It's a pretty expansive one. It's neat, even though I think it's going to be hard to explain sometimes.

Will it help anything if I give you blanket permission to use my ideas if someone asks for examples?

I don't remember the details of conversations I have with individual people, even if they give me their permission, but for things like listing examples of ways a power could work it does help to have talked to people about it before.

Even if we give permission? Why?

I think it's easier to always have only general knowledge than to have a lot of general knowledge and a few specific details.

What if I gave permission to remember everything from when you were with me?

Hmm, it would still be...

I talk to a lot of people, and almost none of them volunteer to let me remember them. So if I went into every new world remembering the details of only those people, I would be... giving my experiences with those people more weight than my experiences with everyone else? And I don't think I want to do that.

Aw.

Well, you do have that permission, just in case some weird edge case comes up where you can use it.

Thank you!

Thinking about new powers instead of new drawbacks, maybe something where you duplicate a fictional power of some kind without having to go to a world reflecting that fiction?

Oh, interesting... I'll have to think about that one. It might turn out to be unexpectedly tricky. Because... when you duplicate a power you've personally encountered, then there's an easy answer to the question of what it's like and how it works, but when you duplicate a power you've only heard of or speculated about, the answer isn't nearly as obvious.

Oh, that makes sense. But if there exists a world out there that matches the story, can’t you just copy that…no, because there would be a wide variety to choose from, right?

Yes. And some of them would be a little different from each other, and some of them would be very different from each other, and there wouldn't necessarily be a clear winner or even a clear shortlist of possibilities for which one the person would want to pick if they knew about all of them.

Yeah, if they were all the same there would be no need to choose. What about a power where you can draw light in the air with your fingertips?

Oh, that sounds like fun! I think it would need to be a bit more expansive before I could make a power out of it.

Ooh. What if it wasn’t just your fingertips, what if you could make light trail any body part you liked? One time I saw a really cool long-exposure photo of a dancer wearing glowing shoes.

Oh! I think you might be able to do something like that with Starstuff, actually.

Oh neat.

I keep noticing this theme where I suggest a thing and you say it’s covered by an existing option, and that’s neat, and when it’s because I want something for me there’s no issue, but…I want to help people who would love the idea if they saw it, but aren’t going to think of it independently.

That makes sense. I think... the best way I know how to help people understand what these powers can do is to talk to them, because if I tried to add footnotes to the list explaining everything that's as true as "Starstuff can let you trail light from your hands", the list would be so long I couldn't hold that many pages at once and people would have a hard time reading it.

Thaaaat's true. Does that mean I shouldn't be trying really hard to come up with more powers, since it's also true that too many powers would be hard to read?

I think coming up with ideas for powers can still be helpful, because not every power has to be in the list to begin with, but if someone asks for something that I've already made it's much easier for me to give it to them. You also don't have to, though!

No, as long as it's not more hassle than it is useful! I am really for sure definitely not going to leave until the end of the semester, so that's a lot of time to think of things!

Reasonable!

The next day she writes,

I thought of a something that I might in fact want, but I'm not sure if it's a drawback or a power. I would guess drawback, but I'm not sure.

Oh?