I flip through the book, only I find that no matter how far I go, I can never reach the end. The book looks like some insane illusion made out of mirrors, with infinity contained between two pieces of faux leather.

I’m holding infinity in my hand, but what in the 2-bit god's name am I supposed to do with infinite paper?

"Make a paper mache house, oh wait, I got no glue! What am I supposed to do? Just slobber over the paper to make a mush that falls apart with the slightest poke?" I say anger roiling within my words.

But despite the angry words foaming from my mouth, a smile does come across my face anyway, for a simple reason.

"BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING WIZARD BABY!" I yell while rocketing my arms out like I’m a human windup toy.

I careen into my surroundings from the motion and collide with and launch a piece of orange clothing into the astral, disrupting the careful equilibrium I have created.

But I do not care because my eyes sparkle with the opportunities of MAGIC! I’m so giddy—magic is the thing that I’ve dreamt of touching through the torrents of stories I’ve consumed, and now I hold some in my hands. Although frankly, after having the existence of magic slapped in my face, I can see that some of the things I’ve done are definitely magical. Not just interacting with the strange environment but actually changing the fabric of reality myself.

But as I ponder the possibilities of magic, I realize that I should probably get back those errant pants and return to the subject at hand. Or well, in my hand, the infinite notebook. I now possess

I swim past my barrier, my free-floating swims not affecting anything else, like swimming through a placid void. I grab the pants and carefully recreate the delicate balance that my makeshift base of clothes and slowly floating objects live in, which is only possible due to the contradictory nature of this bizarre place.

And as I do so, I think of something I missed. Studies are considered worthless without the ability to replicate results, and if I can replicate my results here, then my possibilities of escaping this terrible place will greatly expand.

Because although infinite paper isn’t that useful, if this can be replicated with other, more useful objects, I can turn this place from a salt circle placed in hell to an actual goddamn base.

As I slowly pull myself into more productive thoughts, I feel my excitement boil over and drift into my meditation corner before coming to a stop.

I close my eyes and breathe in, and I imagine breathing in a gigantic cloud of blue gas and breathing out the gas in the shape of a waterfall. The waterfall moves to the top of my head with each deep breath, splitting the new river until it turns into a delta.

My delta, the one where my family lived for generations I can almost see the house made of old flaky plaster and well-cared-for wooden floors filled to the brim with family, as it’s supposed to be.

Cousins running around with plastic toys in hand used again far past their time, reunions abound between brother and sister brought together for a rare moment of a simple conversation.

The smell of food is drifting through the air, courtesy of Grandmama. I sit at the rickety wooden table and see my beautiful and vibrant family only for a bit in my imagination before holding them all close.

"I’m getting back to you, no matter what," I promise with a cool certainty far removed from my usual manner.

With that, I get up with renewed purpose; I must untangle the mysteries of magic before my family only becomes an idea of home instead of the living organism that I am glad to be a part of, even though I am far away from them all.

Alright, the 1st order of business is figuring out exactly what type of infinity this book is because it’s going to be important in the future, even if I don’t make a house out of origami.

I drift back into the work slice and hold the book in my hand. I try to feel its weight before miserably failing due to the lack of gravity of this place. But that very same lack of gravity tells me something. My book isn’t a physical infinity, strange as that might seem considering I’m holding it.

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Because if it was, it would probably exert enough gravity to immediately turn into a black hole and kill me.

Lucky for me, this book doesn’t have a literally infinite amount of pages stuck between the tiny space of these two book corners. My hypothesis is that the strange mirror-like infinity that I saw is a mathematical infinity or one brought about by the division and splitting of a real number. There is technically an infinity between one and zero, with infinite numbers between from looking at smaller and smaller fractions, but a set distance between one and zero.

"Wait, can I even take them out?" I ask myself while tapping my chin.

It seems I have thought a bit too much about the theoretical, let’s get to the practical: can I even use infinite things? I test it in the simplest way possible: I open the notebook and tear a bunch of blank papers out and throw them into the astral to drift.

I float amidst a storm of paper, flying in all directions, and not stopping due to the lack of air resistance, creating a wave of paper that slowly diminishes in density until it dies. 1 little poof of mass and motion before it becomes just scraps in the nonexistent wind.

Well, except for one place in my meditation corner, the paper drifts to a stop, freezing in its strange zone of peace.

I remove it from my thoughts and focus on my new task, examining the infinity in front of me. Now in order to proceed, I must first test this hypothesis, so I grab the book and flip through my notes. There are no gaps between any of the pages; they seem to be somehow connected together in the sea of pages.

Hmm, nice to know that my notebook still works. It would be extremely annoying if I had to flip through dozens of generated black pages every time. I grab the back of the book and draw on the last page a 1.

Then I open the book up from the back and flip it around, going up and down the pages, and then arrive back at the last pages only to find it blank.

I quickly flip the book back open, and begin the arduous task of finding my marked page, flipping through the dizzying array of paper. I finally find it a couple hundred pages from the end; the book has generated pages between the last and the last pages!

I stay my calm but I start to feel giddy as I continue with the experiment. I then repeat the experiment by writing down a 2 on the new last pages, and then a 3 after that. Curiously, while there are pages between, the order is still the same: the 1 is the first and the 2 is the second. I wonder if that is why it still works like a notebook.

But why aren’t their sheets in between my notes then?

Well, to find out, I return to the last page and draw a smile, then on the second-to-last page I draw a smaller smile, continuously doing so until if you were to flip it, it would look like a crude animation of someone smiling. Then I close and return to the notebook to find its new position.

A smile blooms on my face because the result is just as I predicted. The little animation stayed in place because it was intertwined with the end. It just feels right for things that are together to not be able to be separated and to be connected. And while science is built on reason, sometimes great discoveries can come of luck.

Anyway, it looks like my hypothesis is right. It’s a mathematical infinity, one where there isn’t an actual amount of infinite pages in my notebook. But rather one that can generate a theoretically infinite number of pages by infinitely dividing the spaces between pages and adding blank pages there. I smile triumphantly at my experiment going exactly as expected before my face gets clouded with the trouble of the origin.

Simply put, how the hell am I a wizard? I refuse to believe that what I did had no price; that's just not how the rules work. It makes absolutely no sense that by just existing in the astral, magic happened. But since magic doesn’t seem to make me physically tired, what does it use?

I assume it has something to do with the astral, considering I definitely wasn’t a magical girl back home. What do I know of the astral plane’s substance? I know that it holds all of humanity's thoughts, emotions, and dreams. Wait dreams I remember something from one of my storage dives; another way to say it is that the astral plane holds all human expectations.

Expectations, that might be it, because, well, how does portal travel work? The commonly given answer is that we essentially use the astral plane as a shortcut, where there are no laws restricting FTL travel. So you can travel incredibly fast through the astral and pop out at your destination almost instantly.

But that can’t possibly be true; I'm in the astral, and I certainly haven't seen them. If what they say is true, I would be constantly hit by FTL human meteorites rocketing across the Astral, or other FTL objects.

It must be some type of magic, and my hypothesis of expectations allows for this. Because if you expect to arrive somewhere and then walk into the Astral, a place filled with magic, apparently you WILL arrive at your destination because that’s what you expect.

And my notebook falls under this; I can explain how the hell I got an infinite notebook. Because I didn’t expect to run out of pages in this plane of magic, I never did. Thus creating an infinite notebook!

"But wait—even before this, I did some things that can probably be called magic." I frown while looking at my meditation corner, holding a freezeframe of confetti within its confines.

"How did I expect my way into that?" I wonder while gripping my chin.

I never had any expectations that my meditation room would turn into a time capsule; in fact, the development of this was quite the surprise. I try to find a way for me to justify expecting that to happen before concluding that expectation causes magic, is the only theory I have that makes sense.

I’ll think of it like string theory; in science, sometimes we have absolutely no idea how something works. In that case, we will make a theory that most likely isn’t true but that still allows us to understand our surroundings more and make experiments around it despite being bullshit.

But if magic can occur if I expect it to happen, what new magic can I do? I look over my base, a delicate construction built amongst this strange place, and think about the fact that before, unless I touched something, I didn’t affect it because this place acts like outer space.

But the entire principle of my "swimming" in this place assumes that while I might not be breathing in oxygen, I am still in a fluid that I can move with. That means that if I were to wave my hands around, I could expect to create a current.

Taking all this information into account, I arrive at the edge of my base, and with closed-shut eyes, I clap my hands, creating a shockwave of some sort of fluid.

And open my eyes to see the now ruffled, vibrant orange shirt that makes up the barrier of my work sway off-kilter.

HAH! The expectations theory works! I was able to do something I was unable to do before by expecting it to happen. Plus, the delicious thing about this theory is that if it’s true, the more I expect things to happen, the more they will happen! I feel like I've finally learned something. I have at least one workable theory of the place, and while it might not be perfect, I will perfect it and make other better theories.

I yawn, suddenly feeling extremely tired after running around and thinking so much. After the exciting day I’ve had, I deserve some sleep, so I go to my makeshift bed and drift off, expecting grand things for tomorrow.

I wake up to the always beautiful sight of the Astral, the menacing yet enchanting landscape of empty black, dotted with tiny stars, and lit up by blooms of color that reveal jagged emotion.

I wake up and do some exercise in order to not go insane, and at the same time, I write on the 172nd page of my now infinite notebook my task for the day: replicate infinity.