And I respect that ♡

I hope they're living their best life, wherever they are! ♡

I bet they are. 

Marionette--oh absolutely not. 

They'll know...

Can you explain how They'll Know tends to cause problems?

That warning mostly applies to people who are carelessly using a lot of mind-affecting or otherwise troublesome powers without considering that their friends might have mixed feelings about, say, Agree to Agree. But it's also generally true that, when you have a lot of power, whether it tends to express itself more subtly or more openly can change a lot about how people see you. I would say that if you don't mean for your power to affect people you're friendly with in ways that they'd object to, They'll Know is probably not going to cause you much trouble.

Excellent!

Check for They'll Know, then. 

Then she finally gets to Realism. 

She crosses it out, and then she scribbles over the crossed-out words, then she gets out a black marker and marks over the words to make them completely illegible, and then she goes and gets a bottle of wite-out and paints over the entire entry. 

I see you have strong feelings about Realism. ♡

I think it's the Spirit's least favourite drawback, too, but there are people who feel like they need it.

I have very strong feelings about Realism! I am willing to believe that there are people who need or want it, but like, there are people who dislike chocolate, too, that doesn't mean losing access to chocolate wouldn't in the median case be catastrophic!!!

Yes, I see what you mean and I agree. I would warn most people away from Realism if they took it and I didn't think they'd thought it through.

Okay. That horrible possibility having been thoroughly excluded, she checks her point totals--154/96 points for the check tier. Obviously, that's not gonna fly. She goes back to the top of the list and starts going over her checked options to see what she can move. 

A Hundred Ships--firstly she doesn't want to give that up and secondly she's pretty sure it's a prerequisite for several drawbacks she took. She bumps it up to exclamation mark. What's In A Name...the notebook suggested that if she didn't want to interact with magic name bullshit then magic name bullshit would not be part of this complete breakfast. If she has to deal with it once or twice in a thousand years, whatever, it'll be fine, she took It Gets Better. It Gets Better covers for a multitude of sins. She bumps it down to star rank. 

Angelic Tones is not an absolute must-have, but she didn't take anything else that will do its job and she really quit likes it. She'll leave it as a check mark for now, if she still has unbalanced numbers when she finishes this go-through she can do another one. Perfect Hair is in the same boat as Angelic Tones. Dressing Room and Pocket Dimension get bumped up to an exclamation mark. Like Roses goes in the same boat as Angelic Tones and Perfect Hair. Immunity System...it might be narratively appropriate for her to drink a goblet of wine that, unbeknownst to her, contains a poison which causes her to dramatically fall unconscious, dropping the rest of the wine to the floor and collapsing into an unrealistically elegant position and yeah bumping that one down to a spiral, It Gets Better does most of the work she wanted it for. 

Breathe Easy stays a check because not being able to fuck herself up by eating the wrong food means she can eat nothing but cookies for a week if she likes and not get sick. Actually when she puts it that way she's going to bump it up to an exclamation mark. Except, wait, no, it requires Immunity System, never mind. 

She desperately wants Lightfoot so it and its prerequisites can get bumped up to an exclamation mark. 

Gloryseeker gets bumped down to a star, she's pretty sure you can normally do parkour without getting hurt if you're good at it and she can probably pick up separate magic later for jumping from high places and bouncing. 

She waffles about Omniglot and then leaves it a check. Anything You Can Do is a prerequisite for a number of really excellent things, so, exclamation point. Snowglobe and Unleash The Magic also get exclamation points. Inner World is nice, but seems like the kind of thing she might be able to pick up with other magic later. Star. 

...Iron Will seems really important; even with It Gets Better she would really like to avoid being horribly traumatized. She checks her exclamation mark point total and then bumps it up, along with Indelible and Closed Book. 

And we have reached the Power of Friendship! Disney Princess and its dependents can get bumped down to a star. --Except Cotton Candy required Disney Princess, dang. Okay, Disney Princess goes back up to a check but Puppies Everywhere stays at the star level.

Her Best Friend related selections go up to an exclamation point, of course. Mmmmm.

Backchannel stays at a check for now. You Can Teach Better gets an exclamation point. Time Enough For Love--oh hey she seems to have missed something earlier. Work-Life Balance, she counts as her own friend for the purposes of Time Enough For Love--yes, please. Okay those both get exclamation points. How many times has she wished that tucking herself into a corner with a good book didn't actually cost real time??? Huh, she seems to be drawing hearts around the two options. 

The notebook draws hearts next to her hearts.

What a good notebook!!!

She now has more exclamation-mark points than she can technically afford on the exclamation-mark tier, because she took all her drawbacks on the checkmark tier. When she's done with the Power of Friendship, she'll bump enough drawbacks up to exclamation mark tier to cover her current choices, then make a separate list of all the things that are currently checkmark tier, and their point values, and compare that to the remaining checkmark-tier drawbacks and see what's worth what. Unless she ends up with as many exclamation mark choices as she currently has checkmark drawbacks and she just has to promote all of them immediately, which wouldn't be the end of the world. 

...Opting In, I Can Help Them, and Inspirational are a little expensive. Which makes sense, considering how good they are. Sheeee'll tentatively bump up Opting In and I Can Help Them and leave Inspirational at checkmark. She might in fact end up having to give up something she's put at exclamation mark tier, or take more drawbacks...she might have to spend some serious time contemplating a tolerable Perfect Flaw. 

It would be deeply irresponsible to give up Planned Parenthood and it's only one point. Although...probably whatever setting she lands in will have magic birth control...sheeeee'll leave that one at a check for now, then. But she adds an arrow to come back to it later. 

Sense of Style and Bonus Style Points can both go down to stars. They're nice-to-haves, not really important. 

Self-Reflection goes down to a star. Chaser Six When goes up to an exclamation point. 

Her exclamation point total is now affordable if and only if she takes all designated drawbacks. 

Friends in Places...she'll bump those down to a star. They sound nice, for sure, but she does expect to be able to make friends regardless, and sometimes being a little out of place can add to an exotic appeal. 

And she's down to drawbacks! And her point totals match! She goes down and bumps all her checkmark drawbacks up a tier. 

Now...hmmmm.

She doesn't, quite, want to just leave it at this. For one thing, she still might think of a Perfect Flaw to take. But more importantly, she hasn't, actually, been thinking about this for long enough to commit to such a life-altering decision as her exact powerset. 

Hm, hm, hm. 

--And, of course, she shouldn't forget that the notebook can create new drawbacks, too. That's--very sexy and important. Also...

Are there any things about any of the powers or drawbacks that might not be obvious just from their descriptions, that it seems to you like I might want to consider?

That's a very good question, but kind of a broad one! I think it's usually easier for me to come up with these things as we're discussing each option, and especially if you're asking me questions whenever something is confusing or you're not sure how to interpret it, or making suggestions when you would like something more if it worked differently. But I can try! Let me see...

I'm curious what you were looking for from these powers that they weren't offering you. It's possible I could come up with a more controllable version, similar to the difference between A Thousand Ships and A Hundred Ships.

The audible variant is turning out trickier than I expected.

This is one of the most overridingly reliable powers the Spirit offers. A lot of things can be weakened or circumvented by drawbacks, or opposed by the power of another vessel of the Spirit with hostile intent. This one can't.

Do you have any more questions about these, or requests for more variants?

This is another power that works very reliably even in difficult conditions.

Oh, I wonder... I think you've chosen powers that make it pretty difficult, though not impossible, for people to hurt you or your loved ones and end up moved by Inspirational to regret their decisions. What are your thoughts on how Inspirational fits into your life? With Personal Space and Iron Will, it becomes pretty hard for someone to hurt you directly, and Opting In shelters your loved ones too unless they decide to involve themselves or someone decides to go after them independently of your decisions.

I'm noticing that sometimes you rate a choice higher than its prerequisites, which means my automatic totals are a little misleading because in order to take everything at one level you'd have to take some things that you've marked at a lower level. Do you want me to try to calculate the 'real' totals? It's a little trickier than adding things up automatically, and I might get it partly wrong...

This one can be deceptively troubling. What are your thoughts on it? How do you expect to feel about it?

The thing about Emerald Orbs that doesn't appeal to me, is...in real life, people don't look at each other's eyes in a noticing-things kind of way nearly as often as they do in fiction? I could not tell you the color of any of my friends' eyes, or my roommate's. I could tell you my parents' eye color, because we've lived together long enough that it's occurred to me to explicitly check, but I couldn't tell you my grandparents' or aunts and uncles or my cousins' eye colors. So it seems like a perk that would have a lower value, because people wouldn't actually notice it the way they would hair or face or voice.

That makes sense!

She scrawls an arrow next to the Best Friend tree comment, and on a clean section of page, writes

Man, I totally feel like I should, but I'm blanking right no...I will totally spend a while getting ready to go before hitting the isekai button, like, several days at least, though, so I'll have time to think about it--oh, something that occurred to me is, will Dressing Room let me, say, make clothing with text on it from works I'm aware of but haven't memorized or even actually read? Like, assuming the "held or examined" caveat for Pocket Dimension applies to things I've held before I take the Spirit's powers, I'm planning to go through a whole bunch of stores and pick up and put back down as many things as I can, but there's some books I haven't read that I don't necessarily expect to find in a local bookstore on short notice.

Dressing Room might not be perfectly accurate all the time about quoting things you don't have access to, but it'll usually do an okay job with a short phrase... I'm not sure it can give you a dress with an entire book on it, at least not reliably when you don't have the book to copy from.

I was thinking, like, a cape with pages printed on it such that by taking it off and replacing it with another one, I could cut them apart and stitch together a fabric book. But valid to not be able to do that.

I think if you tried that you couldn't be sure that you were getting the real book and not a partly made-up version.

What about if I tried, like, an instruction sheet for inventing penicillin? Would it still get me accurate instructions for making penicillin, just not phrased the same way, or would it not reliably do that.

It would probably not get you something that looked like usable instructions and wasn't, but it might not get you usable instructions. And instructions for making penicillin written in one world might not apply well in another.

I...think...probably if, as I in fact intend, I download as many cheat-sheets for nifty technological uplift stuff as I can to my laptop before I go, the Spirit won't send me someplace the important stuff like penicillin won't work. Or, like, it could send me someplace disease is approximately not a factor for some reason, but I would be really upset if people were dying of syphilis and I thought I could save them and I couldn't.

That makes sense! Being the sort of person who would do that makes it likelier that you'll end up somewhere that it will work. But something else might end up being more important and constraining your choice of destination, or you might end up travelling between worlds and find yourself even farther from home.