"It's so exciting!"

"It's pretty exciting! Backlash isn't amazing but espers'll still be exciting to other people."

"Maybe you can just fix that, who knows. Though guiding actually feels amazing, reportedly more so if one's partner is snugglier than June is, so it would be a little sad to not have it as a phenomenon at all because we were all so perfectly capable of never getting backlashed."

"I expect clearing backlash to be a lot easier to do than preventing more from accumulating."

"Yeah, but I could imagine it winding up just being, poof, you're not backlashed any more. Like at the end of an awakening, which itself felt pretty neat, but not as good as guiding."

"Oh, sure, but like, you can still go get more and get guided about it. Not actually immune."

"Yeah, you're not wrong."

"I hope you find someone compatible who likes skin contact. I'd probably go nuts in your position, I'm so huggy."

"I'm not huggy as a person but as a backlashed person I get that way, yeah. I go around fistbumping every new esper I meet to find out but it's such a crapshoot."

"I'm huggy just as a person. I expect to cope until I've got my family fixed up, but like, it is a thing to cope with." 

"I will hug you if you want but I will not, like, drape myself all over you for hours, unless something really terrible happens to June in which case sure."

"I don't think that would help! I'm not an esper!"

"It wouldn't! It's what I did when I was awakening, my poor parents."

Lucy considers what the book had to say about awakening weeks. "Yikes."

"Yeah, I woke up in the middle of the night and yelled for Ren and spent a while digesting the belief that I had secretly been raised all my life by a mom-resembling robot before I got ahold of myself."

Lucy resists the urge to ask "food mom or soft mom?"

"Well, that sounds unpleasant. I'm glad it's over."

"Me too. - you might want to try out your backlash removal ideas on specifically awakening folks, who don't have partners lined up because like a hundred people would have to make a house call to check to match any given one, and some of those backlashes put people in the hospital for the duration."

"Extra yikes! Also yes, that's a really good idea." 

"I thiiiink I might be down to the point where I can post about this on the messageboard for you."

"Right. And you were going to connect me to your agent?"

"I was also gonna do that! Which do you want me on first?"

"Messageboard first, I think." And she will see if she can figure out texting.

"Okay, posting that I have a connect with someone who has an experimental debacklashing procedure, especially interested in awakeners who are in medical danger... aaand... texting Paula. The agent."

"Right. You said she texts weirdly."

"If she says something that has four concerning interpretations and a normal one she means the normal one."