Nod nod. "Well, I hope to get it started up again, though I won't be able to respond to comments in real time from Bet - I'm probably going to live on Bet." She is texting her parents while she says this.

"Because of my alternate self or something else?"

"They have dungeons now. I'm taking point on getting them up to speed on how to deal with that."

"Oh, that sounds... satisfying."

"I'm hoping it's a high ratio of satisfying to people being obnoxious but it's still early days."

"I'd expect my alternate self to be helpful with the obnoxious people assuming he's working with you on this?"

"He is, yes, he's very useful for local context."

"I can't tell whether I should feel transitively complemented."

"You could choose to if you wish!"

"I think I will."

She finishes her texts to her parents, and returns his phone. "I'll want that back if they answer right away but I don't know if they're paying attention to texts from random numbers very quickly. Now, I'm also here to sort of try to translate, for you and Lorica."

"Oh. Yes, I imagine that might be useful. My alternate self sent me a letter which was nice but not particularly actionable."

"I didn't read it so I don't know what he told you but she's - me, basically, except me if I were an American cape instead of a Canadian esper? So I can kind of guess, how she's doing, based on what it would take to get me to act like she's acting. She's not okay at all."

Nod.

"I have picked up on uh, some of this."

"I mean, a lot of it is probably derivable from her awakening, if nothing else."

Nod nod.

"I... don't actually know how to handle this. Except by explaining why I did certain things and apologizing for not doing better."

"I think - forgive me if I got this garbled, but the understanding I came away with is that you've got a backlash compensation behavior where you don't engage with being responsible for things for awhile after a period of time in which you believe irrationally that you're responsible for everything? I think that the timing on that was really bad for Lorica and then I didn't help at all by having in the time she was here shown up in her hometown, attached myself to her Lucien, and accepted help from her family. The saving grace would be that my backlash kept me a polite distance away from her robot; the bad news is that her robot is now unmaintainable without her tinker power and it'll die at some unpredictable point in the future. She's very - unmoored, right now, and there's no one she can straightforwardly talk to about it, just a lot of different un-straightforward-ness-es."

"Oh um. I have never actually had this compensation before... or maybe I did and the things I avoided engaging with responsibility for were things that I genuinely had nothing to do with and so didn't notice. The thing that happened is that in order to allow me to maintain high backlash while next to someone I cared about suffering quite a lot, I convinced myself that I shouldn't take any actions other than guiding and obeying the orders of my support, even if it was my fault, and also to ignore any counterarguments I came up with to this without thinking about them very hard. And it's taken me a bit to get out of that... rut, I guess."

"...I think I probably could have gotten out of that rut faster if I noticed it was important - Lorica seemed conflicted about wanting to talk to me then in the first place so it didn't occur to me to try putting myself back together quicker than was happening by default."

"She doesn't blame you at all for having whatever coping mechanism works with your backlash. But unfortunately the degree to which everything sucks for her while at the same time no one made any mistakes is not sitting very comfortably. - I guess she might think your partner made mistakes, she was less committal on that point."

"I was not paying very close attention to what Lia did but that seems plausible - she can be very stubbornly problem solve-y in a way that can go wrong. And she's acting like she feels bad about something."

"Also um. I am confused by how people other than Lia not having made mistakes makes things worse?"

"Well, this is my extrapolating from being the same personality as her, not something she explicitly said. But: I run on being smug! I can substitute smugness for most forms of motivation! I can run indefinitely on my infinite self-confidence in being better than all the idiots around me... but it really helps if there are idiots around me who are doing stupid things that I, being better than them, would not have done. She's badly off and she's reaching for that and there aren't quite enough idiots around."

"Ah, I guess that makes sense as a way for her to be."

"Yeah, probably don't try saying things like that to her."

"Oh um. Because it sounds unsympathetic?"

"No, because it sounds - bland? Like it's the same thing you'd say no matter what extremely boring fact you'd learned about her psychology."