"Heck..."

"...That does seem like it might be useful!  Very solid 'makes what you're good at better' sort of thing."

"The other major thing I've seen was people meditating on symbology and geometry- I don't remember much of it, except pentagons for expansiveness, triangles for stability, and squares for precision. Hexagons for growth. Sorcery is always ultimately personal, though. You can borrow spells but don't use them as a bible."

She nods.  "Yeah.  Though I suspect there's also kind of a necessary element of noöspheric saturation, like - if I came up with some random never-before-seen rune language, I'd need to tell people about it before it could start working properly, as more than a focusing aid for wizardry and/or artificiery.  It'd need expression.  ...Though come to think of it, I find myself wondering how that works with the Tinkers-ala-Worm, whose whole hat is doing things where nobody understands how the fuck that works - or, no, that's gotta be some sort of applied conceptual reification...but then...hmm...

"Surely then the ultimate Tinker would be one wielding the principle of reification itself as their fundamental tool - and oh how we should fear that ever such a genius arises.  There are too many things that really shouldn't be, no matter that perhaps they could."

She shudders, and takes another bite of ice cream to distract herself from the dread design she has just drafted.

"...Please forget what I just said.  I don't want to give any wannabe gods ideas.  I don't want to give me any more ideas like that one.  That idea," of a self-reinforcing loop of metaphysical throw-weight, "would've been bad enough before it started having ill-defined but indubitably consequential ontological implications at me."

"Tinkers? They're not making technology. They're making magic items, with some of the details supported by mundane details of construction. That's the whole point. You can feel magic in a tinker's stuff. Hell, I can eat the magic out of a tinker's stuff.

...And out of cute girls."

"...Yes of course they're magic, we know they're magic; the question is how they're magic.  And at least one potential answer has terrifying existential implications!  ...I should build a Hume detector."  Notwithstanding that she's terrified that it will work.

"Hume?"

"Another SCP thing - it's a putative measure of realness in, well, a world full of reality warpers.  A measure of the weight of an ontology, to be poetic about it.  ...Actually, I stand corrected, a measure of the inertia of an ontology."

"Oh, spiritual weight. The ability of a thing to resist hostile magic. Sometimes called authority."

"...Motherfucker."

"What implicates do you imagine this has because I'm not seeing it?"

"...Be glad that you have not had the paper-thin veneer of reality ripped off of Azathoth's dream," she says, positively haunted.  "I don't think it's healthy, to see from this particular perspective."

"...Kay. I'll just completely ignore your concern since you won't explain it, then." Eye-roll.

She sounds annoyed, and starts scarfing down what ice cream remains.

"It's not like every passing whim of yours is rewriting peoples' minds. A rock is pretty sure it's a rock. A slab of neurons likewise."

"I'm sure they are.  But I'm not concerned about my impact, anyway.  I'm but a speck of dust in the eye of the universe, hoping that it won't blink."

But for all she knows, the whole damn universe is an idle daydream of SCP-239.

"I'm sorry.  It's..."

A pause.

"I can no longer truly believe that reality is real, I think, without - self-deluding.

"And not in the solipsistic sense that that sort of sentence usually gets thrown about.

"I might exist and have experiences.  But it's impossible to disprove the existence of Azathoth, if things can exist more than others.  And if Azathoth decides I don't exist, that I couldn't exist - then I have no true defense, for all the tools I could use to mount it are Azathoth's to take away.  Not that Azathoth would care about me, unless I become Azathoth."

"Oh. I misunderstood. I, uh... I can't help you with that."

"...I think I need more ice cream.  And possibly a hug.  Not that I'd dare presume."

"I will hug you. And buy the second round of ice cream."

She stands, goes around the table and hugs. Tail is involved in the hug.

"...I've always operated on the principle of 'change what you can, accept what you can't', personally."

...The hug is nice.  She...  Maybe cries a little bit, too, overwhelmed by a numinous, nebulous Emotion.

"...Yeah.  And I mean, by the same token that we can't prove Azathoth doesn't exist, we can't possibly meaningfully prove that Azathoth does exist either, so it's...

"Kind of moot, on a 'and what can I even do' level, short of somehow usurping the throne of 'the most real' - but it was still a shock to the system from assuming that reality is fundamentally real.  And I have a horrible tendency to jump straight to the worst-case scenario, when I'm weighing out innumerable possibilities."

...This round of ice cream is the pastel to her earlier death-by-chocolate's goth.  Light and fruity.  Sensational.  She eats it carefully, slowly, trying to ride out the aftermath of an unpleasant revelation.

"...What's the spell you've had the most fun with?  Or, like, do you have any cool stories?"

"I don't really have spells so much as three foundational techniques. How about the time I helped a samurai rob a train?"

"Oooooh, do tell."  You have her attention!  And her random pre-knowledge that yes, actually, there could have been samurai pulling off train heists in the Old West(tm)!  (Thanks, Tumblr.)

So it turns out the samurai was seeking revenge for an American arms dealer who had taken a lot of silver and silk in return for guns, and never delivered. And also the arms dealer was a greed demon, who consumes precious things for magic power. Mr. Samurai showed up in San Francisco sticking out like a sore thumb and fought the local mob, winning because he was a latent sword-sorcerer who never realized it.

So Wren sees him running away from a bunch of Tongs with guns, yanks him to the side and kisses him, putting an illusion of a random white couple over the pair so the thugs run by-

And the rest is a pretty typical wild west romp. They just miss the greed demon, but they get a whole safe full of gold, and the samurai goes home with the money.

It's an interesting story!  Really helps take her mind off of the things she's trying to not think too much about!

"I'm kinda surprised there isn't already a movie of this.  It'd make a good one."

"Magic and samurai and the wild west all in one? I can just see some creative type slamming it for 'lack of coherent vision'."

"More like 'a magical samurai chases the path of his honor into a den of rustlers and thieves, and must reckon with age-old questions of right and wrong as he tracks down the arms he was promised - but never delivered!'"

"Hmm, maybe. I don't know how making movies works much. Ooh, I didn't include the part where we made a deal with a pack of succubi to hitch a ride north on their steamboat-bordello. We'd rather attracted the attention of the US Marshals, you see. We went up to Alaska looking like telegraph operators. Now, I don't know what happened behind closed doors... But he was certainly a lot more relaxed on the trip to Alaska than he was getting to Oklahoma."