The narrative is happy to oblige him, of course!

Through the door comes a girl slightly younger than him, broadly humanoid but distinctly inhuman in her details, dressed like a knight in shining armour with her cloak billowing gently behind her. She is powerful and special and beautiful, in a feminine way.

"What a fascinating planar anomaly this is! Hello there; I'm Brenda."

"Oh, finally," he breathes. "I'm Pete. —Peter, but everyone calls me Pete nowadays. 'Planar anomaly'? That's an interesting way to describe it."

She walks up to the bar and grabs a stool; her cloak and scabbard subtly move out of the way."I can see when things aren't native to their plane, and the door wasn't native to the Prime Material and neither of us is native to here. Oh, hello to you as well!" she adds as a napkin appears next to her hand. "I'd like something exotic in the general space of milkshakes, please."

She gets something that looks like a chocolate milkshake with silver sparkles and a ribbon of blueberry sauce running through it and a curly straw, takes a sip, and grins. "Delightful, thank you. So, how'd you come to be here, Pete?" She's clearly offering to hear out his troubles, but only if he wants to share them.

"Earth-looking drink, decidedly not Earth-looking attire. Interesting combo." And great at distracting him from—nope, people reading his narration will not get the pleasure of rehashing this, they've already witnessed the actual thing well enough they do not need him to think about it. "Most proximately I've come here to escape my troubles or at least distract myself from them while time is stopped outside. I assume you didn't know about Milliways before just now, then?"

"Nope, totally new to me. And congratulations on your deduction; I am in fact from Earth originally and got these clothes on Golarion. Are you an Earthling as well, then?"

"Yes I am, but, Golarion? Like from Pathfinder? With, uh, what was it, Iomedae and Asmodeus and Abadar and—first or second edition? I know next to nothing about second edition."

She laughs out loud. "It's the darnedest thing--I don't know! I never actually joined a tabletop group before I left Earth! I've just been thinking of it as a Dungeons and Dragons universe. I don't know if my original Earth even had this particular setting. Those god names are all correct, though. Anything in your books about how to close the Worldwound?"

"Oh there's, I don't know if it's a campaign or a video game? And I guess I don't—sorry, getting ahead of myself, let me try to go from the top." Expansive gesture. "Milliways! I don't know if your Earth had the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or if you read/watched it," and even though he didn't say the word "slash" in that sentence the "/" was very much audible. "In the books it's a bar at the end of the universe which has access to people from wherever and whenever. This version can access other universes, maybe all of them. While you're here and the door is shut time is stopped back where you came from. Bar," and he hikes a thumb in her direction, "is as you've seen sentient and can provide you anything medium-sized so long as it is not magical or dangerous, and she sometimes bends those rules a bit.

"Most importantly, she has access to things from, approximately, everywhere. And the Pathfinder books are from somewhere. Bar, if you would, the core Pathfinder books, first and second editions, from my Earth, anddddd we don't have internet access here so I can't look this up on Wikipedia but I guess, Bar could you also give us a printout of the Pathfinder wiki page on the Worldwound? On my tab of course."

"Oh, that's fantastic! I'm happy to pay for them, though, I've got plenty of money even if this wasn't a reasonable use of Crusade resources. Assuming the bar takes gold, that is." She sets the two sourcebooks next to each other on the bar, opens them, and instead of reading them with her eyes she runs her hands over the text, one hand on each book and the other two hands turning the pages, going at about a page a second.

"...okay that is a really cool power, I want that. And don't worry about paying, I have more money than God." He grabs the wiki printout and skims over it. It's disappointingly short, but has some interesting leads. "Wiki says the Worldwound was in fact closed! Quoting, 'The Worldwound was sealed after the adventurers who inspired the Fifth Crusade killed Deskari.' Any of that ring a bell? The page also mentions a campaign called 'Wrath of the Righteous', that might be the one that has details about how it gets closed, canonically."

"Well, that's a good omen if I ever saw one! I'm in the Fifth Crusade. And the power is loads of fun; it comes from being part notebook. I have some other powers that are teachable, but unfortunately not that one."

"Being. Part notebook."

Oh no why is that bugging him he seemed so chill about everything. "I have magic for copying other beings' magic and I copied a person who's a magic notebook."  

"Copying other beings' magic. Like. Copying how, exactly?"

"I couldn't tell you the theory, but supposedly it goes off what would happen if I was genetically related to whoever I'm copying. Except that's got to be a blatant oversimplification because notebooks don't have genes and I doubt the entity I got the planar anomaly detection off did either. Don't worry, I'm not going to copy you if you'd rather I didn't."

"Okay okay okay okay not okay," he says, hopping off the stool and taking a few steps away from Brenda then starting to pace from side to side while keeping her in his field of view. "Not cool. Not cool. I specifically did not take that drawback. Did you take that drawback? The one, the, There's Another One I think it's called? Because this is bullshit if you did and I didn't and this happened anyway."

"Oh noooo, I'm sorry, I thought it would only point me at Another Ones if we both took it!" Also she is now mentally reviewing everything she's told him for security leaks because he's actually capable of being a threat to her, shit. 

"That's also what I had assumed." He takes a few further steps away from her so that his back is directly to the wall. "I specifically—my apologies if this is an aspersion on your character but I do not actually trust the median person who would want to become a Mary Sue and that is the reason why I did not take the drawback."

"I see where you're coming from, and I hope you'll excuse me for not trusting you either. I'm not sure what your standards for trustworthiness are or how to verify that I meet them, but I mean no harm to you if you mean none to me." Also her threat analysis for why she was okay taking There's Another One in the first place included the hypothesis that people who wanted to run around being awful would specifically avoid There's Another One and the fact that Pete is claiming not to have taken it is not comforting.

"You know, I'm not even like upset at you or anything I'm upset at the Spirit. If it's just willing to, to completely override my choices like this then what's, how can I trust it?"

"Oh no, you're right. If the Spirit doesn't follow its own rules it could do anything." She wants to stick a hand in her bag of holding and ask Alpina what's going on but she doesn't want to give away which pouch Alpina's in and she might not even know the answer. Or might not answer truthfully. "I wouldn't have expected it to give itself away like this if it was malicious, but that's not something I want to rely on."

At this point another napkin appears next to the rulebooks. 

"Bar says it's impossible to do violence in this room because the security will stop anyone who tries, but I don't know what, uh, level, that guarantee is operating on." Specifically she doesn't know how it stacks up to at least one and possibly two Battle Maidens and hoo boy having taken Battle Maiden is not great for her trustworthiness is it. At least she didn't take Undiplomatic Immunity.

"Oh it would be just like a Mary Sue to be able to break any such rules, wouldn't it. I don't think I trust anything that runs on mere object-level narrative, here."

"Mary Sue? . . . Wow, that kind of is a good description of what we are, isn't it. Overpowered fanfiction characters."

"...did you not realize? Even the power names. Assuming they're the same, I guess. But they're all references to tropes. 'Emerald Orbs', eyes in Mary Sue fanfic are often referred to as orbs, or the Dragon Fairy Elf Witch power which I think might be a direct reference to My Immortal but I'm not totally sure—wait, no, she was a vampire in My Immortal—anyway. It was very specifically borrowing terminology from the genre, or at least my version was."

"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?"

"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."

"Unfortunately I don't know how to test any of it. And it has implications, right? If every possible series of events can happen, does that affect what it means to try to accomplish anything? If writing about a series of events makes them happen, or makes them happen more often, or something, then everyone should stop writing dystopias, or only write dystopias with ridiculous plot holes or something, and make sure to mention in all their fictional settings that everyone goes to a nice afterlife. If writing with plot holes actually causes the timelines of other universes to be inconsistent that's a different kind of horrible. I've been ignoring all of this stuff in favor of trying to fix the thing where demons are invading the material plane, but a time-pausing bar with every book ever written and a door that people from any universe could walk in through is a good opportunity to investigate this if anything is."

He nods along, then says, "So that makes sense as far as it goes, but I'm in a universe where Tom Riddle is a high school student. And so are the Pevensies, from the Chronicles of Narnia. And so is Tintin from the Adventures of Tintin. And before I became a Mary Sue, my life didn't have a plot. It was just a life. There was just stuff that happened. Now it definitely does have a plot. I think... there's some difference, here, a qualitative difference maybe, between universes that are—fictional versus not. Or maybe it's not qualitative? Maybe universes can be more or less fictional with respect to each other, somehow?

"And also, there's..."

"...give me a second to hide behind the bar."

She pointedly avoids looking at him while he's hiding. Instead she looks at the exploding stars and thinks about anthropics and infinite Brendas taking infinite samples from an infinite distribution of realities, while being natively smarter than your unfortunate narrator and wearing a +6 INT headband on top of that.

So he takes an unobserved moment to himself and...

"Okay so I remember you took the mental immunity suite but I don't know if that means you'll immediately know what changed here or if I'll need to tell you to pay attention to your eyes and not your brain when looking at me now."

"Woah, who did you Dragon Fairy Elf Witch for that?"

"No one, this is an anime character called Astolfo from my Earth. When I was designing my femsona while talking to the notebook I kept having him in mind and then when I finally accepted the powers and appeared here this was what I was looking like. Which I thought was hilarious. But it... with the Pevensies and Riddle and Tintin thing...

"I'm not sure if every possible universe is real but I think that it might be the case that some universes are—more real than others. Whatever that means. That, uh, a given person is more likely to find themself in a place like our Earth of origin than in Golarion, maybe? Or something? I'm not sure. I think there is probably something there, though, about causality being more there than narrative, and narrative being more there than pure chaos. If that makes sense? Like, it may well be the case that there is an infinite number of possible things that may happen next, an infinite number of Petes and Brendas having this conversation in an infinite number of universes, but I think I intuitively expect that whatever happens next is very likely to follow causality, and somewhat less but still quite likely to follow narrative conventions we're used to, and very unlikely to be completely random. If there is an infinite number of Milliwayses with an infinite number of uses having this conversation, there are more uses having this conversation in a way that follows causality than there are uses having this conversation just before an enormous fluffy plush bunny appears out of thin air and smothers us."

"Hmmm. There's something to that. It's definitely an explanation of our observations, I'm just not sure whether or not it's the most parsimonious one. There's also the possibility that every internally consistent sequence of events happens equally often, and there are lots of casual sequences that are normal and fewer but still lots that feel like they follow narrative logic and almost none with giant plush rabbits. So every individual timeline is equally likely but not every category of timeline is the same size."

(Could she be smothered by a sufficiently immovable giant plush rabbit? Yes, because she would eventually run out of oxygen, but it would take longer than for a baseline human because a baseline human would die of CO2 poisoning first and she's immune to poison. But of course if her struggle against the giant plush rabbit counted as a fight she would be a match for it.(This train of thought runs in parallel to the main one; she doesn't stop talking.))

"There's also the possibility that we can't reasonably use our experiences to infer what kinds of timeline are more real generally, because we've both gotten the attention of an entity that can increase or decrease the realness of particular timelines and is pushing us toward timelines with things recognizable as stories of the sort that would be written in our cultures of origin. Whether by nudging things in the world in real-time by the same kind of interventions that back up our powers, or by picking the exact right starting point with something akin to simulation-based precognition."

"It can't be true that the category of possible timelines that make sense is bigger than the category of possible timelines that don't because of... well, one, entropy in the information-theoretical sense, and two, something akin to Cantor's diagonalization argument but for timelines. Do those shorthands make sense and point at something useful to you or should I explain, a lot of the time I spent agonizing over this stuff back on Earth involved looking into anthropics and I've got all of these cached thoughts in my head that are probably not super useful to other people."

"Are you sure you're filtering correctly for timelines containing sapient observers with coherent memories? I would expect the vast majority of such universes to be simple in the, ah, Kolmogorov sense, thank you Omniglot I didn't have a word for that, which drives down the likelihood of what I'm going to without loss of generality call giant rabbit scenarios." Pete is such a kindred spirit, this is fantastic.

It is fantastic, he's starting to trust the Spirit on a visceral level again because it was absolutely worth it to meet her.

"Yes! But that was sort of what I was getting at. If every timeline is equally likely then giant rabbit scenarios vastly outnumber normal ones; if for some reason timelines are weighted in reality according to their Kolmogorov complexity then you get back the common sense result that normal things should happen instead.

"But the thing is, just conditioning on timelines having contained coherent observers up to a given point isn't actually equivalent to that. Even if we do that, the relative number of realities that then go on to have giant rabbit events is still overwhelmingly high. You do need to go 'actually, reality is weighted inversely proportionally to Kolmogorov complexity' as a thing in itself, just knowing that it's had coherent internals up to a given point doesn't suffice. I'm pretty sure."

"You're right--I was being sloppy with my use of the word 'timeline', equivocating between the meaning 'a set of boundary conditions and a set of laws producing successor states from predecessor states' and the meaning 'a sequence of states that may or may not be tied together with laws simple or otherwise'. So then the question is, how much evidence do our experiences provide for or against the complexity weighting hypothesis, bearing in mind both the anthropics angle making my experiences more useful evidence for you than for me and vice versa and the fact that we're an extremely unusual non-representative pair of people and possibly so is everyone we've met since we Isekai'd."

"To be honest I'm not even sure that is the question, so much? Because like... examining this from a couple of angles.

"So first, if everything is equally real, then nothing matters, it's whatever, you can literally do whatever you want, so you might as well ignore this possibility, right? And this possibility kind of in principle is impossible to ever be concluded, you'd kind of need infinite evidence for it, so its probability should be zero and you should act like that."

"That's only true for values of everything that include timelines without solid causality where people's actions aren't affected at all by the contents of their minds, otherwise you can make some things impossible by your choice of what decision process to be, but so long as we're stipulating that I follow you."

"Yeah, pretty much. 'Follows causality' is a way in which we can predict to find ourselves in some realities with higher probability than in others.

"Which is the second possibility: everything is not equally real—if there's some reason why some realities are more real than others, then it could be because only some realities exist at all, or because some realities exist more than others in some way, or because there is something bigger than them that is making us experience some realities and not others. I think 'only some realities exist at all' is kind of just a special case of realities existing more than each other so we can treat them the same."

"If there is something bigger than them that is making us experience some realities and not others, that thing is either the Spirit or something controlling the Spirit or something that acts through the Spirit, and that thing wants the kinds of stories the Spirit wants. In that case, trying to think about any realities that don't follow the Spirit's narrative sensibilities is an exercise in futility until and unless we can outgrow and overcome the Spirit itself. Whatever we will experience will be what the Spirit wants us to experience, in a certain sense, and then the only thing we can control is the kind of people we are, and we have to be the kind of people who will do the right thing according to our values in the worlds the Spirit is putting us in. I'm not sure if this means that when we interact with worlds we're just kind of creating them when they didn't exist before for our stories to happen in or, or what, but in terms of what actions we should take I don't think it matters, so much, because all other realities are beyond our reach."

"I would be very surprised if we were creating realities by interacting with them, for a couple reasons. For one thing, I don't know how that model handles the thing where the universe I went to was separately a Pathfinder campaign in the universe you came from. For another thing, something that human-scale is a weird thing to have involved in universe creation; I'd expect it to be something more like advanced civilizations simulating new universes, or black holes budding off their own universes like some cosmologists suspect, or something more mathematical where sets of physical laws inevitably exist the way syllogisms inevitably exist. Of course it's very plausible that the Spirit is an advanced civilization simulating entire universes and we're someone's cheat-code-using Sims characters or whatever." She considers making a joke about hoping she doesn't get drowned in a swimming pool but can't put together anything that sounds more funny than creeped out. "There could even be multiple explanations for our existence at the same time: if two universes and/or/AKA computers programs contain the same chain of conscious experience, there's a sense in which the same person is in both worlds at once until they encounter a difference between the programs and diverge."

"Oh, I mean, I'd consider advanced civilizations simulating stuff and black holes and whatever relevantly creating realities? In the sense of, like... a totality of experience, I guess. I, hmm, I don't think there's a version of Pathfinder's Wrath of the Righteous that has a Brenda in my universe and I think it wouldn't be insane to imagine that your arrival there forked the, ah, Platonic concept of that story into a specific instantiation of it that now has you and that could be said to be a sort of new reality you created by arriving in it."

"Oh, I agree that those things create realities, I was positing them as alternatives to humanoid fiction writers and our notebook choices and stuff creating realities. But I agree that simulators could totally have forked their Wrath of the Righteous program for different sets of characters."

"Oh! I mean, hmm, in principle yes, but... The thing I mean, here, is more that, well...

"All of that preamble I was going on about was to say that there's something that's determining what kinds of things we're likely to encounter, which may be the Spirit as implemented through advanced civilizations simulating us or whatever or it may be the Spirit, as implemented through some high-dimensional superintelligence that can make people exist just by thinking about them or it may be some other guiding principle that means some realities are fundamentally more encounterable than others...

"But I don't think it really matters, in practical terms. Whatever reality is, whatever fundamental reason there is for things to be the way they are, it has to be consistent with our experience and observations. And what I have experienced since meeting the Spirit is a life with a plot, and assuming that there is a narrative structure scaffolding me has yielded good predictions. Prior to that, it was just causality; now, it's causality and plot. And because of that, throwing back to the topic that started this conversation, I think that reasoning about something like having writers or authors or plotwrights or whatever else, and maybe equating those with the Landlords and/or the Spirit, is useful, because of this observed structure of our lives. Or at least of my life. At a micro level, this here interaction between us, since you arrived in Milliways, it's totally a kind of story I'd have enjoyed reading, and thinking about it from that angle would have and has yielded good predictions about what actually happens.

"So that's the sense in which I mean that we have someone writing our story. It yields good predictions."

"Hmmm. I don't think my post-Spirit life has no plot, but it sounds like it has less plot than yours? I've also been tracking how good narrative logic is at making predictions, and it's better than I'd expect in the total absence of plot but far from perfect. Though that might just mean I enjoy stories that subvert the obvious expectations, or it might mean the Spirit noticed how much I value things being in principle scientifically understandable and put down some of its scarier tools as a kindness. But I agree with you that none of this is actionable right now, and we just need to go on solving the problems we're equipped to solve with the tools we have, including the tools we learned from reading fiction."

"Which makes me wonder whether I should immediately read the entire Wrath of the Righteous setting documents and every Pathfinder handbook or . . . not that. Because I might be the kind of person who would prefer to read the story where the books turn out to be describing a slightly different world and trusting them too much will lead me into error, over the story where they're straightforwardly correct and I use them to win at everything--no, I'm being ridiculous, I wouldn't stick myself with a story where the right thing to do was avoid reading a book. Even if they're wrong in some places I'm guaranteed to be better off reading them as long as I don't trust them unquestioningly."

"I was going to suggest exactly that. And, you know, to the extent your experience in Golarion does follow the campaign, if it does at all, that would in fact be it following a plot. As a thing to keep in mind.

"But I may be more sensitive to the ways things are or are not plots, too, as a separate explanation for the difference. Everything that's happened so far to me would be something I'd enjoy reading about or, or playing as a game, or something. ...even the awful parts with Riddle because they're awful in compelling ways and also kind of hot. And you saw my modified-to-be-ethical version of I Can Fix Them, yeah, I'm exactly that kind of person."

That gets a little smile. "It's pretty brave of you, that you're that kind of person. I looked at I Can Fix Them and went 'that sounds like a really useful power I could do a lot of good with, but it would be unpleasant so I'm not going to'. Fortunately I immediately met a woman who's basically I Can Fix Them in elven form, so I've been keeping her alive while she shows demon cultists the error of their ways by being sympathetic to their problems."

"It is unfortunately the case that I was already the kind of person who would try to Fix Them even without the magic notebook giving me powers ensuring it'd go well. It, ah, often did not, in fact, go well. But the tendency was already there. The notebook said that that's the Spirit's favorite power and I freaked out a little bit—you read all of that. My friend Vivian called it 'self-identification through the other' and said that the Spirit is kin with me.

"So no it wasn't bravery it's just that I am exactly that kind of idiot."

"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."

"I also expect the latter in a lot of cases, but of course if there are really sparse neighborhoods where a certain set of starting conditions produces only a handful of histories those may be harder to find for exactly that reason. Not that I'm trying to argue for any particular model, here; I'm just sort of tossing possibilities around recreationally."

"Anyway I feel, I think, reasonably unconfused at the end of the day about all of this as it relates to what it means to take actions. Do you still have thoughts about it? —also could you look away for a second? I want to deanime."

"Oh, sure. And, same, actually." She turns her back and, assuming he also turns his, de-animes.

He also goes into his more masculine face. "Done."

"Likewise. Did you want to Dragon Fairy Elf Witch me, by the way? It'll be a bit of a lottery, I've got a dozen different things in here."

"...mildly concerned about the arms."

"So was at least one friend of mine; I love them but I'll admit they're not for everybody. My understanding of the metanarrative is that if you don't want the arms you won't get the arms."

"I guess the power does say no drawbacks, hmm. What-all do you have?"

"Silver dragon, which gives me the face scales and some sorcery and I can turn my hands into claws and back. Alpina herself, which lets me read with my skin and write on it. I have the eyes of a hawk, the sense of smell of a dog, and the ears of a cat." She flicks the latter. "Got the four arms off a demon and resistance to fire and electricity from some other demons. The aeon was the planar anomaly detection and telepathy with anything else that's set up for telepathy. The angel is why my hair glows a bit, and also made me slightly wiser and able to see in pitch darkness. I age like an elf and have elf ears." She pushes some hair aside to reveal that she has four total ears, all nonhuman. "And the dwarf heritage is better balance and being a little harder to injure even on top of Inner Strength."

"...I wonder how it would work if, ah, looking at all inhuman were a drawback? Which in my current world it really is."

"I can ask Alpina if you can dodge the cosmetic stuff altogether, if you want. I think it's doable? None of me looks like a dwarf or a dog, and if I ever had visible hawk eyes Emerald Orbs did something else with them before I looked in a mirror."

(Brenda's eyes are currently almost human-passing, bright green with a hint of gold glitter.)

"Ask her for me, please? Like now that I think about it I expect it'd be fine given that looking nonhuman would in fact be a huge drawback but."

She puts one hand on a page and gives a thumbs up with another. "Yup! If you want to keep looking human, you will."

"Cool! Okay, let me try to," discover previously unknown heritage... "Oh the enhanced senses are cool. And," <testing one two three, is this telepathy thing working?> And he can also write on his skin, does that work—oh it does, he can get a tattooed Oni mask and then get rid of it and write his name on his forehead and get rid of it and then finally get the dragon tattoo he's always wanted, although that one is completely covered by his clothes. And also claws? Claws! "I should look into what-all silver dragon sorcery does, Bar could I get another copy of the Pathfinder core book, on my tab? Thank you, you're a gem. —you could read what's in a book by just touching it couldn't you, oh your powers are really exciting, sorry I'm blabbing I do that if I'm not paying attention."

"No no this is great, this is exactly how I felt about getting all of these except all piled up at once! I'm glad you like them!" Bounce bounce. <Telepathy is super handy even though most of my friends don't have it!> "I have to touch each page but yeah it's way faster than using my eyes."

<Being a Mary Sue is awesome.> And with the Pathfinder book here he's going to look for the section on sorcerers to figure out what he gets from being part dragon. This is going to be completely useless in his current world but gosh it's really shiny.

<It really is.> And Brenda settles in with her own set of sourcebooks to figure out exactly how she's going to close the Worldwound.