It is a few hours into a projected 168 of them. Haru is trying to get back to sleep while his mother holds him, because 168 hours is going to feel a lot longer if he can't figure out how to sleep while lonelier than ought to be humanly possible.
Suddenly not having his mother holding him is certainly a way to ruin the attempt.
He's - somewhere that looks very like the sidewalk outside his apartment, but also clearly is not. The silhouettes of the buildings are uncannily similar for how different the specifics are - that convenience store has a different name; his apartment building is a different color and that one has a different façade; several buildings in one cluster that were more on the historical side have been replaced with something shiny and new. The McDonald's on the corner is still there, but with different decor.
It's the middle of the night here, too, and the streets are empty enough that there are neither pedestrians to glom onto nor cars to walk in front of in the immediate vicinity, though he can hear traffic in the distance and - maybe a set of footsteps?
He is so tired and it hasn't even been five percent of this shitshow. Footsteps yes please. "Help!"
The source has headphones on and doesn't notice him at first. She braces flinchingly when she sees him coming at her.
"Hello, I'm really sorry to bother you, I don't know where I am or how I got here and also I am in the middle of my esper awakening as of a few hours ago and it didn't previously seem to have an involuntary teleportation effect which would also separately be a really weird backlash manifestation and anyway I need - supervision, an ambulance will probably do the trick in a pinch?"
"What rock do you live under. I'm sorry, I don't mean that, I'm just - it means I am having a psychiatric emergency that will predictably last one week, can you call me an ambulance and sit with me till it gets here."
"Do you actively want an ambulance or is there a not-in-a-pinch solution that would work better?"
"You could also try calling my parents, I'd been planning to ride it out at home with them, it's not like there are drugs that help or anything, just, as things to ask of a complete stranger when I don't know where I am go, an ambulance seemed like the broadside option! I am intermittently a suicide risk, it turns out my backlash is being intolerably lonely."
Tap tap taptap. Her phone's UI is weird.
It rings out to voicemail and the voice on the 'leave a message' recording is male.
"My dad is supposed to be on an airplane to come take shifts with my mom, so he won't answer, but, just to check -" Number.
"Okay, well, I didn't think esper awakenings involved manifesting new exciting delusional symptoms after they got underway but I also didn't think they involved spontaneous teleportation and I do think I can't trust my brain right now, I'd take the ambulance if you'd be so kind and ambulances turn out to be a real thing that exist and can take me to a hospital."
"By all means tell me what thing I should have instead of an ambulance for my psychiatric crisis."
"I know this guy. Works for the government, in R&D, helped me out of a tight spot once. I could give reasons I think he'd be more helpful but I think I should just call him and if you don't like him you can have him get you an ambulance after."
"That sounds like an extremely puzzling approach to a psychiatric crisis but I am temporarily insane so I will tentatively trust you on this assessment, random stranger."
"Name's Netra." She navigates to something on her phone and starts typing, out of Haru's line of sight. "Also by call I mean text."
"Understood. I go by Haru but if you need my legal name for some reason it is Bellamy Masaharu Swan, and no, I don't know what my mother was thinking."
"I apologize for being compulsively incapable of shutting up. It doesn't even help."
"Oh. Do I have to listen; I can't really do that and type at the same time."
"It doesn't help if you do, I am having a magical problem and not a mood one, so I guess that means you needn't, you are a complete stranger and owe me nothing besides an ambulance or your choice of arguable improvement over an ambulance."
"Yeah, I get to be an esper, just like I always fucking wanted. Some people just fall into a nice simple coma or something, but not me, oh no."
"Mhm." Typetypetype. She finishes up, pockets her phone.
"Are you violent at all?"
"I don't feel so inclined and have not been historically but I am racking up symptoms at a really dismaying rate! I have dyspraxia and can be escaped by anyone capable of a brisk jog."
"Sure, if it's not too far, because, again, dyspraxia, I will trip and fall into traffic if I have to speed up above a sedate old-person pace to keep up with you."
"It's not." She leads him at a sedate old-person pace to a building half a block down from the one that looks weirdly like and yet weirdly unlike his own.
"It bears a strong resemblance to the exact block I live on except for all the ways it isn't! I live in Toronto, or at least so I remember myself to have believed in saner times."
"That's good, unless it isn't. At least it appears to me that we are both speaking English, so there's that."
"Well, it's better than being in Bangalore, especially since I'm in my pajamas," a T-shirt and buffalo check pants, "and it's worse than being in a Toronto that I recognize."
Door, keycode. The lock display instructs her to 'RETRY FINGERPRINT SCAN' and she jams her thumb on a side panel at a few angles until it chimes and lets them in. "So there's, uh, magic, in 'the Toronto that you recognize'?"
"It's everywhere in the world since the seventies. Espers, dungeons, monsters, whole nine yards. If I'm having a delusional episode about that it's really thorough and I cannot rely on my information that my episode should last only one week."
Elevator waiting. "I don't really follow the news but it does seem like a thing I would have... ever... heard of. If it were real." She pat-pats his shoulder.
He leans in kind of pathetically about that. "Yes, hence the rock comment."
"...Okay. - Oh." Her watch buzzes; she checks it. "He'll send someone within the hour." The elevator arrives and she hesitates, just for a beat, before leading him in.
"...You don't really seem like you're having a regular psychiatric problem, to be honest. I think it's more likely you've been, like, drugged, or hypnotized, or having some other sort of spy bullshit problem, and he's enough of a spy bullshit person that I think you'll do a lot better with him. You're - really coherent..."
"Spy bullshit? - I suppose I was operating on the assumption that a hospital would know what an esper is."
"I will have to take your word for it at least until I meet another person." He is hugging himself a little bit and occasionally swiping his hand across his eyes when they get too teary.
Howsabout they exit this elevator now. Here is her apartment. Her keypad is either fingerprint-unwanting or less picky; they get in first try. It's about the same size as Ren's but worse decorated.
He will go find a sofa to sit on and sit on it curled up very small.
"No thank you. I was in the middle of trying to go back to sleep - my aw- my subjective memory is that my awakening hit in the middle of the night and woke me up."
"Cool." She pads down the hallway and seems set to disappear around a corner.
The bedroomish part of the studio is as sparse as the rest of it except for the double-decker rat cage, which is crammed with lots of different climby and hammocky objects of no cohesive aesthetic. Netra scoops up two rats onto her shoulders, takes one in hand, and passes one to Haru.
"Hi there little rat. There are none of you in Alberta. Yeah that's my thumb you're sniffing there. You don't have those and that's why your species has not conquered the world." He will go back to the couch to sit with the rat. "What's this one's name?"
"Cortado." Once he's seated she passes the rest onto him, one at a time. "And Macchiato, Steamed Milk, and Double Double."
"And now I know things about your culinary preferences. The Italian ones are good names but why not go with Latte and, like, Espresso, or something, for the latter two? Yes my shirt does have a pocket well done little guy. Are you a guy, I would check but I've got your pals here one in each hand..."
"They don't bite, right? It would not rate highly among my problems at the moment, but."
"I will avoid freaking out if they nibble painlessly on me. You've gotten all the way up to my ear, congratulations, Cortado, I've actually got two of those but they're the same, if you've seen one you've seen 'em all."
Netra steals Steamed Milk back for her shoulder and takes the spot at the other end of the couch to do some phone scrolling on.
"Xavier - the guy - wonders if there's anything else his assistant should know before picking you up."
Typity type.
"He wants to know more about the esper thing anyway. And if there's anything you think might help."
"A small percentage of people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four awaken as espers! Using esper powers causes backlash, with bespoke acute symptoms and generic chronic ones. Awakening consists of a week of quality fucking time with one's very own acute symptoms. Usually it's something that more closely mimics a medical condition than this, like, people get fevers or neuropathy or they go blind or something like that, but I have this instead. At the end of the week in theory I will be all better, till I use my powers, which I'm not going to do if there aren't any other espers, because the way to get rid of non-awakening backlash is by hanging out in close proximity with a compatible fellow esper."
She types for really not long at all given the length of that description. "And you... want to talk to people and are sad?"
"My backlash appears to be loneliness. Since it is a magical problem and not a normal emotion that I'm having for a normal reason, talking to people does not help, nothing but a week going by will actually help, but I am doing it compulsively anyway, like how it doesn't help to scratch poison ivy but one might do it anyway. It is very unpleasant, I'm not sure 'sad' is exactly right. I have a tiny bit of flex in exactly how the loneliness manifests and I am mostly focusing on pointing it away from the solipsism option because that one makes me want to kill myself. I am not amazing at this yet but I think there's practice effects, on that part."
Steamed Milk has her tail wrapped around the back of Netra's neck for support and is stretching out So Long to snifsnifsnif at Haru again.
Can he extend a hand for Steamed Milk to climb onto without alarming Netra.
Well, she does glance up from phoning and then keeps watching until the rat ferry has safely departed, but she doesn't jump this time.
"I appreciate the rats. It doesn't help but at least I am not rationalizing myself into social anxiety about why it's not helping." He pets Steamed Milk.
"I think I should get a cat. If anything about my life is ever the way I remember having expected it would be under the prevailing conditions. No point if I'm going to be the only esper in the world or if I am having some completely standard physical brain damage situation with no magic powers at the end."
"I have a slight sore throat if that counts - doubt it's contagious, I'm just talking too much - but otherwise no. I did trip and bang my elbow on my doorknob, that still aches, but I didn't hit my head."
"That's good. It would be really bad if I'd only just thought to ask and it did."
"Yeah. I would ask the same thing in your position as I understand you to be presenting said position. I'm going to be so pissed off if I have brain damage that might last more than a week and don't get superpowers."
....Maybe she'll just let him patter to the rats until the assistant arrives.
The rats are good. And small. There are four of them. He has opinions about their names. He counts Macchiato's spots. They have kind of offputting bald tails. Do they do any tricks? Can he feed them treats? Rats don't purr and he thinks it would be good if a cat were purring on him, for values of "good" that would not fundamentally alter the situation in any way.
Rats don't purr but they do chitter quietly and twitch their whiskers in what Netra taciturnly describes as a happy way. They'll turn in tight circles for Netra's "Spin!" and "Unspin!" but not his. And sure, she can fetch some frozen yogurt dollops from the fridge for him to give to them, which greatly increases the chittering from Double Double. The others are less noisy about it but Macchiato is very grabby. Haru was kind of wrong about them not having thumbs; their front appendages are much closer to hands than paws, and Macchiato uses hers rather than her mouth when attempting to steal yogis.
This will keep him unhappily occupied for a while. Eventually he is telling the rats the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
After forty minutes of apartmenting Netra's phone dings and she announces that the assistant's on the way up.
"I - oh, right, my uncle gives accurate time estimates even when I don't. Oooooooohhhhhh you have scamperers! And also a problems guy? Hi problems guy."
"Hello, Haru, I'm Ari." She finds a ratless spot on the couch and sits there. Since Cortado has scurried off next to the arm to keep everyone else away from her treat and the other three are on Haru, this puts her rather closer to him than Netra seemed to prefer.
He is currently leaning on "everyone hates me" instead of touch-starvation because rats are very small and do not purr and are not much good for the touch starvation version, whereas as long as they aren't biting him they can't hate him that much. "Do you happen to know why your - uncle? - is a better place to stash a guy with a psychiatric emergency than a hospital would be, I'm still confused about that."
"He - helps people a lot? He fixes people's lives. Sometimes, as like a hobby or something. It's.... sorry, I'm not very good at explaining things right now; I woke up like," watch-check, "forty-seven minutes ago, and all of them were spent getting here as fast as I could, and I got like four hours of sleep." It's still dark out.
"Samesies. I woke up in the middle of the night with backlash onset and had just about finished deciding to ride it out at home with my parents, calling my dad to fly across the country, sending the paramedics my mother called away because 'at home with my parents' would be a fine place to hang out for a week, and was trying to go back to sleep, when poof. You know, subjectively, I don't know what the fuck consensus reality is doing."
"I've been sent more explanation of your deal than I've read, on account of the trying to get here quickly; wanna explain it to me in the car? And we can grab some coffee."
"Sure. How shall I divest myself of these rats? What time even is it here?"
"6:15. I'll take them." She grabs a throw pillow, scoops Cortado onto it, and holds it close enough for Haru to transfer the rest.
Rats go off the awakening esper, or whatever the fuck he is, and he follows mystery man's niece.
She heads for the stairwell instead of the elevator. "So you're having a psychiatric issue?"
"At least one, yeah. I have seventeen years of memories of living in a universe where sometimes people turn up with various individually weird health problems of some kind for a week and then they have superpowers after that, but this model of the world cannot explain the thing where I am now in a slightly different Toronto where that is not common knowledge."
"It's not fun. I was really hoping that if the dice came up 'esper' for me that I'd have some more comprehensible medical condition and instead here I am being exotically insane."
She waits till they're on a landing to ask - "Do you want a hug?"
"I really really want a hug but I will be kind of insane about it. I'm also gay if that helps so like, just insane, not hitting on you."
"...I'm happy to hug you in light of this but maybe it would be better to start somewhere that isn't a stairwell. If you think it might be hard to stop."
"Okay." Stairs stairs. Glance back at him. "...Shoot, was I supposed to bring you shoes?"
"I don't know what you were supposed to do. My feet are not my main problem right now and as long as I don't step on a rusty nail and get tetanus and possibly even then that will continue to be the case."
"- Sorry! You know what, let's just -" And she backtracks up to meet him at a landing with a door to the rest of the building, which she holds open for him. "Elevator."
Where's the elevator there it is. They can hug while they wait for it.
Hug hug hug hug. "Did I miss your name while I was de-ratting? I'm Haru."
"Hi Ari. It would be nice to meet you under better circumstances but at the moment it's mostly confusing. I do really appreciate the hug though."
"Hugs are good!" Here's the elevator; she doesn't try and extract herself from him before shuffling in. "...Should I carry you to my car? For shoes reasons and also hug ones?"
"I'm very strong! I'm preeetty sure I can fire-carry you and less sure but still optimistic that I could do something more huglike. I didn't park that far away."
"Well, if you're not risking throwing out your back or anything I would appreciate it."
"Cool." Once they hit the ground floor she unhugs enough to duck under his arm and hoist him. "This okay?"
"The jacket conceals my true power." Here they go to her car. "Do you wanna sit together in the back for a bit or do you want to get where we're going as fast as possible."
"Okay, and you're still good to swing through a Tim's? - Do you want - is it bad enough that you should down some painkillers and, I can do a tap on the head, do you want to trade a headache for skipping the next hour of car ride -"
"......I'm not in physical pain except for my elbow which is occupying almost none of my attention. I could go for some Tim's if it's six in the morning. I have absolutely no idea what the thing about the tap on the head is?"
"You know, like, should I - bam - knock you out. The painkillers are for afterward but you'd want to take them ahead of time so they have a chance to kick in." Here's her car; it's dark teal. "If you give me your order I can get you breakfast even if you don't want to be awake for it."
"Don't you think I have enough problems without a concussion? Apple fritter and a mocha."
"I wouldn't give you a concussion! I learned how to do it properly. But if you don't want to then that's, really and truly the most fine, I just thought it should be on the table." She gives up on trying to de-pocket her keys with him on her shoulders and sets him down. Now they can be in the car.
In he gets. "I think I'll pass, on the off chance that anything I remember about the world is correct."
"That's so fine!" She does something on her phone then passes it to him; the app isn't familiar but seems basically navigable. "Want to pick a music?"
"I kind of can't read very well right now and I'm not big into music but if you wanna direct me to something I'm easy?"
It's like ten minutes to get in the drive through. Ari wants a latte (vanilla), a breakfast sandwich (bacon), and twenty Timbits (assorted).
- Ope, personal space invasion is - not at all surprising, actually, though it might be a little startling.
Ari wants to park for a minute to wolf down half her sandwich and then they can get properly going.
Nom nom. "So what do you do when you're not giving strange espers and/or head cases rides?"
"I work at a summer camp! In the summer, and bits of the spring and fall, and they do one event in February. And then the rest of the time it's just odd jobs. A lot of cleaning, mostly, and then stuff like this where something weird comes up and Uncle Xave sets me on the case. - Usually not quite this weird."
"That's short for Xavier?" Why. Why does he need to ask this question.
"Yep. I'm the only one who calls him that, but he's the only one who calls me 'Ariel', so we're even."
"Would you say the 'tap on the head' thing as a separate concept from a concussion is common knowledge as a thing outside of fiction?"
"Yeah? Concussions are for like, really hard impacts, or if you get knocked out a bunch in a row."
"That's... not how I remember it being. Do I seem generally coherent enough that you would expect me to remember my parents' phone numbers?"
"Yeah. I mean, if you knew them instead of just having the contacts saved. But if they'd been the same since you were a kid, definitely."
"Have you ever heard of a psychiatric condition with unbearable loneliness as a primary symptom?"
"I mean, if you told me there was something that was trying to be a truth serum or whatever that worked like that, I would totally believe you..."
"Okay, also, do you believe truth serum to be a nonfictional thing that works as truth serum per se instead of just generally making the brain work worse and hoping one of the things it's worse at is lying."
"I guess if I have superpowers in a week I will... strongly suspect that I am from another timeline or something, and never be able to prove that to anyone because I won't dare use them if I'm the only esper in the world."
"If I am from the esper timeline, instead of just having a really complicated psychotic break, then what I'm going through right now is a preview of the backlash I can expect from using whatever powers I get. Espers can de-backlash each other in a process called guiding, but if I rack up backlash all by myself I can't get rid of it. It wouldn't hang around in psychological form forever, that's my acute symptom, it'd turn into chronic pain and organ damage and stuff, but, like, still."
"I always wanted to be an esper and right now I'm kind of questioning that thought process but it's not something one does on purpose by winning an essay contest, it's basically random. Very slight tendency to run in families."
"Is there anything I can like... do... about the loneliness. While driving."
"No, not really, I am under a magical curse, I am not just in a mood. I have compulsive responses to this condition but the only things that would actually help would be a compatible esper or the week elapsing. Or me turning out to be wrong about what's going on with me."
"Nothing to make you more comfortable, either? Even if it doesn't help help."
"...I'm not sure that's what that means but also you get, like, infinite slack about that kind of thing right now. But like do you want me to say, I dunno, 'acknowledged' or something instead, 'cause otherwise this is maybe gonna come up a lot."
"I just have to come up with things to say and they aren't passing all my usual standards of relevance and cleverness before the part where they come out of my mouth right now."
"That's, really so super valid. - What do you normally do, when you aren't being a weird esper or getting rides."
"I read a lot. I play Civilization. I have a blog, about espers and dungeons and monsters."
"Jane Eyre. If I just explain the plot can you pretend to be interested enough to ask questions about it?"
"Charlotte Brontë. A little darker but same general region of spacetimegenre."
"Cool. I dunno whether I could pretend but the good news is I can probably simply actually be interested, is that good enough?"
Ari seems interested! Once or twice she might be asking for more clarification than is strictly necessary, but she seems generally genuine. And she sometimes has trouble keeping the names straight, which is maybe helpful on a strict number-of-questions basis.
Yeah, he can remind her that Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester is only Mrs. Fairfax's cousin-in-law and clarify who Adele is as many times as necessary.
"You know, I keep saying 'my uncle' but really he's my cousin once removed. But that's really just so much worse to say all the time."
"I would probably approximate that to 'uncle' too if it were a cousin once removed I saw much of and frequently referred to."
"Yeah, he goes for 'niece' too even though he's all persnickety about names."
"Like how he's the only one who calls me Ariel. I can't get him to not. - Though, we have kind of a jokes thing going on; he'll probably call you whatever you want."
"It's nice!" And they can fill the rest of the car ride with book plot?
She knows that one already actually! But the trip isn't much longer than an hour; she can backtrack on clarifying questions about previous Jane details to kill the last ten minutes.
The house is only one story, but with a large footprint and in the middle of fucking nowhere. After she parks and pockets the car keys, Ari passes Haru her bag of food and jogs around the front of the hood to lift him across the gravel driveway. The sun's up, now.
"Oh boy, gravel, I'm glad you've been hitting the gym enough to haul around teenage boys."
"I'm kind of cheating but yeah. Can you get the doorknob? Should be unlocked."
"Iiiiiiiiiiiiii don't want to elaborate actually, sorry." She gets the door closed behind them and out of her shoes without setting him down. "HELLLLOOO Uncle Xaaave, I have the problems guy, his name's Haru."
A very tall man strides from around a corner. "Good morning, Ariel; Haru. ...Does our guest prefer to be elevated in this way, Ariel?"
"I don't have shoes, the driveway was gravel, and my psychiatric emergency features touch starvation."
"We won't!" She carries Haru to a couch and deposits him thereon without breaking contact, and once he's safely down she can cuddle up properly.
Snuggle. "So if you've already read the Tempest is there any other classic literature I should summarize at you, I have the taste of an English professor."
"Oh, I don't know. - There was a, it showed up in my recommendeds, there was this song that was kind of a real banger, I didn't look into the rest of the show, but I think it was based on The Sorrows of Young Werther, do you know that one?"
(Xavier seats himself in an adjacent armchair, dons a pair of reading glasses, and unobtrusively interacts with a little e-ink tablet.)
"I have not read it though I think I recall hearing it was linked to a rash of suicides while it was contemporary."
He's seen Muppet Christmas Carol, albeit when he was like nine. He can go into how the adaptation differs from the original book.
"- Sorry, can we - I'm just really antsy, as a person; I think we're going to need to shuffle around every few minutes, if - we're doing this. My arm is squished, can I have it back?"
"Yeah. Would it be easier if I just laid down and you sat on me or something, so you didn't have to ask whenever you need to reposition?"
Her arm is hers now, but it can be hers around Haru's shoulders. "Wouldn't that... hurt? You?? I'm kind of worried that it would and you wouldn't be able to ask me to move."
"It probably depends where on me you sit and how much weight you distribute to the couch? This is also fine though."
"Would a massage or something work, where movement's already involved, or is it just - surface area -"
"That probably works great but I expect to be like this for a week so I am trying to think of low effort options."
"Those will probably be very useful when I have not just downed a large latte." She spins him away from her and starts on his shoulders.
"Thank you and your latte." He is possibly the tensest person she has ever touched.
Jesus Christ. Does he loosen up at all with effort? She is not like, practiced at this, but.
Sure.
"I'll be right back," she announces when he's done with the latter.
- that is completely reasonable but he casts a frantic look at her quiet uncle.
"Hello, would it be too optimistic to assume that you decided to invite a psychiatrically lonely stranger into your home because you are not averse to keeping said stranger company. From less distance at least while Ari's up."
"Not at all." He de-glasseses and transfers himself to the couch with an open arm. "I've been looking into your condition."
"A fair bit." He combs his fingers through Haru's hair. "There are a handful of drugs that aim for effects similar to your loneliness; the closest match lasts between two and twelve hours depending on dosage, with the strength of the effect matching the duration. The description of neediness is similar to what you display, although the fact that it continues even as you receive attention is not."
"If we assume that my memories have any validity I think they incline me to a model where I am from another timeline or something where there are espers, those haven't always been around, we'd just have to diverge sometime before the seventies. And also in this timeline at least some people believe that you can knock people harmlessly unconscious without this being a concussion, which, maybe some people kind of believe that at home from watching too many action movies, but they don't also offer to do it."
"I was getting to that. The first part at least - let's be careful of your head, then, shall we?" He scritches Haru thoughtfully.
"Assuming that blah blah memories etcetera I should be able to stay on top of that if I'm careful, with practice, psychological backlash is malleable a little bit. The suicidalness pops up if I get solipsistic and I hate my other choices less even though they are also very unpleasant and embarrassing."
"Hm. In that case I shall still offer to throw together a helmet you can't take off by yourself, but not expect you to accept."
"I've had a concussion before, because I'm dyspraxic and fell down the stairs, but I think becoming an esper might fix that, so that's a nice consolation prize for not getting to safely try out my new superpowers. Unless you are planning to punch me in the head I don't think a helmet is a good use of... any of the things it trades off against, just keep me away from the kitchen knives and don't leave me alone."
"...Noted. As for your memories, I haven't been able to find record of any drugs which by themselves produce anything remotely as immersive as you seem to be experiencing. Or rather, there might be some that operate on a similar scale internally, such that you might not be able to distinguish them yourself, but as someone interacting with you - receiving logical responses to my questions, seeing you look at things that are actually in the room instead of phantoms that aren't there - I can rule them out.
"Much more likely, from a shall we say local perspective, is the possibility of extensive conditioning work. There are various methods, but the gist of the idea is that someone wanted you to believe in espers and did a large amount of very fine detail work to make it so.
"However, since many governments have at least occasionally been publicly working on contacting other universes for decades, I'm most inclined towards believing your suspected version of events."
"Unfortunately, all material on the subject younger than a few decades old is generally both secret and not something I personally have been working on. But it doesn't seem out of the question."
"Espers are useful and stuff, if that's the kind of consideration they're responsive to. Lots of 'em work in civilian industries, you don't need to have dungeons kidnapping people to want the espers that came with that."
"I'm interested to hear more, but if that's really the truth behind your situation I expect at least our government will not need convincing in order to be motivated to help you."
"I am not going to want to prove it before I can get back to my universe, I do not want undischargeable chronic backlash."
"Easy transportation to a separate Earth even with no magic and much worse technology then our own would still be a huge advantage for any country that could control it. No one reasonable is going to ask you to demonstrate."
Ari returns with two glasses of water. She hovers awkwardly for a moment until Xavier holds his hands out to take them, then nabs some coasters and sets them on the coffee table.
"Would that everyone were reasonable." He scootches in a little when the arm is no longer around him.
Then there's room for Ari on his other side. "Is it my turn for a massage or does it not work like that, is that not helpful."
"It is probably just as satisfactory to the compulsion situation but I can't guarantee I'll be any good at it." He will make an attempt.
Xavier scoots back a bit to make room. "Is there any danger besides suicide in not indulging your compulsions?"
"I... could have sleep deprivation related problems, over the week? I don't think I'll be able to sleep alone."
"Thanks. It probably doesn't have to be a human if you know someone with a dog you could borrow though."
"Uh, also I assume I can't talk either of you into accompanying me to the bathroom as needed but if someone could be talking to me through the door I might be able to make do with that."
"Well, I haven't tried it. I was at home when this started, with my mom, and she said something about how it beats changing diapers."
"I am not so against the idea that I'm willing to risk you dying over it. You have a better sense of the calibration here than I; I'll do as you request."
"A multivitamin, nothing that'll do me any harm to skip for a week."
"I'd like to test for whether you might have been drugged, even though it's not my leading hypothesis for what's going on here. I don't have kits for any of my more-specific guesses, but there is one which can tell to a first approximation whether there are any drugs in your system."
"A normal blood draw isn't a huge issue, just don't make me be the one holding pressure on the puncture before you bandage it and maybe spend longer on that step than usual."
"Hm. Is a second blood draw much worse than one, if they're performed competently? A comparison may still be useful."
"If they are performed competently enough that there's not entire drops of blood exposed to the air I'm breathing it's not a big deal."
"Sure, I'm not squeamish. - About - blood, in particular. In reasonable quantities."
Xavier has to fetch the materials (during which Ari patters about a music video she saw recently with gallons of fake blood that she was not a fan of) but then, yes, gloves and needles and arm.
Ari presses gauze in the crook of Haru's elbow and holds his hand above his head while Xavier carries the kit away.
"Was the song itself any good?" Haru mumbles into his other elbow while ignoring the blood draw situation.
"Yeah, that's why I looked it up. And I've personally given like four or five gallons to the Red Cross, but like, you know, over my whole life, which is really not the same at all. - My whole life since I was sixteen. Still."
"I tried donating blood once but I fainted and they told me not to come back. I should revisit that once I am an esper at home with other espers, fluid transmission is one option for guiding. That's the term for de-backlashing each other, 'guiding'."
"As, you know, the optimistic long term projection, I retain insight into the fact that my condition sounds super wacky to the people around me who have never previously heard of espers and our hell weeks."
"Oh! Cool, I think I maybe missed something? For a second I thought you maybe just suddenly got way more delusional."
"Well, maybe your uncle is just humoring me, that'd be a fucked up thing to do though."
"I certainly hope you're right. He says governments are already after means to move between dimensions or something - I don't have that exactly right, I usually take notes on things I want to remember and I can't focus on writing now, but something like that."
"Woah. I mean, that totally sounds like a thing governments would be doing. I really hope it works out for you." Band-Aid?
Now he has a Band-Aid and all is right with the world except for the things that are not. "I hope so too. It would be an incredibly huge ripoff to do an entire esper awakening for powers I can't then use safely and a completely different worse ripoff to just be psychotic to no end whatsoever."
"I guess I don't know things but this really doesn't seem to me what being psychotic is like."
"Yes, well, I don't think so either but if I were psychotic I would probably also not think so."
"Isn't there an order? And what about the Aeneid, is that in there too or is that someone else?"
"That's Virgil and I haven't read it yet. The Illiad comes before the Odyssey but is a little less fun for the typical modern consumer."
"Well, do you think you're more likely to run out of stories or to get tired of telling me about them."
"If you're definitely going to want both I can start with the Illiad, I don't know how much of the week to expect you around for."
"I don't have anything else going on and it seems like you could use the help."
(Xavier rejoins them, back in his armchair, without interrupting to announce any test results.)
Ari is somewhat worse at coming up with literary questions while receiving a massage, though she can produce plenty of comments about what exactly Haru should and shouldn't be doing to her back.
That will do at least well enough that he isn't inspired to complain.
Aaaaaaaand that's enough of that. "You can braid my hair if you know how to braid hair."
He will, like, try, sure, he can get the basics like "be gentle" and knows the over-under pattern.
If he gets a decent result he can have a hair tie off her wrist to finish it with.
And she's antsy again, and her hands are tired of giving massages. How well can Haru storytell from her shoulders, while she occasionally paces and very occasionally does a couple squats?
It's undignified but he would rather be exercise equipment than curled up by himself on the couch, whatever works for her. Blah blah Agamemnnon &c.
It doesn't take very much of this to wear her out, at least, and then they can go back to the couch and switch position every three-to-five minutes. ...Also now she wants to stretch out her arms and back occasionally, but she can y'know have her legs draped over him while she does that. She's back to previous levels of plot questions.
Also oh right she has some Timbits left; munch munch does he want a couple.
By the time he's halfway through the Odyssey, her shiftings have spaced out a fair bit but so have her questions.
He'll take a Timbit. He starts pausing expectantly more often between sentences.
She takes the hint at first but slows down on those too until she's maybe fallen asleep.
...well, if she's asleep maybe he can just scootch up to her and also take a nap, he got like three hours of sleep last night.
Ari's less but not zero squirmy asleep compared to when awake. It's up to him, whether he can manage a nap.
Squirmy is fine. It helps keep him convinced that she is a genuine person.
She is not sufficiently squirmy to send them off the couch, but it does take enough semi-conscious awareness to keep balanced that she wakes up after about 40 minutes, with a bit of a start.
Can she stretch a li'l bit without waking him up.
"Mm? - Oh." Can she extract one arm and then maybe the other if she does it sooooo slooooowly.
Then the distance from her fingertips to her toes is going to be absolutely as long as she can make it within the constraints of this couch and with a dude wrapped around her torso. She manages to crack her back; that's a bit better.
Xavier rises, then kneels next to the couch and wraps himself around Haru.
Ari slithers, haltingly, out of Haru's grasp and over the arm of the couch. Successfully and without at any point thumping onto the ground.
And from there it's straightforward for Xavier to carry Haru to his bed and climb in with him.
Xavier is significantly less squirmy than his niece. One might even say: he isn't squirmy. Pet, pet, pet, pet. For as long as Haru stays asleep.
He takes a two-hours-and-change nap, then blinks awake. "- where am I?"
"About an hour outside Toronto, in the same house you fell asleep in. I moved you to a bedroom so poor Ariel wouldn't feel so stifled."
"I am either having a really dramatic psychotic break or I'm from another timeline somehow and my only mental problem is that I'm having my esper awakening hell week. I recall you leaning toward the latter explanation."
"Are there more details you want to check if I know or does that do the trick?"
"Since I'm leaning toward the later explanation, that much seems fine."
"Well, that's what I thought at the time, but you see I'm rather insane."
"She read to me as physically uncomfortable and eager to escape, but blamelessly so. If I hadn't been handy to rescue her I expect she would have willingly stayed as long as you needed." Scritch scritch. "Though I'm pessimistic about the quality of sleep both of you would have gotten, in that case."
"Your blood didn't have any anomalies I could detect compared to that of people from this timeline. It might be safe to sedate you."
"The EMTs in my universe did not recommend that but awakenings are all different so I guess it might help and just doesn't work in enough cases that it's covered in paramedic training modules."
"Mm. And strange timeline-hopping scenarios aren't likely to decrease risk, are they. If the only concerns had been cost or ease of administration for your family, I would have said I have some advantages over your previous situation."
"Espers are valuable, they'd have sent somebody to the house or put me up in TGH for free if that had seemed to be the best way to get me through it both of alive and kindly disposed toward the government of Canada."
"My elbow's still sore from when I fell earlier pre-dimensional-transit. I've got a bit of a headache. I could use lunch."
Xavier retrieves a pill bottle from a drawer in his nightstand before rolling out of bed and offering a hand up to Haru.
Haru will hold his hand all the way to wherever they get water. And probably after that.
"...if I were home and Ren didn't want to cook I'd maybe order pizza?"
"The location of my home was chosen for factors other than delivery coverage. I don't mind cooking; is pizza still your first choice?"
"I don't know what ingredients you have. Or if you can even make pizza on short notice, I think it needs to rise and stuff? I think something with cheese in it is my first choice but I am not otherwise feeling very picky."
Ari walks swayfully - dancingly, but not elegantly - into the kitchen. "I want pizza if and only if you have pepperoni that's like, regular, and not the fancy rich person stuff."
"- I don't want to eat anything that used to be a whole animal. Anymore. I have decided. I don't care if it's fancy somehow other than that."
"I have not been super impressed with vegan meat alternatives in the past, though, like, I'll eat tofu if it's in front of me."
"Oh, it's exciting, don't you think? To find a more mundane difference between our timelines. If communication and travel are possible between Haru's world and ours, we might have something useful in itself to trade them."
"Ariel, will you attend to preventing our guest's starvation of touch so that I may attend to preventing our collective starvation of calories."
Hug. "Prevention isn't really on the table. Actually I am actively trying to be as touch-starved as I can because it's less psychological than the other ways I seem able to bend. Indulging it, maybe?"
"I am very fortunate that I have already read the Wikipedia page on espers five times. And otherwise been interested in this sort of thing for ages. Or I might not have known that psychological backlash admits of a little malleability, and I can't really read right now so I wouldn't have been able to look it up even before I appeared here."
"...I can't believe you have Wikipedia but not cultured meat. - Sorry, uh - could you not have had someone read it to you? Or summarize it in their own words?"
"I think it will work if you read things to me, but your Wikipedia doesn't have anything about espers, now, does it, and it didn't occur to me or Ren before I vanished."
"Right, but it might have if you hadn't already read it five times?"
"Do you think it's better for me to read you things than what we've been doing?"
"That seems like a thing we can do sometimes but I wouldn't want it to be the main thing, I think. - Heyoo, what's the verdict."
Xavier returns from down the hallway. "There's some venison sausage, which at least wasn't farmed, if that makes a difference to you. And plenty of cultured options which nonetheless are not pepperoni."
"See, no, I'm pretty sure farming is way better than being a wild deer and getting shot at the end, I just think it's gross. I could go for some grilled chicken 'n' cheese and tomato soup?"
"What if we were sitting down." Ari pulls Haru over to the chairs by the counter.
He can sit in a chair next to her if he's hugging her arm and leaning on her shoulder. "Then tautologically we'd be sitting down."
"Soooooo truuuuuuue. - We could continue to odd a see but now I'm kind of more interested in hearing more about things where you're from."
"I don't know! Have you noticed any other differences that I haven't been around to hear?"
"Uh - I might forget something, today's been a lot - concussion thing, truth serum, cultured meat, governments working on contacting other universes for decades, I think you've been present for all of these discrepancies."
"We have cultured eggs and stuff, too. Those at least are more recent; it took a while to get stuff that was good enough at doing the shells. Meat we've had for, literally my whole life, like before I was born. But you still have Wikipedia, it's not just that you're way lower tech..."
"I guess our tech took a turn from what it might otherwise have been when dungeons started kidnapping people and industry started exploiting exotic materials removed from dungeons...why would you bother culturing the shells?"
"They don't for like, industrial kitchens; the summer camp I work at gets 'em in cartons, sometimes whites and yolks separately. But most people, like, want their eggs to be eggs?"
"I guess it's a convenient packaging form factor? It just sounded like they weren't considered market-ready at all till they had shells."
"I dunno, I was a kid when we switched. Maybe they were around and I just didn't notice."
"There was a gap between cultured meat becoming near-ubiquitous and cultured eggs becoming more than niche, but yes, they were on shelves before they were in shells," Xavier notes without turning away from his cheese grating.
"Heh," says Haru, at the wordplay. "And they taste the same? They're bioidentical?"
"I think they taste better and this is a least like, not an opinion that zero other people hold. So probably not."
"Huh. I will have to... eat an egg at some point while I'm here, I guess."
"You should do this! Now explain dungeons kidnapping people or whatever."
"Right, of course. Dungeons started appearing in the seventies, at the same time the first espers started awakening. Your standard dungeon is going to spawn somewhere in, normally, a city, with a portal to a pocket dimension, magically yoink maybe one or two dozen people from within a few-blocks radius, stash them inside of itself, and contain some monsters and be sort of on-theme in some way with the monster type and the environment of the dungeon. Like, if it looks like a tomb, it's going to have skeletons or something. The themes are suspiciously centered around concepts that are interesting to humans, like there's dragons and dinosaurs but there's not weird animal mashups we don't have a word for or extinct creatures that get less press than dinosaurs. Somewhere in the dungeon there is a core, which is usually going to be a kind of basketball-sized object hidden somewhere central, sometimes guarded by a boss monster but a lot of dungeons also just have lots of equal monsters instead; destroy the core and the dungeon collapses within a few minutes and is never seen again, any people or things inside irretrievable forever. Many dungeons you can evacuate and kill with a non-superpowered SWAT team or army unit or whatever. If the dungeon is not killed then after a few days it'll despawn on its own, people and things inside irretrievable forever, and then the dungeon - matures, comes back bigger and more effective and streamlined."
"A lot of those characteristics have some range of variation, too, like sometimes a dungeon sends out monsters to drag people into it bodily instead of just assuming them into itself, but most dungeons are like that."
"That sounds so spooky! I guess it's not worse than like.... I dunno, I was going to say like natural disasters or international incidents but you probably also have those and then this on top."
"Some people credit the decline of international armed conflict to dungeons - you can keep quite a lot of army guys busy on managing dungeons and if you have a lot of army guys and they're not doing anything about the kidnapped civilians then your civilians get restless."
"That's so fair. I think we might be at lower rates than the like sixties through eighties but not, uh, I wouldn't say in decline. Not that I like know things, but, like, there's construction near my apartment that's from some sort of sabotage-related explosion, they think, even if they haven't figured out who it was yet."
"...that would definitely be remarkable in my world, there's monster damage but not sabotage-related explosions so much, especially in, like, residential areas."
"It's not like right next door to me. .....But yeah, I guess it's not that far away either..."
"I am not aware of sabotage-suspected damage anywhere in Toronto in my lifetime."
"I mean, I don't really follow the news, I could have missed some, but yeah."
"I follow the news zero and I still know of like, a dozen maybe."
"...that's different then, yeah, who the hell wants to sabotage Toronto?"
"I mean, they don't, right; they want to sabotage things in Toronto. It's like a pretty normal amount for cities of this size...."
"What things does Toronto contain that are attractive sabotage targets??"
"Man. That's so weird. I don't know if it's necessarily worse than dungeons, I guess, but it seems like you could instead simply not have it, if it's humans doing it."
"I can't say I've ever been tempted but I also haven't ever been in a situation where it would be tempting."
"I don't mean you as an individual, just, human action alone could prevent this, which is not the case with dungeons as far as I know."
"Yeah, but like, everyone is human individuals, right? So it's probably hard in some way even if it's not literally impossible the way it would be to stop natural disasters or whatever. ...Actually, it might be easier to stop natural disasters; science is doing new cool stuff all the time."
"I don't think my world is particularly close to eradicating any kinds of natural disaster. It sounds like you have some kind of fuck-uppedness in your, like, equilibrium of incentives, which is yielding all the sabotage? I don't know what it would be though."
"Well, maybe dungeons will be contagious and we'll be united by a common enemy or something and cut it out."
"That'd be cool except for all the ways in which it would not be cool."
"Yeahhhhhh. Do you have any reason to think they might or might not be contagious?"
"No, this is my first nonfictional exposure to other universes. They didn't, like, start in one place and expand from there like an epidemic, they started happening all over the world."
"Huh. Would you guys have noticed if there were any, like, on the moon?"
"Maybe not. But I doubt there've been any there. They like population centers, they don't even show up on farms more than once in a blue moon. Cities mostly, once a cruise ship."
"I was about to be like, 'That's so weird,' but maybe it's not actually that weird based on the other things you said about them."
"I mean, they eat people, or like not literally eat them usually but certainly want them for something. There's no people on the moon and not usually much of a selection on a farm or in the desert or in the middle of the ocean."
"...people landed there, but it was before dungeons were a thing, and even if a dungeon had spawned right at the time of their landing it was like three guys, even a very small dungeon is going to want at least, like, eight, and will appear someplace that has more than a total of eight options to sort through them in some way."
"It would not have been weirder to me that you guys hadn't gone to your moon than it is you don't have cultured meat! - But you didn't like keep going back? Maybe dungeons take up all your money for that sort of explorationy stuff?"
"I guess that could be it but also there's not a lot of stuff to do, on the moon? In the long term a flourishing human civilization has people living there but it's not hospitable or cost-effective or particularly useful at our current tech level, I guess maybe it is at yours..."
"2025, I guess dungeons are somehow slowing us down more than rampant industrial sabotage is slowing you guys down. Or maybe even minor head injuries are like lead poisoning and you guys are more resilient to them or something."
"How do you feel about the idea of going through some medical scans and tests? After a week has passed, of course."
"It is currently sort of hard to project how I will feel about things in a week unless I already know my preexisting opinion on whatever it is."
"Very reasonable." Xavier ruffles his hair and sets a plate with two folded half-sandwiches in front of him. There's not the best view of the chicken, with it surrounded by bread and at least three kinds of cheese, but it looks approximately like a pretty regular steak of chicken breast. Xavier circles back to fetch a bowl of soup garnished with additional grated cheese but no herbs.
It is. The meat is quite good but not in any identifiably non-chicken way; it just tastes like an unusually delicious example of the kind.
He is going to sort of hug her arm and eat one handed if that's okay with everybody.
Ari doesn't complain, at least. ....If she depockets her phone, does eating take up enough of his attention that she can get in a few rounds of puzzle game?
That's a no. Phone gets blanked and goes facedown on the counter.
"- No, it's fine, sorry. Uh, maybe after lunch we can play something actually collaborative."
"...books. I am normally an introvert in my introvert hole with a book. Or Civilization? I'm not sure if you can get multiplayer Civilization to be quite multiplayer enough for my symptoms to tolerate it but it might be worth a try if there are computers and Civilizations to hand. Or Alpha Centauri or, like, whatever alternate universe civilization-building game you might have."
"I have my laptop but I think not anything in that genre. I have... some party games, which are kind of more about the party than about the game, and also like basic move-based puzzle stuff where the main limit to scoring high is how much thought you're willing to put into each move, such that two heads are way better than one?"
"Worth a try. It's probably too optimistic to imagine I could concentrate on Civ anyway."
"Mm. ....Do you think you're having a better time than you would have at a hospital?"
"If the hospital's never heard of espers, almost certainly; even in my universe where the hospitals have heard of espers they left me home."
"That's good. I kind of thought when I picked you up that something like that might be true, but it seemed good to like, check, now that you're here."
"I am still pretty confused about the hospitality but it's not bad qua hospitality at all."
"You're very interesting. I now suspect you'll be a very useful person to have made a friend of, but even before that you were interesting."
"I'd have to be remarkably interesting to be worth a week of this. I guess perhaps you're planning to turn me out tomorrow."
"I would not necessarily class myself as an extrovert, but I think your own discomfort may be throwing off your calibration of how unpleasant this is for other parties."
"Maybe, but it turns out I'd really rather believe you're grudgingly tolerating me than believe that you don't exist."
"Hm. ...Would you care to elaborate on that?" Here's Ari's sandwich, and then her soup.
"My flavor options or whatever you want to call them that I have discovered so far are solipsism and, like, social anxiety, and touch starvation, and I'm mostly leaning on the last one but the first one is the one where I'd rather be dead."
"- no?? I mean I am trying to have the most touch starvation because it's the least fucking with my head option and doesn't make me want to be dead."
"And in order to get that, you don't need to do any actual starving of touch?"
"Right, I have a magical curse and not a thing that responds to reality at all in any way."
"Okay... - Acknowledged. Heard." She starts in on her sandwich, one-handed.
"You don't have to be sorry - uh, unless, magically you do - I just don't get it. But I might if I think about it for a second."
"Part filler word, part I am concerned that I made you self-conscious by responding how I did to you saying 'okay' about a thing earlier."
"The thing I don't get is how reality not affecting your curse in any way.... works. .....I could probably piece it together on my own if I thought about the way you've acted so far but maybe for magical curse reasons you want to try and explain it instead of there being quiet for me to think in."
"Trying to explain it definitely sounds easier. So, uh, I am experiencing the emotion of loneliness. Which I'm not used to at all, I'm introverted and have never been alone long enough for it to be a problem, it took me a bit to identify for sure. Sort of like a depressed person could continue to experience sadness even if they, like, got exactly what they wanted for their birthday, or if it was a really nice day out, or they saw a kitten, or whatever, I will continue to experience loneliness at roughly this level all week. But it's causing all the same impulses that normal endogenous loneliness would. I'm metaphorically scratching poison ivy here, turned up to eleven, it doesn't help the underlying emotional state at all but not doing it would take up an absolutely intractable amount of my concentration and I'd probably eventually fail at controlling myself, possibly in a direction that'd make me do something worse than simply snuggling people all week."
"Geez, gotcha. No starving you on purpose, then. ....Though we are going to have to switch sides once I run out of sandwich so I don't have to try and use a spoon left-handed."
"...You know, it's like super good that you showed up now and not a few years ago. I've really gotten a lot better at being a person in the past while, and like, one of the ways that's true in is that I used to be really self-conscious about wanting anything, or like inconveniencing people? To the point that I was really annoying to be around, because I just like, wouldn't express any preferences, literally at all. But like, now you don't have to - or, hm... don't have any non-magical basis - to worry that you're bothering me, because I can and will just tell you about it when it happens, and then we can not do whatever the thing is. It's kind of amazing."
"Well, if I'd landed two years ago it's plausible the first person I met on the street wouldn't randomly have known your uncle."
"That's also true! I kind of think of him as knowing infinite people but this is not literally the case."
"I would imagine not. It would be different in kind from other interuniversal discrepancies."
"Yeah, I'd say that, and then next thing you'd be like, 'actually, my earth is flat, somehow, even though we have a moon that we've been to even if it was only once,' or something. Probably something weirder than that, actually, that's still not really on the same scale as being able to know infinite people."
Xavier's own sandwich and soup are ready; he sits in the open spot next to Ari. "Does your world experience sunstorms? Solar flares?"
"I have heard of solar flares, I don't think they're usually very exciting to non-astronomers?"
"Ohhhh whaaaaat? That sounds so convenient. Here we like, launched a superweapon into the sun in the fifties so it wouldn't blow up on earth, but then now it still makes cell signal go out for a while every now and again; it's super annoying."
"Wow, uh, I think our sun is not in the habit of threatening to blow up the earth."
"So the superweapon wouldn't blow up on earth, not so the sun wouldn't blow the earth up," Xavier clarifies.
"Oh. Uh, why is the sun a better place for such a thing than just... the vacuum of space?"
"I was not involved in the decision-making process, but I believe there were concerns about debris returning to earth."
"In the movie they were under a lot of time pressure and just had to do something fast; I don't know if that's accurate."
"Getting things to the sun isn't even fast, it's, you know, about one astronomical unit away."
"I think picking the coordinates was the part that had to happen fast, not the actual getting it there. But like again, I know this from a movie that was accurate enough for them to show it to us at the end of the year in physics class, which is not zero bar but also not a high one."
"It might have just been a bad idea in the first place; sometimes people have those. And act on them. Like having a superweapon to begin with."
"Yeah, it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to ask if we didn't really."
Shuffle shuffle shuffle swap. "Why's that so happy-making? - Were you getting tired of being on that side; you know you're like, also very welcome to make physical comfort requests, right..."
"It's a social anxiety type symptom I think! I confused the shit out my father when I called him about it because he knew I always wanted to be an esper so I sounded like I had to be being super sarcastic when I told him it sucks!"
Xavier, now adjacent to him, slings an arm around his shoulders and gives him a single squeeze.
"How concerned are you about the risk of not being able to communicate a preference of yours, which you'll regret once more clearheaded?
"Uh, not very? Not being able to enforce a boundary even if I mention it I am worried about some, I guess, this has occurred to me as a possible failure mode of crashing in some random guy's place, but it would get mentioned if only because I'd eventually run out of other things to say."
"It's good that you're able to watch out for yourself at least that much." He ruffles Haru's hair and returns to eating.
"I agree! Most backlashes will not just strike newly awakening espers dead on the spot but some of them come close and it looks like if some awakening esper had to show up in this timeline I am a relatively good choice because I don't need to mystify any doctors and can mostly rationally account for my own delusional symptoms!"
"Oh, a lot of them aren't even psychological at all! Fever, say, that's a simple one that'd kill you if you couldn't go to the hospital and have them put you in an ice bath - fever drugs wouldn't work and somebody with that backlash in this situation would cook a few layers off their brain while the doctors came to terms with a magical fever that wouldn't go down."
"How strange, that drugs don't work and ice does. Is that universal, by equivalent?"
"I'm not actually sure if ice baths are the ideal protocol for a fever backlash but that's the general trend, that if there's an effect operating on - physics rather than solely biology - you can physics back at it, but the biology isn't listening, the biology is doing magic curse things instead. There are actually some pills that help with backlash but I can't remember the whole chemical name and it doesn't touch awakening, the use case is, like, you were in a dungeon with your partner and your partner died and you need to get through the meet-and-greet process to find a new one."
"Is it possible to affect adjacent biology? If your fever gives you a headache in the course of brain-cooking, can you treat that normally? It must work at some remove, or at least not be known not to; you accepted the painkillers earlier..."
"Well, my backlash doesn't directly feature any physical pain. Unless the antipyretic properties in normal painkillers are indicated in their mechanism of action I'd expect them to work fine on the hypothetical fever esper's headache."
"I expect them to still have all their side effects? And I guess there could be some case where, like, if you fail to metabolize some chemical in one way the next thing it does is bad, but I'm not a doctor. I was going to be a doctor, if I didn't awaken... not a pharmacologist though."
"Nice! Or, I mean, now you're maybe going to be an esper instead?"
"If I can get home. Espers make good money, though, there's charities about malaria."
"A piece of information - which I have yet to determine the relevance of - is that I am a pharmacologist. To a first approximation."
"Well, if I get really annoying and you want to sedate me I'm not opposed in principle but I don't know how much other stuff there is like the concussion thing."
"Yes, do let's see how the painkillers pan out before trying anything stronger. Are you genuinely more concerned for our annoyance than your discomfort, or are you worried that annoyance would lead to practical negative consequences for you?"
"Oh, I'm dreadfully concerned for my comfort over other people's annoyance or I would have probably not asked a random stranger to call me an ambulance and then accepted your hospitality instead, I actually feel pretty guilty about it when the social anxiety symptoms are kicking me too hard but it seems robust so far that I would way rather comfortably survive the week than not impose on you when I'm pro-surviving at all. I'll just sometimes be apologetic about it. I think probably even if you are very irritated with me at some point you would call me an ambulance instead of kicking me out into your gravel driveway with no shoes on."
"Would you hedonistically prefer to be sedated at least some of the time if you knew it were safe."
"If I knew that, yes. I think some people just fall into comas and I am occasionally longingly considering the virtues of comas. I'd probably panic on the way out of consciousness about the likelihood of being left alone in my coma bed, but, like, not for very long, since, coma. It just seems unlikely to be knowably safe."
"Indeed. But there are shorter-lasting knockout drugs which are about as safe as coffee and which I'm beginning to wonder whether you simply don't have, without a culture where sabotage and its like are common."
"...can you explain how a culture of sabotage etcetera makes these drugs exist? Like, I'm pretty sure lots of people would love a sleeping pill that was as safe as coffee - I guess if it doesn't produce actual sleep it's less useful but you'd see it for, like, claustrophobes in MRIs, dentistry, the sort of thing they do twilight anesthesia for but only if the patient really can't stand it because it's not as safe as coffee."
"I could easily be misattributing the cause, but we do have something which gets used for those things - in addition to skipping medium-length plane flights for some small but notable fraction of travellers - which was originally developed for adversarial purposes. It's somewhat limited in availability largely because of the potential for abuse to other parties, not because it's dangerous for personal use."
"I guess it's nice of your saboteurs to be so, uh, considerate? Instead of just chloroforming people or murdering them."
"Some advocate for wider availability, with the idea that it would cut down on that. But there isn't much barrier to anyone organized getting ahold of some, so lawmakers think we're at the correct level of inconvenience to reduce total harm."
"Sounds like a tricky balance to strike. Anyway, no idea how it'd interact with my interdimensional brain. - what was the painkiller I took, I was expecting ibuprofen or acetaminophen."
"......well, I've never heard of that in my life so if I start frothing at the mouth or something it's probably that." He prods his sore elbow.
"Noted."
His elbow feels fine, a touch sore if he really pokes it. And his headache's gone too.
"And I haven't noticed any side effects. Are there any it's normally expected to have that I should keep an eye on?"
"It can exacerbate side effects of some classes of other medications taken with it. It's not advised to take any with alcohol, but that doesn't stop, stereotypically, college students from doing so with the intention of both heading off their hangover and having a stronger buzz. When this goes poorly it tends to be in the direction of leading to injury rather than by a direct medical cause."
"Oh, well, fortunately I don't drink. Not that this would be a great time to go on a drinking spree even if that were a thing I did."
"It might help. It like, probably would instead not, but it might!"
"Let's not and say we did and then immediately retract that claim so as not to contaminate anybody's data about alcohol's interaction with awakenings."
"Probably! I don't know about it in particular, just my sense that the biology's not listening."
"Do you feel well enough for shopping, Haru, or should I send Ariel on a solo quest for shoes, clothes, and groceries after lunch?"
"I don't... love the idea of being insane in public any more than I have to?"
"It's fine, I love field trips. Do you know your sizes for everything?"
"Uh, I'm not sure I should expect clothing sizes to be consistent across universes, but -" he does.
"I can get stuff with some give, but those don't sound obviously wrong to me. What colors and stuff do you like?"
"I usually just go with, like, blue jeans, and T-shirts in - I guess not literally any color, I'm not the wears-pink kind of gay. Black red grey blue white green brown whatever."
"Cool. And sneakers? It's early enough that if we need to return them I can just go right back, probably."
"O - kay. Am I good to nab some like pajama bottoms for me, too? I didn't actually pack stuff for a week and if I have to drive back into Toronto today I will die."
"Probably out of an abundance of caution I should not attempt to shave this week, so I guess nothing in that vein."
"...well, if you're not in range of takeout then I guess not 'Chinese takeout'. Whatever you'd make at home to approximate Chinese takeout. I have lowbrow food tastes."
"I could go out a little later rather than sooner and bring some back with me?"
"If that will not interfere with your shoe-returning contingencies that would be very kind of you!"
"Ehn, if I have to go back into town tomorrow I won't die of that one."
"Where is this, anyway, I guess I don't know if we have the same suburbs but we have Toronto so."
"Eloel, 'suburbs'. Nearest stop light's in Pine Creek, and I'll be running to Lakedale for errands."
"Exurbs. Whatever. I don't recognize either name but perhaps that means nothing."
"I would really not expect you to even if they were a perfect match."
"Mmhm! Do you want anything for like, groceries? Should I get frozen pizzas and stuff."
"...is this a Canada in which people do not eat Kraft Dinner box macaroni and cheese, or merely one in which it is not abbreviated that way."
"That would be very unlikely on my planet. Does the food company Kraft with a K exist at all?"
"Wow. Well, any box of pasta with a little packet of cheese powder you turn into a sauce will do the trick."
"Oh, sure. And frozen pizzas, and things like that." Phone phone type type.
"Yeah, things like that. Instant ramen. Peanut butter and jelly. Whatever."
"You actively prefer these to cuisine that requires more complicated preparation immediately before eating?"
"I wouldn't go so far as to say actively? I'm used to it, and I guess if I never have authentic KD again because I'm trapped in a universe that doesn't have it that would be among the thousands of problems with that situation but I won't miss it for a week."
"I enjoy cooking and consider myself good at it. If you want these things Ariel will get them for you, but I will largely be preparing my own meals separately; you're not conveniencing me by choosing them and you're not imposing on me in choosing something - more selective."
"If you're going to be cooking all the time anyway and it's not extra trouble to fix some for me too I will eat what you make, you're a good cook."
"...it's going to be my birthday somewhere in this mess and cake is traditional. I am presently confused about the date in a way that I think has to do more with interdimensional transit than with backlash."
"Usually on my birthday we go out for steak, not because I like steak dramatically better than anything else but because it's nice enough to have in the rotation and expensive enough to need an excuse."
"Steak it is, then. I suppose that to you cultured is more novel and desirable than the costlier kind."
"It does taste better, too. Literally the only benefit of eating a piece of an actual cow is that it's, like, fancy."
"As you prefer! When would you like your celebration to be, regardless of whether this corresponds perfectly to the relevant date?"
"Well, I started awakening in the middle of the night before, uh... Wednesday, which was the twelfth, and my birthday's the thirteenth... it doesn't matter, this week is going down in history as Awakening Week and then after that I will be eighteen and an esper and it just really doesn't matter."
"And if I'm not heading out till later, you have a while to think of other things you might want. In the meantime, ready to try out some co-op games?"
To the living room! (Well, to the sink with their dishes and then that.) "Did you want the puzzley kind or the party kind?"
"Well, it'll be sort of encouraging if I can do puzzles at all right now so we could try that first."
"Cool. I have Shinies and Yours, Weeper as things that stand out in this genre? Ooh, and Excelsior is a pretty good co-op co-ord game, if the puzzles don't pan out; I wasn't thinking of it because it's kind of neither puzzles nor party."
"I guess based solely on the titles I am most curious about what the heck Yours, Weeper could be about?"
"Well, first off, do you have a game called Minesweeper where you're from?"
"It's funky, though! You like, play a run of games until you lose, and you collect a bunch of power-ups along the way that make this easier, like, a really common early one is one that doesn't let your first blind click hit a bomb, if it would, it just flags them until you find a piece of normal ground. And a later one is like an EMP that deactivates all the bombs within a certain radius, but it has to be your last move on a field otherwise you instantly lose, because it like, shakes the ground. And the art is really nice; the animations are all really swooshy, and there are like, characters, with honestly pretty good plot. ....I have some qualms with some of the plot but like. Overall."
"It's not actually supposed to be co-op but it's not timed - or like, there's an IGT for speedrunners but you don't have to pay attention to it - but I lose most of my runs to carelessness so I think it benefits from like, having someone to discuss moves with."
Setup setup setup. "Not carelessness carelessness - okay sometimes carelessness carelessness - but like, not being super patient about taking ten minutes to think out all the implications of a single move, y'know? For multiple moves in a row. I don't have time for that! Except for this week when I definitely definitely have time for that."
"Mhm! I mean, thank my uncle." Her laptop is now projecting to the TV as a second screen. Vwoop here's the game. "Do you want a new save file or do you think you won't be able to pay attention to the plot anyway?"
"I think I can probably pay attention to the plot if you're explaining it to me, I won't be able to absorb it direct."
"Does that count me reading the lines or do you need, like, summaries?"
"I will tuuuuurn on the relevant streamer mode," she narrates. There's a toggle for voice acting, apparently.
"....That won't happen? It's voice acted by default; I turned that off."
"I am also sorry you can't read! It sounds like it sucks." Settings settings new save file. "How do you spell your name - or, uh, sorry, can you not right now -"
Oh noooo, wow. Type enter. Does he perhaps want some extra hug about this.
Of course it would. Well, here's the game. The plot is apparently about two fantasy civilizations who've been at war for a really long time but finally made peace. The player character works for one side and is meant to clear out a lot of old minefields. There's talk of a diegetic tutorial level for regular minesweeper rules with a training simulation but when they opt to skip it it turns out it's been mysteriously sabotaged and they have to go straight into fieldwork.
Ari's a pretty decent reader, at least with the example of different voice actors to draw from.
It is pretty hard to concentrate on. But he can when prompted dredge up general principles about Minesweeper and answer questions about the value of different upgrades and snark about the plot.
"Than literally nothing, yes, than getting a decent book read to me no. But anything that extends your tolerance to cover the week is good."
"...Yeah, sorry, reading an entire book out loud sounds kind of like torture. I bet you can get my uncle to do it; he likes showing off and is more patient than me. This is better or worse than you telling me the plots of books?"
"Mostly the problem is that I can't concentrate on the individual layout of each puzzle, so I'm just talking about the plot, which like you warned me is not amazing, and about generalities of Minesweeper, which get samey fast, like, there's only so many times I can comment on how whenever there's a corner like that it's got to be a mine."
"I like most of the plot, I just think it handled a couple things poorly later on. But Excelsior might be better? It's actually co-op; you play as a pair of secret agents infiltrating different places by climbing buildings in various ways. Sometimes you're literally attached to each other but generally you're having to work pretty closely together in order to do things that your character can do that the other one can't. I don't know whether that's social enough or whether you can even like, hold a controller without it being miserable for you."
"I don't think I'm specifically impaired in merely holding a controller. Though we might wind up compromising on cuddliness in ways I won't love."
"Let's give it a go?" She exits the game and then leads Haru up to the console under the TV to extract the controllers. What if they sit like - this - with their sides pressed together, and, hm. Arms are hard. She goes through a couple configurations. "How's this?
"I'll live. - it's not hard to answer 'better or worse' type questions but on an absolute scale the week is going to suck."
"...Ugh. Well, I'm probably still going to want to mix it up in five minutes anyway. - And shoot, I forgot to connect them." She's going to steal Haru's controller back and lean off the couch to tap them against the side of her laptop until they chime. And then back in position.
She doesn't bother starting a new file on this one, just goes into an existing one and navigates through the level select. A cutscene with voice acting starts playing but she skips it. Apparently this level has the two of them tied together at the waist with a length of rope, and they're trying to climb the outside of this variously-textured skyscraper. Sometimes they're sticking to glass walls, sometimes they're navigating platforms. A lot of it is one of them standing in a spot while the other swings back and forth until there's enough momentum for the first to jump and send them both flying.
Ari wants to switch positions after they cross the first real obstacle (what if her legs were across his lap?) and after another two, "- Where's the suckage level at?"
"Suckage level is tolerable, I'm mostly able to look at the screen even."
"This is a pretty easy level; do you think you'll be able to handle harder stuff or is that not hopeful."
"Some of them are tighter windows on coordination fundamentally like this; there are some we should probably skip with us doing separate minigames to unlock different stuff; there are some with minigames that still involve cooperating pretty tightly, like, taking turns doing a thing, or there's one where like you're doing one of those electric grid puzzles, but one player has horizontal movement and the other has vertical, and the puzzle itself is pretty easy because the hard part is working in sync."
"I could probably take turns doing a thing if the thing itself isn't too complicated or you're prompting me through my turns."
Ever upward, then! (With breaks for Ari to switch up the way she's in contact with him pretty frequently. It ends up being mostly leg-based.)
Ari doesn't have more than about two hours of playing this in her, even if Haru does.
He calls a halt after forty-five minutes. "It might be worth trying more of this again later but I'm getting pretty sick of it."
"Fair!" She starts shutting it down and packing up the objects. "Where the heck were we, in you telling me stories?"
"We were halfway through the Odyssey, shall I pick up from where you fell asleep?"
Half an hour in, Xavier silently resumes his position in the armchair.
The arrival of a person in the room is more interesting than the Odyssey but he manages not to break stride.
That's good, because Ari has questions! And only some of them are logistical ones about how to comfortably keep up cuddles.
"Ariel," Xavier interjects during one of their shuffles. "I've whipped up something which you're under no obligation to take, but might wish to."
"Something used by agents on stakeouts, or in other scenarios where it's advantageous to be comfortable remaining still for long periods. Very well refined, very safe, no mental effects, but it'll sell well enough if you don't want any."
"I'm not going to answer that. Decide that you want it or don't on its own merits; I didn't make it for the money. But of course feel free to take the out if you need to."
"I'm accustomed to oral medications for adults being pills," comments Haru even though the situation obviously did not need this comment in any way.
"Well, hm, yeah? Uncle Xave, do they usually call this sorta thing medication? Like, officially."
"Hmmm. I think to me a medication is something that makes you less bad instead of more good, and that - maybe doesn't change just because I in particular, the one taking it, am worse than most people at the thing it makes you better at? Like, I drink coffee to focus, and I'm normally pretty bad at that, but that doesn't make caffeine a medication, let alone one that I would take as a pill."
"Many augmentative drugs are in fact mass-produced in pill form. It's somewhat less common for ones an agent might need to take while in a high-action scenario, and I found a liquid form factor more convenient and quick to produce with the materials I have in my lab at this time."
"Caffeine pills are a thing. At home, anyway. And stimulants for people with ADD are medications and not completely distinct from coffee."
"I don't know much about it, I don't have ADD. They're both called stimulants, you hear about people who have it self-medicating with caffeine."
Apparently it doesn't kick in quite immediately, but after another two shifts the requests start spacing out substantially, until they're longer than it takes for Haru to start becoming uncomfortable.
It's improved by having fewer momentum-breaking physical logistics!
Ari sits through the whole! Thing! And she thinks the main couple is pretty cute.
"Are you gonna want dinner soonish? It'll take me a while to do errands first."
Snuggle. "So what were you going to be doing before a problems guy appeared, what'm I interrupting?"
"Reports. Much less of an interruption than it would be with something less data-related and more physical; I was already going to be working here regardless."
"Ah heck, classified information, my secret super-weakness. Ugh. What do you do in your spare time, then."
"Well, maybe awakening'll cure my dyspraxia and I'll have a consolation prize for never being able to try out my magic powers safely in the form of learning to dance. I can't do it now, though."
"Is this a case where asking how your classes were going is an interesting question, or the opposite."
"I mean, I'll take it, considering. I usually get A's, sometimes I'll let a B slip past me in history or math or French - actually I bet language practice conversations would really hit the spot, I wouldn't be able to take notes but the amount and kind of paying attention to each other combined with learning a skill might be as good as it gets - and I take gym pass/fail and mostly follow a yoga app and lift weights in the corner unless we're doing something where I won't break my neck like swimming."
"There's occasionally some variance. I could practice with you, if you'd like."
"Trés bien. Of course there's still the finding a conversation topic problem but it feels marginally less stupid to settle for asking where le plume de ma tante is when it's language practice."
In French: "I was going to suggest that I could read books to you, but perhaps that wouldn't be sufficiently social."
"If you go slowly and I ask questions of the words of the book, I think it is good."
Xavier's e-reader thing does not already have Le Petit Prince on it, but it can within a moment.
Haru's read it but that's not really in his top ten concerns now. He interrupts every sentence or so to speculate about etymology and clarify points of grammar.
Xavier is deeply knowledgeable about French grammar! It would take a pretty deep cut to hit on something he doesn't already know.
Then they will tolerably pass the duration of Le Petit Prince. "Have you got Les Miserables or the Count of Monte Cristo?" he asks when it's over.
It's at a substantially higher reading level, but they can pick their way through it as slowly as necessary.
Though this means Ari's back before they're very far in it at all. "Foooood arrival!"
"Hello! I'd offer to help put things away but I believe I'd be an active detriment."
"Seems legit. Are you staying in my uncle's room?" Takeout bag gets deposited on the kitchen peninsula but she's got Walmart ones in hand too.
"There's a spare room if you'd rather set up base in there, although I expect that Ariel would take it by default." (He's switched back to English.)
"It probably makes more sense for her to have it, it's not like I have a lot of my own possessions or functional desire for privacy right now."
"I brought you some possessions! I guess not really a lot of them, though, yeah. But if you want to change into day clothes you can now."
"Do we need to do the talking through the door thing or will somebody accompany me?"
Haru changes into new clothes in a businesslike fashion while concocting various schemes not to be out of physical contact and not make it weird. He comments on all the clothes but the comments are things like "I don't recognize this brand" and "it's not worth returning it over but this one's got a stitch missing in the sleeve hem", he doesn't have a lot of clothes opinions.
Xavier proprietously sits on the bed facing the wall with his eyes closed.
"I should hope they're not broken in! Come eat, the food's already had a decent car ride's worth of cooling."
"Yeah 'course." Food! Ari tears into some egg rolls and puts one in her mouth before heading back out for the rest of the groceries.
Omf dumpling. "I assume downscale takeout is going to be vat meat in this timeline."
"Is it always like, real animals, or do they make weird mad science ones - or are people eating things that would be hard to farm, like, uh, alligator, because it's no longer necessary to farm it -"
"Initially, most meat was grown from samples taken a relatively small number of whole animals, which were judged to produce the best available version of various cuts of meat. We moved onto editing the genomes directly a few years later, and since then a few hybrids have become relatively popular. I believe Ariel's partial to biffen. And yes, if you'd like to try alligator - or, let's see, elk, orca, kangaroo, dodo, that sort of thing - I could acquire some without too much issue."
"It's not my life ambition or anything but as long as I'm here, why not. Biffen is... I don't have a confident guess."
"Beef and chicken! Mostly. The brand I like's also got some turkey and like, quail mixed in. And a little fish I think?"
"Ah, okay, I don't know why I imagined they'd stick to two-animal combinations."
"Those were the norm when I was little but then they like, improved."
"I can go shopping again tomorrow! It's better anyway; I'll be going back to the city for more things from my place and the selection's not shit there. The grocery stores out here don't have much of the fun stuff. ...To me. Biffen and some other stuff you won't have tried are still pretty standard." Nomf. "There's some in my egg rolls; you can have one."
"I feel like a novel meat blend will not be trivially appreciable in an eggroll, half the time I couldn't tell you if they contain pork or chicken." He eats one anyway.
Yeah it's an egg roll.
"That's really fair. What do you want for tomorrow?"
"...I have no idea what I'll like. Is orca any good? Is dodo? - do you have non-extinct dodos in this timeline, that pushes back the earliest possible divergence point though I don't off the top of my head recall how far."
"Well, those were the ones that stuck out to me most on the list and I have no other way to discriminate."
"I have a friend who always gets orca whenever we go out for burgers. I think it's kind of creepy, I mean, what if they're people..."
"...even if the animal ones are people surely the vat ones are not?"
"...For your calibration most burger places don't serve orca. She just always wants to go to a specific one that does."
"Most burger places don't even have, like, turkey burgers, my timeline, so that makes sense."
"I think most places here have a couple-three choices at least. ....But like, in the city. Maybe not here here."
"I guess maybe it depends how strict you are with definitions of 'burger'. Like, McDonalds'll put chicken on a sandwich for you and that's not a burger, and has a plant based vegetarian thing these days and that is."
"I mean, you could put chicken in a patty - and then you'd have a chicken patty, but if you then did not bread it you'd have a chicken burger. It's like a specific form factor. They just mostly don't do that for some reason."
"Yeah, I've seen turkey burgers but not chicken burgers and don't know why."
"...doesn't sound familiar but I might not know about all the countries in Central Europe."
"...not like 'they all learn it in school so you can get by there with English as a tourist' but 'it's the principal native language of the majority of Aldovians'? Okay, that makes it weirder that I haven't heard of it. How long has it existed?"
"...okay, that either pushes back the latest possible date at which our timelines could have diverged by a lot, or we used to have an Aldovia and it got folded into some other country at some point or doesn't speak English in my world and I don't happen to remember it. I'd ask for a map but it would be unrelatedly hard to look at one."
"Do you think you could like, draw? For the benefit of another person?"
"I might not know for sure till I try it but my guess is that I can doodle a little map to give someone directions if I natter on about it the whole time and cannot do a portrait commission even if we assume for the sake of argument my drawing skills were up to such a task."
"I guess it doesn't seem that important to nail down a bunch of differences very quickly. Though maybe you find it more interesting to talk about than other stuff?"
"Timeline differences? I do find them interesting but would not expect to be able to draw an accurate enough European map from memory to help."
"Wait really? ....I'm kidding; that's not a difference. I can't do that either."
"I wouldn't expect many people to be able to. I can just about fill in all the provinces on a blank political map."
"Okay, that I can do. There aren't that many of them! ...Is it still ten, for you? And three territories?"
"Yes, that's the same. Numerically." He can list them in case they differ non-numerically.
"Name doesn't sound familiar but I don't remember who it was instead because I didn't pay much attention to politics when I was eight."
"Why that in particular? - Okay, I see why, actually; good question and I also want to know."
"Is that a country? I don't recognize the name but if it's a random town that's not big enough to get lots of dungeons I wouldn't."
"I mean, it's impolite to say it like that. For people who know better."
"Like who didn't just jump timelines. It's not," airquotes, "PC - uh, that means 'politically correct' - but I didn't want you to feel bad about having said it."
"Me too! Uh, the latter, and also not exactly half. But I've never been, whereas he like grew up there."
"...I'm struggling to imagine 'bigness on Christmas' as a national stereotype for any country full of humans instead of Whos. - does this timeline have Dr. Seuss."
"Historical coincidence has nationally-significant events occurring at Christmastime; combined holidays lead to increased exuberance of celebration in both; several Aldovian carols and modern Christmas songs achieve standout popularity; the country's small enough - and despite or perhaps because of economic mismanagement, comparatively competent at keeping appetizing sabotage targets outside their borders - such that much of the world forgets about it the rest of the year."
"Stereotypically! That one's less offensive, though. Like us being polite, maybe?"
"Ren - uh, my mother - told me once that the ASL sign for 'Canada' is a lot like the one for 'sorry'."
"It's better than many of the older signs for various countries that were based on physical features of the population."
"I'd believe it. I don't actually know any sign language, Ren's jut a fountain of fun facts and I retain some of them."
"I can fingerspell and I know like, maybe five-ten actual signs but that's it."
"Sure!"
Once dinner's wrapped up she can start going through the alphabet with him. Erring on the side of taking his hand and repositioning it herself way more than she would with anyone else.
That's very helpful of her. Also it makes anything he thinks of to say take up more time, which under the circumstances is plausibly desirable.
"LSQ - Langue des signes québécoise - uses the same alphabet, though it's largely a different language otherwise. In case you need to fingerspell French. People do different things for the accents; with loanwords in an otherwise English context you might just skip them, some people draw them in the air - either above or below the letter immediately after signing it, as you would in writing, some leave them to the end of the word -" And he can get into the details of what groups of people tend to do these things and when.
That's really helpful and interesting! Haru will practice all the options as they are mentioned so as to be Participating.
Xavier's somewhat more restrained than Ari about correcting Haru's errors, despite apparently being more knowledgeable. He tends to demonstrate differences himself while describing the difference verbally, and occasionally slips in a, "May I?" before making an adjustment.
"OOOOOOOOK," Ari says and signs simultaneously, after a while. "I'm going to retire, even though it's really early. To bed. Or like at least to my laptop."
"How are you feeling?" Xavier wonders, pulling Haru in. "Within the bounds of current possibility."
"Fine, pretty much, I know the ASL alphabet now. We'll see how much I've retained in the morning."
"Indeed. When do you think you'll want to bed down for the night? It's about 9:30, now."
"I usually go to bed at around ten, my sleep schedule right now is afflicted with dimensional travel and also nap but nine thirty is a fine time to start wending generally bedwards."
"Then let's begin."
He reprises his position on the bed for Haru to change back into pajamas, and then steers Haru into that spot to do the same.
"I think it works a little bit better but not dramatically so or anything."
"Have people in this timeline always known how to knock each other out without doing brain damage," yawns Haru.
"Hmm... I'd say no; it does take some skill. But the oldest techniques I've heard of are more ancient than modern."
"Weird that things can be different anciently and there's still, like. Canada. Same provinces and all."
"With different brands for quick-mix pasta but matching ones for coffee..."
"And the languages match... or, I guess I don't know enough ASL to say that one definitely does, could be I'd go home and find I was signing gibberish."
"I'd been wondering about that as well. You'd have mentioned if you knew more than English and your amount of French?"
"I mean, I know like, individual words that are basically loaned into English, like. Kimono. Mabuhay. Tai chi."
"...I guess without dungeons you might not have much of a Filipino refugee population?"
"Dungeons were really bad for highly urban and also poor places. Indonesia also got hit really hard but not a lot of Indonesians wound up in specifically Toronto so I haven't met as many of them. Egypt did surprisingly well though."
"Mm, refugee population as in 'and their descendants'; I see. I'd be very curious to hear about this in great detail when I'm a bit more awake."
"Good. Perhaps tomorrow night, if there are still no ill effects from the painkillers, we could try a conservative dose of sedatives."
"Yeah. Still don't hit me in the head but if I'm too inconvenient we can try sedating me later maybe. Sorry."
"I'm not going to hit you in the head." He will, however, ruffle Haru's hair. "If it sounds good to you, we'll try something to get you asleep initially, and work our way up if that goes well. I don't feel it would be safe to induce a coma, as much as you might prefer it."
"Some people just fall into comas directly with their backlash. Which is a huge liability in dungeons and I guess this isn't, so that will be cool, if I ever go home and have good powers for dungeons. But it sounds nice right now."
"Well, we might be able to get you skipping as many as twelve hours a day, if all goes well."
"I do want to be awake when I'm coming out of it. So I can - watch it going."
Haru can feel Xavier nod behind him. "We can certainly skip that night."
Can Haru be quiet long enough to fall asleep. Maybe. He's going to try very very hard.
Well, Haru has to pee and he doesn't want to do that without anybody to talk to through the door. "Xavier?"
"Good morning. Sorry. Have any interesting dreams?" says Haru as he extricates himself.
"Not that I recall." He spends a moment without moving, and then rises, graceful as ever. "Yourself?"
"I think I'm slated for very boring nightmares all week," hup, bathroomwards. "About, you know, being alone in a void forever and trying to navigate automated customer service menus that claim my call is important to them while I'm trying to figure out how to die or whatever."
"I dunno, do you have anything else we could be talking about?" He needs a minute to psych himself up for the loss of physical contact and go into the bathroom and then he's in a bit of a rush, judging by the sounds. "What's on the agenda for today?"
"Much the same as yesterday. Ariel is, I believe, heading back into Toronto for a few hours. Outside of that I'll attempt to get some work done, and for dinner we'll celebrate your birthday."
"Happy birthday to me. Where is the spare toilet paper in here, I don't actually need it but it's something to say."
Haru opens the door with a spare square of paper between his hand and the doorknob before he starts running the sink to wash his hands. "That's the obvious place, I guess. I probably hate being this inane more than you hate listening to it."
"Seems plausible. Any notable dream details?" He comes to stand behind Haru and put his hands on his shoulders.
It's very considerate of him. "The customer service robot had a weird accent that, in the dream, I identified as Cantonese, but cannot figure out in retrospect. Nor alas imitate."
"Mm. What were your options for trying to die, if it's not upsetting for me to ask?"
"I don't think I'd die if I jumped out of a window, you've already been warned about keeping me away from kitchen knives, I guess I could go swallow the entire bottle of the painkiller whose name I forget but I expect that'd leave plenty of time to get me to a hospital and get my stomach pumped? I don't think this is going to come up because I'm not going to take actions to not be around people and you could stop me even if I wind up in a very stupid headspace."
"I was really confused in the dream that being in the void wasn't doing it. I did not manage to be confused about how I was able to be heard over the phone in space, though. I was contemplating trying to like, swim, toward the nearest star."
"Kind of a blurry mishmash of two dreams, I think I spent some of the customer service call stuck in an elevator, but I wasn't getting anywhere on figuring out how to get dead in an elevator."
"It does seem difficult. Would you prefer to get back in bed or move elsewhere?"
Time for Haru to again play How Long Can He Shut Up. It's not very long but he can try asking yes-or-no questions so Xavier can just go "mmhm" or "nn-nn".
Haru hugs a Xavier-arm morosely and tries to fall asleep too and manages to have sort of miserable daydreams that don't involve talking aloud.
After another half hour and change, he runs a hand through Haru's hair. "Good morning, properly."
"I'm sorry. I hope the last while hasn't been too standout-awful from that baseline."
"It might be a good idea for you and Ariel to be on offset sleep schedules so I can go bother her if you're sleeping in and I'm awake?"
"Yeah. I don't know how much she's likely to object to waking up early?"
"You might have better luck getting her to stay up into relevantly-early times," he admits.
"That'd work if she'd share the bed, I could stay up with her and then if I got up first come bother you. Dunno if she'd go for that."
"You can certainly ask her, once she's awake." He steers Haru back onto the side of the bed facing the wall. "I'm going to get dressed."
Today's shirt winds up a little too big on him, but the rest fits well enough.
"Breakfast preferences?"
"Blueberries are good? Or apple slices but only if you feel like peeling an apple. Are there weird fruit combinations like there are meat ones?"
"I have some strawberry-rhubarb as a single plant, frozen. I don't expect it to be fantastic in pancakes; blueberries it is?"
"I prefer it in cakes, personally. Maple syrup is available, perhaps obviously."
"Some people don't keep it around, if they like, don't have a sweet tooth or whatever."
"I don't think I know any recipes that want it as a baking ingredient."
"I do! Should I have Ariel pick up some other fruit combinations as well?"
"There's fewer of them than with meat, since plant products are still mostly grown instead of cultured. But more and more-interesting things have been popping up in recent years."
"Probably there are like. Apple cultivars we don't have, even if they aren't also part banana. Though I have never been that aggressive about trying every weird apple in the store."
"I'd pull up the Wikipedia article on apple varieties if you were able to read it." Kitchen! Pancake prep!
"Not significantly. I didn't like, sit out of music class the way I sat out of gym."
"I might normally sing, to fill silence, but I'm not sure it relevantly does that, for you."
"I mean, I don't have to be very musical to sing along, if I know the song, and I don't think I'm like ear-bleedingly bad."
"Uh - well now I'm worried it's racist if all I can think of are Christmas songs - what month even is it here, it's September at home - Ren's been on an Enya kick and I could mumble along with a lot of that by now? I probably know most of the words to Bohemian Rhapsody?"
"It's late March. I would not personally be offended by a selection of Christmas music, although given that it's not seasonal for either of us one of the other selections would perhaps be preferable. ...Though I am curious about overlap, given that many of our popular ones are from a country you lack."
"Uh, oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it - you being curious about the lyrics helped till they got repetitive, apparently."
That warrants a hair-ruffle, apparently. (He washes his hands again, after.) "I don't know that one. The bells, the merry sleighing bells, their cheerful tinkling tells, of winter's warmest fee-eeling -"
Haru twitches a little bit when ruffling his hair proves to require additional handwashing but doesn't comment on it. "I don't know that one... hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king, peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled?"
"Yes. Kids from two to ninety-two all have eyes aglow; Christmastime at last is here and the stars put on a show?"
"...might be kind of familiar but not enough to place it. Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright?"
"Yes. Possibly the most famous Christmas song we have. Adeste Fideles laeti triumphantes -"
"...tune sounds familiar but I don't know it to normally be in Latin. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose, and if you ever saw it, you might even say it glows?"
"...might have heard it ever before in my life but not more than once and not recently. Hark, hear the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say, throw cares away..."
"That one's surprising; I would expect very little from that part of Europe to match. Fresh-fallen snow on Christmas Eve, good fortune, good fortune to all, it brings?"
"Doesn't ring a bell. Uh, jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh?"
After a pancake-making's amount of back and forth, they determine that as a general pattern hymns and out-of-copyright songs match and more-recent ones don't. Though there are exceptions on both sides.
"And probably some false negatives, I at least have certainly not heard every single Christmas song in the world. In my world." Omnomnom pancakes.
"It's not especially something I've made a study of, either." Om nom indeed.
At exactly nine o'clock, Xavier's phone buzzes. He looks somewhat concerned. "One moment -" And then he's reading, and then he's typing. Pretty furiously.
Haru smushes his entire face into Xavier's shoulder and tries not to start crying about it. Why is this his backlash. It is the worst. Why can't he just have seizures or something.
Type type phone down. "I'm sorry, there's been a change of plans. What were you saying?"
"I don't remember. Something about Christmas songs. What's the change of plans?"
"...Oh, you look awful." Now they can snuggle up a little closer, yes. "Apparently you're not the only person who's appeared from a different world, and another one has requested to come be with me specifically out of a list of government employees. So I'll need to go get her, and you'll be staying here with Ariel."
"Well, she wouldn't, if she's eight, twice that would be markedly early for an awakening. How in the world did she pick someone off a list of government employees - how was the process 'show her a list of government employees and let her pick one' decided on, isn't that weird? -"
"Mhm." Phone phone. "Apparently she asked for someone within my department, and also had questions about my physical characteristics." Type type type.
"Maybe you're... famous in her universe or something...? Like, some people must match to found the same countries and write the same songs? I guess? Though I can't actually think of a major historical figure or famous person I'd have wanted to be placed with when I was eight..."
"That would really be something." He scoops Haru into a bridal carry and heads for the guest room.
Being carried is nice insofar as things can at present be nice. "Whee. What's her name?"
"They haven't said." Knock knock knock. "Ariel, get up. I have to leave."
"Yes. Please get dressed unless you don't mind doing it with Haru in the room."
Aaaaaaaaaugh "any exciting revelations about little miss picked you off a list?"
"That's really weird! I think... most people? Are probably safe for a random eight year old? Not necessarily prepared to take one in but not dangerous to them... - is she going to object to me and Ari also crashing here and if so what upshot does that have -"
"I have no idea. If she does I will make some sort of arrangement which will not leave you significantly more miserable."
"Thank you. If my assertion on the matter means anything and also even if it does not I am not dangerous to random eight year olds."
"Morning Ari. Apparently a random eight year old from another universe was for unclear reasons offered her pick of government employees to be stashed with and chose Xavier based on his name and physical description."
And Xavier frees himself. "I should be back in a few hours. Good luck having a decent time."
"I don't know more than that. I don't know why they couldn't have gotten her a cab and a social worker to go with it even if they were for some reason committed to giving her her pick of government employees."
"I mean... then the government would have to know where this house is? Which like, sometimes you want them to, but like, I think a lot of people they try to avoid leaving documentation of that stuff around."
"...must be a Saboteur Dimension thing, I'm pretty sure the government knows where people live in my universe unless they're doing a secret identity esper thing. Still, he could've asked them to have her meet him at like, an intersection. I would have been happy to accompany him to a nearby intersection for some fresh air."
"I'm sorry. I don't know if there's a better reason than, 'he didn't think of it'. He looked pretty freaked out though; I don't think I've ever seen him like that."
"I didn't pick up on it especially but you know him better than I do."
"I dunno, he's just normally.... not like that. Sorry, I just woke up like a minute ago."
"No, I get it, I don't need a lot of conversational horsepower anyway. Do you want some pancakes? He made pancakes."
"That sounds really good in like five minutes. I guess they might be cold and bad by then. Ughhhhhhh."
"Some of the paler ones could maybe tolerate another thirty seconds each side in the pan."
"Good enough for me." Flooooop. "I guess microwaves also exist."
"You can microwave bready stuff but it comes out kind of gummy, doesn't it? Maybe you have weird microwaves in this timeline which don't do that because they are actually using gamma radiation, or something."
"Man, I dunno. There are options for not making them cold and hard. ...Making them not cold and hard, whatever. Were you singing earlier?"
"We were figuring out whether Christmas carols match. A lot of them do but some do not."
"If you want - if... if it would be correct social, you could sing to me while I wake up a little more? And that might be. Better. Than this."
"It might not work for very long but I can give it a whirl. Uh. Are you going to Scarborough Fair, parsley sage rosemary and thyme..."
He can sing two verses and start a third and then he chokes to a halt on the third "parsley".
"The social anxiety facet of the thing doesn't like it when I'm repetitive and this applies to song motifs."
"Okay. Well. I'm at least a little more awake now. Did you get enough pancakes?"
"Then let's go get pancakes." It takes a couple of seconds before she actually starts moving. "...Hup. - Coffee also, for me. Maybe for you? Do we care about there being drugs in your blood anymore if there's an eight year old?"
"I don't know if we care about that. I don't need coffee, it's not like my alertness is the bottleneck on me accomplishing anything today. I don't know how the eight year old will change things but before he got texted about her we were observing that maybe if you sleep later than your uncle does I should stay up late so I won't be the first person awake, crash with you, and then if I'm up before you are I can bother him."
"...Eeeeeeuhhhhh." Oh, there's batter left over, Ari will just get the griddle hot and make herself a fresh few.
Can she do this while being hugged. "It is understandable not to like this idea but I had to wake him up this morning so I could go to the bathroom and then he wanted to go back to bed for half an hour and it was not great."
Yes. "I think I would like, literally rather stay up all night and crash at like ten. Than that."
"That's probably not worth it because then there would be large periods of time where, even without mystery eight year old related errands, I would be supervised by only one awake person. Maybe the eight year old is an early riser, I think kids often are."
"I might be in the exact right mood for certain brands of eight year old, the kind that just want to talk about cartoons and video games all day nonstop. I would bring my whole backlashed self to a conversation about Pokémon right now."
"Sure, tell me about Pokémon, I'm working from like three episodes of the 2025 anime and the first half of Pokémon Saturn from when I wound up babysitting one of Ren's students."
"I actually know like nothing about Pokémon. But I do have so many thoughts about the plot of Yours, Weeper and would be happy to tell you about them eight year old style."
Then Ari can dive into how some aspects of the plot are really good, like the character development of the person who comes up with all your upgrades, and the mechanical effects that interacting with their emotional struggles can have on what sort of tools you get - and how for an optimum endgame speedrun (which is down to under seven hours as of a couple months ago) you have to be really manipulative and cruel to them, because this gets them to build you a really incredibly useful gadget, but it fucks you over plotwise in the postgame content - to the point of kind of failing to eat her pancakes.
Haru does need to routinely do conversational turn-taking in there, maybe she can sneak bites then.
She's taken occasional bites! Like three of them!
No but then the thing is that some of it is also so bad, according to Ari. Like how a third of the way through the game the other side also starts hiring you, and their minefields work according to a different set of rules so you have to learn those, and like, it kind of makes sense that they'd want to use you since you're technically a robot software, it turns out, and they can just run multiple copies of you, but then it's established that the other side has a whole thing about -
"I thought you were dead! - I didn't very think you were dead but like the official story is - you already know that, you definitely already know that." She keeps confusedly compromising between putting her hands up in a gesture of surrender and clutching at Haru. "Uh, please don't kill us?"
Haru's evaluation goes rapidly from "maybe an unexpected drop-in friend of Xavier's who Ari doesn't get along with amazingly" to, uh, "armed intruder". "Please, it's my birthday," he says, because he can't think of anything else because he is insane, why does he have to confront an armed intruder while insane, that's unfair. He can put up one hand, the one that isn't busy hugging Ari.
"I'm not going to kill you," she says to Haru. Specifically to him; she's not looking at Ari at all. "But you're going to come with me."
"I will not be answering that question. You're being kidnapped."
"I - I know I can't do anything to stop you, but, I can't let you take - am I invited? If, if you want anything out of him you want him as an ally, and - you have to be really careful, you can't hit him on the head, it could really hurt him, like really really - I know a bunch of things -"
"Please don't hit me on the head, that causes brain damage where I'm from. Or give me drugs either, I may have weird drug reactions."
"Then I hope you will cooperate without need for such things." She finally looks at Ari. "No, you're not 'invited'."
"Please, he's horribly lonely - if you want to not hurt him - and you should! - you have to know how. Ma'am." Ari glances around at the surrounding cupboards. "...Could I please take an orsitamet -"
Svetka closes the distance between them and punches Ari in the side of the head.
"Ohhh shit," says Haru. "Is her neck okay, even if her brain is - why are you kidnapping me? Where are we going?"
"Hold still. Please." She produces a pair of handcuffs and starts putting them on him.
"I have dyspraxia, I'm not a threat." Can he get his hands in front of him instead of behind, at least.
Yes. Though there's a rope next, and she proceeds to ensure he has very little wiggle room. "Mmhm. Anything more you'd like to tell me about how to minimize harm to you?"
"I am having a psychiatric problem that will last the next, like, six days, ish, which makes me extremely lonely, so you have to talk to me, pretty much constantly, I think phone calls are fine if you get sick of me and want to put me on with your handler or somebody. Also hugs are good. For a value of good that does not in fact address the symptoms but does address the constant urge to try to address the symptoms."
"Yeah. I don't have superpowers right now but expect to after it's over. But I'm not going to want to use them without access to other espers because that'll just get me like this again, with bonus organ failure."
"I hope we can find you some, then." She hoists Ari and carries her to the armchair in the living room. Same treatment here, handcuffs and rope, except that Ari gets anchored to the chair and doesn't get her legs left free.
"For the cases which aren't the most likely." She takes a blanket from the couch and wraps it around Haru's shoulders, then - hugs him.
Haru, who is very insane, leans into his kidnapper's hug. "Is it cold out? I've been staying in."
"Moreso than yesterday." She's not a very good hugger. "I apologize for the inconvenience."
"My magical brain damage wants me to say something conciliatory about how you're just doing your job, or something, but unfortunately I have no idea why you have this job so I don't know what would be the thing to say about that. Are we going to be in transit long enough that I should bring a change of clothes? Snacks?"
"Sorry though I am, I am not quite foolish enough to allow you to bring objects of your choosing." Instead of letting go of the hug she adjusts her grip and slings him over her shoulder.
"Yeah I guess that stands to reason. Why are random women strong enough to carry me in this universe, is this more pharmacological divergence or something or do you just lift a shitton."
"I am not remotely random." Out the front door they go. (She hasn't put shoes on him.)
"I got that. What did she recognize you from? Like, is this a universe where professional kidnappers are celebrities whose faces appear on billboards, that would be weird."
"I have been occasionally newsworthy." Walk walk. She heads around to the side of the house.
"Recognizably? I'd expect that to be a liability in your line of work. I guess once you have enough recognition it gets things like the people you're trying to kidnap not resisting very hard because resistance is futile. Borg-style."
"There's a television series - I don't know if this universe has it but it might - it's sci-fi, and there's a race of conquering contagious cyborgs who go around saying 'resistance is futile, you will be assimilated'. Their spaceships are shaped like cubes and stuff," Haru chirps. He's not going to scream, or anything, considering, but is anyone going to notice that someone is carrying a tied-up teenager here?
They are surrounded on all sides by woods! Svetka walks off into them. "I don't know that one. Though I don't consume much fiction."
"I imagine the life of a famous professional kidnapper is very action packed. Maybe with airplane rides between kidnappings. But perhaps that's when you sleep."
"The publicly-known ones are mostly sabotage, assassinations, intelligence gathering... some thieving, occasionally..."
"You know, in my universe there's hardly any sabotage. Also serial assassins and functional spies and thieves do not become famous, especially not with their faces attached."
"Yeah, I guess? Like there's... makeup and stuff... but it's not going to fool top of the line facial recognition once they know what face to be looking for."
"Ah. I am famous with my face attached, but occasionally there is another face attached to mine."
"I'd expect that to like, move unnaturally. Maybe you just pretend to be very stoic all the time when you are doing your thing."
"That used to be somewhat necessary, when I was... ten? And younger."
"Okay. Are we like, driving somewhere? Helicopter? Space elevators exist here and nobody mentioned it to me yet?"
"It seems like it might be hard to have me responsibly seatbelted while I am quite this tied up."
Aaaaaaugh "I acknowledge that I can't do anything about it but I'm accustomed to wearing seat belts in cars and would prefer to do so especially since none of the things you're apparently famous for were 'motor vehicle accident statistician'!"
"If you promise to cooperate I will partially un- and retie you around the seatbelt."
"What the hell else would I do, even if I could somehow overpower you I would be alone for hours because you knocked out my babysitter!"
"High-stress situations occasionally bring out people's stupidity."
"I am extremely insane but absolutely not in a way where I am remotely likely to deliberately court a risk of being alone for hours, I can barely go to the bathroom with the door closed."
"Then you can wear a seatbelt. Slightly more conventionally than you would have."
It's a pretty basic-looking silver car, parked in a little dirt pull-off area, with ankle cuffs built into the passenger seat. Those go on first, and then yes, untie seatbelt retie.
....And a hug, when she's done. She rests her chin on his shoulder.
"Wow this must be fun to get detailed," he mumbles into her sleeve. "With the ankle things. Do you have to pass it off as a kink thing?"
"Oh, that makes sense. Also possibly you have - goons or something who clean the car for you, and you aren't driving past random car washes staffed with high schoolers who want to save up to go to France."
"We can talk about something else if the things I'm randomly coming up with are boring."
"In my world starting in the seventies there are sometimes hostile pocket dimensions that open up a portal somewhere and kidnap people, just like y- not actually like you at all, most of them teleport people into themselves although some of them do dispatch monsters to collect victims instead. They usually don't kill them but they never have a good time. At the same time people, about one out of every fifty K in the late teens sometimes early twenties age range, started awakening as espers. Awakening means we get a unique symptom hitting really really hard for a week, then it goes away, then we have superpowers but using them causes backlash which consist of that same symptom proportional to power use. Espers can quote unquote guide each other's backlash away with close contact, if they're compatible, which we can tell by touching, but I don't know firsthand what that feels like, I was identified as a suspected awakening by paramedics and not by an esper. Espers don't get kidnapped by dungeons though people who will go on to awaken later can."
"No. Kids usually don't get taken, I've only been in the usual age range for getting taken by a dungeon for a couple years. What's weirder is that my mom also hasn't been, this even though we live in a dense part of Toronto - dungeons like dense cities."
"Do you think your psychiatric issue makes it easier to get secrets out of you?"
"Oh yeah absolutely. I don't know anything that would be sensitive in my universe besides irrelevant personal stuff and I'm assuming you're kidnapping me because you already knew me to be from another universe."
"I'm, uh, not thrilled? Are people you kidnap usually happy about being kidnapped? Do I get a selfie and an autograph?"
"Honestly I would not turn you down, it'd make for a conversation piece, but I would still be pretty unhappy about being kidnapped. Admittedly less unhappy than I would be if it made the difference between being at home or not, but I was already separately transported to another universe so you have not made my mother any more worried than she was already."
"Hm. ...I would not bring you to a place which I thought would treat you very poorly."
"If whoever you're bringing me to just wants me to tell them about dungeons and espers and our tech tree they could have asked nicely! I'm very talkative right now!"
"You could've asked me and Ari nicely instead of breaking into the house, even if it was necessary to circumvent some sort of government or whatever. You could've snuck me a note asking me to make a phone call. Which I couldn't have read, because I can't read right now, but I could have gotten Ari to read it to me and dial the phone for me."
"- I apologize, I didn't mean to distress you more with that. I was... thinking."
"It's my job to securely deliver you to by employers, and not my job to attempt to entice you to work with them. Above a certain baseline of treatment."
"Oh, you don't need to, on account of I'm very talkative right now, I would tell anybody anything if they prevented me from going and finding people who weren't assholes to talk to instead."
"I don't know that information is the only thing they want out of you," she notes, offhand.
"Being an esper runs in families but only by like a factor of ten compared to genpop, even cloning me a thousand times probably won't get them another if people can start awakening in this universe at all."
"They've all got a core, it's a thingy about the size of a basketball, and if you destroy the core the rest of the dungeon collapses in a few minutes, killing anyone inside. If you don't do that, then eventually after like a couple weeks of kidnapping people and producing monsters and stuff, the dungeon will go away on its own, again killing anyone inside, and then it'll come back bigger and meaner in months or years. The first upgrade is usually the most substantial but it continues indefinitely; the worst dungeons are all ones that got away in the early days and have kept doing so since then. If the dungeon dies while its monsters are outside of it, sometimes they vanish or disintegrate or something, but sometimes they stick around, there's a few of those around. Some of them talk. Usually the monsters of an active dungeon do not talk. Some dungeons are four dimensional inside. Dungeons can contain substances that we have not invented or that retain magical properties after removal from the dungeon, too, some of which can even be reverse engineered, and those are big in the materials science sector."
"I have been kidnapped and I don't really want to be cloned a thousand times, or tortured, even by accident which is currently really easy to do, or - I don't know what they're going to do to me and it's scary."
"Are - is... I'm sorry." She takes off her right glove and puts a hand on his shoulder.
He leans his cheek onto her hand. "Isn't sometime after becoming a world famous assassin etcetera a weird time to be developing qualms - or is this a rapport thing, you don't really need to do that because of my backlash presentation, I will talk to you regardless until you hand me off."
"And it'll be here all week, folks - is it going to take more than a week to get me wherever we're going? That would be a dumb plan, I could wind up being able to teleport and then where would you be. I mean I'd still rather not because then I'll be lonely forever till somebody figures out interdimensional transit but still. I probably won't be able to teleport, there's usually some kind of conceptual oppositeness going on and I don't think teleportation is opposite loneliness, but stranger things've happened."
"I don't have any powers yet, if I had any powers I wouldn't be using them because they'd give me backlash, and if I had powers and they were mind control I wouldn't use them at all!"
"Which I have only your word for." She puts her free hand primly in her lap.
"If I had and wanted to use mind control powers why wouldn't I have used them before you hit Ari in the head and kidnapped me?"
"You're from another dimension and I have no idea what limitations you're working within."
"Are they gonna torture me to see if I'm lying, does that work in this universe like knocking people out does."
"Uh it's possible that I've been the audience of a virtuous propaganda campaign, but, like, it works in movies, the same way knocking people out does, because it's convenient for the plot, and the received wisdom on torture in real life is that people will say whatever they think might make the torture stop but if you can't actually verify anything they're saying then that's not a good way to get true information. Like, you could torture me into changing my story six times about whether I have mind control powers but this would not result in you knowing more about whether I have mind control powers, if you don't have a way to check."
"That's very interesting. You having said this will not s - I do not think it will affect whether you are tortured. I don't - think you will be. I hope you are not."
"Well, y'know, if you want to be more confident of that than you are right now this is probably the right time to take any actions about that compared to later on when I'm with whoever might or might not torture me out of whatever beliefs they might have about whether it works for any goals they want something to work toward."
"I - hm. I will likely be tortured if I do not deliver you. Some small amount."
"I wasn't imagining you reporting for duty empty-handed, I was - I guess imagining you could defect? Or go to ground someplace but you might be too recognizable for that."
"Hm. ...I think this will not be relevant." She clicks on the turn signal and pulls over.
She turns off the car but doesn't move to unbuckle either of them. "It seems your host had somewhat more defenses than I had initially been aware of."
"SVETKA PLEASE!" he shrills, thrashing around in the not very much give his being-tied-up situation affords.
Okay apparently the next thing he's going to try is SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN CASE THERE'S HIKERS OR PASSING CARS WHO CAN HEAR HIM DOING THAT
A car goes by! Every once in a while, even.
None of them even slow down for him.
After the third time this happens he gives up and just stares out the window at the trees.
After an hour or two one of the cars slows down.
And pulls up behind them, even.
"I see we're in the era of sci fi writing in which the robots are allowed personal pronouns."
"...Mhm." Xavier picks the ankle cuffs and saws through the seatbelt, but leaves Haru largely still restrained. Then carries him to the other car.
There's a presumably-eight-year-old robot in a car seat in the back! "Hello, Mr. Haru."
"Hiiiiiii. Are you okay?" Asks the not-super-okay-looking robot with the ice pack in the front seat.
"Okay. Sorry I uh, couldn't fight off Svetka Ignatyeva. I don't think anyone really, uh, can, but. Sorry."
Haru gets buckled in. Over his bindings. "Please describe the situation as you understand it." And given a hug.
"Good fucking luck with that. Fine. Assassin broke into the house somehow, we had a chatty standoff till she socked Ari in the head, I got all tied up and went with her, we drove for a while and she talked to me till she pulled over and passed out, I screamed a lot, I gave up, the rest is history."
"Thank you." And now it's time for them to be driving away, really pretty fast.
"My name is Kennedy," the child introduces herself. "Would you hold my hand?"
"If I put my hand near yours," she clarifies. "Would you hold it? I won't if you would do anything else."
"I will do things else like. Breathing. But sure I'd hold your hand."
"No. What would be the point, I'm not the kind of person who drowns Sims in the swimming pool."
"...If you know you're awakening," contemplates Ari, "do you think, what, we're magically going to turn back into people in a few days?"
"If I remain tied up till the end of hell week then I will no longer be magically lonely and it'll matter way less whether there are real people."
"Has it occurred to you that like, these things are related? Uh, with respect. Like, did anything change information-wise or did you just have a really, really really, really bad time, which I'm very sorry for."
"What is this, a customer experience survey?" He coughs; his throat's really pretty fucked up.
"Why would there be a customer experience survey if you're the only person in the world!"
"Kennedy, if you were given a bottle of water, do you think you could help Haru drink without spilling most of it all over him?"
"Haru, would you like some water despite the fact that most of it will likely get spilled on you."
Xavier instructs Ari to get a water out of the center console and pass it back to Kennedy, who manages to not spill most of it on him! Maybe closer to a third.
He is wet and tied up but mostly he is HORRIBLY UNRELIEVABLY LONELY.
"I still really want to know the answer to the customer experience question."
"Haru. Did you learn anything that made you decide no one else was people, or is your mind control, which you know you have, just being really mean to you."
"I'm not making a comment on how much it sucks! I'm saying that if it's the mind control then that means we're real."
"If we were real in the first place and your mind control, which you already told - which you already said gave you solipsism, gave you solipsism."
"Oh. ...Why is there a word for that, if you're the first one with this magic insanity?"
"Okay, wait, you think other people used to be real, right? At least. Because otherwise why would there be customer experience surveys, and - yeah, and words and stuff."
"Oh, you could all be dungeon monsters or something somehow. Maybe I'm older than I remember being and did a ton of stuff I forgot. Maybe there's aliens, or used to be aliens, and they did some kind of AI thing that got away from them and is now doing this bullshit. Maybe I am not thinking of all the possibilities."
"...Can I get a verbal confirmation that you understand that you said earlier that one of your mind control symptoms was solipsism and that you're currently, like, experiencing that."
"Okay! Cool. And your other flavors are... the touch, obviously, and social anxiety? - Uncle Xave, do you think we have a minute to pull over and shuffle seats or will we get gotten if we try that."
He sighs, contemplatively. "I can look for a spot that would be good for such a thing. We're not in an active chase, as of yet."
"Okay cool. Haru, will you promise to not thrash and bump me around even if it, I dunno, suddenly becomes really upsetting that you think I'm a robot who's cuddling you? I have a headache."
"I don't think robots cuddling me is inherently more upsetting than robots which are not cuddling me."
After a while, Xavier finds a secluded enough spot to pull over, extract Kennedy, move her car seat over a spot, buckle her back in, slot Haru into the middle spot, and let Ari get into the back driver's side seat.
"Thanks. I mean, you're not the first person to have called me that. Not in a robot way, in a - the context was very different. Which I guess makes it feel worse and not better than if it had never come up, I think. Actually."
"Iiiiii kind of don't want to say, in front of the eight year old from the weird authoritarian universe, or country or something. Maybe you can guess it from that."
"...no, we are not. Latin's a dead language. Why are you calling me mister?"
"All my adults. When I was little; now I'm already polite so they don't have to say it."
Hairpet hairpet hairpet.
"...Kennedy, comprends-tu le français?"
"Don't worry about it. Haru, je suis tra - je n'étais pas naitre une fille."
"........And that matters because you believe she's real, now?"
"Yeah I think I'm snapped out of it mostly. Sorry. I will try not to let it do that again, I was pretty on top of it till Svetka passed out and nobody pulled over no matter how loud I yelled."
"Welcome back." Hug hug hug hug squeeze squeeze squeeze. "I'm really sorry."
"It's not your fault. I'm sorry I got you socked in the head by being from another dimension."
"I really should have guessed something like this might happen. I'm... going to untie you now??" She leans over to try and make eye contact with Xavier in the rearview mirror.
"...Will you still be annoyed if I call you what I think I should? Sir?"
"I prefer everybody to just call me Haru but I'm not going to insist."
"I will experience annoyance but it is not and should not be your problem."
Hand. "Sorry. I'm just kind of allergic to formal address. I call my parents by their first names when they're not listening. I admittedly don't do this for my schoolteachers but only because nobody would know who I was talking about."
"Your timeline has artificial wombs and stuff? And you were engineered by some non-parent social structure?"
"I was incubated, yes. Some other New Year'ses made me, but Mr. Vogt says you don't have those here except for maybe him."
"I have been assuming that this planet like mine has a new year annually but I'm not sure what you mean."
"On my planet, everyone born on each day of the year has the same personality as each other, and New Year's Day is mine. Mr. Vogt says he wasn't born on New Year's Day, but was still in the autumn, and I think he mostly matches. And Ms. Anders seems like a New Year's Eve, and I don't know what you are. Maybe a Hexumber oh-seven."
"I'm not usually like this. I have a magical problem right now. On Earth New Year's is in the winter. ...early spring if you're Chinese. Also there isn't a month called Hexumber. Here."
"Mr. Vogt told me those things. But my guess was partially based on your name."
"I was being sarcastic. I'm not very nice to people who I don't think exist, I'm sorry."
"I forgive you. But what's the rest of your name? I won't call you it if you don't want me to."
"I really hate my first name a lot and plan to replace it on all my legal documents at home with a superhero name. If I ever go home. But my full middle and last are Masaharu Swan."
"It'd be strange if everyone here or in my world were anything, because probably we'd eventually notice name-personality clusters even if they didn't correspond to birthdays."
Ari finally gets the first knot undone, unlocking a fair bit of slack to unwind. "Apparently there's an entire country of hers and my-uncles. Which is just really crazy to think about."
"Yeah, wow, do they have to time their kids really carefully - or I guess there's the artificial wombs so maybe it's not hard."
"Other geminis are allowed in the country, they just don't help with governance. And I'm the first incubated New Year's; they're waiting to see how I turn out before they try any more."
"Huh, is there some reason you might not turn out like anybody else?"
"Not that any adults have told me. ...I mean I'm the first delayed incubated one of me. I think sometimes people use them right away but that's just pretty normal. I don't know how timing works with mothers."
"What's it like, I've only just met you and haven't known him for much longer so I don't know what kind of country a lot of you would tend to make."
"It's nice. I don't really know what others are like because I was just visiting Rome for the first time yesterday, and then after not very long I was here instead."
"That's how I remember it too only Latin is not mutually intelligible with the thing we're speaking now. You don't even seem to be obviously gravitating away from words that have Germanic roots or anything."
"There's probably some sort of translation magic happening! Is my guess."
"Okay, can you spell other things that you already know how to spell?"
"Believe. B-E-L-I-E-V-E. Philosophy. P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-Y. Horizon. H-O-R-I-Z-O-N."
"I think 'philosophy' is Greek. Don't know the roots of the other two, 'horizon' could be a Latin word but I doubt 'believe' is."
Ari gets the next knot faster, and after another couple seconds Haru's free of rope, though not of handcuffs. Huuuuug. "I feel like that doesn't tell us much about whether there's translation magic. Like, it would have been pretty conclusive if something was off about the spelling somehow, but I don't think we've ruled anything out here."
"I think I'd notice if I could suddenly spell words in an unfamiliar language, even if I didn't notice suddenly being able to speak it."
"Yeah, I think the thing I'm posing affects more what we're hearing than what she's saying."
"Would you say that 'flour' and 'flower' are homophones?" he asks the kid.
"...are also all different words that sound the same in Latin as you know it?"
"I think so. But you didn't say what they meant so it could be different. Ummm, aught the number like ought as in should, fourct the number like forked as in using a spiny cultery?"
"Fourct is not a number in English but we have forks the utensil. Aught is a kind of weird old term for zero and does sound like ought as in should."
"Aught is zero and fourct is four-zero, but in an eights way not a tens way."
"All over the world. Rome likes tens and they surround us so I have to learn that too."
"What about timekeeping within a day, how's that work? Ours has lots of sixes."
"Onect aught seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour, fourct hours in a day, eight days in a week, four weeks in a month, eight months in a year."
"Onect aught is... one zero zero in base eight, is... sixty-four? I think? I am not at my peak math skill right now. Which is close to sixty, which is how we have it. Fourct is four times eight is thirty two? That's substantially longer unless your seconds are shorter."
"Ummmmmm. I have not all the way learned the conversions yet. And I haven't been here an entire day."
"Is there a phrase you say to mark seconds when you don't have a clock, we say 'one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand' and so on."
"Alas. Xavier is there any movement on the prospect of getting interdimensionals like us home now that there's two? - is it just two?"
"I was not informed of any specific others but would be unsurprised if there were, or if more proceeded to show up. There's not already a way to send you back but it's being worked on and people seemed hopeful about the outcome."
"Like this week hopeful or like this year hopeful or like maybe before we are dead of old age hopeful."
"...If I had to guess, between the first two. But that's only a guess."
"I want to go to esper mixers and shake hands with everybody till I find a partner. I will not actually want this any more once I'm done awakening, but I will still endorse it."
"Iiiiiif we're at a topic change, I'm really fricken curious what it was like being in a car with Svetka Ignatyeva. Uh, while she was conscious."
"She talked to me. She wanted to know about dungeons. At one point she accused me of mind controlling her and we had a bit of back and forth about how I can't do that. Apparently another thing you have in this timeline that we don't have in mine is really really good masks that glue on so it's not a problem for assassins to be recognizable. What's going to happen to her?"
"If we're lucky, we'll only find out via conventional news outlets. It will likely depend on how exactly she regains consciousness."
"Yeah, I told her I won't have powers till the end of the week, won't use them then till I have a partner, and wouldn't use them if they were mind control - I guess I might at least consider it if I were being kidnapped, but whatever she thought was happening didn't cause me to not be kidnapped so it'd have to be pretty cut rate mind control. She only had my word on that though so I guess it was not perfectly convincing."
"Put her hand on my shoulder at one point but then took it back when she thought I was mind controlling her."
"Hm. Well, both condolences and 'you're welcome' to you; that's most likely what caused her to lose consciousness."
"Perhaps residually. There was something on my windowsill, which she used to enter the house. It was probably on the exterior of her clothes. It's approximately a matter of luck that none seems to have gotten on your skin."
"Wow, if I had learned that before I was kidnapped I'd have called it paranoid. Am I at risk of passing out from residual whatever it was?"
"Not especially. The sedative goes inert about an hour after being removed from its initial surface, or else I'd have told Kennedy and Ariel to be mindful in touching you."
"But the sedative wasn't all that was on the window, was it, Mr. Vogt?" asks Kennedy, sounding like an eager student.
"No, there are microtrackers, which stay functional for longer. Kennedy was very helpful in relaying navigational information from my phone and getting us to you more quickly than we would have if I were working alone or if poor headached Ariel had been put to the task."
"Microtrackers. What a world. These are cheap enough that you can just dust your windowsill with them?"
"Oh, understood, but that still says something about the price point, some people have private jets but people do not have... dusting the windowsills... numbers of private jets."
"I could likely get a private jet within... let's say two months, or so, if I set my heart on it."
"I don't generally work in ways which earn me the maximum amount of money I could make, and if I instead did..."
"Depends how you're conceptualizing it, I think. But I did pay money for them, and not directly to my employers."
"Mm, I'm going to list things that are sufficiently out of date to have hit the public market - eyescan locks, for computers and phones, which combine retina scans with an eye movement pattern, currently unspoofable; medication implants, which release precise amounts of substances into the body at regular intervals; and fine motorscalpels, which have made surgery much safer and less invasive."
"We have retina scans but I don't know them to do eye movements. We have medication implants but maybe yours are better. I don't know us to have anything I'd know to call a fine motorscalpel."
"Eyescans admittedly seem somewhat superfluous in a place with as little sabotage as you claim your world has."
"Some places hire espers with lousy powers to poke everybody who's going in, to make sure they aren't unexpectedly also espers. But that's like, military installations and stuff."
"My phone is eyescan capable, I just don't have it turned on, because. Annoying. ...And I wasn't an important person who things happen to, before. I should maybe turn it on, now."
"It's fiiiiiiiine. ...You calling me 'it' was also like, mostly fine, or - I forgive you for it? I was trying to give you social anxiety, did that like work, was it helpful do you think -"
"I think in the normal course of operations an esper will almost never run backlash up to awakening levels. Even if I wind up ill-advisedly using my powers without being able to find a partner they'll convert into the 'chronic' or 'resting' form after a while and then I'll just be at elevated all cause mortality risk due to magical organ damage to mostly not my brain."
"There will probably be some loneliness, most people don't get completely unflavored generic chronic backlash. But yeah, in the seventies people didn't know guiding was a thing, everybody was running themselves into the ground saving people and never getting any of the backlash bled off, and some of them lived long enough to see it discovered that actually they should totally be making out constantly with espers if it feels nice."
"...They should? I don't think you mentioned that part. Although I guess you said - " She glances over at Kennedy. "I guess you talked about blood donation, and that's not the only. Uh. Thing that is like blood donation."
"- sorry, my verbal filter is not in complete working order. Blood donation also works but it has to be very prompt, the decay of the guiding effect over time is really sharp, they have special machines for it - they can even make the blood go in a circle to keep it up for longer if the types work out in both directions. But then you need blood type compatibility and esper compatibility and those don't correlate at all."
"I do. It's supposed to be amazing, guiding. However compatibility wants opposite backlashes so I might be looking at a pretty wretched situation in that department, but it's not super predictable so I will have to shake a lot of hands and see."
"Oof, yeah. I hope we get some working portals or whatever pretty quick."
"Well, mine have been divorced since I was a baby, so I'm probably missing out on lots of stuff that most people have. I assume you have people who are responsible for getting you whatever kind of education you're getting, and making sure you have food and clothes and stuff? Parents do that, which you probably knew, and are also, like - my mother Ren in particular has treated me kind of like her best friend and roommate who happens to need her for any task requiring legal majority, since I was like six, but I think that's not typical, I think usually they're more managerial about it. I live with her most of the time, I visit Charlie most years."
"I did know that first part," she affirms. "...I think I don't have any friends, either."
"...well, not everybody does but it's unusual. Do you not want them?"
"I don't really collect them either, though I expect to have to, if I ever wind up in a position where I want to be using my powers. I think people who like having them like having them but that's as tautological as it sounds."
"Friends are great. I hope you get the chance to make some. ...What about at school, isn't that a good place to meet people? Or is yours bad in some way."
"I like my educational institution, but it's made up of tutors and not peers."
"They don't have you mixing with other kids? Like, even at... lunchtime or whatever between tutoring sessions, even taking as read that all the instruction is one to one? I feel like that'd contaminate the experiment, that's not normal - it can't even be normal on your planet, the economies of scale don't work -"
"I've met other children. I just don't see them every day as part of school. It's a favor to me when I'm older, to have there not be too many people my age who will know me then and also know me now."
"If I may hazard a guess, Kennedy," Xavier interjects. "At least in my own life, I was very different as a child than an adult, and didn't feel drawn to continue close relationships across that border. It led to incorrect and out-of-date expectations about what sort of person I was, when I tried, and I found those expectations stifling. So it would make sense to me, if that remains consistent, that they're trying to preserve more potential relationships for you as an adult by somewhat limiting the ones you have as a child; does that sound right?"
"...is it bigger than one city? You're not exactly limited by your parents' jobs or anything, considering, you could be brought up in a random farm village with six other kids, then grow up and go somewhere else and deal with there being six people your age who you don't want to see again."
"It is not very much bigger than one city. And then I would have to live in a farm village."
"Would this be awful? Ren's an obligate city person but did not realize this confidently till after I'd been born."
"I like Toronto better than Grand Forks in a lot of ways but if I interlibrary loan some books to the latter before my plane lands it's fine. Well, whatever floats your... personality-clade's... boats, I guess. Are there particular best practices anyone participating in your temporary alternate universe guardianship should be aware of?"
"It's, uh... the wrong word for this situation actually, it means like, common descent in biology, like how dolphins swim like fish but are in the mammal clade."
"No, it was just the wrong word, I'm finding it hard to give myself enough time to think of correct words in my present state."
"Xavier doesn't have the same birthday, though, and I meant to include him."
"Quite a coincidence, if true, and if I'm the only one in this world. Unless the thing pulling people from other worlds is picking and choosing in some way."
"I just landed in the place corresponding near-exactly to my apartment in my Toronto. Is Verona geographically matched to wherever Kennedy showed up?"
"Right, Rome. Rome is probably here as at home a city in Italy these days but the historical empire never reached this continent, I don't recognize Tenuis as a city name, but also I do not know where you in fact initially landed, besides somewhere friendly enough to Canada that you could get a look at a list with Xavier on it."
"Kennedy, have you gotten a look at a map? Is Tenuis on the shore of one of the biggest lakes in the world?"
"Ummmm. The lake is pretty big? There are bigger ones I think. I haven't looked at any maps."
"On Earth we're near a group of five really really big lakes. The one Toronto's on, Lake Ontario, is not the biggest one, but the biggest one, Lake Superior, is also in the group."
"Oh, like the Magna Lakes? Verona is next to one of them and Tenuis is on the other side of a different one."
"...ah, we're not going back to the house? I guess that... stands to reason."
"I think I'm retroactively more confused about why you agreed to stash a problems guy in your house. It's not like I'm presently a useful problems guy and even if I get home I could easily not be a useful esper later, plenty of espers have pretty lame powers."
"I really did not predict this would happen. Even knowing that it has, I don't think it was especially likely. As these things go."
"Okay. Any guesses how she - or whoever she works for, I guess - found out about me at all?"
"Mm, it's pretty standard for any security feed to have an automated process looking for things appearing or disappearing - to catch cuts and loops, you understand, not actual appearances and disappearances - so that would have been flagged, if you were in the line of sight of any cameras. Her organization could have an in to those systems, technologically or with a mole. They could have coerced, threatened, or otherwise gotten information from Ms. Omar. I don't think she was working for them in the first place, or she would have delivered you to them initially instead of me. They could have had more information than I had access to about the interdimensional transport project, and known what to look for or been able to predict specific appearances in advance. There are a great number of possibilities."
"Is checking up on Ms. Omar," who he wouldn't call that, except, you see, he had forgotten her name, "on the itinerary? Somebody's itinerary, if not this carful of people. - there's like, cops, converging on Svetka's car, right, I'm just assuming."
"I'll see what I can find out once we're somewhere comparatively safe. The Canadian government is aware of Ms. Ignatyeva's location; I don't know what specific actions they may choose to take about this."
"Yeah, I don't know either. Charlie's a cop, I have no idea what he'd do about an internationally famous assassin because that's not a thing we have in my universe."
"I'll be surprised if they manage to keep her very long, even if they do catch her."
"Maybe I should just try predicting more things like I'm in some kind of poorly written thriller."
"I dunno, I watch a lot of bad movies, and they seem pretty much the same as the good stuff except worse?"
"Well, yes, but one aspect in which things can be worse, in my universe, is by taking - worldbuilding shortcuts? - like having people wake up fine again a couple hours after being knocked out via head trauma, or elevating to memetic proportions the degree to which a world famous criminal is so good at all the support skills for that profession such as escaping custody, or postulating so tiny as to be invisible spy gadgets. So I'm just considering mentally turning that dial all the way to the left even on topics I have not yet learned about, like, maybe on this planet you can buy hollow teeth full of poison at the corner store, and everybody who's anybody speaks all the languages that will ever come up in their line of work without having previously had any reason nor obvious opportunity to spend months on that, and, I don't know, I don't watch a lot of thrillers actually."
"If I had access to my lab I'd offer to make you a sedative tooth. They aren't corner-store levels of accessible, though."
"I guess that might be good, if I don't have interdimensional drug reaction problems."
"I was still planning to try a mild one tonight. If we can safely access, approximately, a corner store."
"Residual plan from before this, which I think is still worth trying unless additional unexpected things happen."
"Well, I'm certainly negligible use in preventing myself from being kidnapped even when I'm awake so sure why not."
"I will certainly use all the resources at my disposal to prevent them from succeeding, if so."
"Back into the city. There are a few places we might be safe there, which I am deliberately not yet choosing between."
"Maybe tomorrow should be my birthday. Or yesterday. Instead of today."
"Let's aim for tomorrow, unless that also ends up being awful for you, in which case it was retroactively yesterday."
"We can still maybe get you a nice dinner today? Like, I can't imagine that we're going to do better than takeout, and I bet it can be fancy takeout."
"Fancy takeout, with cake just in case, yeah. It's not really important compared to anything else, just."
"I appreciate that. Maybe I will get to go home and find a partner and guiding will be all it's cracked up to be and I will have the best powers in the world, I think I deserve that."
"If we can manage it. I expect we'll be able to, but I don't want to leave you disappointed if something else comes up."
"I will prepare myself for a ration of gas station snacks. We should try not to undernourish me, it's not the most conspicuous symptom but I'm being quietly physically remodeled toward peak human in various ways - might wind up with an eye color or hair color change too - and I'd rather have enough nutrients to get underway on that without cannibalizing myself too much."
