"I didn't actually read any of the relevant fiction, just heard about it. But some of the power options were, uh, pretty obviously usable for villainy even without seeing any examples."

"Yeah. All of the mind control—so much mind control. I understand the inspiration of the genre but oh my God so many of those powers were mind control."

He's sort of like throwing this out as bait, here, but it's not gonna be amazing evidence of anything. If Brenda's like "what's wrong with the mind control?" then he guesses that kind of is strong evidence but the law of equal and opposite evidence applies, so he's not expecting her to say anything of the sort. He's not really sure what he wants her to say to that.

Him saying that is some nonzero amount of a relief, though of course someone who did take all the mind control would probably claim they didn't, so it's not very much of one.

"Alpina--my instance of the notebook--was able to edit a bunch of the powers to not have mind control. Like, when I meet my Bestest Friend they're not going to automatically be loyal to me, I'm just going to get steered to run into someone I'm likely to get along with. Hmm. I wonder if it would help if we showed each other the records in our notebooks? If I was lying my notebook could be telling the same lie as me but it would have taken additional effort to coordinate on a lie with her in advance." They're going to need to do it at the same time so it's clearly not a ruse by one of them to learn the other's abilities, and she's far from happy with the thought of letting anyone else look at Alpina, but if they're both basically decent people by each other's values it's the best way to get common knowledge of that.

"...you still have your notebook with you? And she has a name?"

"You don't?" Brenda is slightly more tense now. She can see never getting around to picking a name, if he didn't tell anyone else she existed and never had to refer to her in the third person, and there are innocent explanations for her not being here, but "other Alpina didn't approve of him" and "he's lying to avoid showing her his options" both also explain the observed facts.

"I didn't realize those were options! I also hadn't realized you could use DFEW on her, though in retrospect it's obvious, the power does say beings. Bet that means you can get Bar, too. —not the point. I don't, but I would have if it'd occurred to me." It's... actually kind of reassuring? That she did pick a name and did bring the notebook with her?

Thank goodness she has the Best Headband, because it means she can respond while also being distracted by the tempting prospect of DFEWing Bar. "Yeah, now that I think about it it took me a while to realize too. I'm from a magicless-looking Earth; she was totally out of context for me. Anyway, that makes it harder for me to verify anything about you, and means I have to decide whether to show you my options unilaterally or not."

"I wonder if—no, Bar can't do anything magical, hmm. —also, since we're apparently being so forthcoming about this stuff, I would like to observe that if the Spirit is going as far as taking a drawback on my behalf without consulting me about it then faking the actual options you picked would be pretty easy for it. Stuff is starting to get convoluted but I am really confused about what narrative it's going for, here."

". . . I was about to say Alpina wouldn't do that even if the Spirit would but I can't actually prove that. I could--let you look at my records and ask questions about them, without me looking, and then if they were false the Spirit would have to be feeding me lines in real time to keep our stories consistent. I still don't know how I'd verify your intentions but I at least signed up for that, and--if you're being honest but the Spirit is fucking with us I want another human on my side, you know?"

"That's sensible. And the story I was put in was—not Golarion, I'll tell you that much. I'm, uh... does your world have Harry Potter."

"Yes but I've only read--wait! Bar, do you have the last two Harry Potter books from a universe where it's the future and they're all out?" She reads the resulting napkin, dumps a fistful of gold pieces from a bag of onto the bar, and scoops the two books that appear in its place into a different bag of holding. 

"Okay, extremely important business complete, what's your situation?"

"If you've read up to book five then you know about Tom Riddle, yeah? So, the universe I've found myself in is an isekai hub of sorts, they often get people from other worlds, but they don't, themselves, have any kind of magic. And for some reason that is probably related to tormenting me in particular, Tom Riddle—a completely nonmagical and local version of him—is my upperclassman at the boarding school I ended up in. I have been having to stay one step ahead of Literally Voldemort for... longer than I'd like. This has made me a much more suspicious person than I generally am or like to be."

"Holy shit, your caution level is extremely reasonable. I've got Baphomet cultists to deal with but they're all idiots and the law's on my side." She's aware that he could be lying about this too, but it would be a weird lie to start setting up before he knew her Earth had Harry Potter, and the hauntedness in his voice feels genuine. "So, would reading my conversation with Alpina be useful evidence to you?"

"...probably although I feel kind of like that'd be invading your privacy a bit? Uh. Which I guess would make it a reasonably credible signal."

"Okay let's recap 'cause I think I lost the plot. I didn't take There's Another One, you did. We both assumed this meant that you'd only run into someone who had. The reason I didn't take it is because I don't trust most people who would want Mary Sue powers, I do not want to meet Ebony Dark'ness Raven Way. You've expressed yourself as someone who—if I take your presentation at face value—does not immediately trigger my instincts to run away screaming. C.f. how I have yet to run away screaming. But the Spirit stabbed me in the back here so I am feeling kind of freaked out and like anything goes now. Except that doesn't make any sense, why would the Spirit do this, why would it do this now, it is trivially omnipotent in every way that matters to the both of us and making me run into another Mary Sue when I am randomly in Milliways trying to process being—having had an unpleasant time with Literally Voldemort—this doesn't make any sense. I don't know what the game is."

"And in my experience with, again, Literally Voldemort, not knowing what the game is is not safe. And it means that I don't know what counts as reassuring. You see my little conundrum here?"

"Absolutely. It is totally reasonable of you to be--Renee Descartes throwing out everything and starting from 'I think therefore I am.' I just--want to offer you a path out of that, if there is one."

"Also, uh, I don't know if this helps or just makes things more complicated but it's possible that the Spirit isn't what's behind this. This plane is really weird. It might have done something that the Spirit wasn't actively aiming for but also wasn't actively trying to prevent."

"If the Landlords can go over the Spirit I guess I feel less betrayed and more terrified. I've just been kind of lumping them together as, like, the authors. The people making this story happen. I guess there could be many of them.

"...another important insight from dealing with Riddle though is that there is such a thing as useless paranoia. If the Spirit and/or the Landlords are fucking with us then we can in fact not do anything about that. Which brings us to the question of why. Bar says that she has no insight into the Landlords' disposition so if we assume it was the Spirit instead—or, I suppose, if it was the Landlords and the Spirit did in fact have the power but not the willingness to prevent it—what was it aiming for? What's the story that's being told, here, why would it go over my express wishes like that when it hadn't before?

"I think I'll accept reading your notebook."

"I have some thoughts about the Spirit and the Landlords and the writers but I should put those into a coherent form while you're reading. I'll need to write her a quick note so she knows I'm okay with those pages being visible, but you can look over my shoulder while I do it so you know I'm not telling her to lie." She considers adding that while she is not currently his enemy hurting Alpina would be a very fast way to change that, but if he's innocent he has enough fear in his life already and if he is inclined to booknapping there's no sense forwarning him.

"...yeah. Thank you." He walks back over to her to do just that.

See, the problem with the kind of paranoia that you need around Tom Riddle is that it's a weird kind of paranoia when you already know who Tom Riddle is. He would not have been able to be sufficiently paranoid if he hadn't known. So.

...so he's not sure where he was going with that thought. Let's just... leave it hanging there, he supposes.

Brenda writes what she said she was going to write, carefully not touching her hand to the page so she can't be passing a second, more sinister message, then hands over the notebook with  the relevant conversation visible.

He will get to reading, then. This will probably take a while; he'd offer to go somewhere else so that time would pass differently between them and he wouldn't make her wait but that might be interpreted as hostile so he doesn't.

Yeah no he had better keep Alpina within Brenda's line of sight. She spends the time watching him while notes appear and rearrange themselves on her lower left arm.

Fortunately for Brenda despite their little mistrustful situation Pete is in fact a good guy and is not doing anything untoward to the notebook.

"Okay, well," he says, after he's done, sounding thoughtful. "The person who wrote on this notebook is someone I would trust with it."

"Thank you. I recognize it's impossible to be certain that was my real conversation, but." She shrugs. "Would you mind telling me which options you picked? Did you in fact get offered all the same ones?"