"Well, one way or another I'm glad you have powers that will make it work out for you now!"

"Yeah, me too."

"Hey, here's a weird question--is it cool if I Dragon Fairy Elf Witch you? I kind of want to try being anime."

...he starts giggling. "Yeah, sure! Not sure if it'll work but you can try."

"Thanks! Here goes . . ."

"Hah! This is fun. My hair is such a weird texture now but it's not bad."

"—huh! Yours works differently than mine. I can totally tell that you're anime without having to pay attention. ...which is bizarre, I feel like I'm watching the anime version of Roger Rabbit."

"Huh! Maybe it's because I took it on purpose as a weird fun thing and you got it as part of trying to look like your own concept of beauty. Maybe we just have different instincts for what would be more convenient for random people looking at us."

"Or maybe you saw it as a drawback?"

"Yeah, that's what I meant by having different instincts--I wasn't explicitly thinking about it before I did the thing, but I would've felt weird about being animated and other people not being able to notice. But presumably you're okay with how it works for you, and if I was going to speculate I'd speculate that you'd prefer not to draw attention to being animated more than you feel weird about being perceived inaccurately. Or I could be totally wrong! The options that give me nonterrible social instincts might not work with you at all."

"No yeah that's pretty much it. Especially given how I ended up in a universe that doesn't exactly have a masquerade but, like, where being anime would be concerning and alarming? And 'Pete is anime' isn't, really, informative of anything other than my having the notebook's powers, and the people I did tell about the powers also got to see my anime self, so, yeah. I also made my 3D self from literally trying to make Astolfo realistic, so it's not that inaccurate; when I'm not paying attention to it my brain insists that my anime self and my 3D self are indistinguishable and for most intents and purposes they kind of are."

"Makes sense! Whereas I think the people around me would start worrying if I went a week without manifesting some new form of bullshit. RPG universes, am I right?"

"Yeah. It sounds fun, honestly, though I didn't take Battle Maiden so I'd probably need to get stronger the long way."

"Yeah, Battle Maiden has been very important. Though actually Dressing Room has been the biggest game changer, and of course Iron Will is the extremely important dog that didn't bark."

"I took—or didn't take—a bunch of perks with the explicit point in mind that I'm okay if I get a little bit fucked up by the story so long as its whole arc would be something I'd like, and the thing about being able to be grievously wounded if the plot called for it was part of it."

"I'd've said that sounds like an inconvenient set of preferences to have, but you seem to be glad you have them. . . . I turned out to have a narrative preference for moral dilemmas, and while I suppose it's better than not noticing them, it isn't ideal."

"...oh yeah I can see how that would be. A problem. In Golarion."

"Yeah. But if I didn't on some level like moral dilemmas I would probably have ended up somewhere else. So I'm just doing my best to make the Golarion I'm on better off for my being on it and I think I'm succeeding. Also trying to cultivate a sense that actually it's incredibly cool and satisfying when moral dilemmas turn out to be easily resolvable in a way where nobody gets hurt, which is harder but I'm not getting nowhere with it."

"It wouldn't be a Mary Sue story if you couldn't eventually conquer all in powerful and special ways, would it? Breaking stories and settings is our bread and butter."

"Golarion is enormous but I've already broken a few chunks. I wonder if Bar has the histories of the Fifth Crusade with other adventuring parties instead of me; there might be some stealable ideas."

"I think indexing might be a problem, if you ask her for anything from a specific universe she can do it but trying to get a random sample isn't that easily doable."

"Yeah, I've been talking to her telepathically and apparently universes are, I'm going to call it 'extremely densely packed'. There are universes that have the exact same published works for thousands of years until someone gets isekai'd in. I asked if there was a world where the events of Lord of the Rings were published as nonfiction and apparently you can't swing a TARDIS without hitting one."

"Points in the vague direction of the platonic ideal thing?" he says, uncertainly. "I've never read or watched Lord of the Rings. Or, I tell a lie, I read the first book until... there was a guy in a forest? And I couldn't stand the prose and promptly forgot about almost everything that's not culturally osmosis'd."

"Yeah. Could also be many-worlds quantum mechanics or something similar for other physics variants--lots of branching timelines proliferating from the same starting conditions." 

"Is it Lord of the Rings in particular, though, or is it just for any given concept you can think of the TARDIS etc etc? I would have expected the latter."