"Same ones, yeah. I had her change a bunch of them, though, and she created a new one for me. Um. The discussion you had with her, about picking There's Another One. I hadn't really thought of it that way. You made some really good points, there. ...anyway, I can show you the powers I picked and I'll try to remember the wordings of the new and modified ones."

He is starting to have A Suspicion.

"Thank you. Please do tell me as much as you can; I'm curious what powers you designed." Specifically she's annoyed she didn't think to do that, that's so clever.

He gives Brenda the notebook back. "...you could maybe ask if she remembers me? I know she doesn't experience time the same way we do but that'd make it easy to fetch my power choices. I'll be able to remember the powers I took if I go through their names again but I don't want to make you any more nervous by holding onto Alpina.

"And there was only one power we designed from scratch, the others we modified. It was a replacement to Agree To Agree called Backchannel, which is one where I can take a step back and look within myself and understand what someone else means by what they're trying to communicate and how much they mean it and then figure out how to, myself, communicate my side of it. So that dumb miscommunications don't happen, they can sometimes be interesting and character-developing in fiction but in real life they just suck."

"Huh. That's a power that would have helped me out a fair few times, recently. I didn't even think of trying to make a good version of Agree to Agree. I'll ask Alpina if she remembers you."

Peter, the other Mary Sue who I showed you to, wants to know if you remember talking to him and if you remember what options he took. Apparently you didn't come along on his isekai roulette so he can't show me the other you.

Goodness, that's strange. Yes, I remember Peter, although I think he could stop me from remembering him if he wanted to.

I would hate if people could make me forget things but maybe it's less creepy if you're not doing linear time. Do you remember any of the options he picked?

It's less like I'm remembering him directly and more like I'm... looking over the shoulder of the me who spoke to him? Anyway I can show you his choices if he's okay with that (is he?). It's concerning that he met you without taking There's Another One! That almost never happens.

He suggested it but if you'd like him to write as much himself that would be super reasonable. Also, almost never? Do you know anything about the exceptions?

I trust you. ♡ Just a moment while I pull those pages from the other me...

As for how it can happen... the most straightforward way is that something unexpected came up, or something else overrode the Spirit's power, and made this meeting happen when it wasn't supposed to. But it's also possible, the same way it's possible to add powers to someone who has extra points left over, to add drawbacks. The standards for when to do it are really strict, though, it has to be something they would've wanted if they'd had full information and it has to happen in a way that genuinely leaves them better off and also leaves them able to notice that they're better off. Otherwise it wouldn't be right, to give someone a problem they didn't choose to have.

She starts reading his build choices.

"I'm glad you didn't take My Ears Are Burning even though it might have been helpful in this specific situation. I'm very surprised you didn't take Immunity System."

He lets out a bitter bark of a laugh. "And damn my sense of narrative merit, too. I had originally taken it but I changed my mind later because I thought there could be good stories involving me getting poisoned or drugged and I'm sure whatever the fuck is going on right now between me and Riddle will eventually be a story I'll be glad existed but right now it fucking sucks."

"Oh no, that's--I'm sorry. If it helps, you're not the only one whose sense of narrative doesn't always line up with their sense of what's good."

This laugh is more genuine. "Thanks. I'm fine. Ish. And I signed up for it, and don't yet have any regrets, and I'm sure if I ever do they'll be temporary. And I'm sorry for whatever happened to you, too."

It's more about the ways she happened to other people but she's not here to kill the mood when Pete just resurrected it. "Thanks."

She reads a bit more. "Mind if I ask how Four Star Daydream ended up working out? I stopped at Mother Lode out of what may have been an excess of caution."

"I haven't really used it very much, I just happen to have a bank account with some unknown amount of money in it and I found a shiny credit card in my wallet and when I put things on my tab here in Milliways it gets dealt with behind the scenes while I'm not looking.

"I don't know what the narrative justification will be if I ever do need to make any big purchases but when I interrogated the notebook about it she agreed that if I just don't look at it very closely until I need to do so that'll give the power a lot more latitude to function in ways that don't break anything. It's a Mary Sue story, we don't need to do any foreshadowing of how I can afford what I can, it'll come up when it needs to but until then it's just fine."

"Huh. That's--really self-disciplined of you, actually, I don't think I'd be able to resist poking." She doesn't even particularly want to be the sort of person who can resist poking things, because then she might not poke all the things, which would be awful.

Read read mental check that she isn't being affected by Mysterious Allure. She's paying too much attention to Pete and not enough to Bar, which could be Mysterious Allure or could be racism against inanimate object people but either way not optimal. She starts up a parallel conversation with Bar, over telepathy to reduce confusion. 

Backchannel continues to be very cool, she approves of the ethics edits to Love Interest, and he took both of the no-brainer drawbacks. Excellent.

"Looks like you made the kind of choices a person I can trust would make. And Alpina wrote another note: the Spirit claims to very very occasionally give someone a drawback when it would actually be a bonus for them." She reads out the exact wording.

"Yeah. That tracks. I started to suspect that when I read your conversation. Also, um, if Alpina can show you my version of our chats I think it'd be fair game for you to read it too, if you want. There's some kind of personal stuff there especially with how I'm, uh." He gestures at the open shirt over his flat chest. "Not a girl. But I think it'd be fair. —if you do though ask her not to show you the conversation with Vivian, I don't think she would but I just want to make sure. That's a friend of mine who also had some personal conversations with the notebook."

"I was wondering about that but it seemed rude to ask. That's a very kind offer." She relays the new permission to Alpina and reads the resulting logs; partway through her fingernails take on the appearance of polished wood similar to Bar's surface.

There are several days of conversation, there. More than what was onscreened, even, he took a long time of reviewing options and clarifying them and talking to other people and experimenting with his presentation before he finally took the plunge. He even discussed his plans to do it publicly with the notebook, there. The conversation is very extensive.

He's so thoughtful and sensible and good! She makes lots of approving commentary and is glad for him that he had people he could trust enough to talk things over with. She has people like that now, but she didn't on her Earth.

When she gets to the bit about the public isekai she gets positively gleeful. "That's so clever! Did you end up going through with it? I pointed a camcorder at mine and left a note for my parents explaining everything, but of course I have no idea how they took it or what the videotape looked like."

"I did, yeah. In the middle of a park, I timed it to try to make it so there weren't so many people that they'd bystander effect it and ignore it. I don't know if it worked, and the place I ended up at actually turned out to be here so maybe time is even paused back home and nothing has happened yet, but I did try."

"I hope it worked! It would be so cool if you went back someday and there was a whole interdimensional civilization."

"I'd like to talk about some of the earlier stuff, about how the concept of fiction interacts with all this. You seem to be viewing it as, like, your life is a specific story being written by a specific writer and events will be shaped by that writer's plans and what they want the audience to learn when and stuff. Yeah?"

"...enhhhhh," he says, doing a so-so gesture with his hand. "I want to hear your thoughts on that, first, since apparently you have some, but mine are a bit more complicated than that."

"It's definitely complicated. So, to avoid getting too self-referential right out the gate I'm going to talk about Star Trek. There's the material in the TV shows and then there's a bunch of fanfiction, and there's also the Mirror Universe, so you have all these possible timelines. And some of the canon and a lot of the fanfic has plot holes. And there's no reason why the boundaries of actual universes should have to line up with the boundaries of the published works, right? Given the plot holes there's actually some reason why they shouldn't.

So what I'm imagining as probably happening, and this is all speculation, I haven't even designed an experiment to test to test any of it let alone run one, is that there are a ton of timelines we would recognize as basically Star Trek timelines, and in any given one you might have some of the events of TOS and some of the events of TNG and some of the fanfiction and some stuff that's flatly incompatible with the rest of TOS. Universes where the Klingons look the TOS way and universes where they look the TNG way and universes where something happens that changes all their appearances. But probably not universes where they all spontaneously change and nobody notices, unless there's some actual chain of causality that makes that happen, or one of the horrible chaos situations you read the logs of my freaking out about earlier. 

And then what happens when a bunch of humans write and film a new season of Star Trek, or someone sits down to write fanfiction, their choices don't determine the events in another universe, they determine which universe they end up describing. And maybe if their story is too inconsistent and doesn't make any sense there isn't a universe that matches it at all. I don't know if which universes exist is determined by what people write about or if every self-consistent timeline exists or if some worlds can be 'more real' than others or what."

She stops to let Pete get a word in edgewise.

"With you so far."