endbringer, meet gun | Glowfic Constellation

thinkering

"Okay. So. One of these golf balls is the one you made. You know you can move stuff you made. Slide Coke cans and float swordfish and foul up games of robot catch. Any of the balls could be yours, and you know that you can move stuff that isn't yours, too, a la robot catch."

mxglam

"Right! But the way I consciously moved my things was by arguing that it was just the same as making them disappear and reappear again a bit to the left so really there's no reason why it couldn't just stay there."

"That is not an argument that applies to the non-me-made golf balls."

"Exactly."

"But I can move stuff that isn't mine, a tiny bit. Why wouldn't I be able to move it more than a tiny bit?"

"Maybe physics just doesn't like it."

"...I am flying. Physics can go suck a cactus."

thinkering

Lorica snorts.

mxglam

"Okay, point." He makes a golf ball appear in his hand, and then floats it. "You don't need to be mine to stay floaty. Why would you?"

Copy turns to Lorica and says, "I have an idea." Four more balls appear floating beside the original one.

thinkering

"What?"

mxglam

"We're both going to turn our backs to the balls," copy says while original glares at the first one. "Then you'll replace one of ours with a normal one. We won't know which. At worst, we'll be expecting one of the balls to fall, but we won't really know which."

thinkering

"Okay."

mxglam

Both of them turn their backs to the balls. Then both of them look over their shoulders. Balls still floating, okay. Now they're not looking.

thinkering

Lorica plucks a ball out of the air and puts another ball where it was and lets it go.

mxglam

It falls. They hear it hit the floor and sigh.

thinkering

"Maybe it'll take a while of getting used to lesser teekay to work up to it."

mxglam

The other four golf balls are gone. "Well we can definitely keep up the telekinesis while we're not looking, anyway," copy says.

thinkering

"So that's good. Let's see, what else can we check indoors..."

mxglam

"There was one other thing."

"Figuring out what counts as paying attention? Like it clearly isn't line of sight, as per Santuario's forcefield situation, but I'm not sure what it is."

"It's not just thinking about a thing, I've tested this, though maybe that was because of range."

thinkering

"So... describe what you do and don't know about this part in more detail."

mxglam

"If I don't think about a thing I've made at all for about thirty minutes, it ceases to be."

"If I think about it but I'm reasonably far away, it ceases to be."

"If I think about it and it's close by, it apparently does not."

thinkering

"How do you time thirty minutes of not thinking about a thing, anyway?"

mxglam

"Right, that's why I said 'about' thirty minutes, I can't actually time it. It's mostly a thing I've noticed over the years."

"Uh, I've had this power for a long time."

"Like ten years."

thinkering

"Shit. Okay. Um. What counts as 'thinking about' the thing?"

mxglam

"Having a conscious and noticed thought about the thing? I'm not sure, my main checks there were basically remembering the thing should exist and then going to it to check on whether it still does."

thinkering

"What would happen if you made a ludicrously complicated Rube Goldberg machine so you couldn't remember all the parts, and then set it off?"

mxglam

"I dunno."

"We're actually wrong, aren't we?"

"Yes, we are. We just realized we don't need the thought of the thing we made to be all that conscious."

"Santuario's proving more informative than he's ever hoped, I'm sure."

thinkering

"What do you mean?"

mxglam

"His forcefield thing kept working even though I'm pretty sure I spent more than half an hour at a time not being directly aware of it on a conscious level."

"But subconsciously it was always there, I didn't expect the forcefield to wink out."

thinkering