Sadde doesn't seem quite able to focus on homework at the moment. He's fidgeting, and sometimes stares off into space for long periods of time before James has to snap him out of it.
"I mean if you're listening to a phone, you can say what you pick up from the phone to a bot, and then we'll have a record, instead of just saying it to a person who might forget."
"I also wanted to ask how you decide what gets rewound. Like, you rewound me with my suit; is that optional, could you have gotten the suit and not me if you had nastier intentions?"
"No, it's like, my power kinda decides that stuff counts as one thing? Like if I poured water in a glass and then I touched the glass, both the water and the glass would return to where they had been, even if that means separate. So, like, your suit and you counted as one thing, to my power, I could only choose to affect you separately if you were, you know, actually separate."
Lorica loosens a glove. "So if I detach part of it but it's still on me, how does that affect it?" She holds out her hand.
"Yeah, just a little ways. I don't lose memories, I'm a reasonable experimental target."
"Sure." Lorica stands up, walks around a bit, and comes back.
Rewind watches, then squints at the glove again, and nods. "Yeah, like, the glove counts as separate from you if it's not, you know, around you. Like, if I try to rewind the glove five seconds, I'll rewind all of you, but if I try it far enough that you were standing up, then I rewind just the glove." And she demonstrates, touching the glove with a finger and causing it to appear mid-air somewhere Lorica had been.
Lorica catches it and puts it back on. "That sounds almost like a safety - if you rewound somebody's outfit and it had previously been somewhere they were now intersecting - can you get anything to appear intersected with anything else under other circumstances?"
"No. The colors disappear if there's something in the way. Or, not disappear, but just, um, the part of them that's... in the way? Like..." She stands up then starts gesturing around to indicate the places Lorica had been. "If I put something here," she says, occupying one of those places, "then I can't rewind you so you'd be in this specific place, but I can rewind you before or after this."
"But air's fine. If I... blow up a balloon... then I assume you rewind it as a unit? Would the air rewind back into my lungs or would that be blocked off?"
"Well, I know what we're doing when we block out some time for power testing, then."
"It'll be fun. Do I seem odd to your power in any way at all that might mean I don't make a good example, besides the fact that I remember it?"
"Okay, good, no need to comb the other Wards for people willing to experimentally lose memories. Me and robots and balloons."
"Yep! Ooh - if you rewind someone who's been, say, shot, does the bullet appear in motion again or just pop into place where it was with no momentum and fall?"