"Did they... are your guys ok?"

"As far as we can tell. Their emotions aren't permanently fucked in any way that I can detect, and they haven't reported any long-term effects, but we all agreed that they might have some kind of fucked up machurian candidate sleeper agent bullshit implanted in them and consequently shouldn't ever go back to Mu."

She stops. "You're fucking with me. That can happen?"

He shrugs. "We don't know for certain, there are definitely animals that do that kind of thing to other animals. There's a whole fucked up ecosystem based on this kind of stuff. We mostly try and steer clear of pretty much everything on Mu while I gather Color."

"Mu is messed up." Wait, he said something else, right? "Oh, uh, what did you mean by "that I can detect"?"

His flames definitely blue a bit at that, and Sniper rolls their eyes. "Color reacts to emotions around it, including the Color in my system. It gives me empathy, basically. The psychic kind."

He's an empath.

"You're an empath." Ah, that makes sense.

"Correct."

"All of us are, a bit, but Fib is strongest at it," Sniper adds, "since he's always filled to the brim with Color rather than just having enough to revive once or twice without starting to darken."

"Well that explains a lot." Heh, I'm going to be overthinking my emotions for minutes before I forget again. She tried to think back to what she said and how he reacted, but she couldn't remember. Well, she remembered him being insistent on Cean, so he probably picked up on her hesitance there. "Heh, ah well. So you just know what people are feeling?"

"Pretty much. It's a spatial feel, too, so I can tell who's feeling what rather than just what the vibe in the room is. It's helpful for tracking down little fuckers that get dragged in from Mu since just about everything from there has way stronger emotions than your average, like, insect or plant or whatever."

"Ok, what are the inhabitants of Mu? Squid? Crabs? Crab-squids?"

"They're kind of all over the place, 'cause of the whole self-modification thing. It seems like they might have a kind of humanoid bauplan, with basically an octopus for a head, from long-range observation, but we might have just stumbled across a fashion trend, basically."

"Right, right, ok, psychic humanoids with octopi for-"

"FUCKING MIND FLAYERS!?"

"As far as we can tell, they don't implant their larvae into living humans' skulls in order to metamorphose into their adult stage, so they're not exactly the same, but it's an odd coincidence, especially since the big fishy bastards I mentioned earlier are pretty much dead-ringers for aboleths too. We tried looking into whether Gary Gygax was a Conduit before he died but as far we can tell he was totally normal. Very weird coincidence, but maybe not much weirder than that Japan, Yomi, and this place's languages all being really similar, or Rorch's language being basically English."

She just stares at him, entertaining the possibility that the most ludicrous and surreal thing that has even been said to her was actually spoken in earnest. 

"We live in a very, very strange multiverse, but also an oddly familiar one." His flames pretty evenly split between shades of blue and green. "Sometimes, when I don't have anything to do, just waiting around trying to fall asleep, I wonder why things are like this."

"I definitely cannot handle a CR nine encounter that can mind blast me." She scrunches up her face. "They can't mind blast me, can they?"

"I am pretty sure they can mind blast things. I saw one defend their garden from a wild animal with something that looked a lot like a brute force psychic attack just from how the animal's emotions reacted anyway."

"Hahahahaha! Amazing! Incredible! Mind Flayers shooing away aberrations off their lawn with mind blasts!"

Fib chuckles along, though it sounds a little strained. He and Sniper both glance back Strawberry looking a little concerned (and Fib's colors bluing again, though not too much).

"As he said, we don't make a habit of impinging on their territory nowadays," Sniper reassures.

"Eh heh..." She clears her throat. "Right. Uh. So... any other parts of the multiverse concerningly resembling popular tabletop role playing games that I should know about?" 

"Not that I'm aware of, no," Fib answer. "Though...well, you're connected to Crucible, right? Does it seem familiar at all to you from before? Because from what I've seen of it, it's oddly reminiscent, albeit more so in the broad strokes than the details, of the settings of a few video games I remember from my Earth."