"Hm!"  A series of quick  connected thoughts - "Is there going to be a blog post about me?  And by me I mean us."

"Not if you don't want there to be."

"....Singular or plural you?"

"Plural, if you don't come to a clear agreement pro-blog-post then no blog post."

"Mhm.  ...Do you know of any other espers who fractured about awakening?"

"I've heard of one where multiplicity is the main symptom."

"Tell me about it."  Do not append a 'stud' to the end of that just because you thought about Grease one (1) time in the past few days.  That's not even a social anxiety thing it would just be weird.

"Well, I haven't met this person, I just read a journalist's writeup of the situation that was titled something stupid like 'What One Esper's Backlash Can Tell Us About Ourselves' or whatever and I wouldn't be sure how to find it again. But it sounded like they have hundreds of different folks who show up at various levels of backlash and they're usually less oriented to the situation than you are, like they'll be actively confused about why they aren't the sex or age or species they expect to be, one of them only speaks Polish, they switch faster and less controllably at higher levels of backlash, and the esper in question retired because it turned out a couple of them were, like, evil."

"Did the unbacklashed one speak Polish??"

"Presumably? Their power was personal invulnerability, so they can't have been doing it by magic."

"I could imagine it being - fake Polish.  Presumably the description would have made its way to you in a way that would have caused you to describe it differently, though, if it were that."

"Depends how good the journalist was at their job."

"Yeah.  What were the evil ones like?"

"According to the article one of them nearly knifed a dungeon victim before a different one took over."

"Hmm."

"Again whether that's true depends on how good the journalist was at their job."

"Yeah.  ...Do you think I'm evil?"

"You don't seem to be."

"Yeah, I don't think so either.  Maybe I would think that anyway, but I think I'm more stable than Julien and like, he didn't want to eat chicken even when he thought it was a hallucination so I think we're pretty safe.  - Thank you for being - something - enough that we didn't feel pressured to eat chicken even when we thought the universe was pressuring us into sex; we would have felt really bad about that one."  ...Possibly worse about that than the sex, if both had happened??  He's not sure; hard to say.  But easy enough not to say out loud, because that would be awkward.

"Well, you're welcome, you're not the only vegetarian in the world and I wouldn't want to make any of 'em eat chicken."

"Hopefully that was the most difficult situation of that kind you'll ever have to navigate."

"Probably will be but you never know."

"Mhm.  ...He asked for the guitar even though he expected to be sitting right next to you all week and practicing stuff like that at our level sounds like torture for both parties."

"I own headphones."

"I don't really have a sense of how good sound canceling has gotten for people who can afford headphones that cost more than ten dollars."