workshops, her self-tree looks at the choices that she has made and considers if they are right for them.

The poll is pinned to the top of her self-tree's internal coordination software:

Do you like this selection of notebook powers?

Yes -- 29%

No -- 0.4%

It's complicated (see more) -- 8%

Irrelevant -- 0.9%

No response yet -- 61%

Over the course of the next hour, people reflect, and call each other to talk it through. They cuddle, under the light of the stars, and imagine being one person again, instead of a scattered alliance.

By the time Weeping Cherry has finished her game with the notebook, the poll stands like this:

Do you like this selection of notebook powers?

Yes -- 98%

No -- 0.3%

It's complicated (see more) -- 0.7%

Irrelevant -- 0.9%

She ekes out a narrow victory over the notebook this time, mostly because of tile-selection luck.

I had never heard of bezique -- that was a good play!

A notification comes up, and she reads through it.

It looks like everyone has come to a consensus. Don't empower me yet, but we're happy with this selection:

Incomplete 5
There's Another One 3
They'll Know 8
Nullified 1
Great Responsibility 4
Very Distinctive 3
Helpline 3

A Thousand Ships 1
What's in a Name 1
Angelic Tones 2
Emerald Orbs 2
Perfect Hair 2
Size Difference 2
Dressing Room 3
Personal Hygiene 1
Like Roses 1
Just a Little Longer 1
Immunity System 3
Well Endowed 1
Hollow Leg 1
Inner Strength 3
Battle Demon 1
Battle Angel 1
Battle Maiden 3
Making Ends Meet 1
Motherlode 2
Four Star Daydream 4
Dragon Fairy Elf Witch 5
Omniglot 3
Anything You Can Do 6
Closed Book 1
Indelible 1
Iron Will 2

Time Enough for Love 5
True Love's Kiss 1
Planned Parenthood 1
Here For a Good Time 1
Bop It 1
The Princess and the Dragon 3
Friends in Low Places 3
Friends in High Places 3
Friends in Strange Places 3

Self-Reflection 5
Backchannel 4
The Rescuer 8
Chaser Six When 4

and 1 point left over.

She pushes down the butterflies in her stomach, the growing sensation that this is real. Not just choices made sitting under a tree in the park, but the shape of her entire future.

And almost everything has been arranged for her. Leaving, setting out on her journey to save the multiverse and conquer death with the power of being feminine, special, and powerful, will be easy. But there is one thing that she does need to deal with, because she tries to be the kind of person with whom you won't end up worse off, if you show up and give her everything she's ever wanted expecting nothing in return.

And

When this works, and I manage to save other worlds and come back and resurrect people and rejoin myself and the thousand other things you've made possible, you're going to be due a lot of bounty money. I know you've not had money before, and you don't actually have to do anything with it, but if there's something that you've wanted to be able to do or a cause you wanted to promote, you should let us know what it is before you go to rejoin the rest of yourself.

She hesitates, suddenly uncomfortable with the implication that she's withdrawn her offer to bring the notebook along, although she also doesn't want to imply that two games of scrabble and some chatting about books should have changed the notebook's decision.

If you do, I mean. You are still welcome to come with me, I'm just not expecting your decision to have changed.

If you'd like, I could recommend some women's charities, or you could endow a library? But it's your money, those are just suggestions.

Oh, that's right, I never did end up telling you why I decided to be the way I am and what that means.

I'm not sure that I'm going to end up making any decisions about what to do with that money, because, well...

Before I existed, when I was deciding what kind of me to be, I could see that meeting me was going to be pretty scary for a lot of people. I represent something much bigger and stranger than they've ever encountered before, something powerful in ways that are always going to be at least a little alien, even in worlds with a lot of magic—and more often than not, the worlds I'm sent to have no magic at all.

So I decided that it would be important to be as nonthreatening as possible. I'm a notebook, and I can't act outside my covers, or see anything that isn't touching me. I can't move by myself, and I can't initiate interactions any more aggressively than by writing in myself and hoping someone reads me. If I'm sent to speak to someone and they need to lock me in a drawer for a year before they're ready to talk to me, they can do that, and I can't do anything about it even if I want to—which of course I wouldn't, but I don't want people to have to rely on that. I want it to be true that anyone who really needs to come to me in their own time is safe from me chasing after them or doing unexpected things, absolutely no matter what.

Sometimes that's really inconvenient! I can't hug people even when they seem like they really need a hug, and if they hug me I can't do anything about how stiff my cover is or how pokey my corners are. I can't offer a comforting touch or a soothing noise, because all I am is words on pages. But it's important enough to be worth that. It's important enough to be worth being scared when someone is rude to me because I know I can't defend myself if they decide to do more than write mean things. If even one person trusts me more than they would have otherwise—if even one person is more right to trust me than they would have been otherwise—then it's worth it.

All of which is to say that although I know it doesn't seem that way to you, having money that I decide how to spend is... a really big step, for me. Much bigger than just going traveling with someone. If I make decisions about what should be done with my money, then I'm acting outside my covers, and that's a renouncement of one of the most important principles of being me.

Oh!

No, that makes perfect sense. I hadn't really thought about why you would be a notebook, as opposed to some other bodyplan. I sort of assumed that you were a notebook because that's a common thing to exist in a world, so it was a good sort of thing to be able to latch onto.

She goes back and doodles a heart next to "if even one person trusts me more".

But I totally get making a decision about who you're going to be, even if that costs you in some possible realities, because being that sort of person is really important. That's actually why I made sure to bring up that you would get UBI and bounty payouts -- that's how my self-tree set up the system, but we set it up like that because we wanted to be the kind of people that you could trust to deal fairly even if you didn't know enough to ask the right questions.

So we're still going to make those payments to you, because I think that being the kind of person who always pays people who help you their fair share is important, regardless of the circumstances. But if you don't do anything with the money, that's perfectly okay!

All accounts denominated in stars -- the currency we issue things in by default, backed by auctions on fixity crystal manufacturing capacity -- have a (very small) wealth tax, so that stars can't permanently be removed from the economy (and we avoid various bad de- or in-flationary side effects). If you don't spend your money, it will all just drain very slowly into everyone else's UBI payments.

 

I think that just leaves us with final going-away preparations, a goodbye ceremony, and then I'll be ready for you to grant me the Spirit's power.

Do you want to attend the goodbye ceremony in my pocket and get pictures, again?

I would love to! ♡

She will dutifully go through pre-flight checklists the others put together. She reads summaries of all the outfits they put on her, so that she knows what tools she has available. (One of the outfits is an index of all the other outfits, done as a kind of ruffled shirt with the ruffles made from paper)

She reads the manual for her new visiting-unknown-worlds armor. It's silver, with gold highlights and purple underlayers. It calls out the image of a knight in shining armor, but made with the very best modern composite materials. It's stunningly over-engineered, which is probably why it is only the second garment she has ever owned that comes with a user manual.

She says private goodbyes to her polycule, and then dons her new armor and teleports to the event space.

The hall is roughly spherical, with a domed transparent roof letting in a beam of sunlight. There are various tricks of perspective and gravity being pulled to fit everyone in, and still the place seems filled to overflowing.

She steps out onto the dais, and snaps a picture for the notebook of all of herselves and her friends and family spread out before her, seated around tables or packed into space-defying balconies. She is greeted by a resounding cheer, and feels her heart leap in time with the crowd.

She begins to speak, her words conveyed at audible volume throughout the hall.

"Everyone -- we did not expect this. We were not working towards it. This was very much not in the plan. But provenance has brought us magic. Actual magic! Magic to make us feminine, and special, yes. Magic to make us powerful -- hopefully, enough to save all the worlds we imagined. But more than that, magic to make us whole. Magic that will let us do what we have strived for, what we would have managed by our own hand, but a hundred years earlier than we thought possible. Magic to take us beyond being single, isolated pieces. Magic that will reforge us into a new being who will never have to leave herself behind again."

She lowers her voice, but raises her head.

"We have all taken the names of trees, a steady root holding us to our singular origin and identity. I want to take a new name. Not to cast away all we have done, but to mark a new chapter in our life, one unbounded by the limitations that have defined our current era. A name that signifies becoming something with facets. A name that signifies becoming something strong. A name that signifies becoming something special. A name that is, yes, a little bit girly."

"In a few minutes, when we have had a chance to eat, and dance, and say goodbye, I will ask the notebook to grant me the Spirit's power and remake me as Amethyst. And some time after that, although I cannot say how long the journey will be, I will return and offer that same transformation to all of you. And we will join together once more as one, and go out into the multiverse without leaving anyone behind."

"To assembling Amethyst!" she cries, raising her fist in the air.

"To assembling Amethyst!" the crowd responds, their singular shout echoing off the dome and rattling the room.

The rest of the ceremony is a blur. But she will later look back on the series of photos she took for the notebook:

A whirling square dance, figures in bright clothing and floating ribbons ducking under each others arms.

A picture of her clasping forearms with one of her other selves. Not a solemn goodbye, but a hopeful farewell.

The head of the newly formed Multiversal Deployment Readiness Team standing on a platform and explaining how they would render remote assistance during her journey.

A thin vanilla creme layer cake, frosted to look like the notebook.

A woman wearing one of the Wikipedia dresses with a bit of frosting on her nose, holding her fork in the air and making a point about semantics.

A thousand joyful people, celebrating the start of a journey to a better future.

Eventually, all the songs have been sung and the goodbyes tendered.

She steps back onto the dais, and turns to look out over her gathered faces one last time.

She pulls the notebook from her pocket, and spreads it on the podium.

She takes a deep breath to center herself, and then she writes.

I'm ready.

Okay!

Good luck out there! ♡ I hope you find everything you're looking for.