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It's the anniversary. Glam would very much not like to celebrate.
It’s their last day on Winslow High—they’re being transferred to Arcadia on Monday—and also their last day without a patrol schedule assigned.
And the PRT released a small announcement on its website about Glam joining the Wards. Now their wiki page doesn’t get erased, of course—they’re no longer speculative. They wonder what it’s got on them.
Sadde and Bell in Worm
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mxglam
thinkering
"All right, that's probably enough. Chart me, bot," says Lorica, and the bot appears a chart on the wall with columns for Glam's expectation, Windflower's, and the result.
mxglam
The effects of expectations can be very easily divided in three components: what Glam expects will happen, what Windflower expects will happen, and what Glam expects Windflower expects will happen. Making a couple of numbers up for the various combinations, but keeping them consistent, paints a pretty clear picture.
The results are best when Glam's and Windflower's expectations agree and Lorica was speaking the truth about them, and worst when Glam's expectations are directly opposite Windflower's and Lorica was also speaking the truth about them. When Windflower was expecting nothing, there was still some passive resistance to Glam's expectations, though small compared to when she was actually expecting something to happen that was not what was going to happen.
The results are best when Glam's and Windflower's expectations agree and Lorica was speaking the truth about them, and worst when Glam's expectations are directly opposite Windflower's and Lorica was also speaking the truth about them. When Windflower was expecting nothing, there was still some passive resistance to Glam's expectations, though small compared to when she was actually expecting something to happen that was not what was going to happen.
thinkering
"So - she might have been helping when she was set up to help. Unless I'm just not that good a liar."
mxglam
"I... well, you don't exactly have a body language," they point out. "And I didn't consciously know when you were lying or what. My subconscious might've picked up on it? But in any case..." They squint at the charts. "It does look like she helped, yeah."
thinkering
"But only to a certain degree, she wasn't like having twice your usual ability aimed at the effects. Shy of that."
mxglam
"Mm yeah. Now I'm wondering if everyone has the same lower weight or if there's, like, diminishing returns." They look at one of the parts when their expectations were at odds. "She was better at hurting me than helping me, though, I think?"
thinkering
"Yeah. We can run another test, get my dad or something..."
mxglam
"We'd need your dad and Windflower, there, and they'd need to be told different things, so the test would take like four times as long, but yeah, we could do something like that."
thinkering
"Well, it'd be easy to tell them different things, my dad's helmet talks to the bot."
mxglam
"Mmhm. Would your dad buy that it was a squinting test even with these weird things happening, though?"
thinkering
"I could tell him it's a test of your control at range on low feedback."
thinkering
So Lorica calls her dad over and Transit plays Go Fish with Windflower and expects as told and Lorica runs all the tests again in a different order.
thinkering
"Okay, so having a vast crowd believing in you won't help that much except in the sense that it's much better than a vast crowd being skeptical at you."
thinkering
"Yeah. But a few skeptics will cancel out a lot of positive expectation. So you need to be very careful about Internet haters getting any traction."