"Hi! I've been reading Shards of Honor; it's lots of fun. How's your life going?"

"In spite of all my work, the earth continues to warm."

Quest available: It's Getting Hot In Here (Let's Take Off All Our Clothes)

Mitigate the effects of climate change.

Success: ????
Failure: ????

No, Erogame, he is not getting naked in a coffee shop. Arguably it's less crazy than putting the standard kilogram in his ass, but that he can at least theoretically do without getting caught. Also it's intruiging on an appel du vide level. Public nudity is just rude.

"We're a morbid pair, aren't we? Both have a good chance of getting killed by our fields of study."

Lev chuckles at something in his book.

"I find a little fear of death spices things up wonderfully."

"I'm afraid I can't say the same, but you do study much more exciting kinds of death. Speaking of research, one of my labmates is right over there. Hi Lev!" This last is a bit louder and accompanied by a wave.

Lev glances up from his book to see who has so inconsiderately interrupted him, waves, and returns to reading.

"Come over here and be social!" Says the massive hypocrite. "You can tell us what you're reading about."

He puts on his noise-cancelling headphones.

Hypocrites get what they deserve, he supposes. He'll have to apologise to Lev later. "Ah well, no book review for us," he says to Sarah. "Too bad, you should meet him sometime. He's brilliant. Anyway. Do you enjoy a little risk when you're not at work too?" Shit, was that an accidental innuendo or is he just expecting to see them everywhere because of the game?

"Sometimes. --Unfortunately I have a meeting in a few minutes, catch up with you later?"

"Sure, see you 'round." Dammit dammit dammit he is such an awkward fuckup, he is now two for two in this coffeeshop on people he tries to interact with avoiding him. Except the barista but she's paid to interact with people.

Lev sees that Sarah has left and takes off his noise-cancelling headphones.

Bruce is not going to bother him again immediately. He is going to sit here and drink his coffee and feel awkward and wonder if putting points in SED will give him general social skills or just make people want to sleep with him.

Quest available: Just Spit It Out

Have a real conversation with ??? Aarons for fifteen minutes. ????????????

Success: +500 XP, +1 SED, +1 LST
Failure: The Skip the Boring Parts perk, ????????

Maybe this is the Erogame's way of saying Lev wouldn't mind talking to him. It seems like sort of thing the Erogame would do in that circumstance. On the other hand, P(A|B) is not P(B|A); this might also be the Erogame wanting him to do something obnoxious. But there's only one way to find out. He gets up, brings his coffee over to Lev's table, and smiles nervously. "Mind if I sit here?" he asks, flashing back to more real and fictional First Days Of School than anyone should have to put up with.

"Go ahead!"

Oh thank goodness, Lev isn't still annoyed at him. He grins, sits, and starts trying to read Lev's book upside down. This last isn't really a conscious decision; he just does that.

"Don't bother, a bunch of the studies didn't replicate."

"Alas. Anything in here that did?"

"Yeah but-- he keeps going 'priming might sound weird but the weight of the scientific evidence is so strong that there is no option but believing it's true' and, no, the weight of the scientific evidence wasn't that strong, in fact it turns out that priming effects exist only for the most obvious things like word-stem completion tests and, no, it is not true that if you are primed with elderly people you walk slower. And that would be fine if he'd said that the evidence was weak and he was uncertain, science moves on, but he's so overconfident and it's really really annoying."

(Lev has never been this passionate about anything related to biochemistry.)

"Ugh, yeah. And now science marches on and he has egg on his face, but I doubt you're willing to trust his interpretation of the evidence on questions where the jury is still solidly out."

"Yeah, I think the lesson of Thinking Fast and Slow is that academic social psychology can't yet outperform just thinking about what people you know are like and drawing conclusions about what humans are like from that, which is terrible. I mean, you don't even get to know that many people? But the studies are all conducted on MTurkers or undergraduates who are even less representative than the people you'd meet in your day-to-day life, people barely ever do cross-cultural studies and when they do it turns out people from the Anglosphere are strange--"

He's wearing a necklace with a rose and a ring with a cubic zirconia diamond on it. If Bruce is observant enough, he'd notice that Lev is also wearing foundation, eyeshadow the color of his skin tone, and a tinted lip balm, and his fingernails are painted with clear polish.

"Man, now I want to gather some objective data about how good I am at even noticing what people I know are like, I might be even worse than academic psychology. Analyzing bad tools with different bad tools." 

He doesn't notice the makeup, but does notice the jewelry and that Lev is very nice to look at today. He tries to think of a way to compliment him that doesn't sound any of weird, douchey, or lame.