And then it's Sunday!

Tae-hwan has once again slept over at the Yahontovs'.

...man, things are really getting serious between Eric and him, huh? Peter ships it.

Alright, so, morning thoughts today:

What... exactly... is up with that family. Like, is it the case that the simulators put it there to mess with Peter personally, are there other people out there with equally interesting and wild backstories, are they outlying but not impossibly wild in terms of family history, what gives? 

They say once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action, so does he have a third idea for something he could do that would shake things up enough to draw the simulators' attention, if they exist? Being super famous and socially transgressive didn't cut it, someone's already replaced the Grim Reaper by climbing the ranks, what's next? ...maybe Peter could still try to replace Alexei actually but hrrrmm he'd want to first have a chat with Alexei and see if he can't just convince him to stop reaping people...

...he's getting distracted. What kind of thing would be really disruptive, if there are simulators and they're paying any attention at all? It feels really hard to top replacing the embodiment of death itself, as ways to shake things up go. Are there any other big-name supernatural people and/or things Peter could try replacing? Father Winter, the Flower Bunny, uhhhhh yeah he's got nothing, and neither of those is really quite as impactful as stopping deaths altogether. Which he's gonna still try to do anyway, via Alexei, but like, that's not a good test of whether the simulators are paying attention, which was the main goal of this exercise.

Hmm, but maybe he's thinking about it from the wrong angle. He doesn't really need to top the Grim Reaper idea, does he? Maybe. Like, if the simulators do exist and are directly messing with him, probably they're paying attention to his ideas even if they're not the most impactful thing he can think of, if they just wanna convince him that there's not really anything he can do.

...they could've just not done anything. If they do exist and did in fact do all of this. Nothing would've been as convincing as zero evidence. Although, like, then he would've wasted his time pursuing a career for the sake of a goal he couldn't achieve.

Maybe that's it? Maybe they're paying attention and just trying to communicate that he shouldn't waste his time getting it because he already has it? But if he already has it they could just say so. Maybe they have very little control over how to communicate? But if they spawned a whole-ass entire family with a family history that matches his earlier thoughts that seems really fucking implausible, doesn't it? But maybe there are bizarre constraints he's not thinking of.

Okay, possibilities:

One, they think it's funny to mess with him in this way. If that's the case, then him coming up with some new idea will either result in nothing, which they'd find really funny because he'd be tearing his hair out trying to read into the absence of evidence, or in his new idea turning out to have already been implemented by someone else, to drive home the point that there's nothing he can do to meaningfully change things.

Two, this is a way they have of communicating with him and they have very low bandwidth to do so with and this was a pretty unambiguous way to do it, or as unambiguous as they could be. If that's the case, then if he has a new idea it will turn out to have already been implemented by someone else.

Three, it's all just a massive fucking coincidence. If that's the case then he'd expect to find other families whose history is just as interesting, or at least in a similar kind of interestingness, as the Yahontovs'.

Four, something he hasn't thought of.

Alright, when he puts it this way what he should do is kind of obvious.

There is approximately no action he can take that will be informative about the "they're messing with him" hypothesis because under that hypothesis they have access to his brain and they'll just provide him with the most useless or confusing or ambiguous set of observations he can make. So he should ignore that possibility except insofar as it should make him much less confident in every other possibility.

If they are trying to communicate with sincerely him but have bizarre constraints, he should think of different tests that are less flashy but just as informative. Now that the possibility is on his radar, since they can presumably read his mind, it should be straightforward to come up with some very specific tests and see whether they happen. If they do, Peter can probably come up with some low-bandwidth communication code and hope they'll buy into it. Binary ftw, baybeh.

And if it's just a coincidence he might want to go find more interesting families somehow. Maybe just meet a bunch of people and ask about their family histories.

...he never asked Tae-hwan about his family history. NTS, do that.

Anyway, this all means that maybe he shouldn't come up with something super flashy to do? Other than what he's already planning on doing, i.e. convincing Alexei to stop reaping people nonconsensually and figuring out ways to awaken other people. Maybe if he comes up with some other goal that is desirable in itself and super flashy he can start pursuing it, too, in case he still wants to collect evidence.

But also, that "figuring out ways to awaken other people" thing, he should maybe get on that.

Hmm.

He does not have the faintest idea where to start with on that (that's a lie, he has a couple of ideas), so what he'll do today instead is go to the Realm of Magic and acquire a familiar and maybe try to practice some more magic and learn stuff.

About that.

Oh, there you are, bub, Peter thought he'd managed to get rid of you for good but it seems like you'll just stick around no matter what, huh.

Well, sup?

...you know what, never mind.

Nah uh, finish what you were saying.

Sigh.

Okay, so, it seems like this morning Peter is feeling kinda bad again.

...seriously? And it took him this long to realise?

Maybe he was very distracted by his philosophical thoughts.

Yeah, sure, whatever. Feeling bad how, then?

Bad like how he felt when he was collecting stray magic in the Realm of Magic to become a spellcaster. Not, like, that bad, quite yet, but still a bit full and starting to get nauseous and, perhaps interestingly, now that he pays attention to it his skin might feel a bit... charged? Like there's electrical currents traveling up and down his body? Oh actually there's a literal visible spark there when he looks.

...oh, is he overcharged because he hasn't done any magic recently? It's been, what, two days? Yeah, that'd make sense, actually. Like, he even had a shower yesterday and the day before, like a pleb, when he could presumably just use the cleaning spell on himself. Right?

Well he just woke up and as he says he showered last night so he wasn't, like, grimy or anything, but to the extent he was kinda not perfectly post-shower pristine, now he is.

On the bright side, casting the spell does help! But only marginally, probably exactly because he wasn't that dirty to begin with.

Hm. Fair, but annoying.

Okay how about he does some "practicing" on his own of, uhhh, Creative Magic? And see how that goes.

Two hours of it doesn't get him anything but it does spend enough magic charge that he's not feeling bad anymore.