Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

On Friday, this story aired on NPR's Morning Edition: Does reading Harry Potter have an effect on your behavior? (link to audio and written transcript).

...I may have also let out a vocal "Whoo-Hoo! Score one for the storytellers!" because it's one thing to know for yourself that something good is also true, but it's a whole 'nother reason to celebrate when that truth is publicly acknowledged.

So of course, I had to spread the Happy.

Okay, so I've decided to go with the haunted house version of my story. Now, which of these three levels of "living" should my toys have? These definitions are borrowed from TVtropes.org's "Sliding Scale of Living Toys")

Level 0:

Immobile: Toys cannot move independently, but can observe, think, and communicate with each other, via a sort of ESP

Level 1:

Schroedinger's Toy: Toys can move and do everything a person can do, but only when no human person is looking (presumably because it's the human who decides they can't move, and that rule is only in effect when the human is present)

Level 2:

Toy Masquerade: Toys can move any time they choose, but they just choose to keep it a secret (all the Pixar Toy Story movies use this level)

I'm waffling between Level 0 (which I'll add a "twist" to), and Level 2 ...or Level 1.

If I go with Level 0, my toys will have a sort of "Astral body," like the New-Agers wrote about in the 1970s and '80s. When they're at rest, their "astral bodies" will be snug inside their polyester fluff and stitching bodies, and what they see, hear, and feel will be bounded by that body's limitations. When they're "out and about," a ghost-like version of themselves can leave their bodies and wander through the world, like ghosts, including walking through walls, etc. With a tremendous effort, they may be able to influence the physical world (knocking pencils off desks, etc), and maybe be able to move their own bodies from the inside, in an emergency... But since, most of the time, they're interacting with other toys and entities on the same level as themselves, they don't even notice that they're ghostly bodies are all that different from their polyester bodies.

On the other hand, Levels 1 & 2 would give me a lot more flexibility, especially in the very beginning of the story, when I need to get my toy protagonist into the path of my human protagonist, so she can take him home... His polyester fluff self needs to get within her reach, from the reject bin, or wherever he's put when he's first discovered.