"How do you pick poses and angles, or do you?"

"I don't! Most of what I think about when I put a person in the book is, like, personality stuff."

"Huh. ...why?"

"Why what?"

"Did it just seem like you ought to do it that way, did you try it another way and then this wound up working better..."

"...It seemed obvious that the thing a person is is their personality and memories and so on, more than their specific physical form? In sort of the same way that when I put a book in the book I mostly remember the content rather than the cover. The cover is also important but it's not the, the essence of the thing."

"Having seen a lot of creators try to put people in the book and fail to varying degrees, I can confirm that personality is a crucial component."

"I wonder how abstract you can get. Like, can you put the personality of this whole magic system in, you were talking about how extensible it is..."

"Interesting question. I have never seen anyone try it."

"I'm not sure I can - think in the right terms for that. ...I might be able to try to put in the previous creator based on the magic system and the things the spirits say about him, but I'm not sure how useful that would be."

"...wouldn't hurt, probably not the solution to the puzzle."

"Yeah."

"Oh well."

Cor attempts to void a small bit of air to see if he can do that.

The small bit of air vanishes obligingly. Now he has a bookable impression of a small bit of air. There is no detectable sound, but it still draws a curious glance from Camalirea.

"Just experimenting," he tells Camalirea. He books the air. "Can you make a lot of stuff at once?" he asks Riale. "Like, could you inflate a balloon suddenly with that?"

"...good question. Unfortunately, I don't think I have a balloon, so experimenting may have to wait."

"Okay. Have you got a rock?"

"Sure, what for? How big?"

"At least fist sized? I want to take the middle out of it."

"Oh cool!"

Fist-sized rock. It's white and slightly sparkly. Probably booked because it was so neat-looking.

It's very neat looking!

He attempts to remove its rock guts.

It's sort of hard to get a handle on how to do that; it's much easier to void whole objects than partial, and much easier to void things you can see than things you can't. He might end up needing the rock replaced a few times before he really has it down.

He whittles the rock into a more spherical rock as practice at partials, and tries removing bits of rock on the far side by feel and then by not even that, and then he gets a new rock and tries again.

Success! Now he has a rockful of nothing. A rockempty.

"Ha! This'd be worth a lot of money at home. If we were doing nonessential magic."