The notebook

It is not a panel drawn on the screen. It is an object held in the hand, on the same render layer as the lamp and lit by the same lights, and the lamp moves towards it to light the page: it is the only thing that says where the light on the paper comes from, and reading costs you seeing less far for those seconds. TAB opens and closes it, and the pages turn with the wheel, which is the last thing anyone would think to try on a book.

Three pages. The canto says where you are going, the names say whom you are carrying with you, the requests are what somebody asked of you on top of that; the book of names sits in the middle, because it is the currency of this game and you should land on it turning either way. The requests page does not exist until somebody has asked you something: a page is discovered when it has something to say, and a blank page is a promise made before it can be kept.

While the notebook is out the weapons withdraw, because there are two hands and one is holding the book. The bag does not live in here and never will: on screen the notebook takes up an eighth of the view, and a grid cell would come out five pixels wide in it. What stays here is a few lines of text, read standing up, without stopping the world.