"You've shown you can do robots and can say you're working on something to carry and aim the gun through the air at high speed," says Lorica. "Dynakinesis... I'm less sure. Behemoth doesn't just take literally all the energy that enters his radius or everyone would wind up freezing solid in place, you might be able to bullshit around that."

"Yeah. Bullpooping around is pretty much what my power's for."

"Why are you so G-rated?"

Pause. "Um. It's. Uh." They look slightly uncomfortable about it. Or very uncomfortable about it. "Kind of a... remembrance thing."

They decide to elaborate. "My mother. She used to say that swearing was... not exactly bad, but it was a tool, like all other words, and it communicated something, and if I just swore all willy-nilly, that wasn't bad per se, but if I don't swear much, when I do it's more meaningful. And, she might've just been trying to use the sort of reasoning she knew would convince me not to do it as I grew up, maybe, but now it's... sort of something I have left of her, in a way."

Nod.

They shake their head quickly and smile. "Anyway. No more depressing stuff, we were talking about how to kill Endbringers."

"Right. So Behemoth can absorb impacts a fair amount with dynakinesis but if you can get in his range at all it doesn't actually get harder to move, is my understanding. You get, if anything, warmer, not colder; batteries and generators don't drain away to nothing. He doesn't indiscriminately leach all energy out of his radius. So come up with something halfway plausible about how you're going to shoot 'the kind of energy he doesn't control'."

"Okay, promising, how do we deal with the inevitable person who's gonna call bullpoop on it and try to convince other people I'm making it all up?"

"Don't allow comments?"

"Even if I don't, doubtlessly people will talk about it on the PHO boards, and they might wonder why I'm not allowing comments there anyway."

"You're not allowing comments because Internet comments are the scum of the earth, obviously. I'm not sure. Do you happen to know at what ratio of pessimism to optimism adding other people's expectations doesn't improve you any farther?"

"No, and I have no idea how to even measure that. One person is enough to outbelieve me, but I think there's some... measuring going on? Like, I think there's something like 'how strongly' I believe something that's pitched against same on other people. I don't have any information on whether there's diminishing returns or different weights for other people's beliefs, but for now I'd bet on everyone being treated the same."

"...How sure are you that other people even can help as opposed to just being able to hurt if they're skeptical?"

"Well, I haven't ever performed any controlled tests, I guess, but it's the impression I have from regular power usage?" Pause. "Biggest piece of evidence that comes to mind: my laser was stronger after your talking about it against Leviathan. Alternative explanation: the fact that I expected that to be how it works did the thing."

"This definitely calls for controlled tests, because if it's just your expectations that need managing for positive results it's not worth the risk of backlash."

"Yes. How should we test that? Perform some kind of feat multiple times while I don't actually know how many people are watching each time, see if anything changes?"

"I was thinking call Windflower over, tell her we're testing the squinting thing, and occasionally lie to her about what you're trying to do."

"How do we test the 'she's affecting it positively' hypothesis against the 'she isn't but my expecting she is is' hypothesis under that setup?"

"I don't tell you what I'm telling her?"

"Okay... yeah I guess it sounds like a good first test. There's three things we're testing, right: my expectations alone, mine versus hers, and mine alone." Pause. "But actually even if other people only contribute negatively, their passive expectations definitely do contribute there, and the whole building-a-rep thing is still worth it if only to remove everyone else's negative passive expectations about me."

"Only to the extent you can avoid trolls claiming you can't do anything. It demands a much more conservative approach."

"No, that's not what I mean. Like, people not only don't expect a random Tinker gun to hurt Endbringers much, they expect it not to, and that definitely counts against me and is an expectation I need to work on. If I'm just a random nobody, they'll have no reason to not hold the basic expectation that I'll be ineffective."

"There's kinds and kinds of ineffective. You did hurt Leviathan. You didn't kill him, but he shooed that much sooner. If backlash gets too bad you might not be able to do even that much."