"It kinda does!!"

Vivian cringes, inhales, and drops the tree impression.

"Felicia, you know how I'm cool about you guys being Catholic even though when we met I was kind of twitchy about it?"

"...yeah?"

"The reason I started being cool about it is that I realized the reason society works is that people politely ignore when other people privately believe things that sound insane to them. Like God existing. Or God not existing. Or God probably - no wait that'd be bitchy, nevermind, sorry. Anyway. You seriously cannot make your sibling be Catholic. The best you can do is emotionally blackmail him about it."

That last sentence kind of breaks her down into nervous giggling.

"I don't want to make him Catholic, I just... I thought he was. And now if he's not I, I don't know."

"...Fel. Come here and hug me."

...okay.

"The notebook said many worlds have gods but she didn't think ours does."

She pulls away, a wild look in her eyes. "What?"

"She said she can't know for sure because she's a notebook. But the way she put it, I think... there's worlds where it's much more obvious, right. And... here we are. So if there's a God, or Catholicism is true, it's a lot less obvious than elsewhere and in principle I may be visitng worlds that do have obvious gods. And I don't know what that means, but, but I think Catholicism isn't true actually because lots of worlds are real, maybe all of them, and the Catholic God can't have made them all."

Welp it is her turn to start hyperventilating and having a panic attack. "I, I, I, I—"

"That was a bad idea."

"Pretending I hadn't thought and asked about it was a bad idea, it felt like lying."

Vivian hugs Felicia too. "Could you have waited for her to not already be breaking down - breathe, girl, come on - fuck it, Felicia do you need a Xanax, I have mine in my bag and they are literally for this -"

"Break all the way down all at once," he mutters.

"That's kind of cold even for you."

Felicia is holding onto Vivian and not saying anything, just trying to control her breathing and not cry.

"...shit, I'm sorry Fel, I didn't mean to..."

She shakes her head and shuts her eyes.

Pet pet.

Argh. He scoots over to the nearest tree so he can lean this head back against it and beat himself up inside his own skull. For a mercy, his author is deciding against detailing how that's going, but the reader can feel free to imagine whatever they want here.

Gabriel and Marcus look at each other and decide in unspoken agreement that Gabe is gonna hover around Peter and Marcus is gonna hover around Fel and Viv.

Yeah Felicia is not gonna be okay very quickly it looks like.

You know, this should be evidence that he's not in a story. In a story they could just be done with all these damn little details and get to the part where he gets superpowers. Maybe this whole scene gets elided over with a paragraph talking about how he had his friends help him and accidentally triggered his sister.

Hey can he get a superpower for eliding over uncomfortable parts of his life he should Not.

"MK, hand me the notebook please," he says after a bit.

"—sure, here you go."