"What about you?" Bella asks Helen.

"The only time I was ever in therapy were in my second life and the shrink tried to work me through my 'empowerment fantasies'," she does air quotes, "of secretly being a famous dead hero."

"Yeah, but do you have anything in mind for what you would want from a therapist who can in fact tell that you aren't fantasizing - I haven't checked, but I could if I didn't believe you - even if she is not a very good therapist."

"Working through my phobia of scissors?"

"Okay, I actually have read a book about dealing with phobias, I might be able to go through the process without doing anything grievously wrong. Tell me about it?"

"Gregory's power is temporarily manifesting sharp objects. He cut my throat open with a pair of kitchen scissors."

"...Ow. Okay. So the book I read had a few different techniques in it... since you have a specific incident the recommended one is something called 'fuzzed re-living'. I assume you have a pretty vivid recollection of the event?"

She shudders. "Yes. And I am very leery of anything that looks to make me re-live it."

"I could try one of the other methods, and I understand if you don't want me to do anything about it at all and you'd rather stick with what you've got, but it's not as bad as it sounds. You'd think about the memory and I'd sort of gray out the parts that were distressing. You know how if you're having a dream, things can just happen with major details missing? It'd be like that. Instead of the scissors, it would be 'nothing in particular'; I'd fuzz out the pain and attached emotions; we'd go over it a few times slowly letting stuff back in, a bit at a time, so the scissors would have less significance. ...I'm not describing this very well."

"That doesn't sound so bad. Would it actually damage the memory, though, or just reduce the emotional connection?"

"According to the book it won't damage the episodic recollection; it'll be like having also had an unusually well-remembered dream in which one day Gregory came over and did nothing in particular with nothing in particular about which you felt nothing in particular, separately from the actual memory."

"That sounds...useful. It would be nice not to compulsively wear scarves in the summertime."

"Yeah, that sounds uncomfortably warm. ...But possibly separate from a phobia of scissors per se, if you also avoid exposing your neck in addition to just not having scissors around. So I'd need to keep that in mind too and make sure I didn't focus too exclusively on the scissors."

"If I leave my throat vulnerable for too long I start remembering..." she trails off. "What could happen if I didn't protect it," she says finally. "Not so much the wound being applied, but what it felt like when he was done...you can't do much with a gaping throat wound but it still doesn't kill you instantly."

"Yeah. So - this is a pretty in-depth procedure. It's not broad - I will not learn things about any of your fifth birthdays or favorite color or personal life unless they come up in the memory I'm fuzzing for you - and it's not dangerous, because I'm doing something very simple and easily reversed if I accidentally also fuzzed something like what color your carpet at the time was. But it's deep in the sense that I will be very tangled up in the emotions I'm dulling for you and the thoughts those emotions prompt. I wouldn't be allowed to even register you as practice hours if I hadn't already taken the standard-on-my-plane patient confidentiality training and made applicable promises, but just because I won't tell anyone else doesn't mean that I'm not someone else. Also, while I happen to be unusually defensively robust, I'm not mentally impregnable. If someone attacks me, anything I've learned may be a casualty along with my more naturally-come-by memories. Also I have never done it before and don't have a more experienced subtle artist on hand for course correction; I think I can do it, but I'm still in school and don't have expert clinical judgment. All that said, I'm willing to try it if you want me to."

"I think--as long as no one I'm ever likely to meet who isn't you is likely to get their hands on the memories it should be fine. I don't have any philosophical objections to mind-reading, just practical ones."

"Well, I suppose it depends on how much planar travel you do, but yeah, I get the picture. Say when."

There are non-negligible amounts of phobia, but it has been seventeen years, and the dreamy quality means that she doesn't really have more of a flare-up than she would just looking at a pair of craft scissors.

"If you want that gone, I can do that too, that's a lot less work on your end and faster to boot."