And then the most unspeakably beautiful person anyone in this room has ever seen walks in.

Her hair falls in a long single braid down her back to nearly touch the floor, and she strides with a casual grace and confidence that humanizes her ethereal beauty enough to make her more attractive than intimidating, and all this only makes it even more striking that she is not, actually, hotter at a glance than the possessed girl, despite being objectively more beautiful.

Her thoughts run slightly too fast and in slightly too much depth to follow completely in real time, but she is mostly thinking about how relieved she is to not be attending another fucking art exhibition.

Sadly, no matter how interested she is, she cannot really justify asking Edie to ransack this woman's head for memories of art. 

At a direct, unobstructed glance, the next entrant appears to be a perfectly normal boring milquetoast brunet white boy. 

If, however, anyone happened to see him out of the corner of their eye, there is definitely something off about him. Is that hair or a mushroom? A sleeping animal, perhaps? Is that skin, or bread? Wood? A discolored fold of linen? 

His mind appears as though through a funhouse mirror, but he is definitely assessing the room for targets. 

The next two people to enter the room are also unfairly beautiful, although not quite in Ysandre's tier of exquisitely crafted physical perfection or Bree's tier of raw sexual appeal. They come as a set, and they're not literally in telepathic contact with each other but you could be forgiven for assuming they were from a quick glance at their surface thoughts; they know each other so well that it's like each has an echo of the other in his head.

One of them is taller, with delicately pointed ears peeking out of his shoulder-length brown hair, and seeing the room mainly in terms of physical position and movement: who's standing or sitting where, which directions they could most easily move in. He leads his companion to a seat near the back that doesn't block anyone's exit and isn't close enough to anyone to pose an immediate physical threat.

The other is shorter, with wavy red hair and human-shaped ears, and taking in the contents of the room in much more depth and detail. He sees the way Emily and Edie make a clear unit with one another, and catches a hint of shyness in the moth lady's body language, and as soon as a backward glance reveals the statue he immediately surmises that it must be a fellow student even though he can't see how.

And there's something else about the tall one, a subtle undercurrent in his mind—like stress, but not quite the way most people experience stress. A constant underlying tension, which he can work around with practiced ease but never fully ignore. Twice, in the time it takes them to cross the room, an image flashes across his mind of grabbing the nearest person and breaking their arm or throwing them into a wall; both times, he dismisses the impulse as soon as it forms, but for just that brief flickering instant he wants to.

The redhead, meanwhile, turns out to be telepathic enough to catch Edie looking, although it takes him a couple of seconds. He glances at her and silently raises an eyebrow. It's obvious why she'd want to read everyone's mind, of course, and assuming her intentions are otherwise benign he doesn't exactly object, but he is curious what she's going to do about being caught.

(In parallel with that, he's thinking about Liamar's likely distress at the invasion of privacy, and calculating possible ways of getting the stranger to stop; asking nicely is the obvious first line, of course, but if that doesn't work is it viable to use force? Probably not; he doesn't think he's going to end up being the most powerful telepath in the room, certainly not more powerful than someone who reads everyone casually as they come in, and even if he might be, he doesn't think it would be wise to start a fight in the auditorium. This entire train of logic flashes wordlessly through his mind with the speed and ease of someone to whom this kind of tactical calculation comes as naturally as breathing.)

Hi! Yeah, you're not the first one to catch me. I haven't been reading more than just enough to confirm non-hostility; I've stopped. She shows him a snapshot of her own sensory experience, which includes perception of each mind in the room but not, actually, a read on anyone but him and Emily, and she's dropped down to basic communicative on him and is sharing as much with Emily as she's getting off her. You guys seem neat. Is your friend okay? Context: the brief dip into his friend's mind that she did get; emotional affect: concerned for rather than by him. 

Not especially, he admits, with a hint of wry dark humour. After a silent shared glance with his companion, he elaborates, My lord has a problem and we are here in search of a solution.

He can't quite figure out how to put the problem into words, and so sends her a network of linked concepts instead: the underlying stress she saw, and the pattern it follows of always tightening up and never winding down until one way or another it snaps and releases into an outpouring of violent rage. Atali's own attempts to offer Liamar an alternate outlet by giving him vivid waking dreams, only to find that imaginary violence didn't work; something about the true embodied experience of beating someone to death is necessary to the process, and whatever it is, Atali at least can't figure out how to counterfeit it with his current powers. So for now they do their best to find minimally harmful outlets, and in the long term Atali wants to become good enough at altering minds to make those outlets unnecessary.

Eesh, that's unfortunate. If I happen to run into anyone with complementary kinks I'll let you guys know. Uh, if he wanted me to try fixing the problem I'd be willing to try but I'd want to look at his mind in much more detail first and even aside from the privacy thing I wouldn't expect him to trust a stranger to mess with his head.

Indeed he would not, but I thank you for the offer.

What if anything do I have permission to say to someone potentially compatible?

You can give them what I gave you.

Okay. Thanks. Good luck. 

The next one into the room is a tall woman with a swimmer's physique, radiating confidence and some kind of pleasant, musky perfume. 

She's intrigued by the possibilities the university offers, but not in a predatory way; she very much likes helping people and sees this as another avenue to do that. Not to mention the fantastic scientific knowledge this place offers...

She scans the room, raises her eyebrows when she sees the unfairly beautiful people, and, on the basis that they're closer, heads towards the most recent pair. 

She takes a chair a row back, so she isn't actually pressuring them into interacting with her just by proximity, and says, "Hello." 

Atali looks back at her with a slight smile. "Hello," he says, with less enthusiasm but still some friendliness.

"So I hear people outside my little corner of the multiverse do gender differently than they do where I'm from. Wanna help me investigate?"

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out immediately but I can't say I came here with that sort of thing in mind."

"Mmkay. Nice meeting you anyway, I'm Dafina." 

"Atali. Likewise."

"Cool." 

She gets up and heads over to where the other unfairly beautiful person is. 

"Well hello there."

"Hi! Is it true that most people in the multiverse have a binary gender system?"

"Technically I can't answer that for most of the multiverse but it's pretty common in the galaxy I'm familiar with."

"That sounds fascinating. On my planet, we have six."