"It was a really tricky one for a first dungeon, too!"

“Well, I have a bit of a tricky power, so I suppose it fits.”

"You'll get the hang of it."

“I’m not complaining! I love the sense-sharing. I suppose everyone has a learning curve.”

"I'm still getting better at flying. I need practice to do it in anything but the most inefficient naive way, and I basically only use it tactically, not for practice, because the guiding tradeoff's so bad. I might have still been getting better at flying in ten years but if you wanna go for some rides I bet I can cut down that learning curve a lot."

“I would love to go for some rides! Flying is great!”

"Oh good! - do you happen to recall what was going through your head when you pulled on my ear, that was puzzling."

“Oh. I, um, remembered a thing I read once about hypothetically controlling an airplane from the outside by manipulating the flaps on its wings. I was trying to see if I could steer you.”

"...that's so fucking funny, oh my god."

“I had Nonconsensual Comedy Week instead of hellweek!”

"It did look very... peaceful, though I've refrained from saying so thus far because I know I hate it when someone's like 'loneliness, what kind of weaksauce backlash is that'."

“…Well, I really don’t like that I straight-up could not conceive of something as—I feel like ‘important’ is kind of a catastrophic understatement—as ‘other people.’ I feel like there’s a meaningful sense in which I’m not an agent, when my model of the world is that far off. Which, I realize lots of people would like to just stop existing for that week? But then I suddenly could think again, and I could remember what it was like to be that way, which was—pretty strong existential horror, honestly. Or psychological horror? I don’t do horror enough to be clear on sub-genre boundaries. Which—I do realize! Is still way better than most espers get!”

"I don't do horror enough to know either, but - yeah. My backlash'll do solipsism sometimes and it's the worst part, the part I've got to avoid as hard as possible, even though I react - differently, to it, since I can still imagine people existing and really wish they did."

“And I have complicated feelings about it because it was a lot better than average, probably, so I really can’t complain about it to other espers, but having the dominant narrative about something that unpleasant be how lucky I got is still—weird. Like—I will absolutely take it to become an esper, if it’s that I’m lucky to have gotten not only powers but such cool ones that’s totally fine! But when it’s just about that week it’s less fine.”

"Hundred percent. Though for whatever it's worth you were pretty low-maintenance. I was not and I am still sometimes awkward about that with my parents."

“I do really appreciate that my non-agentic self output comedy and not massive amounts of inconvenience!”

"Should I have - pushed harder on the guiding, I was reluctant to hover around the house or whatever because you weren't talkative until I'd already done a fair amount of that so the overlap wasn't great, but I could've bothered people on the phone, and Cricket."

“I…definitely want to find more partners going forward, but—I honestly have no idea how the tradeoff works during Hellweek, like, the massive piling on of backlash isn’t dependent on power use or anything, but it doesn’t just get worse and kill you if you aren’t getting guided. I really appreciate the lucidity I did have during that week but I have no idea what the curve is like in terms of results to input and I don’t, in fact, prefer to have burned a lot of resources for not that much improvement?”

"The closer together the two backlashes are the faster the guiding rate, so I could have tried to hold you down to the level at which you were more conversational, but only when we were awake, and losing progress every time we stopped touching and myself being that backlashed all week did not seem worth it once I had the initial improved understanding of what was wrong and what you wanted me to do about it."

“Yeah. Honestly, if for some bizarre reason I expected it to happen again I would probably just encourage you to use your powers more during that week in ways you would otherwise like to, and use me as a backlash sink. Like doing more dungeons or practicing flying or whatever.”

"Practicing flying would have been fun but I wasn't sure what was up with pulling on my ear or what else you might have decided to do!"

“Well. I was trying to steer. I probably wouldn’t have done much more than that, I hadn’t forgotten gravity existed, or airplane malfunctions.”

"You weren't worried you'd crash me?"

“I figured if I could change your flight path via a relatively simple adjustment, I could adjust in the other direction is something started to go wrong.”

"I don't think that'd be a safe assumption on a real plane."