Haru calls his mom. She can't think of an appropriately borrowable pet but says she'll buy a feeder mouse on the way home as long as Cricket doesn't mind eating it post-experiment for them.

Can do.

And here is Ren with a mouse in a little grille-topped plastic box!

Lucy looks up when the door opens but when the comfy thing doesn’t move towards it or anything she goes back to her book.

Ren presents her with the emboxed mouse.

Sounds irrelevant.

Cricket politely takes it into the backyard to dispose of.

No displayed interest in a nonperson animal.

I don’t know if that’s conclusive, she’s usually more interested in people than animals…

Not conclusive at all, no.

Eventually she puts down her book and goes back to her phone.

She gets another text from her mom, and frowns at it.

Then she goes back to Traceless’s text about her having an esper awakening.

Uh. Wait. If you’re awakening as an esper then…the obvious thing to feel arbitrarily really good is…guiding, isn’t it.

Which you get from other espers.

Who have the capacity to see you with your shirt off.

She gingerly unhugs long enough to untie her shirt from around her waist and put it back on.

"So the donuts were actually - Lucy?"

Oh! That’s her name!

“Yes?”

"Hey. You're awakening. Can you possibly describe what your backlash is now that you can talk?"

OH of COURSE that’s where all the confusion is coming from.

“I seem to be missing—concepts? Possibly just one concept, I don’t know. But I’ll read something or hear a song and there’ll just be chunks of—gibberish, like, it’s not that I don’t recognize the words but that the words’ meanings don’t make any sense.”

"Okay. Which words confused you, do you remember?"

“Um…” 

She gets up and grabs the sonnets book.

“‘Heir.’ ‘Thou.’ ‘Husbandry.’ ‘Mother.’ ‘Lady.’ ‘Muse…’”

He writes those down but the pattern is not obvious. "Is there anything confusing in a way I should try to explain?"

“Uh—I assume the reason it occurred to me that I could be perceived is because of guiding?”

"Yeah, I'm pulling on your backlash pretty hard. Your roommate called me and -" Hm. 'Mother' is one of the confusing words. "- then I took you home with me from the hospital."

“Roommate goes on the list of confusing words.”

"Do you know who I am?"

“You’re an esper.”

"Okay, but you don't remember which one or anything?"