She grins and leans a little closer — she and the other Pirates honestly find plurality cool as fuck, so the grin's even honest — and whispers conspiratorially, "I'm actually one of five girls crammed into this overstuffed brain." She taps the side of her head for emphasis. "We switch out who's in the mental driver's seat."

"Really? How does that work? I haven't really gotten into neurology much... if that would even help, everyone says the Nervegear is incredible for just interfacing with our senses so scientists probably doesn't understand how to analyze stuff like personality and memory."

"It's wild!" she replies with a laugh. "We have different interests and preferences, we use our voice differently, we stand and fidget differently. Some plural systems have a hard time switching, some easier. We're lucky enough to be on the easier side of that. And we collaborate really well with each other. Plus, whenever something fucks one of us up, the others are there to console us. It's pretty cool to never be alone, too."

"That is weird, and cool. That's a lot of things to have change. Having friends inside your head sound like it would be nice too."

"It really fuckin' is," she smirks. "Our brain can't run as much parallelism as we'd like, but we do what we can to stretch in that direction, just to have more room for everyone to occupy front at once. The banter's fun."

Her smirk sharpens a bit. "And well, if we happen to be more than friends in here, no one'll begrudge us a little private fun, yeah?"

"That makes sense, true multitasking is really rare. Even computers do a lot of rapid switching to simulate it a lot of the time." She pauses. "And you do you girls. As much as you want to anyway." She watches to see if her attempt at a joke worked.

That gets another laugh out of her. "Exactly."

She shakes her head, smiling. "Thanks for being cool about this, Emily."

Yay, her joke worked! "Sure, it's cool and I guess I'll need to remember more names but I'm good at remembering things... well not always rules but most other things."

"Names are more useful than rules, anyway. Plus, we've got a trick to make it easier." She holds out her arm, showing off the bracelet, which is currently green. "Talked our way into getting this thing, which tries to change to our theme colors to match who's in front. We can switch it manually, and it gets smarter over time. Green's mine."

She makes a small hand sign. "Green Hailey, got it."

Oh, this is a new player so they might not have noticed that part. "You can use the interface to take pictures and dictate notes too. You can trigger stuff like that with gestures so you don't have to go all the way into the interface. That doesn't really work for people who fidget with their hands unconsciously a lot though."

"Oh fuckin' sweet. If we can make the gestures specific enough, I bet we can keep 'em out of our usual fidgets. That's so fuckin' useful." She grins wide. "Thanks, Emily. Fuckin' veritable font of intel, you are."

"You're welcome, this game is the best and I want everyone to enjoy it."

"We're certainly loving the customization and immersion already. It's great."

"Yay!"

"Also, the fact that I can get range time without sinking hundreds of dollars into a gun out in the mundane is really convenient. Speaking of which, that's my plan for after lunch. What about you?"

"Oh! I could use some practice. I'm not used to my current stats yet. I'm really looking forward to getting them up again. There's nothing like being able to jump higher than your head even if it takes practice to get used to it."

Hailey stretches and grins. "That sounds awesome. Worth building up to, for sure. I think we'll be building for speed and agility, though, more than standing leaps."

"Oh, agility and speed are great too. Lots of airtime isn't actually very good for fighting, but it is a lot of fun and strength is useful for a lot of other things."

She nods, smiling. "Yeah, I bet it makes traversal a snap, and if you get dragged into a close range scrap, you're less likely to be the one to regret it."

Then she stands and stretches. "Wanna come find a gun range with us? Get to see me an' Ruby quibble about pistol choices?"

"Sure, there's a bunch so it shouldn't be hard to find one."

Into the map she goes. Gun range, gun range, where are you gun range? Are there appreciable differences in them?

If there are any differences besides the name it isn't immediately apparent. There's one only a couple blocks away; Francine's Firearms.

"Found one. Mind if we swing past our apartment on the way to drop our sword off first?"

"I don't mind at all. You're planning to go with pistols?"