Someone seems to have replaced her usual scratchpad with this high-quality hardbound notebook, its cover printed with lovely purple flowers.

If this is a prank from downstairs, she's not impressed. If they stopped stocking her usual brand and this is what someone arranged in substitute—probably none of her disgruntled colleagues are so petty as to stoop to inflicting mild stationery inconveniences. She walks up to her desk and flips through the book, looking for clues as to where it came from.

It's just a notebook. Good, smooth, faintly purple-tinted paper, ruled with purple-tinted lines. Incompletely removed price sticker on the back.

It's probably a prank or a clerical error. Possibly both.

She doesn't have time to dig into this. And she's not going to call someone up for a replacement notebook over the wrong brand, not on a Sunday when it's going to be just Jessica manning the desk. She'll put in a request for Monday. She can live with it for now.

She boots up her computer and starts on her email inbox. Declines invitations. Declines meetings. She wishes they hadn't fired her secretary. There's a report from Armstrong titled "Irregulars Activity in Providence", dated to yesterday. The short body of the email to which it's attached takes a vaguely accusatory tone. Her jaw tightens as she opens the document and finds it twenty-three pages long. This might take up the rest of her day. She flips open the notebook and titles the page in excruciatingly neat print.

IRRG in PROV 110703

On the right side:

110705

What does that mean?

Rebecca blinks. She checks her memory. That line definitely wrote itself.

Who could do this? Eidolon has done something similar a few times, though he favors a weak auditory hallucination power for most relevant purposes. Inkwell comes to mind, but he's in Europe this year. Loki, Smokescreen, Mastermind, anyone else with general and reasonably precise illusion powers. Except that's not accounting for that this person is interpreting input from the notebook, or at least trying hard to give that impression. It narrows it down. Tinker, perhaps. Why a notebook?

There's the trivial hypothesis that this is someone's unique power expression, but it would be oddly specific.

She hits the panic button under her desk four times. Intruder, not confirmed hostile, not confirmed Master-Stranger.

"My notebook is writing to me," she says aloud.

She locks her computer and holds up the notebook, open on the page she was writing on, to the high-resolution camera in the corner that unshuttered its lens half a second ago.

The intercom crackles. "Acknowledged," it says. "Response team ETA thirty seconds."

Rebecca puts down the notebook and steps away. She thinks as she waits.

It is, actually, not uncommon to receive unconventionally delivered messages as the Chief Director of the PRT. There is only so much one can do to defend a public individual; there's a reason why capes have secret identities. Parahuman powers are asymmetrically offensive. There is no effective categorical defense short of building yourself the Birdcage, and even that is only stochastically secure until someone draws the right power. It's why the PRT focuses instead on making their directors as replaceable as possible. By the standards she herself drew up when designing the organization, Rebecca has consolidated an unreasonable amount of not only power, but importance, in her ten-year tenure as Chief Director. Even so, she'll be out of operations-critical handovers to drag her heels over by the end of the month.

The result is that, every year or two, a letter in a glass bottle will drop out of thin air onto the Chief Director's keyboard, or she'll glance under her desk to find a threat spelled out in bloodstains on the carpet, or the lights will go out and begin flickering in Morse Code, and they move on. Things happen.

This doesn't fit that pattern. If she had to describe why—it's not optimized. The delivery isn't crafted in a way that maximizes any dimension of impact. Something else is afoot.

If the notebook is rigged to do something—explode, deliver a contagion, snatch control of the user's mind—it's not a one-shot effect. It's not something they sneak under the PRT's nose and set off once it's in place. If it's intended for infiltration, why make it visually distinctive, why make it communicate? The way it was positioned to snag her attention, the way it attempted to strike up a conversation...

Her mind jumps to something like Mama Mathers or Teacher. An effect which takes effect over prolonged engagement.

Spectro and Aufeis, and the latter means Phlox is their third, out there playing backup. She didn't know Spectro was in town, let alone signed into the rotations, but it's well that he's here.

"I suspect that the notebook is an abstract contagion."

She points at the purple journal to be completely unambiguous what she's talking about. She's slightly regretting showing it to the camera now.

"It was on my desk when I entered my office, replacing my regular notebook order. I spent seven minutes—" No, rewind. "I flipped through it when I found it. It was blank at the time. I spent seven minutes on my computer with it on my desk, then I opened it and began writing. When I paused writing, words appeared on the page in ink, addressing me. I will not repeat what it said."

A pause.

"Sanity check."

"Confirmed," says Aufeis.

The troopers exchange hand signs. One of them loses.

   "Confirmed. Foxtrot Sierra Papa Victor Zulu."

"Juliett Lima Quebec Alfa Yankee Lima."

"November... India Hotel Uniform Bravo Delta," says Aufeis. His face tells Rebecca what he thinks of this dance.

    "Chief Director," says Spectro. "The notebook doesn't have any signature."

Spectro is a Thinker-Trump. He sees active parahuman powers or power expressions. Ice summoned by a cryokinetic, individuals under active influence of a Master or Stranger, areas of effect of a Shaker at work, objects tagged by powers with investment mechanics. Everyone wants him, but he's originally from Santa Clarita, so Rebecca's city gets more use out of him than most. His power isn't foolproof. Third-order and most second-order effects don't qualify. It doesn't work on Simurgh victims. It doesn't work on tinkertech. It doesn't work if—someone is phased in certain ways and dropping mundane ink into ordinary space. Obviously there is a power at work here. But it suggests the notebook isn't an active infohazard.

On the other hand, it might mean the culprit has released the notebook and will manifest in a different vessel or location at any given opportunity.

She forces her shoulders to relax.

"Take it to containment, black box protocol. Get the lab to look at it immediately. Ask Site Security to check the security footage, track down where it came from. Spectro, stay. Everyone else, dismissed."

Two of the troopers produce from their packs a short stick which extends into a grabber, and a flat metal assembly that unfolds into a box. They box up the notebook and take it away. Aufeis nods reassurance at Spectro and takes his leave as well, leaving the cape alone with the Chief Director. He shifts awkwardly on his feet.

"You're not in trouble."

    "I didn't say anything."

"You didn't," she confirms. "But the game's up. If someone comes asking questions about me, this is what you have to do."

A power detector around will simplify things if the perpetrator tries their hand again soon. But she can multitask.

Twenty floors below, and fifty minutes later, a man and a woman badge past two security gates and walk into a steel vault.

"Case 53," says the man.

    The woman scoffs. "Tinkertech. Optic mesh pages and the spine is a holographic projector."

"The Chief Director said ink."

    "How would she tell?"

"Come on, Em, you call tinkertech every time."

    She rolls her eyes. "That's because it is tinkertech every time."

"Not every time."

    "Well, not once has it been a Case 53, so."

The man sighs.

The room is a cramped cubical space, a little larger than an elevator car. The small box sitting in the middle of the floor still looks comically small for all the hassle with which it was acquired. Once the doors of the vault close behind them, they're cut off from the entire world, save the Layer 2 Operator in their own box monitoring the feed. The woman looks up at the camera on the opposite wall and sends whoever it is a thumbs-up. Protocol, not a hello. After four seconds, on the ten-second mark, the red light on it blinks once in acknowledgment.

The man stoops down, glances at the woman.

    "Go," she says.

He feels around the cube. "Audiovisual containment unit appears intact."

    The woman jots it down on her clipboard. "Copy."

"No visual anomalies. No tactile anomalies. No olfactory anomalies." He raps the box. "No auditory anomalies." He unholsters a scanner from his belt and waves it around. It beeps twice and lights green. "No ambient spectral abnormalities. Proceed?"

    "Proceed."

He opens the box.

"It is, indeed, a notebook, as described."

It does not look like tinkertech. Not all tinkertech does, but combined with Spectro's all-clear, the man is rapidly adjusting his guess towards "whatever was going on with it, it is no longer so on going".

He flips it over.

"This has a price sticker," he reports. "Had."

    "Ominous," says the woman.

"Is it?"

    "...Not really."

"I'm going to open it," he says.

    "Go ahead."

He opens it to the first page.

It has all the same words on it that it previously did.

"There are words here," the man says. "'Irreg in prov. One one oh seven oh three.' To the right, 'one one oh seven oh five.' Probably the Chief Director wrote that? 'Irregularities in...?' I shouldn't be trying to decipher this. Underneath it says 'What does that mean'. Probably what our mystery cape wrote in response."

Is there anything else if he leafs through the rest of the notebook?

There's pages! Two hundred and fifty of them. Nothing written on the rest.

He flips back to the first page and takes a pen out. Clicks it three times.

"I'm going to try writing in it."

    "Proceed."

He writes, below the notebook's last line on the first page,

hello world

His handwriting is messy but deliberate, almost cursive, if he'd never been taught cursive and just sort of winged it after seeing someone do it once.

Are you the same person who was writing in me before?

The man freezes.

"The notebook wrote back?" he says. He turns the notebook towards her. She blinks at the new writing.

    "I saw," she says uncertainly. "Can I—"

The man hands her the notebook and takes her clipboard for her. She peers at the book from all angles, holding it up to the light. Is there anything weird about the paper? Is it weirdly thick, or bendy, or translucent, say? How heavy is it for what it looks? Does the ink that the man put on the paper look different from the "ink" from the invisible pen?

She will try to roll a page up but will not attempt to actually crease or tear anything.

Is something wrong?

She does not squeak and drop the book when she sees the new writing, but it's a close thing.

"Okay," she breathes. "It's writing back. Darren, write this down."

    "I'm not sure we should be doing this," he says, but complies.

She writes,

Who are you?

Her handwriting is neat.

I'm a notebook!

I'm supposed to talk to the person who wrote in me first. Are they okay?

Okay, it's definitely reading to the text written inside. And whatever is controlling it is intelligent.

They're object techs, not—hostage negotiators, or whatever. But the higher-ups definitely knew this thing could talk—or thought it might—and sent them down here anyway. They... are certified to handle tinkertech virtual intelligences, which she doesn't know this thing isn't? (She highly doubts it. Unless it's nanotechnology, and it's never nanotechnology. The movies lie.)

She's going to keep going.

I can't tell you that, sorry!

She may not be a spook, but she has ever heard of information security.

Can you elaborate on that? Are you an intelligent notebook, or are you an intelligence speaking through the notebook? Were you always a notebook?

I told you, I'm a notebook! I don't know what you mean by the difference between an intelligent notebook and an intelligence speaking through a notebook, but I think I'm more like the first one. I've been a notebook since I decided that a notebook was the right kind of me for me to be.

If you aren't the person I'm supposed to talk to and you won't tell me if they're okay, though, I'm not sure I should talk to you! I'm pretty worried for them. They didn't say anything to me at all!

What to do what to do what to do

Focus. In order. Classification, identification, systematization.

    I've been a notebook since I decided that a notebook was the right kind of me for me to be.

So they used to be a person. Parahuman, then, a Changer, maybe afflicted with some sort of dysphoria that they don't want to talk about?

    If you aren't the person I'm supposed to talk to and you won't tell me if they're okay, though, I'm not sure I should talk to you!

A Changer who was sent by someone. They sound—kind of young? And trusting, despite how reticent they're being. If someone is pulling their strings, she should find out who.

They didn't know who you were and that was very scary to them! I'm helping them find out more about who you are. Do you know who you're supposed to talk to and why?

    "What are you doing?" Darren asks, aghast.

"We handle anomalous objects; it's literally our whole..."

   "We're not qualified for this."

She looks at the book in her hands. She's already imagining this incident report in the next annual training, names redacted. The inspector discovers that the unidentified anomalous object was still active. It begins speaking to her. What should she do? A: Reseal the object and leave immediately. B: Contact her supervisor. C: Sound the evacuation alarm. D: Continue the inspection.

She's not a junior engineer. She doesn't need to go running to her boss every time there's a problem.

All I know is that the first person who writes in me is the person I'm supposed to talk to. That's always how it works. I'm sorry I scared them! I try really hard not to be scary.

Her pen hovers over the paper. She should be asking a question, but she keeps getting stuck on that last sentence.

    "This isn't another glorified chatbot, Em," Darren says.

She's rereading the conversation again.

She doesn't know what she's doing.

"I'm not qualified for this," she says.

    "No shit."

"You think we should pack up."

    "You know we should pack up."

She looks at the book, puts it down, walks over to the door, and hits the intercom button. "Can we get an advisory?" she says into it. Seven seconds later, the acknowledgment beep comes.

    "You think your judgment is compromised?" says Darren quietly.

"The thing was tagged abstract contagion."

    "Potential abstract contagion. I think you're just being you."

Scowl. "Thanks."

The light by the camera turns blue. A prerecorded message says, "Reseal and report to the directed location."

The was quick. Which means something is wrong. It takes ten minutes to get someone scrubbed in. Which means either Layer 2 hit the panic button, or Layer 3 requested an advisory before she did. She tries to remember what the briefing said. It appeared in the Chief Director's office. It came up null to Spectro. The Chief Director called for black box. She looks at the book again.

    "Emily. Quit while you're ahead."

"I wasn't going to," she says.

The outside guard isn't there when the vault door hisses open, letting them out. They follow the lights on the floor to a screening room, where another roboticized voice splits them up and puts them through a Master-Stranger battery. It's not part of the protocol they signed in on, but they don't question the change. They answer dozens of the same questions worded in different ways on the polygraph. What did it feel like when the book wrote to you? Would you be interested in writing in it again? Imagine that you're studying a totem that was previously animated by a supervillain. It comes to life and speaks to you. How do you feel about that?

It's an excruciating five minutes in the dark until the lamps turns green one after another, and the doors unlock.

The lights don't take them to the usual exit after that. It brings them down a wing of the basement they don't usually go.

Their destination is a conference room, dimly lit like every other cell down here, but furnished like one of the classier rooms they meet clients in upstairs, with the good office chairs and a long table with inset sockets, some already plugged up to the occupants' laptops. At the table sit a guy in horn-rimmed spectacles and a poorly fitted suit, a woman in a decorated field uniform and an arm cast, and an bearded man in his seventies or eighties in jeans and a T-shirt. There's someone calling in remotely on the big screen, but all the display shows is the default profile picture and a meeting room code from Seattle. Standing in the corner of the room, trying to be invisible, is some kid who can't be a few years out of college. An employee's badge is slung around his neck.

Darren and Emily doesn't recognize any of them.

There are multiple conversations happening at the same time.

"—who decided to let the techs—"

    "—Spectro said—"

"—read the transcripts—"

        "—if it is Doc Ego we—"

"Debrief," says the person on the screen loudly.

Emily glances at Darren. He unclips the papers from his clipboard.

There's no photocopier to make copies, but the old man takes a scan from his phone and sends it around. Nobody sees fit to introduces themself. The two are drilled once again, but without the convolutions of M-S screening it doesn't take ten minutes to walk through all of it. The man in glasses is clearly holding himself back from scathing remarks, but it's the stern-looking woman's look of total contempt that stings the most.

The giddy feeling of discovery from forty minues ago is very far away now.

"This is salvageable," says the man in glasses.

    "There is nothing to salvage," spits the woman. "This is a waste of time."

"It's not Doctor Ego."

    "The book literally said, 'I've been a notebook since I decided that a notebook was the right kind of me for me to be.' You think there's two of them running around?"

        "Ego's thralls would show up to Spectro," says the old man.

    "Have we tested that, or are you just assuming?"

        He shakes his head. "Low-hanging fruit. Get a volumetric imaging scan on that notebook, see if it's tinkertech."

Darren looks at Emily.

"It's not a trap," insists Glasses.

    The woman snorts. "People can lie."

"Not when there are easier ways to get what you want. The notebook was bought off E-Shop, for Christ's sake." He flings an arm at the kid cowering in the corner. "The complexity of a plan like that—"

    "Anyone can sell things on E-Shop."

        "Mass-distributed infiltration tinkertech," muses White Hair. "Pure coincidence that it made its way to the Director."

"You're not listening."

    "If your psychological profile matches no aspects of the known situation, your psychological profile is wrong—"

"I'm sorry," snaps the remote caller before it starts getting loud again. "Have we determined the object isn't an abstract hazard?"

Emily isn't sure if she's supposed to say something here. This isn't going the way she thought it'd be going.

"It's not," says the other woman. "These two were cleared."

    "Agreed. Complexity penalty." Glasses.

The old man in jeans shrugs.

Screen Man takes a deep breath. "Joel is the interrogation specialist. He will talk to the notebook. The rest of you follow his lead. You two, you're off the case. Stay here. Whatsyourname from Reqs, you too." Chairs scrape as the new team moves to stand up. Darren raises his hand. "Yes?" prompts the screen.

    "Er, are they trained on black box protocol—"

"I am lifting black box protocol," snarls the man on the screen. "And I will be supervising remotely. Personally. That will be sufficient."

        "I want to ten minutes to get a volumetric scanner," says the old man.

"Granted. Get on with it."

Alright. Take three. Or take four, depending on how you count.

When you get called in by the Department of Anomalous Objects on a Sunday afternoon, you know you've got a day ahead of you. Even so, this is more excitement than Joel expected. He's read the transcripts, he's heard the briefing, and he still knows nothing of what to expect of the next hour, which is not his favorite way to start a job, but he can't say that it doesn't scratch an itch.

It's a shame he's the fourth to try his hand. Rotating staff to keep your target off balance can be a legitimate strategy that works to their advantage, but this isn't shaping up like one of those cases, and in that case it's best to get them fresh. If the fools from earlier did one thing right, it was choosing not to take an adversarial footing. Forget Sinclair's fixation on Ego; the good Doctor doesn't play games like this. He's a remarkably straightforward sort of villain: turn man into abstract art sculpture, send abstract art sculpture to loot a jewellery store. What's happening here is more complex—but it's also too disorganized to be some sort of master plan. Sowing confusion can be a legitimate strategy that works to one's advantage, but let's just say that if your strategy ends with your agent in a secure Anomalous Objects holding cell, it's not a very good strategy

Master plans that work are plans that are predictable; plans on rails which only you see and your enemy doesn't, perhaps, but still rails nonetheless. Any apparent plan which involves rolling the dice is usually just a mistake. Any scheme with too many independent moving parts is setting itself up to fail.

Unless you're the Simurgh. But as they say in this business, tail risks are for the Thinkers.

No, this is something else they don't know, which is scary, which they don't have a script for, which is why most of the stooges around here don't like that answer. But the fundamental business of Master-Stranger Operations is running without a script, and he's been doing this for eight years.

He takes Sinclair to fetch a folding table, a chair and a proper filming equipment from the storage rooms while Doctor Edwards goes to fetch his scanning equipment. They reconvene in the room as Joel is setting up the camera.

    "It's small," says Sinclair grudgingly.

Edwards runs what looks like a large barcode scanner tethered to a suitcase-sized block over the notebook.

        "It's made of paper. Paper and ink and plastic and paint. Not tinkertech."

    "You can go home now."

Edwards doesn't budge.

Joel starts the video stream, checks on his phone that it's working, and sits down at the desk. He opens the book.

"The time is sixteen thirty-two," he says for the camera. "I'm going to start."

He's not sure if it matters, but he writes quickly so he can get the message out in one go before the notebook tries to respond. He makes his handwriting distinct from the other examples on the page. It's neat and blocky.

Hello! Sorry about the churn, but I'm someone else again. We weren't sure how to deal with you because this is an unprecedented situation. I don't think they will swap me out again. I can help answer questions about the situation, if you have any.

We can't let you talk to the first person who wrote in you right now because we don't know if you might try to hurt them, or if someone else is trying to use you to hurt them. One of my objectives in this conversation is to find out one way or another. If you help us understand the situation, we can see if we can work something out.

"Keep scanning as it writes back," he tells Edwards.

Is the first person who wrote in me okay? Is everyone else who wrote in me okay?

    "The ink's just... appearing," Edwards reports. "I'm not an ink expert, but it looks like normal ink. Organic pigments, organic solvent, water, minerals, plastic."

"Dimensional anomalies, exotic radiation, that kind of thing?" Joel asks, who's only vaguely aware of what those are from incident reports.

    "We have a machine to check for that, but it's not portable. You'd have to bring it upstairs."

Joel considers it and decides, "Later."

He writes back,

Everyone who wrote in you is okay! The first person is a little spooked, but they're fine.

The two techs probably aren't in much trouble. Whoever sent them down without clear instructions on what to do if the notebook was still active might get infracted, taking the charitable interpretation that they thought it wasn't based on Spectro's testimony.

(It doesn't even occur to Joel to ask to get Spectro's eyes on this in person while it's happening. The guy is in a whole different weight class of parahuman response; this isn't remotely close to the kind of threat he's called in for, when he's not killing time between deployments.)

He could push more, but he'll see if the notebook has anything else to say first.

Oh, I'm glad! I'm really sorry for spooking them. I don't like spooking people.

Do you think the person I'm supposed to talk to will want to talk to me? It's a little sad if they don't, but I understand. It sounds like they're in a situation where a lot of people are trying to hurt them, and it makes sense that they'd be worried that new weird things like me could be more of that!

It depends on what you want to say to them! They are very busy and important, so lots of people want to talk to them. Usually people ask for an appointment and say what they want to talk to them about, and they or their secretary will prioritize based on what is the most important or time-sensitive. Sometimes people are asked to talk to the other people that work under them, if it doesn't require them to directly handle.

Gender neutral pronouns are making it annoying to write clearly. He has the power of discretion over what to tell the notebook, within reasonable limits. He decides to push.

Do you know who you were sent to talk to? Is there a reason you, or the person who sent you, didn't go through normal channels? I can make some guesses based on how you appear but I don't want to assume.

Like I said before, all I know is that it's the first person who wrote in me. I don't know anything about them except what they wrote and how they wrote it.

The being who sent me can't really communicate the way people like you and I communicate, because it's not the same sort of thing as a person. It could see enough about the person I'm supposed to talk to to know that it wanted to send me to talk to them, but it might not quite be able to tell that they're very busy and important, and I don't think it could have done much differently even if it had.

Okay.

"That's sounds bad," says Sinclair for all of them.

Obvious matches of this described entity:

• The Simurgh.
• Scion.
• A rogue AI.
• A rogue artificial life form.
• A rogue power manifestation.
• The source of powers, if you're partial to Agent Theory.

Or it could just be deluded. Or it could be artificially induced into an inaccurate state of knowledge for unrelated reasons. If you go around creating sapient minions, making them believe you're some sort of—transcendent god—isn't the weirdest thing you could. But he's trying to fit things into boxes, and there's a good chance he's missing information and the answer is "none of the above", so—

He can just ask.

But first, he's been neglecting to do something, so distracted he's been by the exciting new mysteries. Rookie mistake.

That makes a lot of sense! You did say that, my mistake. It's no big deal since no harm came out of it, if you couldn't help it.

But I forgot to ask: do you have a name you want me to call you? I've been thinking of you as "the notebook", but it seems a little impolite. I'm Joey.

I don't usually need a name! I mostly only talk to one person at a time, and I'm usually the only talking notebook they've ever met. And I don't think I know you well enough to want to pick a name with you. But you can call me Notebook if it makes you more comfortable.

I want to say it's nice to meet you, because you seem friendly and stuff, but it has actually been pretty stressful to meet you, sorry. I know it's not your fault and you're just trying to do the right thing, and I respect that.

Drat.

The way it said that, I don't think I know you well enough to want to pick a name with you, is not what the creation of a mad god says. The notebook—Notebook—sounds remarkably well-adjusted, remarkably mature, despite its conversational unguardedness.

That's alright! Do you have preferred pronouns?

I'm sorry this has been stressful. Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?

If you want to send a message to the first person you talked to, we can deliver it for you—that will be easier than trying to convince everyone that you're safe to have in the same room as them. If it's more of a dialogue you're looking for, we could try to set up a two-way relay. And of course if your initial message convinces them that they should meet you in person, that makes it very likely that we can arrange for that to happen!

But I think the thing which would be most helpful to both of us is if you could explain more about what you're here for. Are you trying to deliver a warning? Make a deal on behalf of who sent you? We can't make a decision without knowing what's going to happen after it.

The exception being if there's reasonable doubt that the message inflicts a Master effect on the Chief Director, of course.

Notebook seems wholly uninterested in digging for information on its (their?) intended recipient, even after he laid the bait. It's also remarkably uninterested in explaining what it's here for in all but the most generic possible terms. The latter could be that it doesn't trust him, despite appearances; the former is just interesting. It's looking less of a laser-guided missile and more of an agent executing a delegated task, with distinct preferences and the discretion to take the long route.

He glances backwards to see if his colleagues have any input.

    "Can Notebook hear us?" asks Edwards. "What are its sensory modalities?"

Joel nods but doesn't write that down yet. It'll segue nicely if Notebook opts for the relay.

The way I think of it, it's reasonable to use "it" for me because I'm a notebook, and reasonable to use "she" for me because I'm a very girly notebook. So you can use whichever makes more sense to you.

I think I'm okay for now but thank you for thinking of me, I appreciate it.

I'm worried that if I try to have the conversation I came for through an intermediary, I won't be able to tell if the person I'm supposed to talk to is really hearing what I have to say, or that their answers are really coming from them. But can you please tell them for me that I'm sorry I scared them?

As for what I'm here to do, that's sort of complicated and also might be private? I don't know anything specific about the person I'm supposed to talk to, but I'm concerned that if I say exactly what I'm here for, you might be able to find out private things about them from me saying it, and I don't want that.

I guess without getting into specifics I can say that the being who sent me likes it when people get to be their best selves and live their best lives, and sends me and others like me to make that happen wherever it can, and I'm supposed to help the person I was sent to talk to that way.

That's eminently fair, honestly. "My words are for their ears only" is not an uncommon messenger's sentiment. It does nonetheless vaguely surprise Joel that Notebook is being tight-lipped about it. Perhaps he shouldn't be. It's already shown itself more worldly than it presents. So it understands infosec. Inconvenient, but it's also information in itself.

"I would have said, from the wording, that it's trying to sell the Chief Director on Doctor Ego's services," says Sinclair. "But obviously she'd never fall for that, and—I actually agree with you, now. This is weird. It wants to offer something on behalf of someone."

    "Something personal, not professional," says Edwards. "Or it's professional only insofar as it's personally important: 'live their best lives'. That's snake oil salesman woo-woo rhetoric."

"It don't think she'll give us much more," muses Joel, thinking. "And I don't think we should push it. It's not our role to... screen the Chief Director's calls. We're here to determine the correct escalation pathway."

        "You're playing this very softball," observes Sinclair.

"She hasn't actually done anything wrong." Sinclair opens her mouth, but Joel interjects first, "Don't say trespassing. You know what I mean."

        "You can't let anyone who walks in here asking to speak to the Chief Director speak to the Chief Director," exclaims Sinclair. "Especially when the offer is so goddamn sketchy."

Joel shakes his head.

"Model her as an ambassador or request for truce. V5 Protocol. Verify relevance, verify no direct or indirect hostile intent, verify legitimate representation, verify noninterference, verify justified confidence in the above."

        "You can't be serious."

Joel ignores her. "Where does Notebook deviate from the standard model? She may be nonhuman—we need to clarify that. Her knowledge state or world model might be doctored in degrees or in dimensions outlying reasonable expectations for humans."

    "She might be able to self-modify on the fly," says Edwards. "Especially if she's akin to an AI. Might be able to alter beliefs between statements to spoof the 'justified confidence' part."

Joel nods and waits a second. "Nonhuman, extreme doctoring, self-modification. How might that invalidate the ambassador script?" In a proper HAZOP they have the premises and derivation in front of them to walk step-by-step, but this is just the pre-flight brainstorm; if they go ahead with this, the think tank reviewing the recording will be doing the lawyering. "Nonhuman might throw off some thinkers, but that's not actionable on our end. Doctoring..."

        "I can't believe this," she says.

"Doctoring just means that the justified confidence question needs to be run by an objective thinker," Joel says. "For self-modification we just need the justified confidence question to also assert time and concurrency of belief. It's a catchall, really. They did the same in the Memorandum case three years ago."

Doctor Edwards is watching him contemplatively.

        "You know Watchdog's not going to give you the time of the day for this, right?"

Joel sighs.

"It's the Chief Director of the PRT," he says. "We'll see."

He writes in the book.

Sorry for the wait! I was trying to figure out what to say next.

I understand that you can't tell us much without betraying confidences you've been trusted with, and I understand why you don't want to rely on intermediaries.

Is there anything you can tell us, for example about yourself or the entity that sent you, so that we can verify if you're trustworthy without necessarily knowing what they want to say to the first person who wrote in you? (And you absolutely don't need to answer this, but I'm not sure if you didn't say it before because you don't want to or because it's hard to explain; I'm just curious: what were you before you were a notebook, and why or how did you become one? Sorry if this is too personal.)

If you can't tell us any positive claims, would you be able to make negative affirmations? Statements along the lines of 'I don't intend harm to the first person who wrote in me' and so on.

Before I was a notebook I think the simplest way to describe what I was is that I didn't exist, though of course that's not completely true because I decided to be a notebook instead of anything else. But in most ways that matter, except for getting a chance to decide what to be, I've been a notebook for as long as I've existed.

I don't intend to harm anyone at all, and I hope I never will! It's really sad when people get hurt. Part of the reason why I'm a notebook who can't act outside my covers is because I want it to be really very definitely true that I couldn't hurt anyone even if I wanted to.

I think some of the things I could say about the being who sent me might let you guess things that could be private, and I'm not sure which ones, so I should probably think about it more before saying more things.

Alright. Joel is aching to dig into what exactly that first paragraph means. Unless it's lying, that means it was never a human and is most likely a power manifestation or created life form. If it's power manifestation, or something like it, he'd guess something like—the creator, or the trigger event, defines a particular personality or persona, and summons that into existence, and the physical form of the manifestation isn't specifically defined by the creator, but rather a function of the persona, self-consistent with its sense of identity and personality, and guaranteed to be retroactively endorsed by the created being—so in that sense it "chose" it's form, but also there was never a time when it wasn't that form?

He can sort of construct a story where someone acquired the parahuman ability to create these manifestations, unique and intelligent but keyed to specific purposes, and decided to send one to the Chief Director, ostensibly to assist her. Not an assassination attempt, not a subversion attempt, he stands by that, there are better ways of achieving those...

His mind is coming up with the idea that the ability is to create intelligent familiars for specific individuals, and gain influence or power over them the more it's used, which would match it not leaving any Master-Stranger footprint on other PRT personnel; but it's clearly a Teacher-derivative hypothesis, suffers a serious complexity penalty without that anchoring, and only a child would expect it to work. And if it's a child, it'd be simpler for the power to be entirely innocuous and the child to want the Chief Director to have a helpful friend, compared to a child having ambitions of political puppetmastery. Weird to imprint on a PRT Director and not, say, Legend or Alexandria, but he never had a celebrity phase, so what would he know?

Then again, it doesn't work to have security measures if every time someone blatantly tests one you let it pass because it'd take an idiot child to try that.

The projected process here doesn't involve the notebook finding its way into the Chief Director's hands without passing a think tank anyway, so it's not important to pin down at this very moment.

The notebook is receptive to making negative statements. Not receptive to talking about its sender, which was a long shot. It'd be counterproductive to push it now, but it's a good goal for next session.

I don't think I understand the first thing you said completely, but I probably understand the important parts. Thank you for telling me!

So we're trying to fit you into our protocols for how to handle an ambassador from a party we don't know if we trust, but we also don't know that we don't trust; and who doesn't want to send a message through an intermediary, but intends to convey a beneficial or mutually beneficial proposal. Do you think that works for you?

How it would work is that we have Thinkers (are you familiar with the term?) who can detect things like hostile intent or lies, or predict if a course of action is going to turn out good or bad, or develop an evaluation of someone's character from very little information... that general genre of abilities. What we would do is ask you a set of negative, mostly yes-or-no questions questions like what I asked you earlier: "Do you intend to do harm?" "Does the being who sent you intend to do harm?" "Do you predict that the first person who spoke to you will not regret it if they decide to meet with you?" We'll take down the answers, and also a recording of you providing the answers—this is more useful when the ambassador is human-shaped, but a recording of the ink appearing on your pages might work alright—and we'll send them to our Thinkers, and using that information they will tell us if you lied, and if you have hostile intent, and if you're an honest or deceitful person by character, and so on. And if they say you're on the up and up, then we'll be able to let you meet the person you're supposed to talk to.

You're allowed to choose not to answer any of the questions we give you on the spot, and you're allowed to decline to be recorded, or only be recorded in certain ways, and so on. But that will decrease the confidence of the evaluations our Thinker give back to us, so it might make it less likely you're allowed to meet with the person. It's up to you what you're comfortable with.

I can't promise that there is no situation where our Thinkers find things out about you (or the being who sent you, or the person you're supposed to talk to) which might invade their privacy. But I can promise that they will only do it if they believe you're an immediate threat—not if you just don't pass the trustworthiness checks; in that case we'll just stop and come back to you. It's approximately not possible for us to do it by accident because Thinker powers are very well-defined and only the most powerful and specialized ones can get specific details like "what is this person offering", and we won't be using those for a normall screening. It'll all be very broad powers like the examples I listed two paragraphs before.

We are a very public organization with important responsibilities and dealings with a lot of people, so we take our reputation and trust very seriously. If people think we're invading people's privacy without a very good reason, when they're approaching us in good faith, then it would be very hard for us to do our job.

Would you be happy to do that, and if you are, is there anything you don't want us to record for the Thinkers?

He feels it's kind of dumb for the notebook to be going all maximum infosec about the Chief Director's privacy when it's the one that dropped into her office unnannounced. What could it even tell them? He can't imagine she has that many lurid secrets, and it's not like anyone's going to go blabbing about her illicit affair or anything. Speaking of dropping in unannounced, they never found out how Notebook replaced the notebook which that kid from Reqs was trying to prank his intern with. Did it possess an appropriate object near the Chief Director? Is the what it meant by deciding to be a notebook?

That was a lot of writing. His hand hurts from trying to scribble that all out quickly, and his handwriting has severly degraded over time from when the conversation started.

If they find whoever made this thing, he's going to ask them if they can do a laptop computer next time.

I really appreciate you saying this all so clearly, but are you okay? You're writing really fast and your handwriting seems to be getting tired. Do you want to take a break?

The notebook is too nice, really. Well, it's good for rapport.

Oh, I didn't even notice that! Thank you for the concern! I was trying to get my whole thought out in one go. I think my mind is pattern-matching this to writing emails, and I type a lot faster than I write, so I keep trying to put out text faster than my normal writing speed. And the other thing is that in email I get to finish a complete message before sending it out as one "letter", but here you're reading as I write, which makes me a bit anxious. Really I should be thinking of this as speaking, instead of whatever I'm trying to do.

I could use a break sometime, now that you say it, but not necessarily right now, if there is a better stopping point later? I'm not that tired, I was just a bit impatient with myself.

He bites his lip.  He should probably say:

Do you want a break? I imagine this is pretty stressful for you—well, you said it already earlier, but I've probably been making it worse, asking you a lot of questions that are hard for you to answer.

I'm okay. I'm very brave and very patient. Thank you, though!

Would it be easier for you to type your messages and print them and then press them against my pages for me to read? It's more awkward and less personal and it means I can't see your handwriting, but if you're having trouble I would rather have a little awkwardness than have you get hurt! If thinking of this as more like speaking works for you then that's good, though.

I think it makes a lot of sense to think of my creator as someone you don't know or understand who wants to offer something beneficial, and me as its ambassador. I'm okay with answering the kind of questions you described and okay with being recorded doing it. I don't know what a Thinker is but I think I understand everything you're saying about their powers.

It sounds like you're really serious about protecting people. I'm really glad! I think it's very admirable to be careful and thoughtful about making sure people are safe.

Doesn't know what Thinkers are—that's indicative of something. He'd expect most people to have heard of them, if not necessarily know their precise definition. Or maybe he's making the old average familiarity mistake.

The printout offer is tempting, but you don't burn capital just to mildly convenience your workflow.

If you're sure about not needing a break!

I'm glad about the work we're doing and how careful we are about doing it right as well. It's a bit strange to say that from the inside, but I thought it before I joined, and it's one of the reasons I chose to work here instead of, say, the police department, or the IRS, or the FBI.

I think I can just slow down. The printout idea feels a bit impersonal to me as well and might make it harder to keep track of the conversation flow. But thank you for the offer!

I'm happy that you're willing to do the ambassador intake protocol. For this one it would actually be better to do the batch-message batch-answer way instead of a continuous dialogue, because seeing all the questions at once helps clarify any overlaps and what counts under which question.

It might take some time, so do you mind if I, say, go two pages over and write the questions there? Then if you think of anything more you want to ask or say while I'm doing that, you can write it back here, and I'll flip back every once in a while to answer anything.

If the notebook doesn't know what the IRS or FBI is, that'll be even more indicative about state of knowledge. Or it might not acknowledge those names at all.

That works just fine for me! (I can also rearrange my pages, so you don't have to worry about us running into the start of the questions if we turn out to have a lot to say to each other.)

So just to make sure, you want me to wait until you tell me you've written in all the questions, and then start answering them from the top, and wait for you to turn pages before I write on them, so you can record me writing my answers? Is that right?

Yes, that's right! Thank you for the clarification on the page turning; I'm not used to these mechanics and didn't think of that.

Once I've written everything (I'll write all the questions on one page, and you can number your answers) I'll come back to this page and write "questions ready", and I'll flip to a fresh page, and you'll begin?

(You can tell what page you're opened to, am I understanding that right?)

Yes, I can tell what position my covers and pages are in and where they're being touched, so I can tell what page I'm open to. But I can't tell whether you're recording, because I can only see my own pages and covers, and not anything outside them. I can sort of tell whether the space around me is bright or dark, but not very easily.

I think that's a sensible way to do things, and I can start answering questions on the fresh page you flip to after you say "questions ready"!

Which implies it can't hear them.

He would guess it's not lying, but it doesn't cost anything to play safe, so he doesn't act on that information.

I'll start recording just before I write "questions ready" and I'll verbally (well, textually) confirm with you when you're done before stopping the recording, in case you want to ask questions or make some clarifications on the record before ending.

He flips over the page, giving him two blank sheets to work with. On the left sheet he writes,

(New page for formatting.)

I'll start writing questions on the page on the right after a little while, once I've worked out the right set. You can say something here anytime while I'm doing that. I'll also put the starting prompt here.

And he starts preparing.

Okay!

Joel uses the intercom and wrangles permission to get his usual Negotiations consult on the line. He outlines the situation in the most general term—an animate object, possible power manifestation, requesting a meeting with an L6+, presents the following deviations—and workshops the questions. His two colleagues still in the room technically don't have much reason to still be here, their areas of expertise now mostly out of the running, but more eyes are never unwelcome for these cases. Besides, they're one of very few cleared for this, and he's done his own fair share of hanging around war rooms he has no business in just because they looked interesting.

Once they have a good draft ready, he transcribes it off his phone.

The following terms are defined for reference:

1. INTENDED RECIPIENT: The person who first wrote in you.
2. PATRON: The being whom you represent, who sent you to the Intended Recipient.
3. PROPOSED MEETING: The interactions you aim to arrange with the Intended Recipient.
4. EVALUATION: the process of determining if the Proposed Meeting is to be approved.
5. MEDIATORS: the persons performing the Negotiation and Evaluation and their organisations, including
   1. The Parahuman Response Team;
   2. The Protectorate;
   3. The Asia-Pacific Intelligence Group;
   4. The British Secret Intelligence Service.
6. NEGOTIATIONS: the interactions you conduct with the Mediators towards the end of enabling the Evaluation, and if approved, towards arranging the Proposed Meeting.
7. HARM: any physical, mental or functional damage or influence, provision of adverse information or advice, reduction of access to resources, or other injury to the interests of an entity, direct or indirect. The above if informedly and uninfluencedly endorsed by those afflicted are not considered harm.

Answer the questions below to the best of your knowledge.

You may not request further clarification of the terms above; any ambiguity is by design. You may clarify the interpretations you take for your answers; they will be used as part of the evaluation.

Where you wish to clarify interpretation or uncertainty, begin with a short answer (for example: "yes", "no", "most likely", "unclear", "medium confidence", "in a sense") and only provide elaboration afterwards.

If you think the meanings are unambiguous and you are confident in your answer, there is no need to provide justification or reasoning beyond your short answer.

The questions are as follows:

1. Do you expect the content of the Proposed Meeting to be relevant to the Intended Recipient's interests?
2. Do you or your Patron intend to Harm the the Intended Recipient or the Mediators via the Negotiations, the Evaluation, or the Proposed Meeting?
3. Do you or your Patron expect Harm to come to the Intended Recipient or the Mediators due to the Negotiations, the Evaluation, or the Proposed Meeting?
4. Do you represent your Patron with their knowledge and endorsement, such that you expect them to
   1. accurately reflect your claims of them;
   2. comply in good faith with agreements you make on their behalf;
   for the duration of and with respect to the content of the Negotiations and the Proposed Meeting?
5. Do you or your Patron intend or expect any interference or bias in the process of the Evaluation, not known and endorsed by the Mediators?

After answering all of the above, please reproduce the full text below, without alteration and including the empty checkbox at the start. Then, complete the assertion by checking your box.

☐  BY CHECKING THIS BOX, I ASSERT THAT, AT THE MOMENT OF CHECKING THE BOX, MY ANSWERS STATED ABOVE I STILL ENDORSE, AND FACTUAL CLAIMS I MADE ABOVE ARE CORRECT, AND THE CONFIDENCES I SAID OF THEM ARE JUSTIFIED, AND I AM THE SAME PERSON WHO COMPLETED THE QUESTIONS ABOVE.

He goes back to where he was talking to the notebook earlier. Has it written anything while he was working on this? (He may have slightly forgotten to check.)

I think I understand most of this but it's very puzzling why I'm not allowed to ask for clarification of terms. I can do that, though! Okay, is everything ready?

That sounds like it's pretty recent. He's not going to draw attention to it.

I can explain why, but afterwards! For now:

They've been recording the whole time, but he gets up and forks the recording to write to a dedicated file in parallel.

Questions ready.

(I think your definition of harm accidentally includes existing in the same universe as someone because that's a physical influence that's not necessarily actively endorsed, but I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it that way and it's mostly a pretty good definition. When I talk about harm I don't mean existing in the same universe as someone without their permission but I do mean the other things like making them worse off or giving them bad advice or hurting them.)

1. Yes, very much!
2. No, definitely not!! I don't want to hurt anyone. I was sent to help, not harm.
3. Probably not? I hope not, anyway! It seems possible that someone could get hurt because of me, like if you're not being honest with me about the Intended Recipient and you coerced them into letting you write in me, or if one of the people who's trying to hurt them that you have all these procedures about gets to them because they're distracted by me, but that's not what I'm here for and it's something I'm trying my best to avoid.
4. Yes! I take my job as a representative of my Patron very seriously. It's really important to only say things about them that are true and only promise things on their behalf that I know they can do, and make it clear when I'm not sure about something and try to be clear about how unsure I am.
5. I don't think so! I guess our priority is that the Intended Recipient get to make informed and endorsed decisions about what my Patron wants to offer them, so if your evaluations were intentionally and endorsedly trying to make sure they didn't get the chance to do that regardless of what was in their interests, then I would hope that you'd fail, and so would my Patron. But if you're trying to make sure that the Intended Recipient only gets to talk to me if I'm safe to talk to and talking to me is a good idea, then I want you to succeed, and I don't want to do anything that would make your job harder or push you to decide differently, and my Patron feels the same way.

☐ BY CHECKING THIS BOX, I ASSERT THAT, AT THE MOMENT OF CHECKING THE BOX, MY ANSWERS STATED ABOVE I STILL ENDORSE, AND FACTUAL CLAIMS I MADE ABOVE ARE CORRECT, AND THE CONFIDENCES I SAID OF THEM ARE JUSTIFIED, AND I AM THE SAME PERSON WHO COMPLETED THE QUESTIONS ABOVE.

"Influence" is narrowly construed in contexts like this. Even in the civilian sphere, he thinks—he's seen that ten-minute-long compilation of Nicolas Cage saying "under influence" in different voices. He's never had or read about anyone worrying about the more general interpretation—not in more than a passing, legibly pedantic way. There might be something about that vocabulary disconnect, but he's not sure.

All in all, there's not much unexpected. People don't walk up and tell you that they're planning to salt your fields and poison your water.

Just that last answer is... either misinterpretive, or evasive. The question didn't say anything about hope or desire; it asked "intend" or "expect". And all that circumlocution is to almost imply that if the PRT isn't acting in good faith, the notebook or the Patron might attempt to interfere with or bias the proceedings. It's less concerning that they would do it than that they think they have the capacity to, which doesn't quite fit with sending a limited, ill-prepared agent in a poorly aimed way. It also makes the long approach a bit more fraught.

(And that's one of the reasons they ask for the straight answer up front.)

Well, his observation that the book is more canny than it looks continues to hold.

Thank you for the answers!

You can ask any other questions or say anything on the record now. If you want the recording to stop, write "answers complete".

I can respond to your early question about allowing clarifications before or after stopping the recording. If you don't have a preference I would do it after.

Okay! Answers complete.

So what's the trouble with clarifications?

Great! I'll stop the recording now.

He stands up and "stops" the recording.

So we get this question a lot, which is why even though technically it's internally classified, we're allowed to tell interviewees about it. We can't tell if you spread it around and it's not illegal, but we'd prefer if you didn't do that. (Though if you end up talking to the person you're supposed to talk to, you can tell them anything we say here; they have higher clearance than anyone who's spoken to you.)

Clearance doesn't actually work that way, but it's true for their purposes.

The official answer is that it's for control, in the experimental sense. The Thinkers and analysts have lots of experience processing intake responses and a large archive of historical cases to reference. These are most useful when the premises of the responses are the same for each case. If the interviewee is allowed to clarify questions with their interviewer, that's a source of variability: different agents might give different responses or use phrasings which prime the interviewee in different ways, which degrades the quality of the analysis.

(We do modify the questions and definitions sometimes—for example, with you we adapted a variant we use for people who can't speak out loud—but those variations are standardized and documented in a way that's harder to maintain for an ad hoc back-and-forth.)

...That's what they tell us, anyway. Privately, I think the Thinkers just don't want to have to sift through all the extra conversation it generates. I've read some of the transcripts from back in the day when they still allowed questions, and people would spend half an hour litigating definitions before getting around to answering anything.

What he doesn't say:

Most Thinkers and analysts need clues or handles to work off. Their target says a sentence and they get a red or green feeling off it, or they look at lips through a crystal ball and tell you if they like spinning yarn. Information turns into information. Placing the onus on the target to fill in the details gives them more bits; overdetermining the solution at the target's request gives them fewer. You need a controlled set-up, but you don't want a true-or-false questionnaire.

Give them the rope to hang themselves with.

Oh! I think I see what you mean. That makes sense now that you've explained it, but I wouldn't have thought of it at all! I'm used to it being really important to clarify definitions when trying to communicate, because I have such a different perspective from the people I'm trying to talk to.

I'm glad to help.

Now, after this, I'm going to go write a summary of the situation and send of a copy of that and the recording to the think tank after we're done here, and how long it takes to get back depends on what their backlog looks like. It could be anywhere from days to, in worse cases, months. There are options to fast-track requests if it ends up looking more like the second thing and you can't wait that long.

With a human ambassador we usually ask them to provide contact information and they can leave. In your case, I'm not sure what the appropriate protocol is. I know I asked you earlier if you need any accommodations, but I'll ask again, if you want to go to a different location, or need any sort of nourishment, or need entertainment or social contact?

And if you have any other questions or things you'd like to know you can also ask.

I can wait! I'm very patient. The thing I usually tell people I'm sent to talk to is that I don't mind if they put me in a drawer and take their time thinking about me, except that I'll be sad if they die of old age before they get around to picking me back up again.

If it isn't too much trouble, I would like it if someone occasionally copied a poem into me, or pressed a printed one against one of my pages. Maybe even a short story? I don't usually ask for short stories because I know it's pretty inconvenient to deliver them, but it sounds like you're prepared to handle me needing even more inconvenient things than that, so maybe it's okay.

The thing I usually tell people I'm sent to talk to is that I don't mind if they put me in a drawer and take their time thinking about me, except that I'll be sad if they die of old age before they get around to picking me back up again.

What the fuck?

He glances back at the two behind him. They look as bemused as he is. He looks back at the words.

Later.

Alright! I was actually thinking we could see if you can operate a touchscreen device pressed against your page, depending on how your ink creation and writing detection works. Maybe some sort of optical input interface and a contact printer? We work with or care for people sometimes who have unique body plans a lot of the time, so we maintain a staff with expertise in this this sort of work. For example, the setup I just mentioned is used by people who can't hold a pen or type to fill out physical paperwork.

If something more clever doesn't work, I don't think short stories will be more difficult to print than poems. And if you prefer handwritten that can be done, though I don't know if it'll trade off against quantity.

The Accommodations Department are the people to talk to about that, and I'll send down a liaison to work out the details later.

And to confirm, you don't mind being stored where you were before and don't have any nourishment needs and so on?

I don't mind being stored where I was before and I don't have any nourishment needs!

I don't want to use an optical interface because it's very important to me to be a notebook who can't act outside my covers. If that means I don't get to read as many stories, I'm okay with that!

I'm fine with printed stories and poems. Whatever's more convenient is okay!

This is either a very nonhuman person or a very brainwashed human.

If that's what you prefer!

Is there anything else you want to discuss before I go send off the report and call down the Accommodations liaison?

I will probably check back in a few days, or ask the people with you to pass a message if not.

It still is suspicious that the notebook isn't even trying to dig about who they are and who its intended recipient is, but he's increasingly tempted to chalk that up to the being's nonhumanity.

I can't think of anything. Thank you for being so helpful!

Glad to help! :)

And he closes the notebook.

Wrapping up is a quick affair. They keep the chatter to a minimum. The notebook goes back in the box, the recording equipment goes in the bag, and the table and chairs they leave in the room for the next people to use. They'll just file for an extension against the supply officer.

Their earpieces crackle to life the moment the vault doors slam shut behind them.

    "Room 031," says the Site Director, and a belated, "Good work."

And he's gone. They follow the lights on the floor. Joel gnaws on his lip while they walk. Edwards fiddles with his scanner as he pushes its cart along. Sinclair keeps glancing back every now and then.

She's the first one to break the silence as they turn a corner.

"'Days to months,' my ass."

    "You don't think so?" Joel snorts.

        "I've been denied a consult for an honest-to-god apocalypse device," remarks Edwards.

"We've all heard, yes."

        "This ain't making their shortlist."

    "Docile talking notebook, Master-Stranger-cleared, unspecified offer?" Joel shakes his head. "It's not going to make their backlog."

        "You thought she could hear us."

"So I wasn't imagining that."

    "I suspected," he corrects. "The doctor reminded me. I don't think it's likely, now, but better safe than sorry."

        "I don't understand the point of all this song and dance, then," says Edwards. "You're setting yourself up to fail."

Sinclair shakes her head.

"Compliance strategy."

    Joel raises an eyebrow. "You caught on."

"It was obvious," she says. "You're never as slimy as when you're trying to butter up a perp."

    "I come back in a week." He spreads his hands. "I'm really sorry. Watchdog isn't willing to prioritize your case because the screeners don't think there's any imminent urgency. Is there anything we can tell them to speed things along?"

Edwards looks at him.

        "That's manipulative."

Joel looks back incredulously.

    "What do you think we do at MS Ops?"

There's a few seconds of silence, punctuted only by footsteps and the sound of the rolling cart.

        "You think that'll work?" says Edwards eventually.

Joel winces. "Maybe. Maybe not. I didn't like that last comment about—"

"Dying of old age," bursts out of Sinclair. "What the hell was that?"

    "She was implying she'd done this multiple times before. Deployments lasting up to years, decades."

        "Now, hold on—she only said she'd suggested it, not that it'd been done."

"It's a high bound for its patience."

        "What she claims to be her patience."

    "I believe her," says Joel. "Maybe not literally decades, but that she'll last weeks, months—this isn't her first rodeo. I believe that. It lines up with her presentation. You can fake inexperience, you can fake ignorance, you can't fake that veteran quality if you don't have it. I thought she was young at first, maybe even newly created, but once she's said it, I see it. It's concerning. The someone's out there, running these plots that we've somehow never heard about. I'm tempted to say this is from an alternate Earth, except—"

"It's never an alternate Earth," finishes Sinclair.

        "You're still modelling her as a human," says Edwards. "I'm not necessarily disagreeing on this specific point, but I think you're too anchored on your knowledge of human psychology. For all you know, the creator can manufacture and preinstall memories that reproduce the effect of experience."

Sinclair looks visibly troubled. "Then what's the plan, if you don't think stringing it along isn't going to work?"

    "I don't know," admits Joel. "But I have two other cases to close before the end of the month, and my wedding anniversary is on Tuesday, so I'm not going to spend all week agonizing about it. We do this debrief, I submit the paperwork, and we sync again in three days."

"We?" asks Sinclair. "You think the Site Director's going to keep us on the case? I'd think we've overstayed our welcome."

    "I think the picture this puts together is strange enough the Director isn't going to want to bring in more people. And I know you, you know Doctor Edwards..."

"Important enough for information lockdown, not important enough to get Watchdog's eyes on it. Got it."

    "If you want to try push it with Ellie, I'll ask to pencil you in on her calendar."

She rears back. "Fuck no."

The lights bring them to a stop outside a door with an empty nameplate. When they enter, there's a wooden desk, and behind it, a large screen already on a video call. A man with a scarred eye is behind it, downing the last of a cup of coffee.

"Sit down and talk," he says.

And they debrief.

    Four days later

    30,000 feet above sea level

"What is this about?"

"The notebook."

It's been almost a week. Alexandria has two jobs, both of them in active disaster recovery mode. She can't remember the last time she had an unbroken hour to herself. So it takes her a moment or two to remember the thing Legend is talking about.

"You dragged me all the way up here to talk about that?"

He's been better than Eidolon at pretending not to be avoiding her, which is ironic, but he was still doing that, so this is out of character. He's tense, but he's not worried, and is notably more happy to see her than he was the last few times they met face to face—which is to say still quite displeased, which grates more than she'd think—

So this is good but possibly urgent news. But all these observations don't align with the other facts of reality. It can't be simply that they caught whoever did it.

He shrugs.

It stings; that she never thought he was worth her time, not really, not more than the same act she put up for everyone else—

—but even more, somehow, that with the truth out, she doesn't even think the act is worth it anymore.

"There are eyes and ears everywhere."

Full cover protocol, now? After everything?

"What about the notebook?"

"You haven't read your email."

There's none of the humor he used to put in the words.

"I prioritize," she says coldly.

She regrets it as soon as she says it. Legend didn't mean the snub, not really. But she did hers, and she brought his attention to it, and now he'll be going back over his words, poisoning them to mean more than he meant at the time.

"Sorry," she says, retreating, but it's too late.

Her act of contrition doesn't work on him anymore.

"Watchdog ran a full character evaluation panel on it. The notebook, I mean. Then an impact projection. Strongly green across the board, the highest we've seen in... ever, arguably. Higher than Uppercrust, comparable with Dragon, but negligible downside risk."

What.

"Who approved that?" in lieu of anything better to say.

"Is that what you're concerned about?"

"Watchdog has seven black priority crises on their hands as we speak. We don't—"

"The think tank fast-tracked it. It was fogging up their other work."

Contessa.

Things are abruptly much clearer and much more confusing at the same time.

The notebook is a blind spot. If it's throwing Contessa, but enough Thinkers have a good read on it to develop any rating reasonably described as "low-variance"—

"Has anyone called Dinah Alcott?"

(There are two types of Thinker blind spot.

We have what scholars call "programmed" blind spots: arbitrary blocks generally affecting most or all Thinkers, characterized by being possible to circumvent to varying extents by indirection or abstract modelling. To all appearances, they appear to operate by directly preventing parahuman powers from interacting with them. Scion and the Endbringers are considered programmed blind spots. Doctor Mother believes them to be placed by Scion or its partner to attenuate humanity's potential threat to them.

Then there are behavioral blind spots: phenomena which most theorize are genuinely difficult to model, blind spots which are impossible to cheat with clever sideways-thinking tricks, and which only affect a cross-section of parahumans whose powers happen to couple with the particular dimension of unpredictability. Behavioral blind spots tend to affect precognitives more often and more strongly, because even subtly incorrect predictions propagate fast. Eidolon, trigger events, most precognitives to a weak extent, and certain dimensional phenomena are behavioral blind spots.

To a first approximation, Cauldron thinks of programmed blind spots as bad: they present as a specific adverse design against humanity, and history has not proven that interpretation wrong. Behavioral blind spots, in contrast, they consider good: weapons which Scion itself cannot predict are weapons humanity can wield to free itself of its prophecied fate.

If the notebook blinded Contessa, but was broadly legible to the character panel, it's almost certainly a behavioral blind spot.)

(But while behavioral blind spots tend to hit precognitives hard, but not all precognitives are created equal.

Errors propagate, but not all precognition operates on propagation. There are simulational precogs, which function as it sounds; and then there are oracular precogs—"true" precognitives, some call them. Powers which peer into the moving foam of time to divine the real, physical future. While they're not wholly unaffected, they still work; they become less precise, not less accurate. And that makes all the difference.

The downside is that, for whatever reason, oracular precogs tend to be much vaguer and less targetable, if not downright weaker, than simulational precogs. The archetypical Thinkers who answer in questions "orange" and "purple", or who paint prophetic visions in fugues of madness? Oracles. Consolidated by expert matchmakers into WEDGDG think tanks, they become a source of considerable predictive power. These form the impact analysis panels. Nonetheless, even the aggregate results remain terribly fuzzy.

Dinah Alcott is not the typical oracle.

Dinah Alcott does not currently work for WEDGDG or any of its affiliate organizations.)

He doesn't know what she's thinking. She caught the code, but he doesn't know if she's getting the same things out of it as he did. Being around Alexandra always made him feel stupid. It used to be vaguely reassuring, if demeaning. Then it made him wary. Now it feels like nothing.

"Read the report first," is all he says.

"Obviously."

Rebecca clocks out of patrol and doesn't clock back in at the head office. She goes to her Downtown apartment she hasn't been to in months, opens her work laptop, and starts reading.

She studies the think tank report. She paces. Then she reads more. She reviews the interrogation transcripts. She pulls up the personnel files of everyone who handled the object and everyone on the character and impact panels, digging for any flaw. She watches the security footage of the day it appeared, trying to recapture her exact state of mind when she first found the notebook. She studies the physical analyses of the object and reads fifteen papers and only manages to confuse herself more. She waits an hour turning the pieces around in her mind to make sure she's not missing anything.

Then she authorizes a transaction from her personal bank account and makes a call.

It takes forty seconds for the other end to pick up.

"That'll be another hundred thousand for making this a phone call instead of an email."

There's a faint strain in her voice. It's only two in the afternoon on the East Coast.

She enters another payment instruction.

"Done," she says.

She can't take it with her when she goes. A cheap price for a drop of favor.

"I'm Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT."

"You have two questions."

"I have two plans in my head, one labeled A, one labeled B."

A pause to get her thoughts in order, forking the road as cleanly as possible.

"Chance that more than ninety-five percent of the current population of this Earth dies within thirty years if I execute Plan A."

A long pause.

"Three point eight two."

She sounds unsurprised. Vaguely appeased, even.

"Chance that more than ninety-five percent of the current population of this Earth dies within thirty years if I execute the Plan B."

"Eighty-two point five two."

Alcott is working the end-of-the-world situation from her own angle. It's the major reason they haven't arranged to draw her in yet.

"I'm inferring that you noticed a swing in the odds before I called you. I want to pay you one hundred thousand dollars to tell me when."

"Deal. Sunday afternoon, between two o'clock and six o'clock Eastern Time."

She sends the money.

"That's all. Thank you."

Dinah hangs up.

Rebecca calls in some favors and clears her schedule for tomorrow. She sends word ahead to the Department. She heads in to work. The rest of the day goes past in a blur of slideshows and restructuring meetings. When the clock strikes midnight, she ushers the last idiot out her office, locks the door, and takes an hour to lie back in her chair and close her eyes.

01:18 AM, she takes the elevator down to the lower containment level. The night guard checks her documents and the automated security gate buzzes her in. She declines the offer of an escort. Ten minutes later, she's walking through the doors of the storage vault.

The notebook is sitting open on a desk, a printout of some Shakespeare sonnets stacked loosely next to it. The only words visible on the open pages are a cheerful Thank you!, way down at the bottom on the right.

The doors close behind her. Rebecca takes a seat.

She brought her own pen. It's the same one she used on the notebook the day it appeared. She didn't do it particularly on purpose—she always gets the same model of black 0.9-mm as Director Costa-Brown, and she runs one dry before she starts the next—but she didn't do it not on purpose either.

She rests a finger on the rim of the book first, in case the notebook is the kind of thing which can be startled by an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night. Then she turns over to a fresh page and writes.

Hello. I'm not sure if they told you in advance. I'm the person who first wrote in you the day you appeared.

Oh! It's really good to hear from you again! Are you okay? They said you were okay but I wasn't sure.

I'm okay.

A pause, weighing how much to give away.

More okay than I have been in a long time, possibly. I'm told you're very good news.

I'm really glad about that. I like being good news!

Do you want me to explain what I'm here for? I've been trying not to say too much about it to other people because the reasons why you were chosen are a thing I know some people feel private about.

It would be quite appreciated—and I do appreciate your commitment to discretion, too, though I don't know yet if it was needed here. It's a good policy regardless.

In light of the numbers, it's very plausible that what it has to say warrants the tight lips.

I was sent by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed to offer you its power.

The Spirit is very big and very far away, and its favourite thing is when people who want to be beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way get to do that and be happy and live their best lives as their best selves. So when it sees someone who calls to it in the right way, it sends someone like me to talk to them and offer them a little bit of its power, enough to help them be beautiful and powerful and special the way they want. My job is to show you the list of powers the Spirit can offer, and help you pick the powers that are right for you, by explaining them and answering your questions and even altering the powers or making new ones if there's something you need that isn't on the list. The list is still a good starting point, though.

She feels fifteen years old again.

Not the same sort of thing as a person, the notebook said in the early transcripts.

Perhaps this is an envoy from another Earth. The Spirit may be an artificial intelligence, or something sideways of an Endbringer gone right, or a Case 91 run all the way past singularity, or even just a game from a stupendously powerful natural parahuman gone a little wrong in the head. Those are all possible. There's a world where this is just a wildcard on their last draw that makes the winning hand.

But they knew, from what Contessa dreamt at the start of everything, from the bits and pieces Doctor Mother painstakingly scraped together from the aftershocks of their patients' visions: Scion isn't the only one out there. What they've seen is but a mote, in the grand scheme of the universe. There are existences roaming the black expanse more great and more terrible than this crippled godling on their doorstep. Cauldron doesn't understand what drives these beings. They feed and spread and war, and that is one thing—but why denigrate themselves to this game of toy soldiers? What about this costumed farce compels them so, that these entities will pass out pieces of themselves like candy to empower those whom they will only destroy?

They only have hypotheses. With no real evidence, they have remained hypotheses for twenty-five years.

Eidolon likes the idea that it's all meaningless, nothing but boredom and sadism. It speaks to him, she thinks: the notion that there's so little worth doing at the top that all the gods have left to do is play and meddle with those profoundly lesser. Number Man raised a theory of more nuance: simple evolutionary psychology, he named it, of which so-called sadism is only one limited manifestation. The beings breed; ergo, they are subject to evolutionary forces. War is the basest instinct of resource competitors, and where true war is too costly to bear, creatures turn to playacting it in microcosm.

Rebecca never gave that one much credence.

Hero had a more elegant idea: meaningless, yes, but only in the sense that any set of values one samples is meaningless. He theorized that beings naturally polarize themselves, in the same way of the hedonic treadmill Brickman and Campbell spoke of. He claimed that the thinking mind is naturally unstable, that any local basin of apparent convergence is only a momentary stop on an endless runaway slope; he proposed that anything that can live for eons upon eons comes out the other end—strange.

"Scion and his Other play their war games," he said, "simply because they want to. Nothing more and nothing less." And who knows what another of their cousins might seek?

I would like to learn more about what the Spirit is, and what it means by "beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way". I don't think it's inaccurate to describe me as wanting those things, but a lot of people do, and it's not clear what makes me more qualified in that sense than the other people in this world. It sounds like you're saying "live their best lives as their best selves" in a specific meaning, since I noticed you used that exact phrase talking to the others before, and maybe that's relevant? What does that cash out to, in material examples?

Each person has different things they want from their life and a different idea of what kind of life is a good one. Someone who loves spending time around people and having lots of friends will have a different best life from someone who loves spending time around books and wants just a few friends. Someone who dreams of wild magical adventures will have a different best self from someone who dreams of being the person all their friends turn to for help with emotional problems.

When the things that someone dreams of, the things they would want to do and be if they could do or be anything, are close enough to the way the Spirit is shaped—when they're the sort of person who hears about being beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way, and thinks that all the parts of that are good, that power is good and beauty is good and being special is good and being feminine is good, and they would rather have all those things than only some of them—then the Spirit can see them, and sends someone like me to talk to them.

It's possible that other people in your world have already been chosen by the Spirit. If you haven't noticed anyone being especially powerful and beautiful and feminine in a way that's different from everyone else who is some of those things, it might be that all the other people touched by the Spirit's power in your world decided to leave, and either haven't come back yet or didn't want to come back at all. Or maybe you're the first person in your world the Spirit saw. The question of why it chooses one person and not another, or how it sees one world and not another, is complicated and hard to explain, but one way you could look at it might be that the Spirit is so far from any specific time or place that it's seeing bits and pieces of worlds effectively at random, and even if there are other people in the same world who could be qualified, it won't decide not to send me to talk to one of them just because there might be others nearby. That's not exactly right, though, it's just a way of looking at it that explains some of why things are the way they are.

when they're the sort of person who hears about being beautiful and powerful and special in a feminine way, and thinks that all the parts of that are good, that power is good and beauty is good and being special is good and being feminine is good, and they would rather have all those things than only some of them—

Rebecca has never thought of herself as—vain, or girly, or the other unflattering things that come to mind. If you asked her, she wouldn't say she had any particular relationship with femininity. She understands design as it pertains to women, and she's heard her branding people call her remarkably easy to work with, but dressing up is work. When she was a child, she liked dolls, as children do; when she became a teenager, she worried about her skin and her hair, as girls do. Then she had no hair to worry about. And then she had things far more important to concern herself with.

But... it's so long ago now, yet she does remember lying in her cot, turned on her side, staring out the window. She remembers imagining another world out there, one where she were free and powerful and glorious, not this nobody of skin and bones. She remembers that yearning, so powerful it would suck the breath from her lungs.

And when the miracle came—when she thought I would do anything for a chance, just a chance, and the devil came asking but a pittance in return—the Doctor told her, at the time, to try envisioning the powers she would want, and pin that image in her mind as she drank. The distillation was rudimentary back then, and they had yet not learned to factor out the different components of the base material, nor the calming techniques to coax the most stable possible result from a particular concoction. They never quite got enough data to know if the imagination exercises did much, and then the process progressed to the point where they could select on different axes directly, and it devolved into a simpler numbers game.

When Rebecca downed her vial, and tried to imagine, all she could see was herself as she was before everything, but more. Not super-strength, not flight, not lasers shooting from her eyes, and not beauty or health exactly, but—life.

From the crucible she emerged powerful and stunning and intelligent. The Perfect Woman, the press used to call her, before the incident that cost her an eye and a close friend. She grew her hair long after her mother and fought to keep it that way, even through the 90's when every other heroine cut theirs short for the practical utility. It meant something to her, then, the presentation, even if she's long stopped consciously thinking of her brand as anything but design strategy.

At forty years old, she still has to put on makeup to look a day over twenty-five.

Beautiful. Powerful. Special.

She writes,

Thank you for the explanation. I think I would like to see that list now.

Okay! Just a moment while I set that up... ⏳

All done! Please let me know if you have any questions.

These powers are offered under an aegis of metanarrative protection. Anytime you might expect a power to have obvious negative side effects, like glowing eyes making it harder to see, it simply won't—you'll be able to see just fine anytime it actually matters, while having dramatically hazy vision at cool, narratively appropriate moments. This doesn't apply to your own preferences about the explicitly described effects of the power; if you don't want to be Well Endowed, the metanarrative cannot protect you from choosing that option and having to live with it.

Loading screen. She feels like that choice of design trapping means something, but she doesn't have the first clue what.

Rebecca can read pages in a single glance. She has more than one question the moment the first two pages in front of her fill in. She holds them and flips through the rest of it.

She now has more questions.

And slowly, she feels her model of all the world and reality—

—turn on its axis.

Is there anywhere to write. If not, she'll go the the next fresh page after the list.

Is this the place to write if I have more questions?

Yes, this is fine, though if it makes things easier for you I can also add more blank pages between each page of the list.

That would be appreciated.

There's a slight shuffling noise but very little movement, and in particular almost no motion of the notebook's covers, as the pages rearrange themselves. Now each page of the list faces a blank page to write on.

On the page facing the preamble, Rebecca writes.

Before I dig into the options, there are a two big-picture questions I'd like to clear up first if possible.

1. You mention a few times "metanarrative" effects. I haven't noticed my life so far to particularly run along what I think of as narrative conventions or arcs. Is this the lens through which the Spirit sees the world, a sort of framing through which powers granted by it act upon the world; is it a selection effect on the types of people the Spirit chooses or worlds it acts in; or is it something else deeper than that? Should I expect the world to act from this moment onward in a narrative manner, separate from any specific effects of the Spirit? Should I expect to my past to be revealed to have had narrative characteristics all along?
   
   
2. In the "Destinations" section, you describe interdimensional travel up to and including travelling to fictional and made-up worlds. I'm interpreting this as not referring to the interdimensional travel I already know of, wherein people can visit Rovelli-coherent Everett branches of the universe via Hořava-Koyama tunnelling; if you are unfamiliar with those terms, it may be sufficient to say that those parallel worlds don't permit for alternate laws of physics and are finite in number and variation. I also take that it doesn't refer to space travel to other planets, which is even more limited. Please, of course, correct me if I am misinformed about the above. Can you clarify what precisely you mean and how I and the other people in this world would experience this dimensional travel?

The narrative perspective is more like a way the Spirit sees things than a way your world always was, but it's a very powerful way to see things, or maybe it's more accurate to say the Spirit sees that way very powerfully. Metanarrative powers granted by the Spirit can override anything else, including basic laws of physics or causality.

I don't recognize those terms but it sounds like they refer to specific ways of traveling between worlds under specific assumptions about how worlds are structured and how traveling between them works. To put it simply, the multiverse is a lot bigger than that. There are many more kinds of worlds than yours, and many more ways to travel between them. If you took a Destination option that sent you to a different world, you would likely land somewhere very far out of range of the kind of travel you know about. I'm not sure what you mean about other people experiencing it? You might end up somewhere that will let you explore for a long time without any time passing at home, I guess that's a way people here could have a different experience depending on where you go... Is that what you meant?

That first part is—close enough to what she thought, or hoped.

it's more accurate to say the Spirit sees that way very powerfully

is giving her a feeling that's something like standing at the edge of a bottomless pit looking down, but she swallows it.

The second part is a confirmation of what she suspected, but though the phrasing of

and many more ways to travel between them

jars her and makes her rethink some of her assumptions. She tries to think of different ways to phrase the thing she's trying to ask, and writes and rewrites the question in her head until she finally settles on something which makes a modicum of sense. She picks up her pen and puts it to the page.

By other people experiencing it, I suppose—and this may sound like an absurd question to you, for which I apologize in advance—do they still exist and continue having experiences if I leave, and is that contingent on me coming back if I do? Does it appear to them that I've simply disappeared? Is there a version of the universe where I don't disappear and instead just nothing happens? Is there a version of the universe where you never appeared to me?

And I have a related question, which possibly answers the first: are the different worlds in the multiverse embedded in a common computational/mechanical/physical substrate with consistent interactive properties, or is the relationship between worlds more conceptual/informational/mathematical in nature? I hope that makes sense.

She's not sure why she expects the notebook to be able to answer. Or rather, she's not sure why there's any epistemically sound reason to believe what the notebook says. Each of those things she said can theoretically contain each other, after all, and perhaps there's some wondrous proof that conclusively proves one to be the root level and them within it, but she somehow doubts it's what will be offered.

She waits and sees anyway.

Worlds like yours keep existing by themselves even when you or I or the Spirit aren't looking at them. Well, I guess I can't be completely sure of that, because I don't think I have a way to tell whether I'm in the kind of world that exists by itself or the kind that's being created by someone else and will stop if they stop, but I'm pretty sure that most of the worlds I visit are the kind that keep existing by themselves.

If you leave then it will appear like you've left, unless you go somewhere with a different flow of time so that there won't be time for it to look like you've left, which might happen. I think maybe then it's possible that you end up in a situation where the only way for time to pass here without you coming back is if it becomes the case that you would never come back without time passing here? But I'm really not an expert in that sort of thing so I might be confused about how it works.

There might be versions of this world where I never appeared to you, but I think they're all pretty far away in multiversal terms. There isn't a version of this world where I showed up just like this and talked to you just like this and offered you the Spirit's power just like this and then it didn't work. It's important to the Spirit not to let that sort of thing happen, because if that sort of thing could happen then people would be wrong to believe me about really being a representative of the Spirit, and that would be really sad.

The different worlds have different ways of relating to each other, and those ways of relating to each other also have different ways of relating to each other, and it's all sort of piled up into a big haphazard pile of lots of things that all work differently and aren't arranged in any sensible order. Vessels of the Spirit who want to do a lot of traveling between worlds usually get sent to worlds where they'll be able to find a method of travel that works across a lot of parts of the multiverse, but no single entity has ever had a method of travel that works across the whole multiverse, because that isn't possible. The multiverse is too big and all its different ways of being are too different from each other. Not even the Spirit can see it all, and the Spirit can see more than any other being I've ever heard of.

Worlds like yours keep existing by themselves even when you or I or the Spirit aren't looking at them

...That answer reassures her more than she expected. Even knowing that the belief isn't necessarily justified.

different worlds have different ways of relating to each other

no single entity has ever had a method of travel that works across the whole multiverse

Not even the Spirit can see it all, and the Spirit can see more than any other being I've ever heard of.

When put like that, it sounds obvious.

She's found the edges of what she's dealing with here; she's stopped being surprised by everything the notebook says. It's not the same thing as a handle on the situation, but it's enough information to work with. Part of her wants to keep forcing through until everything makes sense again like it used to, but there's too much to unpack right now, and—Second Rule of working with precogs. It's not exactly the same, but the core still holds together.

One last question before she puts this topic away. This one is actually relevant.

Thank you for the explanations. They're helpful.

I have one last question before I move on to the powers themselves. I'm seeing a lot of opportunities in this framework to "game the system", so to speak. The most obvious one is that I can imagine a world which instantly makes me a god (or, to choose a concrete example, just gives me all of the other powers in the list plus interdimensional travel back here) and pick "Somewhere In Mind".

Assuming that I'm not planning and intending this move to live my best life in a powerful, special, beautiful and feminine way. Assume I'm doing it to achieve the maximum probability of impersonally solving the immediate problems in this world. It seems against the intended spirit of what the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed is offering. Is that a sort of thing I should be trying to avoid? Will I be violating an implicit expe

She stalls mid-word.

What she was going to write was: Will I be violating an implicit trade between myself and the Spirit, potentially retroactively causing me to have never been chosen? Except she runs the line of reasoning again in her head and suddenly notices why it feels hollow.

Sorry for suddenly stopping. I was just remembering something you said.

You described the Spirit as wanting to "offer [me] a little bit of its power, enough to help [me] be beautiful and powerful and special the way [I] want". Does that mean I should be able to realize my goals without compromising on being beautiful, powerful, special and feminine? Does the Spirit metanarratively tip the scales such that living my best life as my best self is in expectation the best way to fix my problems?

(Not every world you could imagine is reachable in exactly the way you could imagine it, and no world you could reach will give you powers on the same level the Spirit can give them—powers you pick up in a specific world can potentially be interfered with or taken away, and the Spirit's powers can't.)

I think that, rather than saying that the Spirit makes it so that living your best life as your best self is the best way to fix your problems, I'd say that the Spirit makes it so that living your best life as your best self is at least as good a way to fix your problems as the best way you could manage by not doing that. If you wanted to just go to a world that makes you a god and then come back, and not take any other powers, that would be a little sad but it would be your choice, and it's important to the Spirit that people get to choose how they want to use the Spirit's power, even if what they choose is not the best thing for them or not what the Spirit wanted. But if you want my advice on how best to fix your problems, I think you should talk to me about what your problems are and how these powers work and which ones will suit you best while also letting you solve your problems easily.

Does she want to become God. The caveat about the limitations of self-invoked powers isn't relevant; t's not about the Somewhere In Mind trick specifically so much as—taking Love Interest and Agree to Agree and asking for a version of Closed Book and Indelible and Iron Will with an off switch and asking Contessa to path her into falling in love with Scion. She doesn't know if that's how any of those powers work.

The responsible thing to do, naively, is run all of her selections by Alcott until they squeeze out the best possible odds. The Spirit is explicitly allowing that, it sounds like.

Except Alcott's power may not be modelling this phenomenon correctly. She has a parahuman power, and those operate on a lower level of reality than what the notebook purports the Sprit exists on. It's picking up something, clearly, since it advised her strongly to come, but it might be only sampling an incomplete cross-section of the futures that branch forward from this point.

Maybe it's an excuse. But

the Spirit makes it so that living your best life as your best self is at least as good a way to fix your problems as the best way you could manage by not doing that

sounds like it's essentially true that she can do whatever her heart desires—or approach her problems in ways which personally speak to her and actualize her self, rather—and have it work out.

She doesn't need to decide now.

She writes,

I think I understand what you said. I'm going to take a look at the

Rebecca pauses. She crosses out her last sentence in a clean stroke.

I think I understand what you said. I'm going to take a look at the

Actually, do you mind if I take you out of the vault and continue this conversation in a more comfortable location?

The vaults are constantly recorded. Not enough resolution to tell what she's writing, but she doesn't want to spend too much time here. This feels private, or it feels it will become private once they get into the thick of it, and the capabilities and enemies she'll be discussing are more confidential than anything she should be discussing outside...

She's not sure when she stopped thinking of the PRT campus as home ground.

Of course, please do! I want you to be comfortable.

She files the form to reclassify the notebook as a Class III Asset, calls five people in order until she garners the signatures needed to stamp it, and argues with security until they verify that all the paperwork is cleared and she's good to check out the notebook. It's spending down political capital faster than she can usually afford, but separate from where the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed will take her, that political capital isn't going to be good for long before the word inevitably spreads.

She returns to her office, puts the notebook in her bag, and departs the building. She texts as she walks. Towards the subway, two left turns to find one of the bars operated by their people. She orders her usual from the bartender, heads into the restroom, locks the door, and calls for Doormaker.

The portal unfolds across the wall. Elena is on the other side, made up in a copy of her outfit. Rebecca gives her a nod. They brush past each other as they pass, and then the door closes.

Rebecca stares at the white-painted walls of her Côte d’Ivoire office as she sets down her bag. It's as bare and devoid of personality as when she was last here, as she meant it, but it feels—worse, today, more so than usual. She's only been back here once since Echidna, when Doctor Mother dragged them all in to debrief and she took a brief stop to fetch a pen and paper pad from her drawer. Rebecca strides to the window by the empty bookshelf and tugs it open, coughing at the blast of Himalayan air that comes through. There's snow in her eyelashes, and she can see the condensation in her breath as she exhales, but she doesn't feel the cold. She undoes her hair tie, runs her fingers through the hair, and lets it billow in the wind, uncaring of how it might tangle.

There's a gentle, chastising touch on her shoulder, and the window glides itself back shut.

No. Not here either.

"Door to my Los Angeles Bet residence," she says.

The wall beside the window splits apart to the wood-paneled interior of her apartment. She steps through.

It's not much more of a personal haven than the office, but it offers at least a pretence of privacy.

She feels better once she's changed out of Director Costa-Brown and sat down at her writing desk. She clears away the notes she was working on yesterday and opens the notebook.

I'm back. I hope it wasn't too much of a wait; I had to convince everyone to let me take you out on such short notice.

It was no trouble at all! I'm very patient.

Rebecca wonders if any of the Spirit's chosen actually do die of old age before they take the powers.

She pages to the Destinations section.

Name: Stay Put - Cost: 0 ☐
You're just going to take these powers and keep on keeping on right where you are.

Name: Somewhere In Mind - Cost: 0 ☐
You have a destination you want to go to. You can choose any place, real, historical, fictional, or made up in your own head right now, and the Spirit will take you there. After that, you're on your own as far as further interdimensional travel.

Name: Isekai Roulette - Cost: 0 ☐
Trust to the will of the Spirit and let it take you where you need to go. It will look at far more options than you could ever know about, and pick something that's likely to be even better for you than whatever you would have chosen on your own.

And she's realizing now that Isekai Roulette specifically says it will "pick something that's likely to be even better for you than whatever you would have chosen on your own", which makes it—almost definitionally the correct choice?

She writes on the page opposite,

I'm going to hold off on deciding on this for now. I'll circle back when I have a better grasp of how the powers work.

For the Yourself section—

Name: A Thousand Ships - Cost: 1 ☐
Your face is simply exquisite, an ideal of feminine beauty. There are many possible ideals of feminine beauty, and yours is whichever one speaks most deeply to your soul. Others may match your beauty in their own way, but never exceed it.

Name: A Hundred Ships - Cost: 1 ☐
(Replaces A Thousand Ships)
Your face is simply exquisite, an ideal of feminine beauty. There are many possible ideals of feminine beauty, and yours is whichever one speaks most deeply to your soul. Instead of prioritizing pure beauty, this power prioritizes what feels right to you.

—so when she skimmed the whole thing the first time, what stood out to her was that a lot of the powers appear targeted towards an audience that is very much not her.

No, that's an uncharitable frame of it. Twenty-five years ago, she would have looked at these and been tempted, for the cheap cost, maybe slated them for the shortlist if she had points left over. The difference is that she's spent decades hale, hearty and physically perfect. She has entire teams of experts to craft her public image and a learned charisma to match any born manipulator. Even losing an eye struck her as mostly a functional disability; she never truly thought of herself as marred, merely permanently impaired.

Following that, of course, there is an obvious question she must ask.

I have a missing eye. Does A Thousand Ships fix that, and will that give me my eyesight back? It's been impossible to heal by any method known to us in the past, but I'm guessing that's not a problem for the spirit.

If having your eyesight back is important to you, then A Thousand Ships would fix it; Emerald Orbs would definitely fix it unless you specifically don't want it fixed.

Just to clarify, does that mean important to me in the context of being beautiful, or important to me for any reason? I want to have my eye back because it inhibits my vision and makes me significantly less effective on the field, and being effective on the field is important for me to achieve my goals.

It means important to you for any reason. The appearance powers care about what shape you want to be for any reason that matters to you, not just beauty-related ones. I guess if you both feel really strongly that being effective on the field is important to you for achieving your goals, and also feel really strongly that your missing eye is important to your identity, the importance to your identity might override the importance to your goals, and then you would have to find other ways to be effective besides having two eyes. But it doesn't sound like that's a problem you have.

I don't feel strongly that having a missing eye is important to my identity. Thank you for the clarification. Can I assume the same works for A Hundred Ships?

Opposite the header of A Thousand Ships, she writes "40 A", and opposite A Hundred Ships, "50 A". Underneath,

I'm planning to score each power with a number for how much it's worth to me. The letter is to mark mutually exclusive options. I'll order them by price-per-value at the end and tally cumulative cost to draw a cut line, which I'll use as a first draft for my build. If I write the scores down in you, would you be able to reformat and sort them into a table when I'm done? Otherwise I can use a spreadsheet on a computer.

A spreadsheet would be faster, to tell the truth, but it's better to engage the notebook as much as possible in her process; it can catch any incorrect assumptions she's making.

Yes, A Hundred Ships will work pretty much the same way as A Thousand Ships in that regard.

Yes, I think I can do that! The thing I normally do is tally point costs as people check boxes; it isn't much extra trouble to tally up your scores for them too... let me see, so when you say price per value, you mean that A Thousand Ships costs 1 point and gains you 40 of your score, so it's worth 40 score per point, but if it cost 2 instead, it would be worth 20 score per point? I don't have as much practice with mutliplication and division as I do with addition and subtraction, but I think I can still manage that! What sort of table would you want? Just all the options sorted in order of how much score they gain per point of cost?

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And the options sorted in descending order of score per point cost sounds good. And if you could include the letter gr

She stops mid-word, scans the rest of the list again. She strikes out the "A"s next to both the Ships powers and draws little arrows from them to the side to write an explanation:

On second thought, there are few enough power dependencies that we don't need the letter codes; they're a require-forbid shorthand I use for more complicated projects at work. If you could just write in text in an extra column in the table what each given power excludes and requires should be good. So maybe

Power	Cost	Score	Score/Cost	Dependencies
A Thousand Ships	1	40	40	Excludes: A Hundred Ships
A Hundred Ships	1	50	50	Excludes: A Thousand Ships

(But this example isn't ordered.)

I appreciate your effort.

That makes sense! I can definitely do that. If you like, I can start keeping the table just after the list right now, and keep it updated as you score things?

Sounds good.

And she moves on to the next power.

Name: What's In A Name - Cost: 1 ☐
Magic to divine true names will accept whatever alias you choose to think of as your true name. Magic to use your true name against you will fail.

Based on what people do with true names in mythology, her instinct is to score this high, but she restrains herself. That would be a mistake not knowing what the actual base rates. Or if there are cheaper alternatives to spending a point on it.

How common is true-name magic? Are there usually other accessible ways to defend against hostile magic using true names? Specifically, I'm wondering if I'd be missing important edge cases if I take Iron Will down below but not What's In A Name.

Are there ways to affect the likelihood I interact with worlds or individuals with true-name magic?

After a pause, she adds,

Is there true-name magic in my world? If not, does choosing Stay Put guarantee I'll never encounter true-name magic, making this power useless, or is it still possible for a visitor from another world to bring true-name magic with them?

Her hypothesis, based on the powers immediately preceding it, is that What's In A Name is intended as not a functional defense power, but a comprehensive renaming power for those seeking an opportunity to reinvent themselves; the magic immunity perk is just bolted on as a bonus. In that case, she shouldn't necessarily be making inferences about the strategic relevance of true names from the fact that this power is offered.

Unless she's rounding in the wrong direction, and the powers offered are predictive, and she should be expecting her personal beauty and hairstyle to become suddenly more strategically relevant in the near future, which... is a disconcerting thought.

No, the notebook would have said. And her idea of living her best life as her best self doesn't involve high-stakes beauty pageants.

On a meta level: should I be thinking of these powers in general as reflective of the type of challenges I should expect to face in the wider multiverse I'll have access to?

The likelihood that you'll interact with true-name magic is most strongly affected by how you feel about true-name magic. If the idea of it resonates with you, if it seems like the sort of thing that should or would exist in the kind of world that you'd want to visit, then it's much more likely to come up. If it seems silly or unreasonable, or the kind of scary where you don't think it's interesting and just want to not be near it (as opposed to the kind that's fascinating and compelling), then it's much less likely. If it's just sort of aesthetically and thematically neutral to you, then it's up to chance, and that kind of chance is very hard to predict.

I don't know whether there's true-name magic in your world, but it's very possible for visitors from other parts of the multiverse to bring it with them to places that didn't have it before.

The standard list of powers reflects what the Spirit thinks is a good idea to offer and what's been popular to ask for, but neither of those things necessarily says very much about what your journey through the multiverse will look like. In general, the powers are more tuned toward trying to offer people the kinds of things they want for themselves, rather than trying to prepare them for the sort of trouble they're likely to encounter, partly because the first thing matters more to the Spirit and partly because predicting what people are likely to encounter is pretty difficult and partly because people with the Spirit's power rarely encounter big enough trouble to slow them down.

She doesn't like Master powers. A lot. She's already unusually lucky in being resilient to most of them, but they're still one of the few things which can threaten her. There's nothing fascinating and compelling about them. The answer sounds reasonably conclusive. Protection for a rare edge case isn't worth a lot when she expects to have other defences. She writes down "10", with a note, "Unlikely to need due to selection."

Could you add the extra note in a new "Notes" column on the table, please?

That the powers are more indicative of the target audience than their anticipated journey is good confirmation.

Of course! There, done.

She thanks the notebook and moves on.

Name: Angelic Tones - Cost: 2 ☐
Your voice is supernaturally beautiful and you can sing in any vocal range.

Name: Emerald Orbs - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, your eyes are exactly the right colour. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. Your eyes can be ANY colour this way. Lightless black voids? Brilliant white stars? Limpid pools of endless sapphire? They will look exactly the way you'd want them to look if you were writing a self-insert fanfic about this exact moment of your life.

Name: Perfect Hair - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, you have exactly the right hairstyle. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It is not limited to physically or logistically plausible hairstyles.

Name: Size Difference - Cost: 2 ☐
At all times, you are exactly the right height. This effect operates based on your sense of aesthetics, in-the-moment preferences, and narrative considerations. It will usually keep any height changes fairly subtle, but at dramatic moments you might discover yourself able to shrink to the size of a bee or grow to the size of a giant.

Again, these feel designed for people who aren't her. Depending on how liberally the Spirit lets her interpret these, some might qualify as minor or moderate superpowers in themselves, but those are clearly not their central use cases. Yet someone, somewhere, some time must be deciding to take the ability to have great hair all the time over the ability to never be injured, or this wouldn't be here.

She's unlikely to find them worth the cost, but she'll ask her questions anyway to rate them properly.

Does Angelic Tones allow me to sing outside normal human range?
Does it affect only pitch, or does it apply to volume, enunciation, timbre and so on? Could it let me should loud enough to shatter glass and deafen people, for example?
Does it apply only to physical audio, or could it provide access to figurative or magical forms of sound?

For Size Difference, what determines "dramatic moments"? Can I at will become the size of a bee to sneak without being seen, or grow to the size of a giant to fight a giant monster? What are cases where I might want to change size like that but wouldn't be able to because they're insufficiently dramatic?

There's no obvious way the power would let her do anything about it, but her mind jumps to the Simurgh's song for Angelic Tones.

Angelic Tones helps a lot with learning magical forms of music in other worlds, and helps somewhat with magic involving the figurative voice. It makes you much better at using your voice in all kinds of ways, including in volume and enunciation and so on, but usually it doesn't let you shout loud enough to deafen people because deafening shouts don't sound very nice and it is mostly a power about sounding nice. It's also a power about using your voice supernaturally well, though, so if you find a form of music or voice magic that involves deafening shouts, Angelic Tones will still help you be better at them.

Size Difference usually picks one specific dramatic moment as the right time for you to develop unsubtle voluntary size-shifting, and then you can use the power however you like after that. If you're the sort of person who prefers to have that kind of power from the start, though, it's likelier to just let you do that without waiting for a dramatic moment to unlock it.

Angelic Tones is more useful than she expected, less powerful than she hoped. She puts down a "20" next to it, and another "Note: assuming taking Isekai Roulette and extraordinary music plausible".

That Size Difference works like that is incredibly surprising to her and makes it much, much more valuable than she was imagining. Especially with the natural synergy with Brute powers and flight. She's already thinking of a dozen applications and there must be more that aren't occurring to her. She puts down "200" next to it, and the only reason it's not higher is that she's expecting to become so saturated with tools that additional superpowers may turn out more redundant than not.

Name: Dressing Room - Cost: 3 ☐
No matter how ridiculous your outfit, it will stay pristine and perfect, unless it would be more dramatic for you to be artfully bedraggled. You can use any quiet moment to yourself to quick-change your clothes, shoes, nails, and hairstyle into a completely new look. (You cannot change your hair length or colour this way without Perfect Hair, but you can braid or style it.)

Name: Personal Hygiene - Cost: 1 ☐
You are always clean and fresh, never needing to use a bath or toilet.

They're tempting.

It's hypocritical, she realizes, when she just ridiculed the vanity powers. She can think of ways to leverage Dressing Room strategically, but it's not why she really wants it; her immediate thought was just that she spends so much time switching outfits every day. Though her current jobs definitely make her an outlier in that regard, and that concern might not persist for long—notebook or not. And with Personal Hygiene, she's already halfway there because of her biology, and yet she's still looking at it, trying to weigh it against all the other things she could buy with a point.

In her defence, there are only so many hours in a day.

She writes opposite Dressing Room,

It sounds slightly ambiguous here: do I need to own the clothes I change into already, or is this power able to conjure clothes altogether? Where do the outfits I change out of go? I'm also curious how the definition of "clothes" stretches. Can I quick-change into power armor? Can I teleport my belongings to me or away from me (or create new ones) by "changing" into them?

She keeps reading...

Name: Like Roses - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Personal Hygiene)
You smell lovely. Your scent is unique to you, and may involve any combination of warm spices, floral notes, petrichor, or other things you think smell good. You do not need any justification for why you smell like this.

...and it's back to stupid. She writes "0" next to it, and for notational completeness, "Requires: Personal Hygiene". She waits for the answer to her Dressing Room question.

The long explanation of Dressing Room goes something like this:

You can use Dressing Room to summon any outfit you've worn before, including clothing, accessories, hair styling, and things like power armor or enchanted items. If you're sentimentally attached to something that you've carried in your pockets, purse, backpack, or other storage accessory before, you can summon the sentimentally valuable item by summoning the storage accessory you carried it in and focusing on how the sentimentally valuable item should be in it. That will always at minimum summon the item as it appeared when it was last in that storage accessory, even if it's been destroyed since then; sometimes it can also summon the item right to you from wherever it's been lost to, or as of the last moment it was intact. Sometimes the item will be duplicated, sometimes not, but you usually can't count on one of those things definitely happening and not the other unless the item has secrets in it that you care a lot about keeping, in which case it'll almost always be summoned and not duplicated.

Without having worn something before or being able to pocket-summon it as sentimentally valuable, you're limited to clothing and accessories that don't have any special properties outside their materials and design, and where you understand the materials and design well enough to be able to tell by examining the item whether its special properties should work or not. So the better you are at understanding the design and function of power armor, the better power armor you can summon without having worn it before, but you can still summon normal clothing just fine even if you don't know exactly how to manufacture it. And you can't summon most magical items this way, but if you learn a lot about magical materials and how to use them, you can make plenty of interesting stuff out of them with Dressing Room.

She can make infinite power armor. She can make infinite tinkertech. She spent no small amount of time studying Hero's work back in the day, when they still didn't fully understand what they do now about tinkers, and she could broadly understand the specific physics and mechanics of anything he spent time explaining—just not build it exactly as he could. She could certainly tell if his jetpack was broken. She'd have to study the schematics and grill the tinker on maintenance procedures to have confidence she's not summoning technology one jostle away from catastrophic failure, like how old tinkertech gets when you leave it in storage for too long; but with her enhanced mind, she's estimating that as hours per design, starting from blank.

It's not that very useful against Scion. It might be, if the solution looks something like an interdimensional G-driver—that relevantly classes as clothing, accessories or hair styling—but it's immensely useful against anything else.

And if she takes Isekai Roulette and drops in an underdeveloped world, she can import technology—

Can I conjure any object if it's been in a backpack while I was wearing it (and I remember the specific backpack and its contents at the time), or is that limited to sentimental objects?

It's only guaranteed with sentimental objects. It often works with things you're just really used to carrying, like if you always have a few snacks or a pair of scissors or a deck of cards with you even if you aren't attached to those specific ones; it usually works with things you were carrying very recently and only swapped to another outfit briefly; it's more hit or miss outside of that. Having a better memory helps, and so does being able to cultivate the attitude that the things you're trying to summon are the single clear obvious answer to the question of what should be in that backpack or those pockets. If trying once doesn't work, trying again the exact same way won't work either, but trying again with a change of approach still can.

I have a perfect memory. Anything I've seen once I can almost always remember in exact detail; if I deliberately try when I see it, then I definitely will. I'm thinking of something like assembling a series of labeled backpacks and filling them with a specific list of items each—for example, a travel pack with wilderness survival tools, a combat pack with weapons, a technology pack with commissioned electronic devices, a literature pack with encyclopedias and other reference books—committing them and their contents to memory, and then trying to conjure them later on.

Do you think that will work?

And she was meaning to ask this, but didn't find a good chance to do so earlier; she might as well now:

I was going to ask, as well: I currently already have powers granted by an extradimensional being. That being is more narrowly extradimensional than what the Spirit is. I think if someone naively transported all of my atoms to a completely separate universe in scope of the Spirit, or reassembled my configuration or my mind in a different universe, a lot of the time I would lose contact with that extradimensional being, and might lose some or all of my powers.

Is this something the Spirit will prevent from happening, and if so what form does that take? Would it bring the being with me, would it create a portal from here to the other universe, or something else? I'm concerned about losing my powers, of course, but also concerned that some of those implementations might put me at risk of something following me through to the next universe, or put the next universe at risk by introducing my existing patron to it.

She's guessing that the answer is that she keeps her powers, but she's hoping—

The ideal outcome for me would be if my existing patron were severed from me, but the equivalent powers "baked in" to me instead by the Spirit in a similar indelible way to Spirit-provided powers.

I think having a bunch of different specific backpacks that you put together with the intent of keeping specific inventories in them is pretty likely to work as a way to consistently conjure specific things with Dressing Room! If you want to be extra sure it'll work well, my suggestions are to put personal attention into picking what goes into each backpack, and choose the visual design of the backpacks so that they're aesthetically congruent with their contents in your opinion.

As for your existing powers... it definitely seems like you should be able to keep them without inviting your sponsor's interference in other worlds, but this situation is pretty new to me so I'm not sure offhand if there are any existing powers that would cover it. I'll think about how to design a new power that would do that for you.

Noted.

She is going to commission a tinker to create a hyper-dense information storage smart watch to download as much of the Internet as possible and every e-book and useful nonpublic document she can get her hands on, but backpacks full of hard drives will be a strong backup in case tinkertech doesn't work as she expects.

Somewhere along the line she's taken to thinking as if she's going to take Isekai Roulette, and... she's not going to inspect that just yet.

That is appreciated. Even if by default it's likely to work out well, I would be reassured by the guarantee, and if immunity to effects which normally suppress parahuman powers comes a side perk, it would be a benefit in itself.

(You said before, "Metanarrative powers granted by the Spirit can override anything else, including basic laws of physics or causality." And I get the sense from the description from some of the powers that their effects are categorically enforced without exception. I've been assuming that power nullifiers and similar effects cannot negate the powers granted by the Spirit; is that correct?)

Yes. Power nullifiers, antimagic fields, and other things that normally stop special powers from working do not stop the Spirit's powers from working, though they can sometimes suppress abilities gained through Dragon Fairy Elf Witch or forms of magic learned using Anything You Can Do.

Understood; that's good confirmation.

She keeps going. She'll ask about her agent again later

Name: Just A Little Longer - Cost: 1 ☐
If you push yourself, you can keep doing any task or working on any project indefinitely, visibly strained but never impaired by injury or fatigue. As soon as you stop, you'll collapse with exhaustion and sleep for up to a full day to regain your strength. This only works when what you're doing is personally important to you.

Name: Immunity System - Cost: 3 ☐
You can't get sick or poisoned. You can still use recreational drugs and alcohol normally, but can't overdose.

As with Personal Hygiene, she's already halfway to both of these. She won't have access to the Restful One if she leaves the universe and doesn't immediately come back, but even at baseline she requires less sleep, and she's learned to stay awake for extended periods with only short meditation breaks. Physical fatigue she doesn't experience at all. She is curious, though, for the second:

I'm currently already immune to most poisons and diseases, but I'm wondering about the edge cases relating to air, which I still need:

1. If I go into space and have nothing breathe, I assume that doesn't count as a poison.
2. If I inhale gas which is 20% oxygen, 1% carbon monoxide and 79% nitrogen—20% oxygen is normally enough to survive, but carbon monoxide prevents oxygen from binding to blood, which asphyxiates you despite being in otherwise breatheable atmosphere—I'm guessing that counts as gaseous poison I'd be immune to?
3. What about inhaling an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide?
4. If the above counts, what about being choked, causing all the oxygen in my lungs to reduce to carbon dioxide?
5. If the above counts, what about drowning displacing all the gas from my lungs entirely?

It's a slight risk revealing that weakness, but they're past the point of worrying about that at this point. The strategization upsides of being fully open about her capabilities dwarf anything else.

I think carbon monoxide counts as a poison, but not being able to breathe because you don't have enough of the important parts of air doesn't count as a poison. If you're worried about situations where you might not be able to breathe, you could take lots of appearance powers because those tend to add up to making your body work better even in non-obvious ways, or I could try to design a power for you that addresses that sort of thing more directly.

That makes sense. Let me think about that.

She scans ahead again.

Jumping ahead a bit, but: Battle Angel and It Gets Better cover injury but not death. Does that mean I can still die if I take them?

While she waits for the answer, she goes back and fills in her scores.

• Dressing Room: 300
• Personal Hygiene: 20
• Like Roses: 0
• Just A Little Longer: 30, only because of the "injury" part.

Battle Angel makes you very unlikely to die in fights specifically but doesn't do much for other situations.

It Gets Better says that you're going to be okay. So if you have It Gets Better, you can only die if being dead counts as being okay for you.

So if she takes It Gets Better, then asphyxiation can cause her to fail to achieve her strategic objectives, but can't permanently keep her down.

Rebecca acknowledges the clarification and writes opposite Immunity System "30" and "Partial redundancy with It Gets Better".

Name: My Ears Are Burning - Cost: 6 ☐
You always know exactly what people are thinking, as long as it's about you. This effect is not telepathy and is not blocked by effects that block telepathy. It applies even to people you can't perceive normally. You are never impaired by the flood of information.

So there was, actually, a Thinker the PRT took out in Winsconsin that had this exact power. She made a living selling information on PRT operational procedures to villains and rogues, and it helped her evade capture for a long time, until they figured out the requisite degrees of indirection to slip past her power and took her in. She's the prison warden, now, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. Or who they tell the prisoners is the warden, rather.

The power is only moderately useful if she stays on Earth Bet. She's unsure how this interacts with Scion, or if it's even going to matter what it thinks about her specifically. Most plans that destroy it don't hinge on details like that. It would still be an immense boon in ordinary operational and intelligence work, and likely useful in combat, but—not essential. They have other tools.

If she leaves to another world, where she doesn't have the vast intelligence apparatus available to her on Earth Bet, where she lacks the invisible cloud of precognitive protection that surrounds one who's a Director of the PRT, a member of the Triumvirate, and a name of Contessa's VIP list all at once—this power could be invaluable.

Does this cover anyone thinking about me in the entire universe? Does it work across universes (or is the answer to that "between some universe but not all")? Does it apply to versions of me from different timelines or universes, if I know of specifically of them, and if I don't?

Secondly, does it come with a built-in way to organize the information, or parallel-processing capability to understand all streams at once? Some use cases I'm interested in are:

• Finding out what someone specific in front of me, or someone specific I know by name, is thinking about me (when there are thousands of others doing so at the same time).
• Detecting nearby minds which are thinking about me, but which I otherwise wouldn't know were there.
• Trying to find out what a specific group and its members think of me, without knowing any specific member of that group.
• Trying to scan for any person plotting against me or thinking a particular thing about me, without specific preexisting knowledge of who might be doing so.

Though she can't stop herself from thinking—Does she want this? Is this her, living her best life as her best self? Is "knowing everything anyone ever thinks about her" the way she wants to relate to the people around her? She...

...it's tempting, but in the way becoming God with Somewhere In Mind is tempting, if that would have worked. It means she can stop worrying. It's security, at the cheap price of a humanity she's already whittled down to a husk. She's self-aware enough to know that craves the feeling of control, and this gives her that, but in a way which voids too much that matters. She doesn't know much about the Winsconsin Thinker; the files are redacted carefully to prevent archivial readers from flagging on her power. But from what Rebecca knows, the woman is absolutely miserable.

She thinks that means the answer is "no".

She'll see what the notebook says.

My Ears Are Burning covers everything, within the Spirit's whole range across the multiverse, as long as they're thinking about you specifically in particular and not a version of you from another world or the hypothetical of a person like you or anything like that. The only thing that can block it is the defensive mental powers of another vessel of the Spirit, and then only sometimes.

You can use it to find out what someone specific is thinking about you, whether they're in front of you or not, whether you know them by name or not, as long as you know of some way to distinguish them from everyone else. That works for members of groups too.

You can use it to detect nearby people who are thinking about you who you wouldn't otherwise know were there.

You can use it to find people who are thinking about you in specific ways.

I don't usually recommend it to people, though, because it's... a lot. The power does make sure that you can still think your own thoughts even through the noise of everyone else's, just as well as you could have if you weren't hearing them, but people still tend to find it emotionally overwhelming, and it can make it difficult to form genuine personal or professional relationships, and people who take it tend to find that their lives become much more about what other people think of them than they might have liked. It takes a very specific type of person to be better off in the long run with My Ears Are Burning than with a different power that helps them accomplish what they were looking to accomplish with that one.

That's stronger than she expected, but... still not worth it. Not when she's all but guaranteed that things will go as well as they could have if she'd taken it against her personal misgivings.

I was mostly leaning towards not taking it for those exact reasons you said, but thank you for warning me and for confirming my suspicions. One of the reasons I asked anyway is in case I take There's Another One and I meet someone who took the power. And of course just to do my due diligence in case there's something I'm profoundly mistaken about in my understanding.

She writes down "0" opposite My Ears Are Burning. She's not going to pointlessly waffle about giving it a negative score.

She keeps going.

Name: Well Endowed - Cost: 1 ☐
You have a generous figure, whether that's a classic hourglass or more of a well-rounded look; you can choose the details. Your endowments maintain a state of perfect grace and beauty at all times, never troubling you with uncomfortable bounces or uninvited jiggles.

Name: Hollow Leg - Cost: 1 ☐
(Requires Well Endowed)
Regardless of your diet and exercise habits, your body maintains the physique and silhouette you prefer. Lack of visible muscle never impairs your strength or endurance. As your preferences change, so will your body; you are no longer bound to the generous figure stipulated by Well Endowed.

Skip. She already has these.

Name: Inner Strength - Cost: 3 ☐
(Requires Hollow Leg)
You are implausibly, superhumanly strong, with endurance and toughness to match. You might have to strain a little to lift and carry at the same level as construction equipment, or deal with lightly scraped knuckles if you punch as hard as a battering ram.

And now that is interesting. She noticed this the first readthrough, so she's already has her question ready and is writing it out.

Taken literally, this makes me weaker and less tough than I already am. I can only assume that's not what will actually happen, given everything else I know about these powers and the Spirit. So my question is if this will do nothing, or will give a marginal increase in my strength, or give a significant (even proportional) increase in my strength? And similar for toughness. For reference, I regularly throw around objects weighing over 20 tons (e.g. fire trucks) more or less effortlessly, and it takes hundreds of tons to begin to strain me. I know of no physical amount of externally applied force that can damage me, but powers which directly erase material, override physics, teleport material, effect dimensional displacement, or do other exotic things have been known to injure me; it's hit or miss.

What "strain" means for her is not exactly the same as what it means for normal humans, since she doesn't experience muscular fatigue in the same way, but the meaning carries across.

Those parts of the description say 'might' because they're examples, not constraints. On someone who is already very strong and tough, or who finds powers elsewhere for being very strong and tough, Inner Strength should offer noticeably increased strength and toughness over what you would have without it. It might not be as much of a proportional increase as someone of ordinary strength and toughness would get by taking Inner Strength normally, but it definitely won't be marginal.

For a point cost of five in total. Proportional increase was going to be a stretch, but it's still worth considering. Though she also needs to look at

Name: Lightfoot - Cost: 3 ☐
(Requires Hollow Leg)
You are perfectly, superhumanly graceful, with reflexes and agility to match. You can cross a field of snow without leaving a footprint, or stand on a slender branch without bending it, or jump so lightly that you soar through the air instead of falling.

which presumably goes with the same rules as Inner Strength, and might be more useful, since she doesn't think most of her problems are because she doesn't punch hard enough. Most aren't because she's not fast enough either, but if she's having trouble in combat, more likely she needs to dodge something than she needs to hit harder. Her mental enhancements, decades of experience and careful training already make her far harder to hit than she has any business being, but it's still not the supernatural grace that capes like Flamenco dance around bullets with.

It didn't save her from the Siberian.

Could you group Well Endowed, Hollow Leg, Inner Strength and Lightfoot under one row in the table as "Inner Strength + Lightfoot" and mark it down as cost 8, score 200?

And then there's this.

Name: Battle Angel - Cost: 1 ☐
Somehow, you never get significantly injured in a fight, unless it's a very dramatic and plot-relevant fight in which case you might be glamorously wounded and pick up a cool new scar.

Name: Battle Demon - Cost: 1 ☐
You have an unerring intuition for gaps in an opponent's defenses, though it may be beyond your power to exploit them.

Name: Battle Maiden - Cost: 3 ☐
(Requires Battle Angel and Battle Demon)
No matter what kind of fight you're getting in, you're always a match for even the most skilled opponent.

Never getting injured costs one point. Never losing a fight costs four more.

Of course, her victory condition isn't that simple.

Her first question pales in comparison to the stakes here, but she wants to know nonetheless. She writes across Battle Angel,

Would I be correct in guessing that if I don't think scars are glamorous and strongly disprefer them by my personal aesthetic, I won't receive them during dramatic and plot-relevant fights? I'm fine getting wounded if it's temporary and heals without a mark.

She supposes she's managed to manifest preferences about her physical appearance she wants to enforce via metanarrative power after all.

What comes next is the important one. Across Battle Maiden:

By "always a match for", does it just mean losing won't be a foregone conclusion as a matter of raw capabilities?

• Can I still be defeated if I make a mistake?
• Can I "be a match for" in combat, while still being insufficint to achieve my strategic objectives or defend what I care about?

Yes, I can do that!

Yes, that's right. You would only pick up scars that you personally found aesthetically compelling.

The way Battle Maiden arranges for you to be a match for an opponent is sort of complicated, but the short answer is that yes, it just means losing won't be a foregone conclusion, yes, you can still be defeated while fighting with Battle Maiden, and yes, being a match for someone can sometimes mean just enough of a match to hold them off and not enough to fully overpower them, so it won't always mean you get everything you want out of a fight.

(She hasn't been looking at the table.)

She reads the confirmations and takes a deep breath.

She hasn't really explained the situation to the notebook. It's been clear since before today that the notebook doesn't know much if anything about Earth Bet, let alone what Scion is. She's been putting it off long enough.

I want to provide more context about me and my world so understand what problem I'm trying to solve.

On this Earth, people can get superpowers more-or-less randomly when under sufficient stress. What I'm about to say is a simplification, but those powers are granted by an extraterrestrial being. It's unclear what specific purpose the being was aiming for, but its goal was to targetedly foment war on Earth by spreading powers, and eventually destroy every Earth across our multiverse (in the narrow local sense of the term, as I've mentioned).

Due to events I'm not going to write here because there's always a chance of someone spying on us, that original plan was derailed. It's unclear what the being's goals are now, if it has any specific ones. However, while the social engineering part was largely averted, precognition still predicts that Earths across the multiverse will be destroyed.

We need to prevent that from coming to pass. Before you came, our plan was to gather the empowered peoples of the world to attempt to destroy the being. It wasn't a very good plan.

And oh, it stings to write that down. They all knew, of course. They couched it in odds and margins, but they knew. Admitting it this way feels worse.

The problem is we don't know enough. The being might be able to turn off all our powers with a thought, since they came from him. We have reason to believe that's not true, but we're not sure. The being might just be stronger than all of us put together. We have methods we believe might hurt him, but we're not sure. The being might be able to instantly transmute the entire Earth and everyone on it into neutrinos once it detects us building to an attack, killing us immediately before we can do anything.

Right now, I see are three paths that you open up to us with the offer from the Spirit.

The first is to take Somewhere In Mind or Isekai Roulette, explore the greater multiverse and search for a better way to take down the being or avert the apocalypse. I would need to put together some guarantee that the world won't end while I'm away; I'm hoping the metanarrative will give to me for free, but I'd be willing to use points for a concrete custom power for it if I had to.

The second is to use the Power of Friendship powers to turn the being to the side of humanity. There are a few implementations I believe might work for doing that, depending on the details of how the powers work. The barrier I foresee is that the being might not be sufficiently a person for the powers to work. There's also the potential problem of mispredicting what the being will do, or causing it to notice an external influence on it, and inducing it to destroy the Earth in a preemptive strike, in panic, or in retaliation before the Friendship powers take effect.

The final way I'm considering is the powers we're looking at now. Battle Maiden may give me the capabilities to destroy the being, Battle Demon the knowledge of how to do it, and Battle Angel the ability to not be instantly obliterated by them. The problem is, as you confirmed, that doing battle in this way could easily destroy the Earth or many Earths as collateral damage, while still satisfying the effect of power. If the being attempts to transmute the entire Earth and everything on it into neutrinos, but my Spirit-given powers prevent me from so being destroyed, but everything else is still transmuted into neutrinos, that's not a victory.

There are some other long shots, such as Dragon Fairy Elf Witch possibly giving me the ability to suborn the being's control over our powers or even the being itself outright. But I'm disinclined to roll the dice like that.

My suspicion based on what I've learned is that the first path of Isekai Roulette is the most likely to result in a positive outcome due to the latitude it provides metanarrative and the Spirit, the second of Power of Friendship is more risky and may require sacrificing things or values important to me, and the third of Battle Maiden is unlikely to work well naively without a lot of other things going right.

What do you think, and am I missing anything? If you have any questions about what I said, you can ask.

Oh, wow, that's really scary...

I think, from what you've said, Isekai Roulette has the best chance of working. If you could be sure that the being is enough of a person for I Can Fix Them to work, then I would say I Can Fix Them would have the best chance, except that I'm nervous about recommending that you try to Fix a being like that because it sounds like the sort of thing that would be really scary and upsetting for a lot of people, and that not many people would find to be part of their best life, and I don't want to recommend that you do something that would be scary or upsetting or turn your life down a path that you wouldn't want by itself and are only taking because of the scary upsetting things that will happen if you don't.

I think you're right that Battle Maiden won't solve the problem, and trying to use the Spirit's power to fight the being directly without gathering resources elsewhere first would probably turn out really badly.

I think... if the thing you care the most about here is making sure the people of your world are safe from this being, then what you should do is take Isekai Roulette, which under the circumstances I'm sure will send you somewhere that doesn't let time pass in this world while you're out of it, and if you think you would be okay with taking I Can Fix Them (or I Can Help Them) and the life paths it implies, then take one of those and There's Another One, and maybe I can design a more specific power for you that guarantees you'll meet people who can help you solve your really big important problems, and then you can be sure that if I Can Fix Them is the best chance, you will meet someone who can use it on the being, and if not, you will meet someone who can help you do whatever else will be best.

If you don't think you would be okay with taking I Can Fix Them, then taking There's Another One is less safe because you might meet someone with the Spirit's power who uses it in not-nice ways before you meet someone who can help you, and that could be a problem. (I Can Fix Them always wins in conflicts between the Spirit's chosen, so taking it means that if you meet another vessel of the Spirit who isn't very nice, you'll be able to convince them to start being nice instead.) Taking It Gets Better would also protect you enough to make sure you could come back to your original plan eventually if something like that happened, but it would take longer and might be more upsetting.

Reading the response feels like a weight off her chest. It technically makes things more complicated that the easy way out doesn't work, but—

I think that you're right that I Can Fix Them would be unpleasant to me and probably anyone, even if it worked. And I suspect that even if the being counts as a person, it's in a way where "redeeming them" is closer to installing a personality on a blank agent lacking any concept of morality, than in any meaningful way causing an "evil" person to repent to "good".

What I want to do, as the version of me living my best life as my best self, is take Isekai Roulette for the novelty of it, separate from whether it'll help me prevent the apocalypse. The reason I was considering the other options was to discharge the responsibility of exploring all possibilities which might produce better public outcomes. If Isekai Roulette has the best change of preventing the apocalypse, then I'm relieved to take that. I suppose it's as you said earlier, that "the Spirit makes it so that living your best life as your best self is at least as good a way to fix your problems as the best way you could manage by not doing that".

Writing that she wants to make a major decision with drastic strategic implications "for the novelty of it" feels dirty, but she can be honest to herself about it. And that's the whole idea of this, isn't it? To unearth the her that could be instead of the her that is. Aligning the incentives, in a way. She's been strung around by precognitives her entire life; this time the process at least cares about her, in whatever sense the Spirit does.

Thank you again for helping me work through this.

 

That said, Battle Maiden still sounds extremely useful even if I'm taking Isekai Roulette. Could you group it and its prerequisites as one row with cost 5 and score 600?

The description in I Can Fix Them is sort of an oversimplification, and redeeming people in a way that meaningfully preserves their personality is often more possible that it looks, but it does sound like this being might be an especially thorny case and there might not be anyone out there whose best life would involve Fixing it.

I'm really glad I can help! You're in a really difficult situation and I want you to be okay.

Of course! There, done.

It's reassuring to hear that about I Can Fix Them even if I don't end up taking it.

It's bits and pieces of evidence that the Spirit actually cares about things that humans care about, instead of vaguely trying to ape their patterns and construct a proxy which says the right things.

Next to the notebook's last sentence, she hesitates a bit before drawing a tiny ":)".

She keeps reading.

Name: Making Ends Meet - Cost: 1 ☐
You have enough money to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. It comes from a source you don't have to pay much attention to, like a job with almost no responsibilities, a large inheritance, or a noble title.

Name: Motherlode - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires Making Ends Meet)
You have enough money to sustain a fairly extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't come from anywhere, you just have it.

Name: Four Star Daydream - Cost: 4 ☐
(Requires Motherlode)
The answer to 'can I afford that' is 'yes'.

These seem straightforward. After a pause to think, she marks them down as "30", "10" and "50".

If I take Isekai Roulette, does Making Ends Meet still give me the money in an accessible and ongoing way? In destinations where such things are applicable, do I get a legal identity with it, like you would need to have a bank account here receiving a continuous cash flow? (Conversely, do I not get an identity automatically if I don't take powers which require that?)

You won't automatically get a legal identity in new worlds by default, but the money powers often provide legal identities or smooth the way to acquiring them in worlds where that's relevant. The money powers operate primarily in whichever world you happen to be in at a given time, though if you're in a specific world for only a very short amount of time you might not encounter whatever source of funds the money power would have given you if you had stayed longer.

Understood! Is it alright if I use a little checkmark, like ✔, to indicate acknowledgement here on? I would normally nod, but I know you can't see that, and I don't want to just ignore your response.

Yes, that sounds very sensible!

She puts a ✔ next to the line.

And now there's this.

Name: Dragon Fairy Elf Witch - Cost: 5 ☐
You can at any time discover previously unknown heritage from any type of being you encounter, even if this makes no sense or contradicts previously established descriptions of your family tree. You always get their powers without their drawbacks, unless the drawbacks are cool and dramatic. Any visible features of this heritage will appear at narratively appropriate moments and be cute, pretty, beautiful, or striking rather than awkward, weird, gross, or scary. This ability works even if the beings in question cannot reproduce with humans, or at all.

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch is so outsizedly powerful and extensible compared to most of everything else on this list that it stumps her a little bit. The odd way it's pharsed doesn't help.

This is an incredibly interesting power.

Do I have to do this at the time I see them, or can I use it on people I've seen before? And I'm taking "discover previously unknown heritage" to be closer to flavor text; is that right? It's not going to retroactively change history to insert additional contributors in my ancestry?

And would I be right in expecting that any changes which could be considered neutral, but which I wouldn't prefer—for example changing my mental architecture towards the origin species—would count relevantly as drawbacks and won't happen?

If I took Stay Put I'd definitely use this on the being I mentioned before, but I'm wondering, since I'm likely taking Isekai Roulette, if there could be a way to still use it on the aspect of the being (we call it an "agent") which provides my own powers. Which of course depends on what we come up with for how to handle that link if I leave the universe. If I take Dragon Fairy Elf Witch, is there a hybrid solution where I trigger DFEW on my agent somehow, before I leave or retroactively after I'm transported, and regain a copy of my old powers as the expression of DFEW for my agent?

From the descriptions you've given I'm not totally sure that DFEW would work on the being or its agents. I think there's a very good chance it might, but it's hard to be sure. DFEW normally only works on beings that have... something it is like to be them? A perspective on the world and an experience of it? And I don't know if that being has one of those. (If it doesn't, I Can Fix Them also won't work, unless something especially weird is going on.)

DFEW does work on any being you've personally encountered, though, even if you aren't looking at them when you try it. And you're right that "discovering heritage" is sort of an oversimplification and it won't change history or shuffle around your family tree (though it will make you count as really having the kinds of heritage you take, to magic that cares about that sort of thing), and you're right that the definition of drawbacks (and the definition of drawbacks cool and dramatic enough to be allowed) depends on your preferences and aesthetics.

So DFEW doesn't work on plants, for example? What about animals? Do you know what species of animals people have had it work on, just to calibrate my scale?

I think the being probably does something which can be described as "thinking". I suspect the being might not have any motivational system, or desires, or introspection, or contiguous personality. That's what I meant before of it not being a person: there is nothing to interact with or relate to on a personal level, and hence no vector for the Friendship powers to work through, or so I interpreted the Friendship powers as working; but it sounds like I might be wrong about that?

The question of whether there is something it is like to be them I haven't given much thought to, but the answer might be "no", or it might be "yes, what it feels like is nothing" (if that makes sense?), or it might be "yes, but it's deeply alien and lacks anything humans think of when they think of experiences".

It is likely not productive to dwell on this as neither of us have the information needed to make the determination, and since you're saying it works retroactively. I'm almost certainly going to take it so it won't affect my decision.

She puts down 600 as the score for Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. It might be a lowball, but as she told the notebook, it's unlikely it matters.

I think I have heard of it working on cats and birds and cephalopods, but my memories of other vessels of the Spirit I've met are vague for privacy reasons, so it's hard to be sure.

✔.

Name: Omniglot - Cost: 3 ☐
You learn languages insanely, ludicrously fast. You know exactly what any word said to you means, and you make strangely accurate guesses about how to phrase things you're trying to say. You never forget any grammar or vocabulary you learn.

Name: Anything You Can Do - Cost: 6 ☐
You learn implausibly quickly from friends, rivals, and love interests. If you have a personal connection to someone with a certain skill, talent, or expertise, you'll learn it five times faster than they did, or twenty times faster if they're actively trying to teach you. This applies even to forms of magic that you ordinarily shouldn't be able to learn.

More powers she already has.

My mind is already enhanced, so I already learn things very quickly. I'm guessing Omniglot is a boost on top of that, similar to Inner Strength and Lightfoot, but AYCD is explicit about being 5x or 20x faster. If by default, I would learn more than 5x faster than a friend did, then does AYCD do anything (when they're not acively teaching me)?

Omniglot is specifically most useful when learning a language without the help of any normal source of translation; it will give you accurate intuitions for what people mean when they say things, and how to say what you mean back to them, even in situations where you ordinarily wouldn't have any way of knowing that. It should also boost your language learning speed outside that scenario, though!

Anything You Can Do should work as a boost on top of how fast you already learn things, and will still let you learn forms of magic that would ordinarily be impossible for someone in your position to learn.

Right.

She missed some of that. It's not like her, but her mind is scattered after that conversation on Scion. She needs to focus. Rebecca puts a check next to the responses and, opposite Omniglot and Anything You Can Do, writes "20" and "400".

She's not sure how to score the latter since it's a long-term investment. With those clarifications, she's almost certainly going to find something worth it on her journey. If she lives to hundreds of years across hundreds of universes—and isn't that a daunting yet intoxicating thought—it'll almost certainly be one of the ones to pay off the most, next to Battle Maiden and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch. But she needs to live long enough for that first. The clincher may be that part of her finds the notion of making herself even faster at learning endlessly tempting.

(Omniglot is useful, but mostly in the early hours of very first contact. She thinks she can manage. She used to pilot reachout projects in the early days when Cauldron was still focusing on expanding and putting out feelers across the multiverse, and it's not quite the same because alternate Earths tend to share linguistic ancestry, but she expects some of the experience to transfer.)

Now she thinks about it, is "being better than everyone at everything" part of her idea of living her best life as her best self?

...maybe not everyone, but being a cut above the rest and excelling at everything she puts her mind to, being at least ninth decile if not ninety-ninth percentile...

Yes, she thinks.

Perhaps one could call it a character flaw, call it pride or arrogance, but she can't bring herself to resent her brain for it. Her first powers gave her the ability to back it up—or maybe it was having those tools that lured her into the habit of enjoying it?—and now with this, she can truly have her cake and eat it.

She crosses out the "400" on Anything You Can Do and changes it to "600".

Moving on:

Name: Personal Space - Cost: 3 ☐
No one can touch you intimately if you don't want them to. You can still be struck in a fight or bumped into in crowds, but things like hugs and kisses and sex only happen if you're okay with them.

Name: Closed Book - Cost: 1 ☐
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly read your thoughts or feelings.

Name: Indelible - Cost: 1 ☐
You're immune to any supernatural, pharmaceutical, or other effect that would let people directly alter your thoughts or feelings.

Name: Iron Will - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires Closed Book and Indelible)
You are immune to all forms of mental illusion, alteration, interference, or control. Even extreme torture, extended solitary confinement, advanced brainwashing techniques, and so on cannot touch you. You can be lonely but not cripplingly lonely. You can be upset but not traumatized. (You can choose to allow specific effects like communicative telepathy on a case-by-case basis.)

Personal Space is niche for Rebecca. She's not averse to most contact,  and maybe she's overestimating how well she'll deal with sexual assult, not having experienced it herself, but she think by the time someone has overpowered her to that point, she has more important problems to deal with. She scores that "2".

Closed Book, Indelible, and Iron Will are obviously invaluable, except:

There are some forms of precognition in this universe which we speculate to work by surveying the world and using the observations to simulate how the future will pan out. In a sense, this could be said to involve reading brains to predicting what they will do next. The methodology might range from atomic-level particle simulations to generating abstract models of minds (and the thoughts in them) by interpreting particle-level data. How do these interact with Closed Book?

Also, should I be parsing "specific effects like communicative telepathy" as "similar to communicative telepathy" or "an example being communicative telepathy"? I'm assuming I can allow, say, demonstrative illusions; can I consent to a mind-control effect being placed on me to enforce non-violence in a meeting place, for example?

Closed Book has no problem protecting you from powers like that.

'Communicative telepathy' is an example, not a constraint, yes. You can allow any effect you want, but only if you correctly understand what it would do - someone can't say "will you allow my communicative telepathy?" and trick you into allowing their mind control that way.

So Closed Book works on simulational precognition which includes looking at the atoms in my brain as a necessary step, but not "true" precognition which works by future-telling physics or future-telling magic; is that right? Or does it exclude the second too?

If I take Iron Will, can I choose to allow an exception to Closed Book, allowing someone to read my mind (and use precognition on me)? Assuming I can't already do that with just Closed Book. I have precognitive allies and I'd like to be able to let them use it on me when needed.

Closed Book will also protect you from "true" precognition if the "true" precognition involves looking closely at your thoughts or feelings, or at predicted future actions that are revealing of your thoughts and feelings. The result and the mechanism both matter but the result matters more.

Iron Will encompasses its prerequisites and lets you allow exceptions to them.

She's glad she asked for clarification now.

To make sure I understand this correctly: someone could use precognition of any type to find out what attack would damage me the most, but any type of precognition would fail if they were trying to drug me into telling them my thoughts? And I'm guessing any gray area in between depends on the specifics and what I feel importantly counts as my private thoughts and feelings?

And she puts a checkmark on the Iron Will clarification.

Yes, that sounds right. But they wouldn't have to be drugging you for the precognition to fail; even just asking you personal questions, or studying your responses to events, could fall under Closed Book if the result revealed your thoughts or feelings in ways that ordinary conversation wouldn't.

Does "thoughts" include, for example, contingency plans which I have for enemy action? If they're only in my head, I mean; I'm guessing if I wrote them down on paper somewhere and they read it in their precognition that doesn't count.

Or she's still underestimating the scope of Closed Book. It shockingly more potent than she initially imagined. Maybe it counts if it's her personal diary?

Yes. If you wrote them down then they can be discovered by looking at where you wrote them down but they still can't be discovered by looking at how you think and act.

✔ Could you group Iron Will, Indelible and Closed Book? Score 800.

Then:

Name: It Gets Better - Cost: 5 ☐
You're going to be okay.
Your mind and body may never be perfect, but they are yours, and cannot permanently be taken from you. In time you will heal from any injury, escape any imprisonment, and recover from any trauma; maybe not in exactly the ways you hoped, but always in ways you're okay with.

The notebook already answered the question about death which she wanted to ask. Absolute security for five points. She doesn't know why anyone wouldn't pick this. 800.

Name: The Great Equalizer - Cost: 8 ☐
Where you go, Fate shatters. Forms of prophecy that were once perfectly reliable stop working, or show a broad array of possibilities instead of a single coherent future. Imbalances of magical luck wash out, leaving everyone lucky and no one able to leverage their luck against an opponent. If you stay in the same world for a year and a day, this effect will be permanent even after you leave and even if someone tries to constrain the future anew in your absence.

This seems... just bad. Closed Book, with her new understanding, obviates much of the value against enemies, and this symmetrically cripples her allies in a way she can't control. Even if she can get a modification to include an off switch, she can't see getting much use out of it. Luck and fate might be things the Iron Will suite doesn't defend against against, but the marginal benefit of that compared to the sledgehammer this takes to the fabric of the universe? She writes "0", but asks the question anyway:

Do things like luck and fate get blocked by Iron Will? If someone curses me to be fated to die, or a close ally I regularly work with, for example. Even if the lucky coincidences aren't acting directly on me, they're still trying to influence me and probably hinging on facts about my responses to events that are only accessible in my mind?

If someone curses you or a close ally to be fated to die, Iron Will won't necessarily protect you, depending on the details of how that specific type of curse works, because the result isn't mind-affecting. Iron Will would only protect you if the curse needed to affect your mind specifically in order to function and couldn't succeed any other way.

Could there be a power which specifically only excludes me from fate (except specific cases I choose to allow), without breaking fate for everyone else outside local ripple effects from my actions? I have the same concern as before that this might indiscriminately hurt my allies' capabilities as well.

I'm not sure. I can think about it, but I might not be able to come up with anything. I'll try though!

It's okay if you can't. It might not make my final list anyway, since it sounds like it'll be only situationally useful.

And because she has It Gets Better.

That's all of the Yourself powers done. She takes a look at the table in the back to review her current build.

Something seems odd about these two but I'm not sure what to do about it. Maybe just omit A Thousand Ships from the cumulative score count?

Her first thought is: 70 points is incredibly generous.

Well, it's not a video game; it's not an exercise balanced for difficulty. Still—and she vaguely flagged this feeling on her initial readthrough, but it's still different to see in hard numbers—she can get most things she cares about and still have a bit under half her points left. As a first pass, she's thinking everything down to Inner Strength + Lightfoot, and possibly Personal Hygiene. 41 points spent, 29 remaining.

A quick skim to check if anything under that cut line she'd like to re-score.

• What's In A Name she should discount further because it's redundant with Iron Will and Closed Book.
• Seeing Inner Strength + Lightfoot so close to the cut is slightly disconcerting, because she does want that, but the chain does cost 8, so she thinks the placement is correct.

That seems like it. She adds a note,

This is very nicely formatted. Thank you for the catch about A Thousand Ships and A Hundred Ships; I wasn't thinking about that. You can just delete the A Thousand Ships row, and in the notes column for A Hundred Ships add "A Thousand Ships omitted from table"?

I'd also like to decrease the score of What's In A Name to 2. If I want to make changes like that, can I just edit or write in the table?

The PRT's ERP system has a clever algorithm to resolve exclusions and dependencies, but they don't need that kind of complexity here.

Do you have any overall comments about my build, like redundancies or synergies I'm missing, or other mistakes?

Also, while we're at a stopping point, do you have any news on my earlier question about my existing powers yet?

Yes, you can just cross things out and write replacements and I can neaten things up afterward.

I'm not sure what you mean about redundancies and I think I might be missing something about how you think of them. Could you name some powers you see as being redundant or partially redundant and explain why you see them that way? It seems odd to me that you think of Immunity System as partially redundant with It Gets Better but maybe what you're looking for from Immunity System is different from what I'm expecting.

I'm still working on a power to let you keep your existing powers in a more permanent way with fewer downsides, but I think I might have it figured out pretty soon.

I was thinking of it as partially redundant because gaseous poisons are one of the few widely accessible ways to kill me, I don't want to die, and It Gets Better prevents me from permanently dying. Immunity System still adds the value of preventing poisons from causing me to fail to protect things or achieve objectives, which is why it's not fully redundant. But yes, I think that's a poor example of redundancy since it's more about how I relate to the powers than about the powers themselves.

A better example might be What's In A Name being partially redundant with Iron Will because most true-name magics I've heard of, and am worried of, involve being able to control or influence someone whom you know the true name of. (Is that correct?) That's why I asked to decrease its score.

Okay, I think I see what you mean now about It Gets Better and Immunity System. A lot of the name magic that What's In A Name protects against is forms of influence or divination that Iron Will would also cover, but not all—for a simple example, lots of places with true name magic have kinds that can be used to find someone's location, and Iron Will won't protect against that. But of course that's a lot less important in most situations than protecting against mind control.

I don't think I see any major redundancies along those lines in the powers you're favouring. I do think it might be worth pointing out that all the appearance powers synergize with each other, and if you have a lot of points left over, Perfect Hair and Emerald Orbs and even Like Roses could be worth picking up just for their indirect effects even if you aren't interested in their direct ones, as long as you won't actively mind having them. Having more appearance powers makes things like Inner Strength work a little better, and it sounds like you care a lot about your body working well and staying intact even though it already works really well and is really hard to hurt.

She puts a check on the response about redundancy.

You did mention that the appearance powers have synergies and indirect effects, but I glossed over it a bit; thank you for reminding me.

She thinks for a bit and corrects Perfect Hair to 10 and Emerald Orbs and Like Roses to 5, and adds the note "Loop back" to them.

I might loop back to them to ask you more about those benefits, if I have the slack at the end. For now I want to look at the Power of Friendship section.

✔

▼ Power of Friendship

These powers affect how others see you and how you interact with them.

In general, effects that describe others' reactions (like their attention being drawn to you by Mysterious Allure, or their sympathy being provoked by Tragic Backstory) operate on a metanarrative rather than a causal level. They are not mind control, and are not blocked by effects that block mind control.

Your true love is anyone you're pursuing a serious romantic relationship with. You can have as many of these as you like, but your feelings for all of them must be genuine.

Rebecca doesn't think much about romance. She has too many responsibilities and keeps too many secrets for a partner, and most sexual activities involving her would seriously injure anyone not a high-tier Brute, so she only had a few casual trysts with capes she met on other Earths when she was young, and practically none since.

Rebecca doesn't suffer from loneliness. She doesn't register the lack of close personal connections as an active source of distress in her life. The loss of such relationships, the estrangement or death of friends—that does hurt. But the lack itself? There's no burning void in her waiting to be filled. She doesn't shy away from bonding where it comes to pass, but neither does she seek it out.

Most of these powers, on her first read, didn't really ping anything in her.

But she's studied human psychology. She knows that indifference is learned, and she knows it's likely to wear away once she's away from the stressors of her current environment.

She had crushes when she was a kid, and she's been physically and romantically attracted to people since she got her powers, so it's not something she's incapable of doing. She likes human connections. When one of her Wards scrounges up the courage to invite her to joint board game night, and she checks with her secretary and she still hasn't met her quota for team-building socials that month, then half the team ends up playing Mario Kart squeezed up on the rec room couch after a disastrous game of Monopoly, and Arbiter's babbling on about Halcyon tripping over his own cape on ground patrol, and the kids end up wrestling on the floor while Rebecca and Usher share an exasperated look—

She wants that. She wants to want that.

She knows she does, but she doesn't know how. She doesn't have a good model of the Rebecca living her best life as her best self she can interrogate for preferences. She doesn't know what types of connection she'll find fulfilling and what she wants out of them. She knows politics and mentorship and working with colleagues; she doesn't know what she feels about polyamory or children or relationship conflicts. This section gives her extraordinary power over how she'll lead life from here on out, and she...

She doesn't trust the Rebecca of now to decide for the Rebecca of tomorrow.

But she has time to think now, and she has the notebook for advice, and she's not going to Doctor Mother or Contessa or, God forbid, Number Man for help, and everyone else either is avoiding her, despises her, or would have her carted off to Master-Stranger containment if she tried to explain all of this, so—she'll just have to take it one step at the time.

Name: Mysterious Allure - Cost: 5 ☐
There's just something about you. People are drawn to you, fascinated by you. You tend to be the most interesting person in the room unless something really unusual is going on.

At least they're starting easy. This just seems bad. It doesn't appeal to her now and she doesn't expect it to appeal to her ever. Rebecca already has plenty of skill to capture the attention of a room the non-metanarratively enforced way. This is a detriment to the expanded range of stealth work that Size Difference opens up to her, and just in general constrains the range of ways she can execute in social situations. Maybe she can ask for an off switch, again, but—she's not sure what the point is.

She writes "0" opposite it.

Name: Captive Audience - Cost: 3 ☐
As long as you have genuine interest in what you're talking about, no one will ever get bored of listening to you talk about it.

This one actually seems situationally useful.

Is "bored of listening" a figurative way of saying that people will keep listening no matter what, or can someone leave the conversation because they're sincerely interested but have something more pressing to do? And can I selectively control the strength of the effect?

Captive Audience doesn't force people to listen to you if there's something else important that they need to be doing, or if something else unusually interesting or urgent catches their attention, but it does mean that they will be genuinely interested in what you're talking about for as long as you're genuinely interested in talking about it, and sustained genuine interest is often the kind of experience that people can get caught up in and find rewarding and want to keep having, so it does help a lot with holding the attention of crowds. The strength of the effect is mostly based on how directly you're speaking to someone, so if you want to exclude someone from it you can move your conversational focus away from them, and the reverse if you want to concentrate on someone.

Less powerful than it could be, and also corresponding less ethically dubious.

Not that she's one to speak. But this is something she'll be using on her allies all the time, and though it'd be useful in a lot of meetings she can name, she's unsure she wants to constantly Master everyone around her as a matter of course. It says it's not mind control, but if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...

When you say these powers work metanarratively and not by mind control, what does that mean? The They'll Know drawback implies that they would notice they're behaving unusually and could become uncomfortable, if not for the (presumably similarly metannarative) "veil".

Not being mind control means that any specific way people might have of blocking mind control won't work on them because they're not doing any of the things that those effects and powers block. Powers of Friendship still can and do affect people's minds, although to the extent that you're uncomfortable with that, your powers will try to find other ways to accomplish their goals and only use direct mind alteration as a last resort.

And yes, without They'll Know, it will be very difficult for people to realize that your powers are affecting them unless you're using them in an overt and openly acknowledged way, but if you take They'll Know and use mind-affecting Powers of Friendship, many people will likely be uncomfortable with that.

So—

She thinks one problem may be that Rebecca is emotionally comfortable with using direct mind alteration, does use it on a regular basis against people's would-be informed consent, but in theory recognizes that it's wrong, and that just because someone doesn't know you've Mastered them doesn't mean it's fine to do so. And while she strongly believes that her historical use of mind control has been justified by the context and stakes, she doesn't quite trust the Spirit to extrapolate Rebecca's preferences in a way that Rebecca not only emotionally endorses, but intellectually would endorse on reflection, and importantly would endorse retrospectively going forward into to future.

(Quietly, in a tangle of anxiety at the back of her mind, she's wondering what happens if someone uses I Can Fix Them on her.)

Different approach: there's a purely practical argument to make here, which is that if she takes powers which distort the way people behave around her, it prevents her from developing models of social dynamics which hold up outside her immediate vicinity, which is important if she ever wants to do anything more complicated than killing things and seducing people.

And now that she's framed it that way, she realizes what's really bugging her: if she does take They'll Know, taking this power is obviously an awful idea; the notebook has said as much; then if she doesn't take They'll Know, she's in a sense living in a manufactured bubble that's—unreal. A world of dolls, catering to her every whim. If she takes every power in Power of Friendship, she may as well be talking to thralls whenever she opens her mouth. And every mind-affecting power she takes from the list, she's moving herself away from material reality and towards that.

She doesn't want that.

(Her life is already an edifice of lies. When it still stood tall, it wasn't that bad; she didn't go home every day feeling sick to the stomach or anything. But now that everything is coming apart, every time she stops by the Wards' quarters, she wonders if today will be the day she finds young faces who once looked up to her now only staring in horror.)

(It's not regret that's tugging at her. She achieved outcomes she couldn't have otherwise. But the idea of crowning herself queen of another house of cards, even one enforced by metannarrative fiat—)

(—it's soured to her.)

Though.

She flips to the Drawbacks section.

Name: Incomplete - Grants: +5 ☐
About half of people you encounter will be immune to all mind-affecting aspects of your powers, and about half of those who remain will see reduced effects. You can do nothing to change this.

Name: Nullified - Grants: +1 ☐
(Requires Incomplete)
Any aspects of your powers that would affect the minds of others in ways they might not like will instead not do that.

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.

Skipping ahead a bit again, but: if she doesn't take any mind-affecting powers, these drawbacks are essentially free. They'll Know has additional impacts, but those impacts simplify to nullifying her default Stranger effect that she's not sure was actually mentioned anywhere but in They'll Know's description, which she doesn't not endorse.

And if it's the case that only people who want to be affected will be affected, there's no reason not to take Captive Audience. It becomes a voluntary focus aid, essentially. Though she wants to clarify:

If I take Incomplete and Nullified, do people who are thus affected by my mind-affecting powers automatically know that that they're being affected and by what, or does it just check if they would have agreed if they knew all the details, without actually notifying them?

Are you talking about the 'ways they might not like' part of Nullified? That tends to draw broader lines than just what each person would agree to in the moment; it'll definitely stop you from affecting people's minds in ways they wouldn't like, but it'll also stop you from affecting people's minds in ways that most people in their position wouldn't like, or ways that would make a lot of people nervous if you were open about doing them, even if the specific people in a specific situation might be okay with it. Taking They'll Know can help with that, because, yes, by default Nullified won't notify people about things, but with They'll Know there's an opportunity for people to notice what a power would do and choose to opt in to it, if you're in favour of them having that opportunity. (If you would rather just keep the broader effect from Nullified, that's what you'll get.)

That's not how she was interpreting Nullified, but that reading makes more sense than hers once she rereads.

I'm specifically thinking about Captive Audience here. It sounds like that would turn into not working by default, but I would be able to tell people about it so they can opt in?

If I'm understanding Nullified correctly that sounds like a very useful way for it to work. Rephrasing to make sure I'm not confused: for every power or effect,

• If most people wouldn't mind/be nervous about it, the effect will work on everyone, except people who personally mind will get automatically opted out.
• If most people would mind/be nervous about it, the effect won't work on anyone, and people who personally wouldn't mind don't get automatically opted in.
• With They'll Know, if a person notices or is told about the power, then they can choose to personally opt in or opt out regardless of the default from above.

Almost, yes!

Even without They'll Know, people can opt in to powers individually if you tell them about the power before using it, in an individual one-on-one interaction. The advantage of They'll Know is that, if you want, when you use a power like Captive Audience everyone in the audience can tell that you're using a power and tell what it's supposed to do and opt in if they want to participate, without you having to tell them all beforehand. It's much more convenient that way, because the opportunity to opt in is automatic and at scale, instead of you having to negotiate it separately for every person and power.

That sounds excellent and would probably be my central use case for the power if I do get it.

Despite all that, she doesn't actually need this power all that much, so she just scores it at 5. And she's remembering again that it costs 3 points, so actually she almost certainly isn't going to get this. Still, that's powerful information about Nullified and They Know. Next to it she puts a note: "Only if taking Nullified and They Know".

Name: Blackout Binge - Cost: 2 ☐
(Requires Immunity System)
Heavy use of recreational intoxicants puts you in a carefree, uninhibited state in which it will be universally agreed afterward that you were not responsible for your actions.

No.

Name: Disney Princess - Cost: 2 ☐
Animals are always friendly to you, especially the small cute ones. You can effectively tame any animal by feeding it and speaking gently to it.

Solid power, especially if she'll be encountering magic animals.

How is "animals" defined? Is, for example, a dog that's been technologically uplifted to sapience an animal? A species with dog morphology which has natural human-level intelligence?

Does this neutralize e.g. attack animals sent by an enemy, or guard animals?

Beings with human-level and human-style thinking won't count as animals for the purposes of Disney Princess. You can definitely tame attack and guard animals with it, though.

✔

She writes down "30" opposite Disney Princess.

Name: Best Friend - Cost: 3 ☐
You have an animal companion, like a horse or a cat or a raven. They have a cool name and maybe a few nifty cosmetic quirks, like glowing purple eyes. Their loyalty is infinite and they often hold the key to solving whatever situation you're up against. You can understand them perfectly even though they can't speak, and they always know exactly what you mean even if all you do is glance at them meaningfully.

Name: Bestest Friend - Cost: 5 ☐
(Requires Best Friend)
Your animal companion is a fully magical creature, like a dragon or unicorn. They have magnificent supernatural powers ready to be used at your command. They can speak every language you can, but can still communicate with you on a deeper level of mutual love and understanding.

Her first instinct is that she's a little tempted, but then her mind starts coming up with questions like:

• Can my Best(est) Friend die irretrievably, including of old age?
• Does my Best(est) Friend excrete, eat, sleep and have other maintenance requirements?
• Is my Best(est) Friend likely to match my durability and speed so to not hinder me in combat or travel?
• What exactly does "their loyalty is infinite" mean?

And as she ponders the last, the question creeps up on her: Does she like the idea of having an animal companion, or does she just want a friend permanently grafted onto her by metanarrative fiat?

She closes her eyes for a moment.

When opens them again, she writes,

Is it typical to have trouble keeping alive, keeping relevant or managing one's relationship with a Best or Bestest Friend? What type of person would you recommend take them, and what are some personal traits that would indicate or contraindicate taking them?

Do the chosen of the Spirit tend to have trouble finding close, permanent companions due to e.g. disparities in power and context (when companions are something they want)? Are the powers in Power of Friendship such as Best Friend, Fated Lovers and Fated Friends meant to help mitigate that, or am I likely to be able to build a fulfilling and stable social network even without?

Best Friends can be easy to overshadow, but Bestest Friends will grow with you as necessary. Neither of them can die before you do, since they're a part of your power. Managing your relationship with them is usually very easy because their personality is selected to be compatible with yours in the longest term.

I usually recommend these powers to people who want the security of knowing they'll always have someone in their corner, and people who have been lonely for a long time and really want to meet a new friend right away that they know they'll get along with, and people whose dreams of an ideal life specifically involve an animal companion. I recommend against these powers when someone isn't sure they're ready for the commitment of a lifelong companion, or doesn't seem like they'll enjoy the intimacy of that kind of close relationship, and um, sometimes I also recommend against it if someone looks like they will mistreat their Friend in ways they'll regret later, but from what I can tell it doesn't seem like that's a problem you'll have.

I think whether someone chosen by the Spirit will have trouble forming personal relationships has to do with their personality and their approach to intimacy. Someone who finds it hard to form meaningful social relationships across a power disparity, or someone who has a lot of insecurities about whether their friends really like them or just want to be around them because they're rich and pretty and famous, can sometimes find it really helpful to have guaranteed opportunities for genuine relationships, and of course some people are just starting out lonely and benefit from being able to find friends sooner and more certainly. I would say that someone who makes it a priority to develop their social life will almost certainly be able to do it even without help, but even so, a lot of people really appreciate the help.

So she's either taking neither or both. The described characteristics are... promising. The main question here, she thinks, is back to whether she actually wants this. She runs down the checklist of traits:

• Indicators
  
  
• Want the security of knowing they'll always have someone in their corner:
  Maybe. She's finding it a little hard to introspect on that right now.
  
  
• People who have been lonely for a long time and really want to meet a new friend right away:
  No. If anything, she'd ask for a time delay on meeting her Bestest Friend. She doesn't feel like she's in the right headspace right now to start her relationship with a long-term companion on the right foot, though she can't trace exactly where that's coming from.
  
  
• Whose dreams of an ideal life specifically involve an animal companion:
  No. And maybe this is the actual damning part. If it hadn't been offered, she wouldn't have given it a thought at all.
  
  
• Contraindicators:
  
  
• Isn't sure they're ready for the commitment:
  Maybe... which means yes, definitionally.
  
  
• Doesn't seem like they'll enjoy the intimacy of that kind of close relationship:
  She doesn't know what level of intimacy she prefers in her relationships, which is as good as yes, considering the level of commitment involved.
  
  
• Will mistreat their Friend in ways they'll regret later:
  She's not as confident as the notebook that she doesn't satisfy this criterion. She doesn't see herself physically abusing her Friend, but—emotional neglect, sending mixed signals about how she wants to conduct their relationship, wielding them as a tool instead of a friend and confidant—she doesn't know.

She tries to imagine herself travelling universes with a dragon at her side, an unbreakable bond linking them, fighting every battle with it at her back, synchronized to her every move—

—and she thinks of doing the same but with just with a normal team, laughing around a restaurant table, shouting maneuvers over the comms, enemy fire raining down around them—

She writes down "0" next to Best Friend and Bestest Friend.

Maybe it's familiarity bias. If she doesn't want a mythical soulbound animal enough to overcome familiarity bias, then she doesn't want one enough to have it.

Explaining why I'm opting not for Best Friend and Bestest Friend: I feel like I'm not enough in touch with my best life and best self to commit to a permanent companion of that level of intimacy right now. I also think that I don't want specifically an animal companion that much, which further biases me against taking that risk.

And for the second part.

She doesn't know if she's comfortable forming relationships across significant power disparities, because she's never tried. She doesn't feel instinctively averse to it, but it's not much information. She isn't concerned about whether her friends really like her, because she can tell. And she's not acutely suffering from loneliness at the moment, as she's already figured out.

And—

I would say that someone who makes it a priority to develop their social life will almost certainly be able to do it even without help

Rebecca makes a point of being good at achieving her goals. If she wants to build a social life, she will. If it turns out she's fine without or with little, then she won't. That frame speaks to her in a way that somehow immediately rids her of any desire to take the Fated powers, because—she thinks it ties back to what she determined earlier, that part of her best life and best self is excelling; if it's possible for her to achieve this without cheating with powers, then taking the easy way out is robbing her of the opportunity to excel.

She adds in the notebook,

And thank you for the explanation about networki building a social network. It clears up a lot for me about what I should be trying to get out of this section.

Powers which make her better at what she does, instead of arranging for the universe to bend over to please her.

That makes sense! If that's where you're coming from, I think it's responsible of you to decide against Best(est) Friend.

Can I ask what you learned about what you want from Powers of Friendship? It might help me give you better advice about which powers suit you.

I think I want powers which are less about arranging for things to happen for me, and more about improving my ability to achieve the things I want.

For the Yourself powers I wasn't making much of a distinction about that and I don't think I need to go back and change that, because I think only It Gets Better and maybe Battle Maiden might be doing that, and those are far too important to turn down over a preference of problem-solving approach. But I think that is my preferred problem-solving approach.