"You might be disappointed with the density of casual superpower involvement in esper meetups."

“Well—sure, but—I have a control power. Just body control and not mind control I think, but having not yet tested it on a vertebrate I can’t be sure. I, specifically, had better get real anal retentive about consent real fast.”

"I support you wholeheartedly."

“I guess I might relax a little bit if it turns out that it is super obvious whenever I do something to a person who can, like, tell on me, if I cross a line, but I don’t strongly expect that. And even if so I am a walking potential privacy violation. Which is fine! But it’s fine because it’s me who has this power, and I wouldn’t do that.”

Nod nod.

“Anyway. Shrimp are cool. And I do not feel especially fussed about obtaining consent from invertebrates. …Unless there’s a cricket-alike with no bones or someone teaches an octopus how to talk, wow, invertebrates was a terrible choice of category signifier.”

"Monsters confuse all cladistic terminology hopelessly."

“Well, yeah, but also octopi are really smart.”

"I don't think they can learn to talk. Write, maybe, but they can't even learn sign like a gorilla."

“Oh, well, not talk talk, but there’s all kinds of stuff. Writing, word boards—I might be misremembering what they’re called. The gorilla thing is more famous but the language people have done, like, a ton of stuff with chimpanzees.”

"Ooh?"

“I don’t think I can describe it with any real justice—um—your backlash probably doesn’t play nicely with YouTube channels. There’s this anthropology/primate evolution student I follow, I will…get transcripts and read them to you, maybe? But the long and short of it is that while humans have the most complex language stuff, we are not unique among primates for having language at all. And also you can totally teach a chimp to sign or use a word board but doing it ethically is harder.”

"I try to spend a fair amount of time not backlashed but it's true that I consume most video content in the form of Cricket summarizing it for me. What's unethical about it?"

“Well, you get more successful the younger you start them, and taking a baby chimp away from their mother and raising them as a human is, like, multiple kinds of not good.”

"You have to take them away entirely? I was imagining just, like, treat rewards."

“You don’t have to, necessarily, but a lot of the older studies did.”

"Gotcha."

“I’ll get the transcripts.”

"I should warn you my to-read list grows faster than it shrinks."

“—Oh, I meant, I’ll read them to you sometime. Possibly while guiding is happening.”

"Aha, I'd like that."

“Not that we don’t seem to have plenty to talk about when I’m not too backlashed but I bet I can get to a point where I can read aloud even when I’m not a great conversation partner.”

"- it's not going to super work for backlashed-me if I can't like, ask questions and make comments you respond to."

“Well, that won’t work if I’m totally nonverbal, then, but…well, we’ll see what I can work out.”

"With June, she hides under a blanket and sticks out her feet and she's got headphones on the whole time, so I'm just on phone calls with third parties or talking to Cricket while I put feet on her feet, that's all she can stand. I think we can probably improve on this but it might be at all complicated."