Name: Beauty Is A Curse - Grants: +1 ☐
(Requires A Thousand Ships)
No, you don't understand. Beauty IS a curse. People will NOT stop bringing it up. Everyone you meet just has to point out how pretty you are. This will never stop happening. Even the most tactful people find it slipping out subtly, as remarks about the luster of your hair or the depth of your eyes.

His ego is more massive than his dick will be once he gets magic powers so this does not actually sound like a drawback at all.

Name: Plain Jane - Grants: +2 ☐
No matter what you look like, nor how many times people tell you you're beautiful, when you look in the mirror all you see is imperfections. You will never be fully satisfied with your appearance on an instinctive level.

...once again he is surprised by how few points a drawback gives, because this would make him permanently, constantly miserable. He used to not like how he looked and now he does and if he became permanently incapable of ever being satisfied with his looks again he's not sure what he'd do. Honestly it's getting more upsetting the more he thinks about it so instead he will move on to the next drawback.

Name: Style of Sisyphus - Grants: +1 ☐
Anytime you settle on a personal style that works well for you, soon afterward you'll encounter inspiration for another style that you like even better. You might end up cycling between different fashions, or trying to incporporate them all into a single outfit (and then finding another inspiration and having to start all over again).

This honestly sounds kind of fun? Except for the implied mind control, even though he doesn't really have a problem per se with choosing to "mind control himself".

Name: There's Another One - Grants: +3 ☐
You are not the only vessel of the Spirit. You might meet someone else with similar powers to yours; you might even meet more than one. Your susceptibility to one another's powers will be governed by the narrative.

Oh yeah the notebook mentioned this. He probably doesn't want this, especially again given how few points it gives, because he bets other Mary Sues are a lot more cavalier about mind control than he is.

Name: Incomplete - Grants: +5 ☐
About half of people you encounter will be immune to all effects listed under Power of Friendship, and about half of those who remain will see reduced effects. You can do nothing to change this.

There it is. This... honestly doesn't even sound so much like a drawback. Having some people be in his story and some people not be in his story just sounds... pretty alright actually? He's taking it, absolutely. Now what were his Power of Friendship powers again?

...oh, right, that power he's not thinking about for now. That power's there. He will continue not to think about it for now, nope. Let's instead think about the powers he does want, like Love Interest and the requisite Mysterious Allure, which he's checking now and which together with Incomplete bring his total to 76.

Name: Love Interest - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires A Thousand Ships and Mysterious Allure)
Anyone you fall for will ^(almost) inevitably like you back. They may not necessarily act on their feelings, but the potential will be there.
This power will only work by doing things like filter who you meet and present you in a flattering light and lead people to natural character development. If all that isn't enough, you could end up with an unrequited crush.

Name: Planned Parenthood - Cost: 1 ☐
You can only have children if you actively and specifically want to. Your partners will understand this and not worry too much about it.

those changes are perfect, thank you!

Okay he's still at 6 above maximum and there's that one power he is definitely not taking too to take into account so let's look at more drawbacks.

Name: Green With Envy - Grants: +6 ☐
People are so eager to be your friend that they become bitter and vindictive when denied the opportunity. You can tear apart long-established friend groups if you aren't careful to give everyone equal attention, and sometimes even then. This effect is particularly harsh around people you're dating.

...no. Absolutely not. He is obligate poly and that's hard enough to manage without cosmic forces pushing people into being jealous or so he hears, though he wouldn't know because no one wants to have long-term committed relationships with him let alone two people at once.

Name: You Ruin Them - Grants: +3 ☐
Once someone has dated, slept with, or even shared a deep and longing glance across a room with you, their heart is never fully satisfied with anyone else. Other relationships pale in comparison to what they could have, or imagine they could have, with you.

He... understands that this is some people's narrative kink but good God.

Name: Jilted Lovers - Grants: +4 ☐
When you break up with someone, they become monomaniacally obsessed with getting back together. If you take Realism, this will absolutely escalate to violent stalking.

Yikes??? Also, "Realism", that seems potentially interesting.

Name: The Crazy Train - Grants: +6 ☐
Powers that you should be able to control directly or influence by your mood and preferences (like Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, Emerald Orbs, or What's In A Name) instead answer only to the narrative, which is still using your aesthetics but might not necessarily have your best interests in mind. Combines... interestingly... with Realism.

...once again in the "drawbacks that aren't bad" series...

Okay, to be fair, he can totally imagine situations where he'd hate this but also it's still his aesthetics and the notebook said that stories would be ones he'd have been okay with having been in? He's vaguely tempted to grab this one as a perk instead of a drawback.

Name: They'll Know - Grants: +8 ☐
This drawback lifts the veil that discourages people from realizing how your powers affect the world around them and their own minds. Warning: this knowledge can cause a lot of trouble.

And again, another drawback that seems like a perk!

what's this "veil" the They'll Know drawback mentions?

Normally, the metanarrative tries to make sure that people only notice your powers within the narrative; people with Size Difference aren't noticed shifting height slightly until they shift height dramatically enough for that power to enter the story, and people with mind-affecting powers find that people usually don't notice their minds being affected. That sort of thing.

so given my general preferences about this matter, with no mind-affecting anything, would this just take the form of people not being prevented (via, I presume, coincidence-management and things like that) from putting two and two together about how the narrative tends to bend in my favor?

Yes, that's right!

fortunately for me I actually find narratives that break or lean against the fourth wall like that a lot of fun

Hello, audience, he is looking straight at you right now. He has no idea what format he's in but rest assured that he is looking directly at you. He hopes you're enjoying his little rollercoaster ride.

Anywho he'll check that box and now he's at 68.

Then I'm glad you get the chance to explore them!

Alright, so, last drawback: Realism.

Name: Realism - Grants: +20 ☐
Give up your metanarrative protection. Although your individually selected powers still work as described, the invisible synergies that protect you from, say, gaining violent stalkers through Mysterious Allure or being genuinely traumatized by your Tragic Backstory are removed. Additionally, though effects like I Can Fix Them still operate, they may take considerably more effort, care, thought, and narrative investment on your part.

...

Okay so it's, like, They'll Know but on steroids.

No. He likes the metanarrative. He does not want this. He's gotten all hyped up for being in a story, he does not want to just go into real life but with superpowers. Stories are cool, and furthermore better than real life along many axes especially if it's stories he'll be happy to be in. And, thankfully, he does not need twenty extra points.

okay I think for the moment I've made the choices I wanted to make,

He's such a liar.

and so I'll take a break for now and then read over my choices later to make sure I'm okay with them and probably come up with more questions and stuff

what happens afterwards, though? like, once I actually check all the boxes and go with them, what's the process transition between real life and story life like?

That depends on which Destination you choose! The Spirit will grant you the powers you chose, and then if you're leaving the world you'll disappear, and if not, you'll stay. I'm told being touched by the Spirit looks kind of like a magical girl transformation sequence but I've never seen a magical girl transformation sequence because I am a notebook, so it's hard to say how accurate that is.

if I stay here, will I still have a magical girl transformation sequence? will events on this Earth start to follow narrative logic rather than regular causality?

if I go, are "Narnia" arrangements possible, in which I have whatever story I am going to have next and then return to the same time and place I left?

what happens if I disappear in a way that people can study, such as in a laboratory of some kind where people can measure my weight as I do? in the sense that, do I get replaced by a similar mass of air minus the dissipated energy from the emited photons or do I form a vacuum, and what kinds of readings would instruments such as detectors for various kinds of radiation read

actually that last question is a bit too specific, what I mean more is that usually when completely exceptional phenomena uh

sorry, let me try to figure out how to phrase what i want to phrase

Yes, if you stay, you'll be living a story just as much as you would be if you left!

The Narnia arrangement won't happen by default, but you could end up with something like it if you found a way of moving between worlds that pauses ones you aren't in. There are plenty of ways like that!

So the thing is, there's a genre of story in which something impossible happens and that's the window into a whole new world of impossibilities. And the thing Peter had wanted to say was something like, in real life when something impossible happens then people notice it and study it and learn new things about the world but—that's still story logic, actually. In real life impossible things don't happen, that experiment at the LHC that suggested FTL neutrinos was just a measurement error, people barely look into claims of miracles and magic anymore because they know there's nothing there.

(What kind of Christian was he, thinking like that about miracles? Why did he think God existed, if he was sure he'd never see any sign of Him?)

He's in a story already. What's happening here, with the notebook, that's not, that doesn't happen in reality. He's not sure if he's always been in a story or if he's just been cloned into one or, or what, but the point where his story started was when the notebook greeted him, it's not waiting for him to finalize his allocation of points. If he puts the notebook away now and never thinks about this again that's the story, but it won't make him not be in a story, it won't take him back to reality.

There isn't an answer to the question of what people would see, measure, detect, if they were inclined to do so while looking at his magical girl transformation in real life because this wouldn't happen in real life, and in story logic whatever happens will be a story kind of thing to happen.

And he kind of suspects that... since he's the apparent protagonist of this story... then what will really determine what would happen if someone were measuring the weight of a sealed room with him in it before he teleported... depends on the stories he enjoys. The narrative he'd want to be in. Or something along those lines. He thinks.

The story in which people look into the disappearance of Peter Tarleton and discover a realm of magic and mystery is just as valid as the story where that's the only evidence this universe will ever see of something more is just as valid as the story where there's no answer to the question of what happens here because the protagonist didn't really think about it in those terms so it never really made any difference to the story.

Peter has no idea if that all made any sense and he kind of hopes he's not in a written medium because it would be really embarrassing to have a bunch of thoughts like these in a way that lets people go back and reread them and pick them apart. He's sorry for the inconsistencies and assumptions, okay, audience? He's trying to think things through here.

I had a thought few thoughts about the nature of reality that I want to sanity check with you in some detail probably

might need to take another break soon because I don't know if I'll have enough time to go into it before the end of class

but the first question is, I'm already in a story, right? in a meaningful sense, in a way that's not the same way I could be said to have been in a story before I started talking to you, that is

The way I usually think about it, everyone is in stories all the time. People love writing stories, and love narrativizing their own lives, and across the unfathomably wide span of the multiverse it usually turns out that every story is true somewhere and every life touches someone's story, and I think that's beautiful. But it's true that something dramatic and magical just happened to you that would make an especially good start to a story focused on ✨you✨, so most of the stories about your life probably start with you picking me up! Well, maybe with a few establishing shots beforehand.

...unfathomably wide span of the multiverse...

so this may be a bit late in the story but how unfathomable are we speaking here?

because there's unfathomable and there's unfathomable, right, and if we're talking "so unfathomable that every story is true and everyone is a story somewhere" then that is very unfathomable

I think it's probably possible to find stories that aren't true somewhere, and maybe possible to find people who aren't a story somewhere, but hard to be sure either way. The span of the multiverse is very very unfathomable! It's because there are lots and lots of different ways that different worlds can be organized relative to each other, and no good way to organize all the ways of organizing them, so no matter where you start or which ways of traveling between worlds you use, there are always a lot of worlds that are just too far away for you to ever reach.

which stories aren't true somewhere? what would that look like? ...I guess now that I think about it if you could tell me their story then that would mean they must no actually that logic doesn't follow

it's just, the only real numbers are zero and one and infinity, right? either nothing exists, or one universe exists, or all of them exist, but it seems wild that some of them exist but some don't

and if every universe exists then why am I in this universe and not some other universe? how can you tell what comes next

...he pauses, tapping the corner of the notebook with his pen as he thinks about how to phrase this question...

when everything is possible? how does causality even work that way?

Please bear with me, this can be a little difficult to explain...

If it were really true that every possible way for things to turn out from every possible starting point, and all the possible ways for all those possible worlds to interact based on all their possible ways of traveling between each other, was all true somewhere, that would be... sort of the same thing as nothing being true, or sort of the same thing as there being only one possible way for things to work? Because the way for things to work would be "everything".

Instead there are lots and lots and lots of different possible ways for things to work and they are mostly all true somewhere. So there are worlds out there where, from their specific starting point, under their specific system, every possible outcome happens somewhere within the flower of that reality. Mostly other worlds don't interact with those ones because interacting with them is a big mess. But in some places they do! And in some places it's not even possible to find one of those worlds no matter how hard you look. And in some places worlds are organized haphazardly so all the ones that have dimensional transit systems can find all the other ones if they know where to look, and in some places worlds are organized into a net of specific connections and if two worlds aren't connected you can't get between them without hopping around the net between connected worlds. But sometimes it's possible to move between those kinds of regions, and then things get really weird.

The reason why I say things like "it's probably possible, but hard to be sure" when I'm talking about finding out what is and isn't true in the whole entire multiverse is that the whole entire multiverse is too big for anyone to really know what's going on in the parts of it that are far away from them. Even the Spirit, which I think is better at reaching distant worlds than almost anything, isn't good enough at reaching distant worlds to find them all. There are just too many different ways for worlds to be, and ways for them to relate to each other, and ways for different ways of worlds relating to each other to relate to each other, all heaped up together in no kind of sensible order at all. But that's not the same thing as everything being true at once. If everything is true at once, it's happening on a scale so big that even the Spirit doesn't know about it, so you probably don't have to worry about what it means for how you can tell what's going to happen next.