"...Come to think of it, I'm sort of surprised your power works around me and wonder if it takes my beliefs into account at all."

...and now they're not flying anymore.

Lorica catches them. "Whoa! Hey! I didn't mean to freak you out, I just have a secondary power that blocks mindready shit!"

They close their eyes, then say, "You can let me go now."

Lorica lets them go.

And they're flying.

"...I really can't doubt myself, I come off as reckless because I need to be cocky, I need to believe I can do anything I want. It's—I bootstrap it some, it's easy to believe I can do something when empirically I actually can but in this case belief is the cause and not the consequence so I need to tie my head around in Escher-esque knots and not think too hard about it."

"Gotcha. So. What I actually meant was, I have this secondary power which won't let powers that mess with people's heads mess with mine. Since your power is basically solid illusions it would have been not outside the realm of possibility for me to either not see the effects, or to see only the effects that were not, themselves, things you were creating. But apparently it's real enough that I'm not noping it. There remains the question of whether your power takes me into account at all or if, for its purposes, I am not even here until I say something the wrong way and throw off your game."

"...well, there's an easy way to test it. Can you, like, not believe this Rubik's cube is here?"

There is a Rubik's cube in their right hand.

Lorica squints at it. Not a real cube. Did they even bother to have the faces in the right orientations? It probably doesn't even have those internal mechanics, to the extent it's there, which it's not.

"All right..."

"Yes, to the extent that I can disbelieve things on purpose at all, which is limited."

"Okay. Now let's try this." No magic 8 ball in their hand. "My hand is empty. Can you focus on that fact? Like, keep expecting it to be empty or something."

"Sure."

"That's reassuring."

"Not to me it isn't."

"Why? I can't make things you make go away. I can't help, either, but that wasn't such a huge drawback that you noticed it back in Acapulco."

They shrug. "I suppose. Though it's not exactly the most invasive of powers, as far as mental powers go."

"I know, but I don't want to have any gaps at all."

"It's really not much of a gap though. I mean, granted, it could be indicative of the efficacy of other similarly-small-but-otherwise-objectionable powers against you."

"I want my mind to be an impregnable fortress, not a fortress with a couple secret passages."

"That's an interesting preference, and it's also pretty interesting that you got a power that suits it so well."

"Yes, well, we might not be having this conversation if it didn't work real well."