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so we're recruiting
haru and fangirl lucy
Permalink Mark Unread

This dungeon's spooky enough that they think it might be an unrecorded second-appearance; it's got victims in, not exactly stress positions but certainly not positions optimized for their comfort, wrapped up in webbing courtesy of the giant spider monsters. There's webs, gappy but sticky and thick, crossing the whole dungeon.

So in flies Haru with a roll of butcher paper to keep people from sticking to him, and a set of approximately disposable cheap scissors because each one will only be good for one web thread. "Attercop, attercop," he mutters. "Old fat spider spinning in a tree, old fat spider can’t see me, attercop! Attercop! Won't you stop, stop your spinning and look for me..." It's a bit on the nose but it at least keeps him firmly in the headspace of not letting the spiders detect him as he floats through the spaces in the web toward another victim. "Hey there, sorry for the wait," he says when he arrives, ripping off a piece of paper to let him alight on the web below her. "I can't get you loose right here and now, they've got acetone outside. I'm going to wrap you up in this paper so I can carry you out."

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Lucy was relatively lucky; she had her phone in her hand when the dungeon grabbed her. This is lucky because both of her hands are webbed far enough away from her pockets that there is otherwise no chance she would have been able to reach it.

She almost dropped her phone three times, getting it into camera mode, turning it to video, and starting recording, all one-handed, but after that her biggest problem was trying to follow individual spider monsters while not having a great angle to see the screen from.

Probably the correct thing to say is “Thank you, how can I be as convenient as possible,” but what instead comes out is, “Holy shit, you’re Traceless.”

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"- yes, that's me! Esper fan?" he asks. "Wow, you have your phone on you, do you want me to pocket that on the way out?" He starts unrolling more butcher paper.

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“Yeah, at this point the risk of losing what I’ve got outweighs the possibility of getting just a little more video—I read your blog. Yelling About Basic Research is brilliant.”

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"- oh, thank you kindly!" He accepts the phone, pauses the recording, and pockets it. Butcher paper butcher paper. "Is that why you were taking video? Doing some of your own basic research as long as you're in here?" When she's all wrapped up the butcher paper goes back in its tube holster and he pulls a pair of scissors. "Gonna get you snipped off here, won't let you fall."

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“Yeah, exactly! I mean, it’s just a phone camera, but it’s still data.”

She holds still so as to not make him make a mistake but she’s not afraid of heights qua heights, it was several other aspects of this dungeon that freaked her out!

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"I'm usually working with a phone camera too! They've gotten decent especially if you have to trade off against bulkiness at all." Snip, and now she in her butcher paper roll is in his arms.

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“I have no idea how good my phone camera is but I was not optimizing for the phone with the fanciest camera because I did not expect to end up in a dungeon.”

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"It's not a very expectable event." He makes sure she's securely held and then hops off the butcher-papered bit of web to fly back down between bits of webbing toward the portal. Fortunately the spiders don't see amazingly; if they don't touch the web, and they won't, they're unlikely to take exception to their victim flying away. "It's pretty dim in here, I've been getting candids of the spiders with flash on."

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“If I didn’t get anything usable at all I will be pissed.”

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"It's not pitch dark, I'm sure you got something!"

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“Good. —Oh, crap, I think I have not actually said thanks for the rescue yet—“

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"I think it's implied though also it would be valid if you didn't find yourself in a particularly thankful mood."

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“I mean today is not my favorite day but you’re Traceless, if nothing else I could tack the dungeon-gratitude onto the gratitude for your entire deal? Research-wise, I mean, I am not—usually—specifically grateful for your particular powerset.”

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"I appreciate that! Would I know you from the comment section or do you lurk?"

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“I’m fiat-lucy.”

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"Oh sounds familiar - I'm going to get the details wrong, forgive me, but you like, volunteer for DDSI or something?"

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“Yeah! I want to work there after college but if I can’t, just continuing to volunteer is fine.”

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"Sweet. What arm of their work are you into?"

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“Right now I’m doing some basic phone bank stuff, but I’m studying data science, so I expect to do more of that later.”

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"Is there a specific hypothesis you're keen on investigating?"

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“I don’t know about hypothesis but I’m very into the question of dungeon intelligence? And monster intelligence, obviously. I like your cat.”

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"You say that but you haven't met him. I started writing up a 'Cricket answers frequently asked questions' post but it was too incendiary to post."

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“He may be verbally incendiary but he’s perfectly capable of coexisting with humanity! He’s a person and he’s a dungeon monster and he gets to be okay, that’s so important!!!”

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"I love him very much and it is so important that he is a person and I'm going to grab a couple of these spiders, if we can find the core, see about them too."

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She does not bounce because this would be a horrible fucking time to bounce but she experiences Bouncy Emotions.

”If that goes well, you can tell them no hard feelings from me specifically.”

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"If they talk. Or, well, I suppose I can tell them either way, same as I can call spirits from the vasty deep, but."

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“If it goes well enough, I should have said. I’m not assuming that non-verbal means non-sophontic but at this stage of research talking is definitely a better outcome than not talking.”

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"So far the zoo folks haven't found any that are obviously smarter than, like, dogs, while not being able to talk, but I confess 'obviously' is a big qualifier there."

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“Dogs can get pretty smart, depending on the breed, but fair enough. A persony dungeon creature seems like obviously a better outcome than a not-persony one but even a not-persony one could be considered going ‘well,’ since existence failure on dungeon destruction is also an option. …And also…failing to destroy the dungeon…I was really insufficiently precise.”

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"They don't have the core for this one yet, I'm probably going to come back again tomorrow and look if they don't have it by then."

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“The dungeon getting away would increase the research value of my video, probably, and yet I don’t prefer it at all.”

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"Mood! I don't think this one's priority enough that they'll bring in Columba, though."

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“Yeah. And it could be moving! What fun.”

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"Could be, yeah. Maybe one day somebody'll have her power but a backlash that lets them use it for more than five minutes."

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“Or a partner so compatible you can tie them to her back and give her more stamina that way.”

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"Yeah. I had an inkling once that she'd be compatible with my metapartner Arctic but I suggested it to them and no dice, it's hard to predict these things."

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“I’ve looked into it some but I’m sure I know less than any actual esper.”

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"I mean, not necessarily, if you stared at the compatibility map's raw data enough you might spot something - actual espers are busy and don't have a magical intuition for compatibility before we actually fistbump somebody."

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“I’m sure I’ll do a data science project on it eventually but I haven’t yet and just staring at it sounds less efficient.”

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"Well, staring here as metonymy for whatever data manipulation sparks joy."

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“Quite. Anyway, not yet. So.”

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"And here we are." He's spent much of the trip to the portal on foot, balancing on pre-butcher-papered strings of the web, imperceptible but at least not flying; he can last longer that way. "I'm gonna hand you off to the folks with the acetone, I'll leave your phone in the recovery tent, all right?"

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“Okay! Thanks so much! For everything!”

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"You're welcome, it was lovely to meet you, shoot me an email anytime!"

And he drops off her and her phone and once more unto the breach.

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Lucy gets acetoned and reclaims her phone and watches a couple of minutes of the video she took and chortles quietly to herself about how not ruined by the low lighting it is and e-mails the professor whose class she vanished out of that she has been rescued and emails a different professor whose class she failed to show up to that she was absent due to dungeon and not personal negligence and heads back to campus to reclaim the stuff she had with her but not, like, on her.

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She is met there by a TA who does the class she vanished out of. “Are you okay???”

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“Mhm! I got, like, spiderwebbed for a while, but nothing fell off from constricted circulation, and I had my phone on me. And! I! Was rescued! Personally! By Traceless!”

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…She is not so into celebrity espers that she immediately recognizes the name. She googles it.

“…Okay,” she concludes once she has. Like, he isn’t not cute, but.

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“He has a blog, let me show you,” she already has the blog open in her phone. She shows her.

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Huh. Okay, yeah, the monster cat is pretty cute.

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Sigh. Normally Lucy isn’t one of those people who bemoans having to take non-core classes, but her statistics TA would have gotten it.

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In the evening she scrapes together a couple of projects she’s done analyzing publicly-available dungeon data and emails them to Traceless, along with a copy of her video.

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He is, by the evening, in the checking-his-email stage of backlash at June's.

Good to see you've got your arms free again! I'll make sure LAC has a copy of the video if you haven't already.
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Oh good idea, I sent it to DDSI but not LAC.

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IME DDSI is more for the kind of information that's already been through a layer of interpretation - like, if a person counts the number of spiders that appear in your video they want that number, the video itself they might store but aren't set up to do a lot with it
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Yeah, sounds right. Also to be 100% clear I was a good girl and did my surveys before emailing you.

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Thank you! Gotta have those. Any guesses how it was filtering? Spiderphobia or anything?
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I am maybe a little spiderphobic now but I wasn’t before, mostly I was freaked out by being tied up by something that probably didn’t care if it restricted blood flow to my extremities until they rotted off and also if I got out of my restraints I would have more problems rather than less.

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Huh, maybe the spiders were incidental, or were derived from the webbing theme rather than the other way around.
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The people who collect the surveys will have a chance to figure it out!

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Here's hoping! Did it interrupt you at anything very time-sensitive?
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Nah. Just a literature class. It was kind of alarming to the people immediately adjacent to me but they’ll deal.

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Did you see the study about how car ownership and accident patterns changed when dungeons started snatching people right off the highway? link
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Yeah! I used it for class last year.

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Ah, sorry, should've probably guessed that
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Don’t be! If I hadn’t seen it I’d’ve wanted to.

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Sorry. Apologies are a backlash side effect so I have very apologetic email habits
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Oh, I see. I’m naturally extroverted and not especially apologetic so that hadn’t occurred to me.

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Being extroverted seems like it must be nice, or at least it sometimes seems that way. But my backlash isn't extroversion, it just looks like it in bad light.
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I enjoy it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. I am complicatedly sympathetic about your backlash because it kind of seems like they all suck but esper powers are so cool.

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I have settled into a workable relationship with mine but when I first awakened I hated it soooooo much. But I AM very glad I'm an esper rather than not that, I would've taken it even if I'd known what I'd get.
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I’m not gonna lie, I would rather live in a world with both dungeons and espers in it than a world that just didn’t have magic. Even not being an esper, even after today.

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I think this may be in SOME ways a nicer 21st century than the null expected 21st century but I'm not positive about that and a lot of people sure aren't around to vote on it anymore because dungeons ate them.....
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Well, that’s fair. I’m not opining on which one is objectively better, just, if you assume there’s one universe where espers and dungeons showed up in the seventies, and one where they didn’t, so the total number of people suffering as a result of either situation is fixed-ish, I would personally rather live in this one.

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When you put it like that, I agree.
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Though I have hopes that with more research and dungeon materials and so on we can make the tradeoff better over time.

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100%. It can be the Black Plague of magic. (The Black Plague improved labor conditions because labor became more valuable, sorry if you knew that already but if you didn't hte reference would have been pretty incomprehensible.)
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I was aware and managed not to get the reference anyway! ^_^;

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I did not anticipate that but fortunately covered adequately anyway!
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It’s one of those things that’s true but conversations about the Black Death are usually not about it, they’re about the horrors.

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Well, dungeons too are often discussed in terms of the horrors.
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Yeah, the Black Death doesn’t have an equivalent of espers.

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It has... people who have genetic resistance to the plague...? but it's a reach.
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Yeah that would only work if the only thing espers did was not get kidnapped. Although maybe I should suggest “people with genetic resistance to a disease can magically eradicate it” as a writing prompt to a friend.

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I wish your writer friend luck with this concept!
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I’ll tell her you said so!

Lucy tracks the follow-up on what she can’t help but think of as her dungeon. Did they kill it? Did Traceless get any spiders out? Probably they aren’t going to post a list of rescuees who haven’t filled out their surveys so people can nag them about it.

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They still haven't found the core, apparently, so most likely Traceless has yet to catch spiders (they'd be a huge liability if the dungeon got away and they'd just have to kill them then). There is no list of victims of the dungeon.

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Hasn’t been killed yet but also hasn’t escaped. Okay.

She messages Writer Friend with the prompt and does some homework and starts looking up possible analyses to do to Traceless’s compatibility dataset and then goes to bed.

In the morning she annoys her roommate with how chipper she is about being dungeon-napped and replies to an email from student health about post-dungeon counseling and goes to all her classes and then lets herself look into the dungeon again.

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Core still missing. A spider made a break for it and was killed but the population of them has been thinned out enough that they're starting to harvest the webs.

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Good for them.

She really wants this thing to die.

Man, it’s a good thing she said yes to counseling, wanting things to die isn’t a healthy Lucy opinion! Like, obviously dungeons need to die, it’s not the worst possible trauma response, but she would really prefer to feel mildly sad about it.

She checks again the next day.

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Core is found, a spider specimen has been caught, and they're keeping it alive to harvest the silk, it's good silk once you acetone off the glue.

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Whew.

She hopes the spider turns out to be a person. That would be so cool. Even a non-person animal would be good, but a person would be better.

She keeps an eye on the situation over the next several days.

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The dungeon tries to escape and everybody has to bolt for the exit while it's coming apart around them and kill the core before it can get away. The spider doesn't survive the loss of its dungeon, sadly.

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Aw! No!

That was HER spider it was not even slightly her spider, what the fuck, she’s going to weird out her counselor so much.

She goes to counseling. She continues periodically emailing Traceless with the results after she does math to magic-related datasets.

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He doesn't always reply right away but sometimes she'll get a batch of responses to accumulated emails all at once.

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And a couple of months later he gets an email from Lucy’s email address saying that it’s Lucy’s roommate and she’s in the hospital with some kind of psychotic breakdown and the hospital has like a roomful of people who are probably not espers but like it sure would be convenient if somebody could check.

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...okay, he doesn't usually do this but usually it's not somebody he knows, since he knows far fewer than fifty thousand people. He calls the hospital to see if they'll confirm that they've got a Lucy who is a suspected awakening, he's Traceless and knows her from the internet and would be willing to come check if they've got her.

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Yeah, they’ve got her! And a handful of other people.

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Honestly now that he thinks about it they probably shouldn't just tell anybody who calls them on the phone and claims to be an esper that they've got a specific patient! But it is not a problem he is going to solve right now while backlashed. He sends June an emoji, and he and Cricket drive to the hospital and ask to see Lucy, he doesn't actually have her name but there can't be that many albino Lucies.

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Lucy is sort of half-sitting, half-lounging on an examination table, her wrists in soft restraints, fiddling with a three-dimensional wooden puzzle thing.

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"Lucy? It's Traceless."

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She ignores him, continuing to fiddle with her puzzle.

”She hasn’t been responding when we try to talk to her,” the nurse supplies.

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"Okay, well, she doesn't strictly have to -" He reaches out and touches her hand.

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Oh wow that’s nice!!! She drops the puzzle and immediately attempts to plaster herself against Traceless’s side.

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"- yes, she's an esper. Uh, I assume based on the wrist restraints there's something more complicated going on than that she won't talk to anyone?"

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“She’ll try to grab things out of people’s hands and won’t listen to ‘no.’”

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Cricket, draped on Haru's shoulder, jumps down to the floor when the plastering attempts begin.

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"Okay, uh, do you have next of kin info to talk about whether I should... bring her home with me? We're compatible and if I get her farther down the backlash scale maybe she'll have some words, but without it I'd want to talk to her parents or whoever." He will hug her though.

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“We have her phone—well, we have her roommate and her roommate has her phone—presumably her parents are in the contacts—” 

The nurse nips out to fetch the roommate. The roommate has the phone number for a mom but not a dad.

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"Hi, Lucy's roommate, I'm Traceless, can I get you to extract Lucy's mom's phone number from her contacts and get her on the horn for me?"

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“Yeah, sure.” She calls Lucy’s mom and hands him the phone.

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He pets Lucy's, uh, hair, that seems minimally weird to do in front of people. Pet pet. Ring ring.

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Cricket figure-eights around his ankles.

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“Hello, love, how’s it going?”

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"Hi, Lucy's awakening and can't talk right now, I'm Traceless, I'm an esper, Lucy's roommate asked me to come by and check her and I thought you should have this information."

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“—Traceless, huh? How many pictures did Lucy take when the the dungeon took her?”

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"I don't know if she took any stills, but if she did she didn't send them to me, I just got video."

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“No, it was a trick question. Awakening. Is she alright?”

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"She is... calm. I don't know why she can't talk, but she's compatible enough with me to be" trying to climb me like a tree, "positively responsive in that direction and I might be able to get her to a level where she has some words with more time, I called you first thing."

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“Thanks, I appreciate it. She’s not having any dangerous medical problems?”

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"No, the medics say she'll try to take things out of people's hands but she hasn't tried to grab her phone so far from me."

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“Okay. Well. Thank you for being there for her. I didn’t know guiding worked before you were done awakening but it seems, uh, preferable.”

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"It works, but it works as though she were constantly using the powers she doesn't have yet at an unsustainable rate, her backlash will keep pulling up to awakening levels any time I'm not holding it down." Does he have to say "so it might be medically indicated for me to carry your daughter off and sleep in the same bed with her for a week" or can that be subtext.

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“…I don’t know how much time you have to devote to the project, or what it might entail…”

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"Uh - well, awakening lasts a week. She's calm when unguided so I wouldn't consider it necessarily urgent to supervise her twenty-four-seven - I had to have company twenty-four-seven and it was my parents, not even guiding company - but, like, twenty-three-seven, maybe. The reason people espers don't routinely poke everyone in the emergency room is because it'd be overwhelmingly false positives and where it was a true positive it would almost never be a compatible person, not because we, like - we've all been there."

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“—Okay, uh, I know—that the, um, fiction, I’ve read, about espers, isn’t accurate, but—you are in fact just talking about being around her and hugs and so on, right?”

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WHY IS THIS HIS LIFE "That is all I mean to imply, yes. Like, maybe without our shirts on but I can be professional about it especially while she can't talk."

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“Sorry! I don’t know you and I’m concerned for my daughter.”

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"Yeah, sorry, I know, this is kind of weird for me too. We will probably be chaperoned by my talking monster cat much of the time, because the guiding will work better if I'm backlashed and my cat's job is to have conversations with me when I'm backlashed if nobody else is available and she can't talk."

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“Thanks. When she can talk, tell her I love her and I’m glad for her and/or will be at the end of the week.”

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"And you are okay with authorizing the hospital to release her to me? Do I need to know anything about like, dietary restrictions, meds she's on, anything like that?"

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“Yes, I can do that. Uh, she doesn’t take anything regularly, unless she started a multivitamin recently or something.”

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"I can ask her roommate, she's the one who emailed me. Can I get you to send a text to my work number so I don't have to keep stealing Lucy's phone if I need to contact you again? I - uh - my cat will give you the number as I presently cannot -" He holds the phone down where Cricket is and Cricket does that. "Is there any other contact information I should have?"

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She takes down the number. “I’ll put my email and landline in the text.”

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"No other family or anything? What time zone are you in?"

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“She has a brother but I’m going to want to talk to him about this before I send you his contact information. I’m in Saskatchewan.”

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"Okay, I'll try to avoid calling too early. I'm gonna hand Lucy's phone to the nurse now for the release thingy, okay?"

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“Okay.”

Lavinia gives the nurse the release stuff and the nurse does the relevant paperwork and could he bop a handful of other probably-not-espers while she does that, just to be on the safe side, they’re over there.

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Yeah, sure, he can pick up Lucy and carry her around to tap people. None of the rest of 'em are espers.

And... then he is going to take off his shirt in the hospital lobby, stuff enough of it into his jeans pocket that it'll stay put, and fly home, Cricket close behind and chattering about Better Off Ted.

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The hospital staff don’t let anyone take pictures of the shirtless esper while inside the building but it’s up to him to be invisible after that.

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He can't make Lucy invisible so, nah, people can see him flying around, it's fine. He's going pretty fast, though, anyone who wasn't already trying to take a picture of something above their heads won't get a very good shot. Wow, Better Off Ted sounds like a fun premise but the romantic interest character seems really boring.

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WHOAH HIGH UP BETTER CLING EXTRA HARD TO THE COMFY THING TO AVOID FALLING.

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- okay he doesn't want to scare her, he can slow down and hold her tighter and see if that helps? And if it doesn't he can get an Uber but he's not sure how to convince her to wear a seatbelt.

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She’s going to cling extra hard but you know what the view from up here is REALLY COOL, she’s good.

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Oh good. He knows she's not panicky about heights in general, he flew her in the dungeon. And the flying will make the guiding work better. And maybe he should find a compilation video of crucial Portia deRossi moments in the show, sounds like she delivered a good performance.

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This is really cool! Pity she can’t control the flying thing… unless she can somehow? She has vague recollections of how airplane wings work…but she can’t see any wings on this thing, and if she can alter its trajectory and she fucks it up, this probably results in crashing.

But she does want to know if she can do it.

She experimentally reaches up and pulls on Haru’s ear.

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- he laughs, but as long as he can still see where he's going it doesn't affect their trajectory at all.

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Oh, so that action makes a noise! This is not super interesting, Things make Noise like, all the time. Well, it's not surprising that she couldn't alter trajectory by tugging on that, it was too small to be a wing. And it's not, like, moving, so it can't be like the small-wing-things at the back of an airplane. The middle one is called a rudder maybe? Not important. 

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Eventually he lands at his house. If he sets her down will she stand and be led inside?

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Yep! If he attempts to lead her by the hand she will ignore this in favor of continuing to Hug, but she is competent to move while hug. 

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Valid to hug. "I'm going to call Ren," he tells Cricket his phone but it is functional that Cricket can hear him say it. He maneuvers Lucy over to the couch and - has to have Cricket leave Ren a message, because he can't be having with that at the moment, but then they can be set up on the couch all three with Cricket purring on an unoccupied Haru location and continuing to explain Better Off Ted.

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...Comfy thing is extremely comfy, but after a little while of this she gets bored anyway and attempts to steal his phone.

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How about she have her phone instead.

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Oh, cool, that works. 

 

If he pays attention to her phone usage, he may notice that she is capable of using language--on a couple of different occasions, she goes into her notes to write things down, and at one point she ends up reading an article about geology.

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Huh.

What if... he sends her a text.

You're having an esper awakening.

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...Hm. Her phone is spontaneously generating text at her. That...feels like a thing that can happen? But there's context about it that she's missing right now? 

She's sort of baffled by the second-person pronoun--"you" implies the existence of persons outside the self--but--

Esper Awakening. She recognizes that phrase; it means getting superpowers. Which is great! But also very unlikely. She does feel sort of disoriented right now, but awakening is supposed to be worse than this? Probably? Hmmmmmm.

Well, it takes a week. She remembers that. So no reason to worry about it until then. 

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...well, she read it, so that's good. He'll text her mom: It seems like she can read; something other than language, per se, is not functioning right now, but she might get ~anything out of receiving texts.

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Good to know, thank you.

She tries texting Lucy:

I love you. How are you doing?

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Gibberish. She goes back to her article.

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Will Lucy let him get up?

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Well, she won't let go, but she has classified him as a moving object and will move with him rather than attempting to keep him in place.

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...yeah, okay, she can accompany him to his bookshelf and he will try handing her a book. How's about, say, The Hobbit.

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She opens it to try to read it, immediately trips over the assumption that Bilbo being a person who takes actions is a coherent concept, and puts it down disinterestedly. 

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Huh. Book of sonnets?

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She recognizes poems as discrete works, so when she gets baffled by one she moves on to the next instead of putting the book down. 

Most of them are romantic to some degree, but the ones that are more abstracted hold her interest longer; anything that strongly and directly talks about people gets her to skip to the next one immediately. 

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Haru comments on this out loud by virtue of the combination of speech to text + Cricket. Texts Lucy's mom - does her name pop up? - She'll page through a book of Shakespeare sonnets but I'm not yet sure what the pattern is for which she'll keep reading and which she skips past. Back downstairs and he's going to get Cricket's sashimi out for him and fix some instant ramen, Lucy seems like she'll be able to eat instant ramen.

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Lucy's mom's name is Lavinia Wayne. 

Instead of waiting for instant ramen, Lucy grabs an apple. She is totally able to eat it. 

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She can have an apple, he will not begrduge her. "It'll be interesting to find out if she thinks to throw the core away like this," Haru remarks to Cricket. The first ramen beeps, does she seem intrigued by it now that it smells nice and stuff?

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Oh, cool, instant ramen has come to be in edible form without her having to do anything about it! Nice!

She looks around for a compost bucket. If she doesn't find one she'll leave the apple core on the counter. 

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What if Haru pulls open the drawer that has the trash in it?

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Nope! Produce waste goes in compost buckets. She can pull a compost bucket together later if the apple core is on the counter, but if it goes in the trash, it won't get composted!

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Huh. He closes the drawer again. Makes a second ramen.

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She eyes his ramen speculatively once she's done with hers, but decides she isn't hungry right now. 

Fork goes in sink and empty ramen cup goes in trash. 

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What if he opens the dishwasher?

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She'll put the fork in the dishwasher, sure. After rinsing it briefly in the sink. 

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Which he narrates to Cricket so he'll have a written record of it to sort out later. Time for him to eat ramen while being snuggled. Can she at least be maneuvered onto his left?

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Sure why not. 

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Then he and Cricket will speculate about her condition throughout lunch! Does she keep reading the sonnets?

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She'll keep struggling through them but she's becoming increasingly annoyed by the incomprehensibleness of it all. 

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He tells Cricket Plus Phone which ones she skips and which ones she seems to process and when she eventually gives up on the book he'll send this (disclaimed as being unedited text to speech) to her mom in case she's got any insight. And also to make it less conspicuous that there is nothing but him stopping him from taking advantage of her backlashed daughter. He will just give that alternate universe asshole her mother might be worried about very little space to hide in.

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Lavinia thanks him for the info and looks up the sonnets so she can try to put together a pattern. The ones Lucy is having less problems with have more...nature...in them?

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If when he's done with his ramen he opens the back door does she wanna be outside or nah?

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Nope. Indoors is comfier, plus if they go outdoors the comfy flying thing might randomly fly off again, and there's no reason to expect that if that happened the next place it lands her will have, like, food. 

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Inside it is. He shuts the door.

Back to the couch. Cricket runs out of Better Off Ted content and starts instead talking about the latest from Bollywood.

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If comfy thing is insistent on going back to Couch this is acceptable. But if it is amenable to being guided, she will go back to the bookshelf. 

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- yes, sure, he's curious where she's going with this! Does she want to exchange the sonnets for something?

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Yep! She shifts her clinging to free up a hand, and run those fingers over the spines; when she sees a title she can comprehend, she pulls it out and checks the back, and once she finds one where she can comprehend the entire blurb on the back she will go couch. 

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Haru's mostly got classic novels! And a couple reviewer copies of books about dungeons. What's she going to land on here?

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Oh, let's go with a dungeon book. People are divided enough on whether dungeons have agency that she can comprehend them while assuming that agency doesn't exist.

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She put the poems back on the shelf (instead of leaving it lying around; she put an apple core on the counter) and picked up a nonfiction book instead. Couch now?

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Couch now!

Was there somewhere for compost?

Lavinia asks. 

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No, I guess maybe she wouldn't settle for a trash can?
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Maybe. If it were at home she might leave something on the counter briefly if the compost bucket wasn't there because someone was taking it out...

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"Cricket, can you check if she minds if you trash her core?"

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The drawer has an extra pull attached at the bottom specifically for Cricket. He pulls it open, then hops up onto the counter and bats the core in.

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--Well that's not ideal but not really worth attempting to prevent. 

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I had my cat (Cricket) throw it away and she looked consternated but not upset or moved to intervene.
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I don't know what that means, sorry.

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Perturbed? Like it bothered her a bit.
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--Sorry, I mean, I'm not immediately able to interpret that behavior, not, I need a dictionary.

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Oh, sorry, my bad.
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I was ambiguous. 

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I apologize a lot as a backlash symptom sorry
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Oh! Okay. That seems, uh. Probably better than...whatever is happening right now 

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It all depends on amount. I flew home from the hospital to pull down her backlash more effectively but I didn't get myself up to awakening levels, that's not safe for anyone.
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That does not make me worry less 

Hopefully she'll be able to tell us what's going on at some point. 

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working on it!
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The dungeon book ever references people, such as espers or kidnappees, but Lucy is mostly managing to work her way through it anyway. 

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Is she going to let him go to the bathroom.

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Sure!

...

Oh, alone? Haha no.

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She doesn't want to let me go to the bathroom by myself. I can force the issue with the gratuitous use of superpowers without harming her but, also, when I was awakening, I could not go to the bathroom alone, and dragged one or the other parent in with me every time, so this is not inherently unthinkable to me. Best guess how she'd feel about this?
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Check how she reacts to being made to let go?

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Haru attempts to pry her off him gently.

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Is his attempt to make her let go more uncomfortable than guiding is comfortable?

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Yeah no he doesn't want to actually hurt her.

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Then nope.

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...what if he tickles her, does she let go long enough?

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Eep! Yeah that’ll do it!

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"Keep an eye on her, kitty," and into the bathroom with him.

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She tries to follow him but doesn’t do worse than pout when this doesn’t work.

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That's good, it'd be hard to hold onto the doorknob from relevant corners of the bathroom. He's out again in a jiffy.

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Oh good! She grabs onto him again, this time from behind so the tickle hands will be less likely to intersect with her rib cage.

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Valid but makes it kind of hard to sit on the couch.

He texts Lavinia to reassure her about the proceedings.

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After a while, she looks up from her book, trying to see if there’s an obvious way to tie the comfortable thing in one place.

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Not obviously no.

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Hmmmmm.

Trying to carry it around while trying to find a bathroom sounds awkward.

Is there anything handy she could tie it to? Some piece of furniture with legs?

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The sofa has legs.

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She takes off her shirt.

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That is a logical thing to do and he will accept this situation. Professionally.

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Will he accept her tying one of the sleeves around his wrist and the other around the leg of the sofa?

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....you know what, sure, he can get out any time he wants if he needs to stop her from setting the house on fire or something, he will allow it.

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Cricket, on the other hand, will be literally rolling on the floor laughing his ass off.

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He can really extremely get out of it if he needs to! It has occurred to Lucy that he might incidentally tug on the knots but not that he could, you know, deliberately untie them.

Okay now that the Comfy Thing is secured she’s going to go try to find a bathroom.

Oh, hey! The room the Comfy Thing ended up in after the Tickling Incident is a bathroom! What a fortuitous coincidence. Pity she didn’t know that at the time.

It does not occur to her to bother closing the door but fortunately the angles are such that this is merely notable and not deeply awkward.

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Cricket has no interest in supervising her when he could be purring on Haru,

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who is petting him with his free hand and snickering and admitting that it might indeed seem very funny in a week.

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And Lucy returns and hugflops. She does not make any move to untie Haru, let alone put her shirt back on; but on the plus side, she didn’t decide to remove any more garments while in the bathroom.

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Since Haru is now flopped on Cricket will undo the arm knot for him and then begin to summarize the entire plot of How I Met Your Mother.

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Oh hm the shirt has gotten loose. Lucy unties the other end from the sofa leg and toes it around her waist; she likes that shirt and it would be a pity to lose it if the thing starts flying again.

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She can do that unimpeded.

...if he puts on music, once his backlash is down enough, something everybody knows like Bohemian Rhapsody, will she sing? This has got to be psychological, maybe she'll sing even if she won't speak communicatively...

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!

She’ll totally sing!

It hadn’t actually come up at any point in their communications prior to today, but it turns out she is good at singing.

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Data!

I put on Bohemian Rhapsody and she will sing even though she won't, like, address me or Cricket
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She does like singing. And Freddie Mercury.

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He'll let the rest of the album play, then, though quietly enough that he can still hear Cricket commentating.

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After a couple of songs she gets up and starts dancing.

She is a lot better at singing than dancing, but she’s definitely having fun.

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Thaaaat's counter to the project of getting her guided to the point where she can maybe issue any comments about the situation. He could... dance with her, he guesses?

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Well, if he gets up this will successfully jar her out of her dance-like-you-cannot-comprehend-there-being-anyone-to-watch reverie! She is briefly on high alert and then relaxes when he doesn’t, like, leave.

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He's not a great dancer himself but he can do moving around vaguely to the beat in a manner which allows for guiding if she's amenable and if she's not then he's going to try to get her back onto the couch.

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She does not perceive him as a potential dance partner. Back to the couch.

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Snuggle.
Would dance, would not dance with me. I think between my observations and the fact that she's compatible with me it's something about how she perceives other people, at least partially, I'm going to ask my mother if she can borrow somebody's pet which Lucy doesn't already know to be a person and see what happens.
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Oh, that must be very strange for her. And for you, obviously. I’ll think about how else to test it.

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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.

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Can do.

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

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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.

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Ren presents her with the emboxed mouse.

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Sounds irrelevant.

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Cricket politely takes it into the backyard to dispose of.

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No displayed interest in a nonperson animal.
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I don’t know if that’s conclusive, she’s usually more interested in people than animals…

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Not conclusive at all, no.
She has eaten up a lot of his backlash and is still not behaving differently basically at all, she must have different inflection points than he does, but espers have different inflection points in their backlash presentation, news at eleven. He gets his mom started about the second grade teacher she has a prank rivalry with and hovers a bit, snuggling Lucy.
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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.

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

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"So the donuts were actually - Lucy?"

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Oh! That’s her name!

“Yes?”

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

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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.”

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

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“Um…” 

She gets up and grabs the sonnets book.

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

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

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

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"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."

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“Roommate goes on the list of confusing words.”

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"Do you know who I am?"

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“You’re an esper.”

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

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“Well, obviously we’re compatible, but before encountering backlash-related confusion I obviously had no way of assessing that.”

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"Okay. I'm... the same person who sent you a text saying that you were awakening, you looked at that text a minute ago."

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“Right, that makes sense.”

She still has her phone open to that message. She looks at it again in case there’s some piece of context there that she missed and that he expects her to have.

The sender is labeled as “Traceless.”

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Oh nooooooo.

She doesn’t entirely remember WHY it’s so much worse for Traceless to have accidentally seen her with her shirt off than some other esper, but it definitely is!!!

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"...is that bad for some reason."

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“I tied you to the sofa!!!” With her SHIRT. It’d be great if a meteor would hit her or something.

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"I could've stopped you, I got out as soon as I wanted out, it wasn't a big deal. I awakened too and also did embarrassing things while backlashed. It's a normal esper thing."

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“Yeah, but doing embarrassing things to you is much worse than doing them to a stranger!”

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"...'stranger' isn't a confusing word?"

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“…A stranger is…a thing-capable-of-perception, that I have not previously interacted with.”

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"Huh. Can you tell me if there are strangers in the room right now?" Ren's over there, fixing dinner, and Cricket's on Haru's shoulder.

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“No, I could tell you were capable of perception because you had to be an esper because the nice thing I was experiencing had to be guiding and all espers are things-capable-of-perception. If anything else in the room is an esper I could probably tell by touching it but I’m pretty sure there are things capable of perception that are not espers, and I have no way of identifying those.” She considers this. “The sofa isn’t an esper.”

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"You're right, the sofa is not an esper. Uh, while you're capable of having a conversation - I can't keep this up literally constantly all week and I need to know your guiding preferences for when you can't remember that I exist, or whatever, in order to express them."

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“Oh, uh—I think while I’m not being guided at all I would prefer to be somewhere nobody can perceive me. With phone and charger and preferably some physical puzzle things. I think backlash is usually more acutely unpleasant than this? I mean I’m mortified now but I wasn’t when I didn’t realize I was being perceived.”

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"You seemed really chill about it, yeah. Would you rather not be guided in your sleep?"

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“No, that’s fine. Actually it’s even better than being guided while awake because I can’t do anything embarrassing while asleep.”

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"Okay. Uh, obviously you can choose to keep your shirt on but surface area is linear with guiding and I am quite confident that no new perceiving-things will perceive the situation or judge you for it if you don't, either now or when you're more confused."

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“…I would be more fine taking my shirt off if I were wearing a sports bra instead of, uh, this, but probably I can get over myself. And put on shorts.”

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"I can... acquire bras and shorts but they're not going to be in exactly your size... hm. At school, are there names posted on your dorm room's door? It'd be yours and one other name."

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“Oh! Yes, my name is on the door. In purple construction paper. With glitter.”

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"Is there anything else posted on the door, possibly also on construction paper?"

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“Oh, uh, yeah, it’s ‘Rosy.’” Why does she have the name of a plant on her door? Probably not important. “In red construction paper with sequins.”

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"Great. Can I borrow your phone? This will help with getting you clothes that fit."

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“Okaaaay.”

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Is there exactly one Rosy in her contacts?

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There is not a Rosy exactly but there is someone denoted with rose emojis.

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Is this Lucy's roommate? This is Traceless and I forgot to get your contact info to ask about e.g. getting her a few changes of clothes. My number is
And then he needs Cricket's help to get the number in one at a time, strings of numbers are the worst, but then he hits send.
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Oh, sure, what’s she need?

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Week's worth of her clothes, phone charger, any puzzly things she had besides the one. I can have someone pick up a bagful if you want to say where's convenient.
This achieves a) not giving out his address, which he has very diligently trained himself not to do while backlashed, and b) not making poor Rosy tromp all over Toronto.
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She gives the location of the campus visitor center and asks for half an hour.

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Thumbs up emoji. From his own phone he texts Paula; Lucy can have her phone back. "Thanks. Some of your clothes will be here soon."

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Wow that was faster than she was expecting! She wonders what he did. “Thanks.”

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"You're welcome. Anything else I might need to know to keep you comfortable this week?"

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She thinks about this. “Food? I can, like, cook, but I don’t know what there is besides ramen and apples.”

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"Dinner will appear in..." He glances over at Ren.

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"Twenty minutes," guesses Ren.

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"...did you catch that?" he wonders.

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“…Yes? You said dinner will appear in twenty minutes.”

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"I said the first part of that, but I didn't say the second part! Did it sound like me for the whole sentence?"

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“…There was a sound change partway through, but it didn’t occur to me that that meant there were two speakers. Why didn’t you say the whole thing?”

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"I didn't know the answer."

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“Then why didn’t the other one say the whole sentence?”

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"The other one didn't know about the question till I started the sentence."

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“So it wasn’t here when I asked?”

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"Was, but your question could have been about food in the longer term than just dinner tonight in particular. I can show you what's in the fridge and the pantry, after dinner."

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“I’m still confused but okay.”

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"Understandable. So, clothes on the way, food handled, you want to be guided in your sleep but if I need to step out for some reason you want to be unobserved, have I got all that right?"

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“Right. I mean, if you’re going to step out briefly enough that I don’t forget observation exists then—but no, yeah, that’s correct.”

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"Okay. Uh, how do you feel about being perceived auditorially only by one additional perceiver beyond those presently able to hear you."

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“Now, or in that circumstance?”

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"Now. I can connect to possible perceivers on the phone, it's a classic phone behavior."

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“Yeah that’s fine. I’m not making any assumptions about how many observers there are or aren’t, right now.”

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"Cool." He calls Lavinia on his own phone. "You're on speaker! Lucy is now aware I exist but it's through circuitous logic going through the fact that guiding implies esper implies that I'm a being capable of perception."

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“Lucy! How are you?”

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“I…am…fine? Well, no, I’m horribly embarrassed, but apparently that doesn’t count this week.”

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"It'd be hypocritical of me to tell you not to be embarrassed but it'd be like being embarrassed about having the flu."

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“I tied you to the sofa. The flu isn’t inherently embarrassing.”

“Sorry, why?”

“Well, I didn’t want him to leave, and I had noticed that he moved ever but not that he was capable of observing my actions.”

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"Hey, you referred to me in the third person, that's neat."

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“Talking to multiple subjects is complicated.”

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"How so?"

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“Keeping track of which is which is the hardest part. But also third-person pronouns.”

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"Well, I think as long as I keep hovering you'll tick down a little from here though probably not a lot, so it might get easier, though I am going to want to stop hovering around dinnertime."

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“In twenty minutes?”

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"Yup."

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“Okay.”

“Be well, sweetheart,” says the voice on the phone.

“I’ll—try?”

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"Feel free to get off the phone, just thought this'd be reassuring."

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“Would it be obvious why if I were less backlashed?”

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"It would be obvious why I said that if you were less backlashed, yes."

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Shrug. “Okay. G’bye, phone person.”

Lavinia laughs. “Goodbye. I love you.”

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"I'll catch you up if there's more developments," Haru tells Lavinia and hopefully she will hang up because he's been hovering a while and hanging up the phone sucks.

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She hangs up very quickly! She has no desire to hear her daughter conspicuously not say “I love you” back.

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Being hung up on also sucks but he is a professional. He hovers. He snuggles. "So will jigsaw puzzles work for you or do they have to be three dimensional things?"

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“I would like three dimensional things but jigsaws are also good.”

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"Are there some in your dorm room?"

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“…I don’t think so.”

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"Okay. Do you think that even when you're more backlashed you might be able to browse, like, shopping websites, and pick some out, and not buy them yourself since they wouldn't show up here but leave the information about which you like somewhere I can see it?"

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“Hmmm. I think I can…leave myself an instruction sheet, for doing that? Worth a shot.”

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"Sounds good. Texting me links works."

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"I can work with that. Do you have, like, actual paper, and a marker would be better than a pen for this."

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"Yeah - well, paper, yes, I'm not positive about markers - do you want to come with me to get it?"

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"You can take a marker out of the bag in the backseat of my car if you need one!"

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"Ah, okay, thanks Mom - yes markers also, why is a marker better than a pen?"

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"More eye-catching."

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"Gotcha. I do have a red pen, but apparently there are markers." Hup. Will she come upstairs to get a blank spiral notebook and then to Ren's car in the garage for a marker?

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She sure will! 

Once she has both, she tears a page out of the notebook and writes, in red marker:

TO OBTAIN OBJECTS, GO TO: AMAZON.COM, ETSY.COM, 

INPUT ITEM LINK TO TEXT SCREEN WITH "ESPER AWAKENING"

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And now dinner's on the table.

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And Lucy has managed to get juuuust unbacklashed enough that, with some squinting around, she can tentatively identify twenty-minutes-saying-person and thank them!

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"You're welcome, dear!"

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Okay good now food eating. Yum. No offense to instant ramen but real food is tastier. 

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It's flanksteak in a nice marinade and a side of roasted potatoes and bag salad.

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Oh that's really nice. 

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It's a little harder to keep high contact snuggling going while they try to eat but Haru will do his best.

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Lucy is willing to go slightly lower contact temporarily in pursuit of appreciating this meal! Steak isn’t something she can afford to have often.

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Haru's also sitting, entirely, in the chair; she will probably get more rather than less backlashed over the course of the meal, if slowly. He and Ren talk about Ren's stitch'n'bitch meetup.

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She starts out half listening to this conversation and it rapidly progresses to zero. Partway through she gets out her phone and puts on a podcast about bugs.

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...inconvenient for having a spoken conversation but he can text Ren, and other people he knows, while the backlash continues to drop, and then get back on the couch and snuggle up a bit more thoroughly when they've finished eating. Ren grabs the delivered bag of Lucy possessions from the doorstep, when it arrives, and puts it up in the guest room. Haru reads the comments and lets himself get back down to zero because it doesn't seem likely that Lucy's going to be very much conversational help with letting him sleep backlashed.

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She would apologize for this, but, well.

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Indeed.

He catches up on all his emails and brushes Cricket and then attempts to steer her through a bedtime routine without looking at anything he would rather she not remember him having looked at.

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It is deeply fortunate that it’s not warm enough that she opts to sleep naked!

He can get a pretty good look at the contents of her care package while she’s going through it. It contains:

-A variety of clothing

-Miscellaneous hygiene items 

-Two brand-new smallish jigsaw puzzles, plastic packaging still intact

-A couple of fidget toys

-A roll of condoms and a packet of lube

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............okay he's not going to text Rosy a lot of interrobangs and "I am not taking advantage of your roommate!", though he will think about it really really hard; but he is going to move those objects into a drawer without making it obvious to Lucy which drawer he has chosen because he doesn't really want her to think, while she is incapable of recalling that he's a person, that she should take advantage of him!

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If he tries to take the condoms away she will object! And then go into the bathroom to make a water balloon out of one of them.

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...acceptable.

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Hee hee plap the condom.

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Okay. Will she also brush her teeth and stuff.

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It will require some prompting but sure.

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And then snuggly sleep.

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Mm. Sounds good.

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In the morning, she has achieved octopus-like levels of Cozy Snugs.

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Okay, he'll give her a few minutes before he attempts to escape to the bathroom in case she'll wake up now that he's shifting like an awake person.

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Okay fiiiiiine.

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"Lucy? You verbal at the moment?"

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She ignores him, so that’d be a no.

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Okay, well, then she's going to be left alone in the room without an explanation while he goes to the bathroom. Maybe she will put on fresh clothes while he's out.

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When he comes back she is wearing shorts and in the process of putting on a tank top because a note on her phone told her to.

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He peeps through the door, then ducks back and shuts it again.

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When he next opens the door she is wearing shirt and shorts but no bra and looking at yesterday’s shirt and his wrists with a contemplative expression.

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He snorts slightly and hugs her and they can begin the Weird Guiding Dance down the stairs to the couch for the day.

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The thing is, she remembers regretting tying the comfy thing up, she just can’t remember why. At any rate she leaves the shirt behind.

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On the couch he will - actually, detour en route to the couch, Poptarts in the toaster first - work on blog posts!

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Lucy will attempt to maneuver into a position where she can both hug and start setting up a jigsaw puzzle.

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He'll cooperate with that, they can have the coffee table close to the sofa.

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Excellent!

Her puzzle is a field of flowers with a windmill in the background. She sorts the pieces into top edge, bottom edge, side edges, and then by flower color or being a windmill part.

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He will snap a picture of her doing this to send to her mom.

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She sends a sparkle emoji back in response.

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After a little while of this Lucy remembers that guiding means observation and that was why tying the Comfy Thing to the sofa was regrettable. Tying its wrist to hers…would probably be less regrettable, if she had done it, especially since she is now wearing a different shirt, but still better to have Not.

“Hello,” she says, because this is a way to communicate to observers that you are aware of them.

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"Hello! How are you?"

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“I’m good. A little hungry, I was starting to think about causing breakfast while holding onto you. Which is much easier when I can talk.”

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"Poptarts are coming soon." There they go. "Voilà."

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“Oh! Good!”

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They can eat poptarts together. "Psychological backlash often admits of some pushing around, if you notice any different states you can get into at the same level," he mentions. "I have to do this a lot. I don't know if you work that way."

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“I’m…not sure. I can try.”

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"Do you think blog posts on the topic will make sense to you?"

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"I'm not sure, but it's worth a shot." 

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"I'll text you some links then. If that won't mess up your shopping workflow."

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“I’m not shopping right now.”

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"Yes but your note referred to my most recent text."

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“Oh. I…think it should be okay? My plan was already to put links there.”

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"Okay." Links for Lucy.

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She tries following the links. The blog posts are…befuddling, but mostly the kind where banging her head against them admits of any progress.

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Pop tarts diminish into nothing.

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When the pop tarts are all gone Lucy decides to give her brain a break by jigsaw puzzling some more for a while.

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Much of the day can pass in this way! Perhaps basically all of it. Lunch is cold cut sandwiches.

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She gets low enough on backlash to have much less trouble with the blog posts. She has…some thoughts…but it remains to be seen how well she can retain them at higher backlash, though.

Cold cuts are fine, obviously.

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Cricket appears to demand attention from Haru but Haru is not spending all day hovering beyond what it took to get her talking in the morning so he is going to spend most of the day watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in his window seat.

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Reasonable! It’s a good show. Her backlash doesn’t always let her appreciate most of it but she still has the opinion cached even when she can’t remember why.

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The rest of the week proceeds in a similar vein. Backlashed Lucy uses the Obtain Objects on three different 3D puzzle type things, and also one of those wires and wooden beads contraptions you find in pediatricians’ waiting rooms.

She gets better at being verbal at slightly higher levels of backlash, but is missing more concepts than at her original words threshold.

At one point while nonverbal she gets in a disagreement with Traceless about how much water exactly she is allowed to put in one condom. Her position is “one time I heard you can stretch one of these things over a park bench, I am too backlashed to check my sources, and a waterbed beanbag chair would be neat.” Traceless’s position is “Lucy no.” They both get wet, but not nearly as wet as if she had been allowed to keep going until she discovered empirically that she was wrong.

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Haru throws out the remaining condoms and presents her with the towel stash.

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She will towel! And also take off her wet clothes.

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...right, okay, he will grab her a change of clothes, fling them into the nearest dry and obvious place, and mop up the floor with additional towels without looking at her.

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She will allow this instead of obstinately snuggling him only because he is also wet.

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Once the house is no longer facing structural problems from the ton of water on the floor he will lock himself in his room and also change clothes and then unlock the door and open it a crack for her to come in when she's put clothes on, hopefully.

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She has put clothes on! Slightly more clothes than are optimal for guiding, because recently wet = cold.

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That's fine. He has actually had the thought that he could probably spare a few hours to go help June with what he left sitting on her, since Lucy has such a peaceable and nondistressed backlashed state, but Casey said something about her having bought groceries recently that seemed like it probably meant "no rush". Snuggles?

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Snuggles!!!

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Very nearly a week to the minute after Haru got the email about a psychotic break, Lucy sits back from the puzzle she was working on, picks up a pillow, and screams directly into it.

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Esper ears can pick that up from the next room! Haru bursts out of the bathroom without drying off his hands. "Lucy?!"

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“‘M fine,” she mumbles. Wait, no. She puts the pillow down. “I’m fine. Finer than I have been in a week. Just, also, augh, my brain didn’t work.”

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"Yyyyyeah." Do not argue with her about how hellish her hell week didn't seem. "Did I have about the right model of it or was it more complicated than I'd managed to work out?"

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“Uh—approximately correct but I’m not sure it was, um, precise? Like, it wasn’t exactly about personhood—your test with the mouse was pertinent—I had trouble with—the idea of anything outside myself having agency—even when I was well enough to notice your mom I couldn’t really think of…people making choices I wouldn’t make? But at my worst I absolutely positively could not conceive of any consciousness outside my own self existing.”

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At least it wasn't - no. Fortunately it - no. "Are you still ticking down now or are you all done, people vary in how fast they go about it."

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“I think I’m done. I wasn’t exactly at full before.” Sigh. “Sorry about yelling. I realize I’m objectively very lucky. Just—have you ever had a problem you couldn’t solve, and then someone else pointed out the answer, and it was really obvious once you saw it, and you felt kind of dumb even though that’s a thing that happens to people all the time? It was like ten yards of that shoved into an inch-long box in my head all at once.”

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"Wow, that's vivid. Uh, what do you need now?"

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“To tell off my roommate about the condoms. Uh, no. I mean I will probably do that but it isn’t urgent. I should call my mum though.”

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"I last saw your phone over... here." Voilà.

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“Thanks.” She restrains herself from lunging for it in his hand. Instead she takes it in a totally normal and measured fashion and pulls up her mother’s contact.

“Mum! Hi! I’m fine. I love you. What? No, obviously. Mum. Yes. No. Cricket is even fluffier in person, it turns out. And was marvelously patient with my backlashed self, although I can’t rule out that he’s been saving a week of grievances for when I could definitely completely understand them. No. No, I may not need a degree but I still like the subject matter. I guess. Obviously. Oh, good. Yeah, I will. Possibly after I’ve figured out what my power is. Sure.” Snort. “Love you. Buh-bye now.”

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In case she doesn't have her phone volume turned down enough to prevent him from getting both sides of this conversation Haru backs off while the phone's ringing.

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She hangs up. “Well. I have now promised to also call my brother but that is also less than maximally urgent.”

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"Legit. What's your ideal timeline on powers testing?"

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“…I have no idea what’s realistic? Uh, like, sooner is better, but I don’t know if that means I should say something like ‘this week’ or ‘in the next hour’ or what. Uh, I think I could do something to you, but obviously I am not going to do that unsolicited.”

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"Awkward, powers that only work on people are the worst to figure out how to test. Uh, if you can wait a bit I should ideally go clear out my partner's backlog, I kind of showed up at the hospital when we were only about halfway done."

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“Totally. I—am not one hundred percent sure what’s reasonable to ask of you right now, but even so I don’t want to be as demanding as socially acceptable, or anything. I can Uber back to campus and take care of personal stuff and we can meet up again whenever’s convenient.”

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"Works on my end. Feel free to call if you have an emergency, like if your power's hard to avoid using. Uh, actually, tell me at what hour I should call your roommate if I don't hear from you in case you have that problem very acutely."

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“Mm. Uh, in about two hours? Ish?”

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"Sure." He makes a note of this. "Talk to you then if not sooner."

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“With any luck I will text you to let you know I’m fine.”

Then she has to actually call for an Uber and wait around until it shows up instead of leaving immediately.

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Haru collects Cricket and flies to June's.

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A little less than half an hour later, she texts:

I get the “I can do something” feeling about animals, too, not just people.

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The mouse was a feeder destined to be snake food and I'm sure Cricket would dispose of another if you need a test subject.
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Assuming I don’t leave it radioactive or something.

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Seems unlikely, but I did mostly mean in the case where the mouse remains alive and well.
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Probably I’m catastrophizing because I’m nervous.

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It's valid to put off powers testing for a while if you would rather, I did.
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Absolutely not. I’m not having trouble resisting the temptation to do I don’t know what to everyone I see, but the curiosity about what it is I’m even tempted to do is gnawing at me.

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OK. I'll be available once June's put right.
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I appreciate it. If getting a feeder mouse is out of your way I can try to catch some ants.

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Oh, I'm not sure where Ren got it, but if ants work by all means.
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I think ants work. They feel like I could do something to them. I can’t rule out that I work differently on arthropods than mammals, though, depending on what I do. They work SO DIFFERENTLY.

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The big thing of course is if it works on monsters. If it's something Cricket won't play ball with I've got a list of zoos that have monsters though I don't know how many will let you check with theirs either.
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Oh, Cricket works. I felt him, anyway, when you two passed me on the way out. I just didn’t update much on that because I know he’s a person.

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In that case the question is if it works on non-orphaned monsters, but you should know more about it before you step into even the tamest dungeon.
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Yeah! But maybe I can be in the vicinity next time you drag some out in advance of a dungeon’s demise

like with my spiders they were never your spiders, Lucy

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That can be the tentative plan! Any luck with ants yet?
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Well I got some but then I realized I didn’t have anything to put them in so I shook them off and now I am inside getting a cardboard box I can punch tiny holes in.

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I wouldn't go with tiny holes, ants are themselves tiny. Jar with a rubber band and a sock over the top, maybe.
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I meant like needle size tiny but a jar might be easier to come by anyway.

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Is it? I realized after I sent that that I'm not sure why I expect there to be mason jars around in a random college dorm.
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*Mason* jar??? I’m getting a jam jar

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That does seem more likely to be readily available. I never did wind up going to college, I don't know what the food situation is usually like beyond the cafeteria I assume they have
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Most of us have additional snacks of some kind.

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And there's a fridge? Or have they invented jam that is shelf stable even after you open it. Or is the latest college student trend eating an entire jar of jam while writing papers at 2am, I wouldn't know
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Many of us have mini-fridges! They’re surprisingly inexpensive.

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Makes sense. I think I was imagining dorms as too small to add appliances to beyond maybe a kettle
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Oh, no, kettles are super not allowed. Nothing with a heating element.

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Huh, is your building old construction or do they just think no level of fireproof material can compensate for the risk of young adults with the power to warm things
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I was going to say it was definitely the second one but actually some of the dorm buildings are a lot older than this one so maybe it’s the first one plus wanting everyone to have the same rules.

 

Anyway I have my jarred ants.

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I await your results with bated breath
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HOLY SHIT AN ANT’S SENSORIUM IS ***WILD***

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Whoa, you can borrow ant senses?? Like you can smell what they smell and stuff?
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Yeah! Also I can make it move. Man, I want to ask Cricket if I can use the sense-borrowing part on him, I wanna see what 4D is like.

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You'd have to wait for a 4D dungeon, presumably?
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Oh, right. Well, I’m going to put these ants back outside before I rack up too much backlash. And then I am going to see if I can find an aquarium with mantis shrimps, because I have HEARD things about the COLORS they can see.

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I bet Ripley's has them! Do you want me to come with you?
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That would be cool!

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When's good?
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I’m still working with my professors and TAs and stuff to get makeup work for the past week but that’s mostly emails and I don’t have class this afternoon.

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I should be done with June in about two hours. Planning to stick with school?
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For sure! I might switch majors to biology, though, something where if I decide to use esper money to pursue a PhD I can write my thesis on animal sensory modalities or something.

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Ooh, fun! Definitively answer what it's like to be a bat
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Yes!!! Oh man I am gonna fulfill so many childhood dreams inspired by Magic School Bus episodes 

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That's adorable
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This power is GR9 I am gonna give my number to animal control and veterinarians and I bet I can get anywhere with coma patients and maybe I could establish an objective pain scale and like OBVIOUSLY there are so many cool things I could do in dungeons—like even aside from the obvious controlling monsters thing, I could do a budget sensor by sending in, like, pigeons or rats or something 

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you almost certainly don't work across portals so you'd still have to enter the dungeon, I'm not sure how budget it'd work out to being, but if the backlash accumulation rate is good enough hell yeah
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I don’t know about accumulation rate but I bet once I get enough practice at leaving myself prompts I remain functional at unusually high backlash levels. The anti-Columba as it were

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That does sound plausible, though, like, you still should avoid getting quite that high without guiding on hand, it'll mess up all your organs and you need those
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Well, obviously. But it takes a non-zero amount of time for acute backlash to metabolize to chronic, right, so if there’s an emergency…

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It can happen immediately if you take a lot of it all at once. Which might not be a danger of yours; it is of mine because I decide a lot of it passively without expenditure and then it kicks in automatically when e.g. a lot of monsters try to look at me.
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Ah. Makes sense. Also, yikes.

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Yep. You have a lot of civilian applications if dungeons wind up not being for you.
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I’m sorry you have fewer

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I'm fine with doing dungeons! But not everybody likes it, the powers don't pick people who are eager for those powers in particular or those powers' dungeoneering applications
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Yeah. Truth to tell when I first realized I was feeling like I could do things to people my first thought was “HEALER!?!?!?” but I didn’t say anything because I was trying not to get my hopes up. And I can’t say I’m disappointed by what I got instead, but like.

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Mood, my pre-awakening career ambition was epidemiology
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Oh, that’s cool! Gotta stick another nail in the horseman Pestilence’s coffin, right?

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100%. we are SO close on malaria
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I KNOW, right??? And POLIO isn’t dead yet. POLIO!!!

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SOON
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Have you ever heard “Ballad of Smallpox Gone”?

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I put it on once a year for Smallpox Eradication Day except when I forget.
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I ALWAYS forget when smallpox eradication day is but I listen to it a couple times a year at least.

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When they put malaria in the ground I'm going to throw a party
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I would say “same” except maybe I will come to your party instead. Who knows

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You're invited!
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I will definitely be there!!! But if I manage to get rich by then I will probably, like, sponsor parties in other places

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tbh I'm not sure how much demand for malaria eradication parties there will be
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It’s me. I’m the one demanding it

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Can you truly demand a party you are not attending? Or do you plan to do a world tour of malaria eradication parties
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Hm! Hadn’t been planning to, but there’s a thought. No, I was mostly just thinking if I paid for music and food people would show up because they like parties, and then there’d be stuff about malaria eradication, and the people there would be, like, “huh, neat”

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Perhaps it really is that simple
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I would presumably have to advertise on social media or something but that seems doable.

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Traceless - he never did really have a chance to introduce himself, though possibly she can sift through memories of his mother or Cricket calling him by name? - is less backlashed now and lets the text exchange lapse, till:

Done at the silo, I can be at Ripley's in 20 traffic willing
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Sweet! Thanks!

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22 minutes later:
Parked
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She got there first and comes back out to meet him, waving and bouncing.

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"You look so excited to experience shrimp colors," he grins.

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“I am so excited to experience shrimp colors!!!”

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If she doesn't stop him he'll pay for both admissions. "Now, probably you will need to talk to the staff if you want to control the shrimp and not just experience their colors, but you've got the things separated reliably, yes?"

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“Yeah, it’s—I’m not sure how to describe it. Like sliding into a pilot’s chair without touching the buttons? But also the buttons do things on their own so you have to deliberately override them. I don’t think that metaphor worked. Oh—” she pulls out her phone and shows him a video of the ant jar. Caramelldansen is playing somewhere in the room and she’s making the ants dance to it.

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"Oh, you perhaps should have a Youtube channel."

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“I’m so going to have a YouTube channel!!!”

Handholding?

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Handholding is an available service!

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Excellent! She does not have much backlash yet but she has a little.

She read maps while she was waiting for him and she knows the way to the shrimps!

“Oh wow,” she breathes once they get there. She tilts her head as though this would have any effect on the shrimp’s perspective. “That’s—this is weirder than I was expecting,” she enthuses.

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"Do tell!"

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“Well, for one thing, they don’t just see more, different colors than we do, they see those colors differently? I’m not sure how to describe it exactly, but, like, when you or I see colors, if there’s a bunch of colors together, then the, the colorfulness, is visually obvious? It isn’t here. It’s, like, if I look for a particular color I can see it, and it’s not exactly that I don’t see any color I’m not specifically looking for, but the way the colors visually interact is totally different. Also,” she tilts her head again, “the…depth perception? Is doing a thing I’m not used to. I’m not sure what it is, though.”

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"Do you think you could draw it?"

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“Uh…I think, um, I will need to get better at drawing in order to do that.”

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"Might be worth working on! Or like digital painting or something, I don't know what the right medium would be."

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“Yeah but no, you’re right, I’ve gotta git gud. I can’t just not show people this stuff.”

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"I look forward to seeing it. - you can't do that, can you, beam one sensorium to another target?"

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“Uh—no, I don’t think so. And I did just try.”

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"- on me? You should as a general rule warn me before trying stuff on me or you'll likely as not just backlash the both of us."

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“What? No. There’s more than one shrimp in that tank.”

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"Ah, if you've already got a fine sense of how much backlash you're racking up then I guess you wouldn't need verbal confirmation that it did something."

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“Also so far every time I’ve done something it felt like something to do it, but yes. Seriously, though, I wouldn’t try something on you without asking first, like, that would be—slightly less bad than if you weren’t protected, I guess, but still, no.”

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"I wouldn't have been offended in this case, since I just now came up with the idea myself, but good practice."

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“Having an idea does not imply consent! I have all kinds of ideas!”

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

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“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.”

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"I support you wholeheartedly."

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“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.”

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Nod nod.

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“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.”

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"Monsters confuse all cladistic terminology hopelessly."

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

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

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“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.”

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"Ooh?"

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“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.”

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"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?"

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“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.”

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

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gotcha."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’ll get the transcripts.”

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aha, I'd like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

“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.”

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I am accumulating ambitions at a bit of a clip.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anything on the list I haven't heard about yet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Setting up a system that asks me questions I’ll fail to answer at different backlash levels and gives me corresponding prompts!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, I like it. If you think you can avoid just - memorizing the answers and having the test re-curve itself over time -"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hmm. Well, I’m sure I’ll end up iterating whether that happens or not.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it'd be surprising to get it right on the first try. - why are such a disproportional fraction of tropical fish specifically yellow, black, and white, over any other color scheme."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t specifically know but I’m sure there’s some environmental reason for that combination to converge to evolve.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Presumably, but there's plenty of others represented, that one's just convergently evolving a heck of a lot."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t know! Maybe it’s good for blending against a specific species of coral.” She gets out her phone and types for a bit. “Google has failed me,” she announces solemnly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tragedy. We'll simply have to wonder forever."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Or I could do research in an actual library with books.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I find that approach useful for learning background about a topic and kind of disappointing for answering specific questions about for example the color schemes of tropical fish."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That’s how I feel about Wikipedia, and oh of course you were thinking of a public library. I mean, like, an academic library, at my university.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure I know how that'd help! The process of looking through a book and following a citation can't change that much based on what books are present in the building, can it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Nnnooo, but the process of asking people for help does? Academic librarians or, like, biology students, or even in a pinch marine biology professors…this might be an introvert/extrovert thing.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, if you expect any of those people to ask them that might work great, but then the library's factored out of the equation except insofar as that is where you would find the academic librarian."

Permalink Mark Unread

“No, because there’s a good chance none of them know the specific answer but they know where I should look for it, and if the answer involves any journals that use paywalls I use the library accounts to access them anyway.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes sense. I have a connect for university journal access but half the time I just email whoever wrote the paper I want and they send me a copy."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That probably works better if you know exactly what paper you want than if you’re combing through several.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, my research process is not really oriented to questions quite like the fish question."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m very easy to nerdsnipe with questions like the fish question. It’s part of why I know such a broad array of largely unconnected facts!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's your favorite unconnected fact?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, I think it’s probably just how human our nearest relatives are, living and dead. I—like people, in general if not always in particular, and…seeing those things mirrored across our most distant ancestors and cousins, not to mention, like, elephants—language, loving your children, grieving your dead—I think, the way I feel about that, those are the kinds of emotions religious people feel.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do we have much evidence for language in other hominids?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah! Simpler language, but still language! With syntax and everything!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Neat! Years ago I asked Cricket if he could understand cats at all and he said 'no, I only speak English'..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I think they’ve never confirmed language in a non-primate but I could so easily be wrong there.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not even like dolphins?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh! Uh, dolphins probably have language but I don’t know as much about that—but orcas have ethnicity!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh no, poor orcas!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t recall anything about ethnic violence…”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, then how do you tell?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Phenotype differences.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's not an ethnicity, just a morph."

Permalink Mark Unread

“It’s an ethnicity when the phenotype differences are geographically distributed.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are morphs not?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“…We have wandered outside the details I remember from science YouTube, sorry.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it's not an ethnicity if it doesn't have a sociocultural component, anyway, if everyone were magically unable to connect what I look like to where my ancestors were from I think that would meaningfully prevent me from having an ethnicity."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, I mean, I do think they have cultural differences? Like the salmon hat thing.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"The what!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t remember which group of orcas it was, but at one point a number of orcas went through a fad of wearing dead fish on their heads! Like a hat!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"How did they even stay on??"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t know!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's so weird! I'm not sure I'd choose on my own to call the salmon-hat subculture an ethnic group but I guess it reduces my objection to someone else having done it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, I mean, they have other cultural stuff—hunting techniques, and so on—the hat thing is just a particularly standout example. Also, funny.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is definitely funny. You can learn what echolocation feels like, I hear sometimes blind humans learn to do it and you might have a leg up in figuring it out without being blind..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I bet cetacean echolocation and bat echolocation feel different! They make such different noises!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or maybe they're the same! Who knows? Soon, you."

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“Ee!” She half-claps, rapidly tapping her fingers but not palms together. “It’s going to be so cool. Oh, man, I am gonna be able to feel what it’s like to purr, I’ve always wondered that.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I bet Cricket'll volunteer for that one, he can purr and talk at the same time, it's incredibly useful when I'm backlashed."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, cool—oh, man, dungeon monsters are going to have so many cool senses I’ve never even heard of!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wonder if you can piggyback on dungeons themselves, they have some non-monster-mediated contact with the world..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, man, if I could control a dungeon…I’m gonna need more partners, that’d have to cost so much backlash. Group hug.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, at some point you run into diminishing returns because you only have so much surface area but it is in general wise to have more partners if you can find 'em, yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

Shrug. “If I find enough compatible people, I don’t think there’s a limit on how much blood you can take, if they also take blood out of you? Isn’t there a kind of dialysis that works like that? I’m AB negative.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"- well, you can't take mine, I'm A-poz. I'm not sure you can run more than one of those machines at once, normally it goes in one arm and out the other."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, can you put different bloods in one machine? Anyway, it’s all academic unless it turns out I actually can control a dungeon, it’d be worth throwing a lot of resources at that but this is slightly insane for, like, normal purposes.” 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure if you can put different bloods in one machine but I don't think it matters if the total blood volume going into you is still throttled to one machine and your vein's throughput."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, it matters some, you can only take so much blood out of one person. Shame we’re mutually incompatible. This never comes up in vampire AUs.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It really doesn't! In fairness I don't think drinking each other's blood would have this problem even in humans, at human-safe amounts."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I wonder if you can just keep drinking blood indefinitely if you think it’s important enough to wreck your digestion over. I wonder if you can get the guiding benefits of drinking blood if you vomit it up immediately, wow, that is a way more niche fan fiction. I wonder if the digestive consequences apply if you only drink plasma…?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't know, but the dropoff in guiding is so sharp with the passage of time, I don't think you can centrifuge out the red cells that fast. I think that, realistically, if you need to get incredibly aggressive about guiding efficiency in short time periods, then that one guy on Reddit might be factually correct little though anyone likes it - not anyone. Most people."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That one guy on Reddit?” She can think of so many unpleasant things a guy on Reddit could advocate.

Permalink Mark Unread

"There was a guy on Reddit who made a lot of people very angry by asserting that the most efficient form of guiding is drinking pee."

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Giggle. “I would distinguish between most efficient versus most scalable, and that is terrible, and I haven’t read that fanfiction but I’ve seen it tagged.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"There is so much weird fanfiction in the world."

Permalink Mark Unread

“There is! It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m not personally into that particular subset, but, you know, ykinmkato.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yuh-kin-ato?" he attempts.

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“Oh, uh—EE-KIN-MM-KAHT-O. Y-K-I-N-M-K-A-T-O. Your kink is not my kink and that’s okay.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I'm familiar with the 'but your kink is okay' version and also have never imagined trying to pronounce it."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I can pronounce lmao too.” It sounds sort of like “ul-mow” but in a weird accent.

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Haru snickers. "You're all set to learn to make weird echolocation noises."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yes I am.” Gleeful bounce.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll text Cricket and ask if he wants to participate but I'm sure it's possible to find a regular cat if he's not into it." Phone beepity beep.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah. Maybe I should get a non-monster cat. Or make friends with someone who does and wouldn’t mind it going on the YouTube channel.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was originally going to get a normal cat, but then Cricket was - basically offered to me as a free to a good home thing, he was not sustaining a great relationship with the agency folks, but - probably you read the post."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I for sure did! And it was great, and if a monster wanted to be roommates with me I would be delighted, but anything I could make a cat do to put on the YouTube channel, Cricket could decide to do on his own recognizance. —Definitely get one or more volunteers with their own pets, starting a relationship with a cat just to exploit them would be non-ideal. Ooh, or I could do videos that double as ads for shelters!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will the cats be dancing to Caramelldansen?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m not that one note. And I’d want to be sure it was something that wouldn’t hurt them. Actually there was this cartoon I saw when I was a kid, about cats who did calligraphy with their tails, I might try something like that.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, that seems like it might be interesting as a control exercise... can you control just part of an animal, if you just grab the tail is the rest of the cat going to try to attack the alien tail?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I have no idea! Or, I mean, yes I can control just part of an animal, but I have no idea what being controlled feels like.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's an esper who gets alien hand syndrome as backlash!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Huh! I wonder how compatible we’d be. That’s probably my first thought forever, now, when I hear about someone‘a backlash.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mostly-successfully perpetuated a standard of fistbumps as a compat check mechanism so if somebody makes you want to throw up you don't have to yank out of a handshake."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, if somebody makes me want to throw up, probably I make them want to throw up, so at least it wouldn’t offend them. But yes, better to avoid it.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Agencies throw meetups, and there's some that are just kind of open invite for espers, you can see about loading up on partners at those. Toronto's a good city but if you want to bop around a bit more obviously check parties in other cities."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, I’m so going to need an agent, d’you have any tips for what I should look out for, while I’m doing research on that?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I picked mine mostly on the basis that she answers the phone really fast, which has not yet literally saved my life but it's not out of the question that it could. I'm not sure what strategy you want yours to take with you."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Be willing to navigate the arcane communication needs I’m going to have while backlashed, I think. Like, using first-person instead of second-person pronouns, and talking around whatever concepts I’m missing, and stuff.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Seems tricky to screen for while you can keep track of the fact that you're doing that..."

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“Hard to screen for how well they’ll do in practice, but I can at least ask, like, ‘how are you at bizarre and labyrinthine communication requirements,’ and expect that some people will say ‘what are you fucking talking about’ and some people will say ‘I don’t know but I’m willing to try,’ and some people will say, ‘I’ve never done that specifically but I’m good at bizarre and labyrinthine other stuff’ and if I’m lucky someone will say ‘I have reason to expect to be really good at that.’”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think they're likely to say 'fucking' in a job interview. - hey, I just realized I think you do not know my name."

Permalink Mark Unread

“—I swear your mom called you by name at some point while I was in the room but I think I was too backlashed to care and now I don’t remember.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I go by Haru."

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“Hi, Haru! Ooh, I should pick a code name. I wonder if Marionette is taken.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't immediately recognize it!"

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“It occurred to me to go for something leaning more on the sensory aspect, de-emphasize the control bit, but then I decided that if I wanted to do that then the YouTube channel was a bad idea, so.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It might still be a good idea namewise. Like... Eavesdrop."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I mean the other thing is that sensors are already, like, a thing, and have been picking over that share of namespace for years now.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I don't know of an Eavesdrop but probably there's been one."

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She gets out her phone. “Based out of California,” she reports after a moment.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eventually Racehorse is going to have to allow names to cycle, but if there's one still active I guess I don't begrudge them, it's a good name."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah. And I think if I did go with a sensory thing I’d want to lean more into the shrimp colors and bat hearing angle than the part where I can do dungeon sensing.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you even can. I can ask Paula to find us a good candidate, whenever you're ready."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Candidate name? Or, uh, another agent.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Candidate dungeon! Though I can also ask her to recommend an agent."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh! I see. I think I want to get some critters for doing sensing with first. Maybe I can find someone who’s having a wasp problem, solve two birds with one stone.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure how you'd find someone with a wasp problem... like, you could ask an exterminator for a referral but that's kind of poaching..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I hadn’t got farther than ‘internet,’ honestly.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you think you can find animals that aren't already obvious to you - like, there's got to be some fish in this tank, but they're all hiding, can you find them -"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh! Yeah, that’s how I got the ants. I guess I could just steal an ant colony, they’re not hard to find, but I’d rather something that flies.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Valid." He checks his phone. "Cricket says he's game."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, cool!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"In context, for letting you experience purring, but possibly also for letting you ride along with the experience of flight. I'd bet against the puppeteering thing being cool by him."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That’s so reasonable! Uh, how much does he dislike me, I assume he at some point expressed an opinion while I was in the room but it fell down the backlash hole. Should I bring food as a thank-you gift? Or, like, something else, but food is easy and traditional.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"He likes food. He does not dislike you a notable amount and you did also make him laugh which is better than most people manage."

Permalink Mark Unread

“The shirt handcuffs were pretty funny.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"The highlight of Cricket's month, I think."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Okay. What kind of food does he like, I shouldn’t assume he has the same taste setup as a normal cat.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"He mostly does but he'll try bits of human food now and then. Principally sashimi and organ meats though."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Got it. I know a grocery store with decent sashimi in the prepared foods section.”

They tour the aquarium a little bit more, because they did already pay to get in—well, Haru already paid to get them in—and then pick up sashimi on the way to his house.

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"Hey kitty, I'm home with Lucy!"

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Cricket swoops over to land on Haru's shoulder. "Hello again," he says to Lucy.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hi! I brought you sashimi!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I haven't had dinner yet so you may plate it and put it on the table for me."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Okay! Thank you for indulging my curiosity.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is terribly tragic that humans cannot purr properly," Cricket says, draping himself across Haru's shoulders languidly. "You have to warn me if you are going to make out with him about it though."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Understood. Not planning to do that imminently but if it becomes relevant I’ll keep it in mind.”

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow that is so much less awkward as a thing to say than anything Haru was coming up with.

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Purrrrrr.

Permalink Mark Unread

And Lucy reaches out and—

“Oh!” So that’s what it’s like! That makes sense! How lovely.

Permalink Mark Unread

Purrrr "yup" it feels kind of weird when he purrs and talks at the same time, not a bad weird but sort of like if you could gargle and sing while you were doing it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh that does feel weird. Lucy plates Cricket’s sashimi and puts it on the table for him.

Permalink Mark Unread

He takes a literally-flying leap from Haru to the table and tucks in. Om nom nom.

Permalink Mark Unread

And Lucy releases her sensory hold. “Amazing.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you getting the cat-eating-fish taste experience too?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah! Or, I was, but I stopped eavesdropping because the purring was what I had permission for."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tedious," mutters Cricket. Omnomnomnom.

Permalink Mark Unread

"She's being ethical, kitty."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m trying to get really tedious about consent because of the control aspect.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anyone who is not enthusiastic will get fed up and tell you to go away. I guess that is one way to go about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

“With the control aspect I could stop them from telling me to go away. Once I’ve had more practice controlling things that aren’t bugs I might relax a bit if it turns out that I and the person I’m controlling can definitely always tell exactly what I’m making them do, but right now I don’t know that for sure.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well I don't want you to do that one."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I sure won’t!”

She will, however, leave soon, before Cricket’s opinion of her drops even lower.

A few days later she texts Haru:

Hi! I have some bugs to try to sense a dungeon with. And some backlash accrued while obtaining them.

Permalink Mark Unread
I'll tell Paula to find a dungeon, do you want to come hang out here while she's looking?
Permalink Mark Unread

That would be great!

Permalink Mark Unread
Do you want like any help covering all these Ubers till you're making esper money btw
Permalink Mark Unread

tbh yes but ALSO I was planning to bike this time

Permalink Mark Unread
Bike this time works too but tell me where to send it
Permalink Mark Unread

She sends him her Venmo.

When she shows up at his house, it’s with someone’s discarded fish tank bungee corded shut, tied behind her on the bike, and full of cockroaches.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is also with five hundred additional dollars! "Wow, please don't let those loose, I'm not sure Cricket could catch them before they escaped into the walls."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Could too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it might slow you down if, say, the tank broke and there was glass all over."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmph."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m sure you could but I also don’t want to have to clean up broken glass.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"The cleaning lady's here today, but I don't super want to make her do it either. Anyway." Hand holding.

Permalink Mark Unread

Handholding! “I’m really excited to test my dungeonability,” she confesses.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Paula's just called, she got me lined up to do sensor stuff in a new one that opened up if the initial unmanned casing of the joint comes back saying that it's environmentally tolerable and I know what gear I need. You can come with me and wait around being bored till it's confirmed safe enough for a greenhorn. - What are low levels of backlash like, for you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Low levels mostly look like expecting other people to make the choices I would make or assuming that they already know things. I’m trying to develop a habit of over explaining to compensate for the latter.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes sense."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I guess you could call the whole thing failure of theory of mind. On a related note, I’ve been vaguely toying with ‘Sonder’ for a name.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"What does it mean?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“The understanding that other people have internal lives as real and significant as your own.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I like that, that's a really good name, is it free on Racehorse?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah!” Also it’s a tumblr neologism but she doesn’t have to say that part out loud. “I checked. So’s Marionette, I sorta compulsively checked everything I was still considering after about five minutes.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think Sonder's better than Marionette personally."

Permalink Mark Unread

“It’s definitely better but I was going back and forth about whether it really fit my powers of if I thought that because I’m biased because I like it so much.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It fits - the opposite of your backlash, and in that respect fits your powers?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Awesome. Sonder it is!!!” She does a little twirl. Fortunately the cockroaches are at this point on a solid surface.

Permalink Mark Unread

Giggle. - phone beep. He pulls it out of his pocket. "Paula found a - water dungeon, that's not great for your roaches, should I tell her nah or do you want to stop by it anyway?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I can at least check if I can control dungeon monsters!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay!" He texts Paula and shows Lucy the phone-on-a-stick images of the water dungeon. It looks... wet in there. The dungeon "sky" is black but so dense with "stars" that there's enough light to see color, blue-green still water with spooky trees sticking out of it. "They've put a pontoon through the portal. I'll go through first and see if anything even tries to notice me and I'll come get you when it seems safe."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Ee! Thank you!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"All my gear's in the garage, Paula's got some loaner stuff that'll meet you at the portal." Out into the garage he goes.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy makes sure the cockroaches are stable for the next, like, while, scribbles a short note about them in case Haru’s mom comes in while they’re out, and heads out to the truck.

Permalink Mark Unread

He has checklists. He loads up the truck with everything on the Water Dungeon Checklist and off they go.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy takes notes on his checklists because honestly that seems relevant to her own backlash.

Permalink Mark Unread

He's bringing guns that are specced for working underwater - "I think possibly you should expressly not learn to fire guns, seems risky" - and flippers and spare towels and goggles and waterproof lights and such things.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh that would be such a bad idea.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good thing you have not already pursued a shooting hobby!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yyyyyep. Talk about a bad thing to have been in the middle of when I started awakening.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You probably would've been fine, it's not like most people who shoot solve their non-person problems with bullets either, but."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, but they have the concept that other people exist and, one, could be accidentally hurt by careless gun usage, and two, can judge them for making terrible life choices.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think those motives are generally operative in me not shooting my alarm clock but I haven't spent long enough with my solipsism mode to find out."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I admit I don’t have the best model of gun hobbyists even at zero backlash.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I wasn't into it before I awakened, would've been very dangerous with the dyspraxia."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m just really not into being able to kill stuff. I mean, that’s probably uncharitable, but guns don’t really have any practical purpose other than killing things. Which, like, obviously dungeons and some dungeon monsters need to be killed, but that’s not recreational.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think some people get into it on the same level as people get into being good at video games, which also has limited practical application. I'm mostly guessing though."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, video games are fine, it’s just, the fact that a gun can, in fact, super kill people, is offputting. I guess if this fact did not feel super salient for some reason shooting would be fine, although even then I would generally prefer pastimes with plot or pretty colors or something.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I actually do have an offensively usable power that I don't advertise but it's very expensive so I mostly shoot stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, I—well firstly I don’t in fact want to be mean to people who do like guns, they’re just emphatically not to my taste—but I’d learn to shoot if it were practical for dungeoning. The fact that it’s not is a fact about my backlash, not the general appropriateness of guns.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I get you."

Permalink Mark Unread

“It can be really easy to conflate subjective opinions with objective facts and not doing that was important even before I got this specific backlash.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have more examples in mind?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Sharp cheddar is better than mild cheddar. Iceberg lettuce is a waste of chlorophyll. Giving up fun toys like bubble wands just because you’re an adult is asinine. Some colors are just bad and nobody has ever looked good in them.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have to be honest with you, I didn't find bubble wands interesting for more than a couple minutes at a time even when I was like six."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, then it’s not because you’re an adult! I don’t usually think about bubble wands that much but they’re, uh, the kind of harmless, low-person-engagement kind of entertainment that it seems like a good idea to have on hand for backlash purposes.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I'd go with drawing if it were me, do you draw?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Not historically, and until I build up enough habits around it I don’t expect my too-backlashed self to care, since the reason I want to get good at it is to show other people cool animal vision stuff.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes sense. I don't draw either but I think I could develop an interest in it that was mostly self-oriented."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I also have some nonfiction collected that shouldn’t be too baffling but it’s important to me to make it easier to distract heavily-backlashed-me from trying to steal people’s phones or take my shirt off in public. It was funny when I tied you to the couch but it would not be funny for a stranger to have video of it.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you possibly want clothes that are difficult to take off without help? Buttons up the back or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

“—That is a really good idea.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You'll be so confused though."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I would rather be confused than have my bra on the internet!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"So valid. You don't think being confused'll make you escalate in some way?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I…guess it depends? I wonder if a dress would be remotely dungeon-practical, since it won’t be mostly my own body I’m moving, and then I won’t be able to take off pants but I wouldn’t have certain jumpsuit-related difficulties that would make it very urgent to do so.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe a dress with pants under it so you have a failover if the pants and you should have a falling-out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Or, like, leggings, yeah. I’m sure I can find a dress designed not to get in the way.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's likely you'll be able to retain that I or other partners you may come by are people, at least when we're in guiding range, for longer than you can remember this about anyone else, I have something like that at dangerous levels. So that may be helpful in the field."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, I do remember when Cricket and your mom were in the room and aaaaall I knew about the existence of persons near me was that you were an esper and the sofa wasn’t.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"With me it's not just 'an esper', I don't have this realization about espers I'm not compatible with, but I can notice that June's a person when I've forgotten that I'm not all alone in the universe. Not that I push it to this level often enough to have a great spread of data."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I think the way my backlash works I would realize that non-compatible espers are also people but I haven’t tested it.” 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can fistbump some people at the water dungeon maybe, though you might have to wait, sensors show up to a dungeon before anyone else."

Permalink Mark Unread

“We’ll see. If I can’t control dungeon monsters I probably won’t get very backlashed.”

Permalink Mark Unread

The traffic isn't too bad; Haru shows his esper passport at the cordon around the portal and parks inside. "You should get an ID. They've got an esper at city hall who'll poke you to confirm, it's not difficult. But today you can just piggyback on me."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Sure! Now that I have a name, that was pretty much the holdup.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You want to sit in the car or the ready tent while I go in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Ready tent.” She’s nervous but she does want to jump in , insofar as that counts.

Permalink Mark Unread

He identifies the ready tent for her and in they go. "Hi there, I'm Traceless. This is Sonder, she's going to be joining my second foray for some powers testing."

There's medics in there and a SWAT team (there's another SWAT team standing watch outside). They wave. There's chairs and a couple boxes of donuts.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy claims a donut and sits down and makes conversation. She’s a new esper but this is technically not her first dungeon, she got kidnapped once before she awakened.

Permalink Mark Unread

A SWAT team guy has a story about getting kidnapped by a dungeon he was assigned to a couple years back! A medic was kidnapped by a dungeon but it was while she was on vacation in New York right out of her seat at an off-Broadway show.

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m sorry about your show, I just missed some class.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It was so disappointing, I'd gotten the ticket in the lottery so I didn't have insurance on it. But the dungeon wasn't one of the really heinous ones, at least."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Mine wasn’t horrible either. And I managed to take some video of it.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"What for?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Dungeon research!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"...was there something special in the video?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Probably not. But the dungeon’s dead, so if something about it turns out to be significant later, the video might be useful. And it’s not like I had anything better to do.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess. If I'd had my phone on me I would've probably just played I Love Hue."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, I was tied up by dungeon spiderweb, with the hand with the phone in it like so,” she demonstrates, “I managed to get to the camera one-handed and with a bad angle on the screen but no way could I manage any of my games.”

Permalink Mark Unread

Traceless pops back into the tent. "I think the monsters are all deep enough underwater that they don't care about anything going on at the surface. Till we get a more aquatic esper in here or a scuba team it's very quiet in there, which sucks for the victims but for your purposes should be fine, you wanna come see if you can find a monster? - also maybe read a victim long enough to inform the urgency level."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Sounds good!” She bounces to her feet to follow him out and into the dungeon.

Permalink Mark Unread

There's a ladder; he precedes her up it. Inside there's the dim starry sky, the murky still water, and the... neon orange... pontoon situation they can stand on right at the entrance.

Permalink Mark Unread

She in fact does not work across dungeon barriers.

As soon as she crosses onto the pontoon, the targets for her power flicker into existence.

She reaches for one that seems to be moving.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is what it is like to be a water-breathing crocodile with six legs.

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow.

And is this what it’s like to take control of a water-breathing crocodile with six legs?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup!

It's... bigger than a cockroach. A lot.

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow yeah. She lets go immediately.

“So the good news is I can control dungeon monsters. The bad news is the dungeon monsters are big.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I really felt that. Maybe experiment with it more after you do an urgency check on the victims? They can scramble a scuba team faster, they just have to shell out bonuses for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah. I think I can divert monsters to rescue if I’m willing to eat the backlash, too.” She grabs the senses of a stationary target.

Permalink Mark Unread

Maybe a quarter of the way to conscious, drowning, not getting worse but dimly freaked out about it.

Permalink Mark Unread

“—Oh, that’s much better than I was expecting. Not actively dying and not totally conscious.” She touches some more hostages to check if the first one is typical.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, they're all like that.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Okay yeah this could be so much worse.”

She dips into the monster’s sensorium again. She’s looking for monster-specific senses, this time: is it getting commands from the dungeon? Can it sense the suffering of the dungeon’s victims?

Can it, perhaps, orient relative to the dungeon’s core?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nah the monster has no fucking clue where the core is and the dungeon is not talking to it right now. It's just swimming around among the floating victims and other crocs.

Permalink Mark Unread

Drat.

Anything interesting? Can it smell blood like a shark, or sense bioelectricity, or see any nifty colors?

Permalink Mark Unread

It can see pretty well in the dark! There's not a lot to see, but it can see it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh well.

“I can point people out to the rescue teams. And I can grab a monster if anyone needs something with one, but until then—or until there’s a good place to restrain one until the dungeon dies—it’s too pricey to do just because.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can almost certainly place a monster with a zoo if it survives the dungeon's death but it's bad practice to catch one without the core in hand. You get a sense of the victims' positions relative to you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Not exactly, but hitchhiking on the monsters’ senses is a lot cheaper than controlling them and they can see in this.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You get a sense of the monsters' positions?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Not, like, directly, but it’s not hard to map the space by bouncing between them.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh, I would've expected that to be really difficult, did you practice that with bugs at all - I'm wary of telling scuba guys where to go on indirect information that isn't proven to add up, it'll probably work if it seems like it to you but only probably."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, uh, the cockroaches were—educational. Had to get them out of some restaurants. Without starting any panics.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"...oh noooo is that where they came from. Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yes it is! I, uh, hope the owners of the first one I tried don’t put that incident together with my powers, if and when they hear of me.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"They probably won't, but..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“More embarrassing than the shirt incident, for sure.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anyway, let me walk you though reporting on the urgency level -" There's a little form to fill out with anything a sensor learns about a dungeon, in this case what the monsters are and how badly the victims are keeping.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh! Excellent! Forms! She fills them out in detail.

Permalink Mark Unread

And then they can exit the dungeon so the data can propagate if she's done in there for now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yep.

“I have to say, I like dungeons better as an esper.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's an equally adversarial but less overwhelmingly one-sided relationship."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah. Hey, maybe you should interview me for your blog, there can’t be many people who have experienced a dungeon from both sides. …I am definitely not just biased by how cool your blog is.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will absolutely interview you for my blog but maybe after you have a few more cool work anecdotes? Followup interviews are less popular than the original ones almost always so you want to frontload the good stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, that’s a good thought. I’m going to take so many notes about this particular cool work anecdote, though. I’m sure I’ll encounter something even bigger than that sometime, but the sense of scale was still really something. And combined with the quiet darkness of the cold water…”

Permalink Mark Unread

"How big are they?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Like, eight orcas. All glommed together into, like, a huge crocodile.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow, that's pretty big even for a monster."

Permalink Mark Unread

“A huge crocodile with six legs. That breathes water. And sees in the dark. I guess I don’t know normal crocodiles don’t do that.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I dunno if they see in the dark but I'm pretty sure they don't breathe water!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, I meant just the seeing in the dark.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gotcha."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Why is it that you have stunningly correct research opinions and a good sense of humor? There’s no reason for those to be correlated!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure there is, most good traits are correlated, perhaps I just have low mutational load except for whatever cosmic ray gave me dyspraxia."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hmmmm. Weird. I, also, am better than most people, and have a standout mutation.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did notice this about you. Mine went away with awakening and yours - brightened a bit. Though actually I don't know if I have a mutation or like, teratogenic damage or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

“My coloration brightened a bit but I used to have some issues with my eyesight and now I don’t.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah, makes sense. Twenty-ten."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Albinism comes with vision damage kind of a lot! Albino cats are, I don’t know if it’s ‘usually’ or just ‘often,’ totally blind. I think it’s something about not having pigment in the iris. I think I have to have pigment in my irises now, just, red pigment, for them to have changed color. My blood isn’t any brighter! I checked. Not on purpose. It was just a scratch.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, it signifies that you were preexistingly pretty fond of your eye color?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I like it! The albinism isn’t actually a mutation in my generation, my mum has it too. So it was—a way the two of us were special. And occasionally someone was weird about it but that just meant I had to double down, right, if someone is mean to you then it’s extra-salient, like, emotionally, that you’re right and they’re wrong.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hm, that's a good way to put a thing I also experience, but I'm not sure it would have caused me to like being an unusual color very much more than it caused me to like being clumsy."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, being clumsy is inconvenient? I didn’t like my eyesight. But my hair is just pretty. Was pretty, I mean, even before I espered.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I agree that your hair is and was pretty."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Right! So it’s easy to like. —Are we flirting, I think I might be too backlashed to tell.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it is plausibly deniable that we are doing that, which is a known characteristic of the phenomenon, or so I hear."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Doesn’t that usually mean, ‘yes but you want to obfuscate that for some reason’? …I don’t want to push too hard on this right now, just, uh, figuring out if we should have a conversation while less or ideally none backlashed.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm easy."

Permalink Mark Unread

“…Can you expand on that? ‘No I cannot’ or ‘not right now’ are both acceptable answers.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"- well I was actually doing sort of a double meaning which you may have been too backlashed to catch, in the sense that not only am I flexible between the listed options about having a conversation, but also I am, uh, after I awakened I was like 'hm I should be easy, that will be convenient' and thus it was so."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah I was too backlashed to catch that. I think we should have a conversation when I am less backlashed but I don’t think there’s any call to be awkward about it until then, not that I am unaware that awkwardness is often involuntary.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can be not weird about it at least."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh good! I don’t think I can do ‘not weird’ but I think I can do ‘not extra weird on top of the backlash weird.’”

Permalink Mark Unread

"The backlash weird should be diminishing as we speak!"

Permalink Mark Unread

“True. But what if I am suddenly called back into the dungeon to brainwrestle the Hell Ambulocetus.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ambulowhat?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Ambulocetus! It’s a whale ancestor! A partially aquatic mammal that had legs and, through convergent evolution, was shaped a lot like a crocodile! …I don’t recall how big they actually were. But like. They evolved into whales.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aha. If they're that big they might in fact want you for that, they'd probably shrug off typical rounds."

Permalink Mark Unread

“In which case the backlash will go back up.”

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Uh, if we are looking at any realistic possibility that you will have to, like, take control of one of the ambuloceti and make it fight another one to keep them off of scuba rescuers, that might put a - timeline - on ideal conversations about whether we were flirting -"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I was thinking, like, after the dungeon.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yyyyyes but if you wind up badly backlashed and also can't let go of the monsters because they'd eat somebody, can I have an advance directive about that to work with?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, okay, advance directive for that situation is yes.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good to know."

Permalink Mark Unread

“The short version of my side of the talk is ‘I think I like you too much for casual sex to be a good idea,’ but uh one the long version has some important stuff in it some of which I haven’t thought about enough yet to confidently deliver, and two anything with stakes that high is, uh, automatically not casual.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"...mood."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m not sure which part of that you mean but I find it encouraging anyway!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can go into more detail in the full-length conversation, if you want."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Sounds good!”

Permalink Mark Unread

By the time the scuba team arrives she's had a chance to zero out and start afresh; they would like her in the dungeon as direction and backup for their dives, complete with comms suitable for talking to them while they're underwater, and Traceless in with her for guiding and to bail her out if she seems to be getting herself into danger.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay. She listens to all the instructions and follows them to the letter.

Permalink Mark Unread

Down they go, with their lights and their underwater guns and their rescue equipment and their scuba tanks, and the nearest croc swims for them.

Permalink Mark Unread

She yanks the croc off course.

Permalink Mark Unread

Hey it was going thataway though.

Permalink Mark Unread

No.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well can it make a noise? It wants to make a noise. It wants to go:

brhMMMMMmmmmmm

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh absolutely the fuck not. She’s not sure that that wouldn’t hurt the divers by itself, but the odds it wouldn’t summon a dozen more of its ilk are…small.

She strips off her shirt and clings to Haru. Modesty can go jump in the jaws of a Hell Crocodilian.

Permalink Mark Unread

Haru's got gear dangling off various objects he's wearing but he can hike up his shirt a fair bit and hold her.

The crocodile would very very much like to go brhMMMMMmmmmmm and will keep trying pretty hard to do that but she wins, and she can watch through its eyes as the divers locate a drowning victim and have them reeled up to the medics and portal defense team standing with Lucy and Haru on the pontoon.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy remembers that the Big Thing is not allowed to eat the divers, but she has lost track of a lot of moving parts to the situation. Mostly involving agents that are not her.

She lets go as soon as all the rescuers are out of the water.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well when they're out there's nobody to go brhMMMMMmmmmmm about, so it doesn't.

By that time Haru has put his face on her neck and rolled up his sleeves to the elbows but has not escalated to Advance Directive Kissing. "What's our estimated victim count? I don't know if she's good for two more of those, let alone twenty."

"It's eighteen, but we're getting Rhombus in a few and Turtle and his partner too. How many monsters are there total, does she know?"

"Lucy," says Haru. "How many crocodiles are there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Twenty-five. When there are divers in the water, this one tries to make a loud noise. I think that would make the other ones come.” She can’t quite recall how she reached that conclusion, but she remembers reaching it. “I think I could make it attack another one, if two were here.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is it worse to reach the ones farther away?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Nnnoooo, but it’d take longer to get—I can check if some other two of them are closer together.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't check anything yet. There's no hurry. If you find one that is near another victim, then you can wait for the divers to go down before you take it and protect the divers with it."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah.” She keeps someone else’s eye on the relative positions of monsters and hostages and wiggles to attempt to maximize skin contact. Are there any other garments she could remove to improve that situation.

Permalink Mark Unread

In theory yes but if she tries to take her pants off Haru's going to grab her wrist. "There's tents, if you need more of a guiding break than we can get standing in the dungeon."

Permalink Mark Unread

…Can she hike the leg of her pants up a little bit even if she can’t take them off.

Permalink Mark Unread

She can do that but "standing on an inflatable pontoon" is not the ideal state in which to make use of this. They can get a little shin-to-calf contact this way if he rolls up his pant legs though.

Permalink Mark Unread

Fair. Fair. The tent is maybe a good idea if she can’t just take her pants off here but she doesn’t want to stop watching the monsters.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lucy, you should stop using your powers for now, nobody's down there and these monsters don't care about surface behavior."

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh. Well then.

“Tent.”

Permalink Mark Unread

He picks her up and flies out of the portal; this dungeon is not power-intensive for him and it'll help her. They alight on the ground. He picks out a guiding break tent.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pants off. HUG.

Permalink Mark Unread

He can take his shirt off in here, though he is going to leave the pants on because, look, he's only human. Hug hug pet pet.

Permalink Mark Unread

He can do that but it will have Lucy attempting to put her legs on his torso.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy is allowed to do that and they can just pretend that no lap situation is occurring!

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy literally does not notice any lap situations that may be happening!

 

…She does eventually uncontort herself after she is somewhat less backlashed.

Permalink Mark Unread

A short flight and a noncommunicative partner had him checking his texts but when she seems better he glances up from his phone.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Sorry about that.” Pants putting on.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's okay but you should - be aware of when you're cutting it close, I was starting to consider when I needed to pull you out of there if you wouldn't quit monitoring monsters of your own accord."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I--will try to be more on top of that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"At least you don't actively object to guiding at any point in the process like June does."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is an advantage. Even when I am totally uncommunicative I am cuddly. ...Which I knew, but previously 'uncommunicative' meant 'asleep.'"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did notice you were a sleepcuddler but chalked it up to the guiding, it's not all that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope. It hasn't come up much outside my immediate family but I haven't yet found a way to fall asleep in the same bed as someone and wake up still on my side. Briefly awkward on a class trip in highschool."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh no! I wouldn't have expected class trips to involve bedsharing!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hotels have pretty big beds! Nobody else had problems besides me!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We went to France once and we got our own beds!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know what hotels are like in France," she admits.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It was actually a hostel, there were lots of us all in one room, but one bed to a customer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Going to France sounds neat, anyway. Where in France?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Paris. Ren chaperoned, she was really delighted about it, we saw all the obvious stuff like the Eiffel Tower."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, did you go up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We did go up!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That must have been so cool."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I liked it less than Ren did but I had a good time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you travel a lot, now, for dungeons?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not usually worth teleporting long distances, I've got good powers but they're not very specialist powers so everywhere's got people who can cover the same bases I do. Once in a while I get called around the Great Lakes region for a psychic dungeon that victims can just exit without special procedures but I'm nothing special in the dungeons where you do need a special procedure, because the psychics who can let a victim out can also shield whatever mobility esper they'd have on hand for the fetching and carrying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...What about confluences?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Confluences hit everywhere at once. There's enough for me to do in Toronto when it comes up, it doesn't make me much more important to have across the world, I just do twice as many dungeons as usual while they're ongoing. - I can't step it up more than that because guiding with June takes so long and we can't do it while either of us is asleep, with you I might be able to do a lot more."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I--didn't ask so much because it seemed like they would have more trouble, it's just kind of a scary thought."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Confluences are scary. You don't have to do dungeons, or do more of them during confluences, nobody can make you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I weren't gonna they wouldn't be scary, dungeons don't grab espers so that's not going to happen again. I'd do confluences even if I didn't do other dungeons."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that's not uncommon. Typical wisdom is to keep your hand in with a dungeon every month or two so you're not out of practice when the confluence hits."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, yeah, I can see that.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have a sense now of what it costs to do all the things you were doing in there - telling where victims and monsters are at various distances, controlling monsters, controlling monsters more thoroughly - would it actually be more expensive to keep two off the divers than just one, if the one fought the other?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“No—to that last one. Uh, observing is a lot cheaper than controlling.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Twice as cheap? Ten times? Fifty?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Mmmmore like fifty but I think maybe not quite that?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have to sense a monster to control it or could you just command one to stay still without additionally spending on the sensory aspect? Do you think you could get anything out of flickering between controlling it and not controlling it so that its opportunities to act were too short to do anything with but you spent only half as many total seconds using your power?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I think so, there doesn’t feel like there’s an—activation cost? I could try doing control without sensing, but I’m not sure how.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"If there's no activation cost the flickering might be good. You might also want to hold monsters still so they can kill them."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I think I can do that.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Test the flickering thing with no divers down, see if it works; if it does, try that with divers and they can put a harpoon in it and you'll get breaks between dives. Sound like a plan?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah!” Okay first she should put her shirt back on.

Permalink Mark Unread

He should too, though he will keep the sleeves rolled up.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay. Back into the dungeon.

She reaches for a monster.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ho hum it is swimming in lazy circles around the base of this spooky tree where it stretches down into the base of the dungeon.

Permalink Mark Unread

Spooky tree is kind of interesting, actually, but not in fact important. What happens if she grabs it and makes it STOP for just a moment.

Permalink Mark Unread

It has forward momentum, but its legs all stutter.

Permalink Mark Unread

But does it, like, react, in any way.

Permalink Mark Unread

It considers going brhMMMMMmmmmmm but ultimately does not do so.

Permalink Mark Unread

She tries flickering no control with STOP.

Permalink Mark Unread

The third time she does this it gets as far as going brhMM.

Permalink Mark Unread

She holds it still a moment longer, then releases it—does it immediately resume making noise, or no.

Permalink Mark Unread

hMMMmmmmmm! it continues.

Permalink Mark Unread

She shuts it up again.

”Flickering is ineffective against noise-making.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Nobody's down there, it's okay if they're making noise, you should generally be not using your powers when you don't need to be."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah…” she lets go again.

Was she right about what it does, are the other monsters heading towards this one?

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The nearest couple are.

"You should be in the habit of narrating what you're trying, I can tell your backlash is going up but not why."

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“I was checking if the sound attracts other monsters.” She lets go. “It does—I think I could lure monsters away from where divers are planning to go.”

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"I don't want to rely on that, it's a few inferential steps beyond what we can be sure of. It's worth trying once Rhombus gets here, Rhombus can decapitate one if it comes for her."

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“Fair.” She is so painfully aware of how new she is at this.

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Rhombus doesn't take much longer to arrive. "Hullo, Traceless. This is Sonder?"

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"Yup. Sonder, Rhombus, she helped introduce me to my first couple dungeons."

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Fistbump?

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Fistbump! Accompanied by a bright friendly smile that hopefully obscures the butterflies in her stomach!

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Yeah no these backlashes have nothing to do with each other why are you even here, goes the new sensory modality. "Figures," says Rhombus. "Anyway, if I were trying to solo this place I'd scuba up and light up and go down planning to behead the monsters. Should I change my approach to account for you?"

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“I can hold them still while you behead them—or not still still, but mostly still, somewhat more cheaply.”

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"That'll be good if a bunch of them converge on me but you can probably save the backlash if it's just a couple and I see them coming. Good to have you watching my back, though." Scuba gear that would have been in the way on the ladder up to the portal goes on. "Traceless, do you need to be on her all the time or can you meet me at the surface and fly people back?"

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"I can do that till she or I needs to bail, bring more platforms with you though."

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“—I can also identify where the victims are. Probably I should have said that first.”

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"That's in the briefing, but the scuba team said they could see a few with the lights up high enough so I'll start with those."

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“Oh good.”

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"Anything else?"

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“The monsters make a noise when they spot rescuers and the noise attracts more monsters, if there are any in earshot.”

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"Good to know."

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"It's pretty loud, you've got earplugs?"

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"Yup."

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And into the water she goes.

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“Part of me wishes I’d accumulated more backlash so I’d’ve been less nervous for that, but it’s a dumb impulse and I don’t endorse it.”

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"Surely you'd have retroactive alarm about it if you said anything you wouldn't have otherwise said."

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“That’s not the biggest reason it’s a dumb impulse but it’s on there.”

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"Oh, also, Rhombus's power is very good but her range is not amazing, she will be deliberately letting monsters get within just a few meters of her before she takes their heads off. I guess since these are crocodiles she might wind up taking off their snouts first."

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“Gotcha. I’m not looking right now but if at any point I do I should not be alarmed by her being in close proximity to one.”

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Rhombus is perhaps Toronto's most effective combat esper. The fact that she's also scuba-certified is certainly convenient. Crocs make noises and come at her and crocs die. She grabs a victim and Traceless fetches them, over and over; Traceless gets guiding breaks but Rhombus is doing without.

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“Should I do anything specifically because you’re accumulating backlash.”

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"If you want to do some experimentation when we've cleared the dungeon, it'll be a good time for it, but I'm staying under my safe levels and mine is downright tolerable if I'm not trying to do anything it precludes and I'm getting hugs especially guiding hugs."

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“Okay good.” Guiding hugs. Normal ones, with all appropriate garments on, and limbs in normal places.

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Eventually Turtle shows up; Turtle's a nearly perfect power match for the dungeon and doesn't need the rest of them as long as his partner's there. Rhombus joins her partner in a guiding tent. Haru assesses himself as good to drive if Lucy's up for chatting on the way back to his house.

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She’s good to chat! She hasn’t done a lot of magic since Rhombus showed up. If he doesn’t have a topic in mind she can share fun facts about fossils.

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Fossils are good! She can also fill out the after-action reports for both of them on the dungeon if she'll narrate enough. Espers don't get carsick.

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She can totally do that! She has so much color commentary. It’s her first dungeon! 

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

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

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"You'll get the hang of it."

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

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"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."

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

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

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“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.”

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

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“I had Nonconsensual Comedy Week instead of hellweek!”

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"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'."

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“…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!”

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"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."

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“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.”

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"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."

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

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"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."

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“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?”

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"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."

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“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.”

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"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!"

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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

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“I think my model of how planes was being corrupted by not being able to conceive of a pilot.”

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"I don't think it'd be a good physics assumption on a real plane, I think they can get into asymmetrical situations pretty fast because of being in three dimensions."

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“Yeah. I think having such a bad model of the world—impacted my judgment even in places where you can imagine building a person-less model that holds together. Because she wasn’t—I wasn’t—I was using my old models, with holes in them. Like, my expectation is, if I fucked with something relatively minor, on an actual airplane, the pilot could fix it.”

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"Ohhhh yeah that makes sense. And the expectation that it'd be recoverable stayed, even when the pilot didn't."

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“Right, exactly.”

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Presently they pull into Haru's garage.

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Lucy ducks into the house and makes sure nothing unfortunate happened involving the cockroaches.

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They are all still in their tank.

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She was pretty sure that would be the case but it’s the kind of thing you have to check.

When Haru catches up, she says, “I think I’m unbacklashed enough to have that conversation, if you’d rather now, but later is also fine.”

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"I have no reason to second-guess you, though possibly we should put it off if it might be a weird conversation to have while snuggling."

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“…I don’t know about weird, per se, but I’m more nervous about it than I was with higher backlash and it might be better to not try to combine the two, yeah.”

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"Snuggles first then, guide off the rest of it and then we can sit at a minimally contraindicated distance?"

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“Sounds good.” Haru is GREAT.

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Snuggle snuggle. "You likely to finish school?"

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“Oh, definitely. I’m probably going to switch to part-time, and I’m thinking of changing majors to take advantage of my powers, but—well. There’s so much cool stuff to learn, and I’ll never have to take out a student loan again.”

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"That's true. Speaking of, you should give Paula your account information, she can stand in for you till you have your own agent."

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“Oh, right.” She gets her phone out to do that. “I might go farther than just a bachelor’s. Imagine giving a thesis presentation on What It’s Like To Be A Bat.”

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"Doctor Sonder."

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Ee that DOES sound cool. “Even if I don’t, though, I’m definitely paying for as much schooling as my brother wants to do. Which is going to be a lot.”

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"Your mom mentioned him like once and then he never came up again, what's his deal?"

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“Oh! His name’s Wilbur and he’s my twin. Didn’t get the albinism—I mean he has to be a carrier, obviously, but he’s heterozygous for it and doesn’t present. I don’t know if he’s actually smarter than me or if it’s just that he likes school more, because he does. And is a total introvert. In high school I was in the GSA and debate team and anime club and he was in Mathletes. He’s funny once he opens up to you, though. I love him to bits and I’d trust him with the key to my soul.”

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"Do you have one of those? Don't tell me, if you have one its existence is a dire secret. Anyway he sounds neat, I'm also an introvert much though I may sometimes appear otherwise."

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“Yeah. Do you have a weighted blanket? Wilbur does and he says it helps when he’s hiding in his room with the lights off after dealing with people too much.”

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"I don't have a weighted blanket, is that an introvert thing? I thought they were for like, autism."

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“Mm. There may be some correlation, there.”

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"June's got one but I'm not sure if she just likes it being weighted or if it's compensating for something else."

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“Backlashes don’t necessarily fit into the same boxes as normal brain stuff, anyway.”

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"Yeah, it's convenient when they're close enough you can slap a one-word description on one but that's usually going to be reductive at best."

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“No kidding. Though if we’re reducing them down to flippant descriptions, ‘existential prosopagnosia’ might fit mine.”

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"I don't have all the agnosias memorized...?"

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“—Sorry, I don’t either, I just happened to have that one memorized and thought it sounded funnier that way. Faceblindness.”

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"Existential faceblindness, huh."

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“I don’t know if it’s accurate but it sorta fits.”

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"I can think of quibbles with it but it seems like a good short handle, anyway."

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“And it’s just a little bit silly. Well. Deliberately using the more obscure word is, anyway.”

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"I can see a case for using the more obscure word if it doesn't literally mean 'face' but if it does then a little, yeah."

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“I do not know if it literally means face.”

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"I'd look it up but I think that would be unduly hard at the moment even if I could now pull it off so I won't."

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She looks it up. “It literally means face.”

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"Alas."

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“I guess using needlessly big words would fit the Dr. Sonder persona.”

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"...it might be a bad habit, if you say something I don't understand while we're both backlashed we're stuck till I can ask a third party for help."

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“WELP never mind then!”

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"Sorry!"

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“Eh, it’s more my backlash getting in the way than yours.”

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"It's the combination! If I could consult Google while backlashed it would be less of a big deal."

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“Well, this is true. But it’s not a big deal, anyway.”

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"Mm-hm."

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“And I’ve done worse. Like the second water balloon incident.”

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"Eh, we got it cleaned up okay but your roommate should be ashamed of herself."

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“I scolded her for it. Although I’m not a hundred percent sure she didn’t feel more embarrassed by the part where I digressed into ‘the reason sex is supposed to be really good for guiding is fluid exchange’ than by the majority where I talked about consent.”

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"Accusing me of taking advantage of a vulnerable awakener, whatever, being wrong about guiding mechanics, that's unforgivable."

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“It’s not that she was wrong, it’s that she knew and overlooked it!”

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"Ah, I see. Rank carelessness."

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“She did defend herself some by saying that she knew we knew each other beforehand and not in exactly what capacity. But, like, I’m pretty sure that was an ex post facto justification and she just had esper fanfic playing in her head when she made the decision.”

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"I don't read that stuff, is any of it good?"

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“Some of it! Although, like, caveat, I don’t read RPF, I read esper AUs featuring fictional people.”

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"What, like, Harry Potter but they're espers in addition to wizards?"

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“Or instead of wizards! But yes, that kind of thing.”

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"Do they all have standard powers and backlashes all these authors coordinate on or does everybody make something up?"

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“Hmm, somewhere in between? Like—I don’t read that much Harry Potter specifically but not, like, none—I’ve seen several where Harry’s backlash is horrible headaches, you know, for obvious reasons, but then what power he has that goes with it varies—the authors don’t coordinate, but there are trends, is how I’d put it.”

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"That sound fun but like you'd have to read a pretty high volume of fanfic to appreciate the conversation they're having."

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“Well, on archiveofourown, there’s features like ‘gifts’ and ‘inspired by’ that let you just follow a lot of conversations through instead of having to come across bits individually.”

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"Gifts? The stories are gifts? That's adorable."

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“Yeah! You can write a story and label it as being a gift for another author!”

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"Do you write these or just read 'em?"

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“I just read ‘em. But my friend who I told about the story idea where people with genetic resistance to diseases can squish ‘em, she writes a lot of fanfic. Not Harry Potter, though.”

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"Something I'd have heard of or nah?"

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Lucy lists several fandoms that are not here reproduced to minimize the lowkey retcons required later on in order to avoid canon puncturing.

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Haru has not heard of most of them and asking what the heck they're all about will carry him through the rest of his needful guiding.

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And meanwhile snuggles are happening! Lucy is a big fan of this.

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"I'm zeroed out. Conversation time?"

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Nod.

“I like you a lot.”

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"I like you too."

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“I know espers have a lot of different cultural stuff around sex, for guiding reasons? And I have not totally figured out where I fit into that yet. But, uh, I think the set of states I can occupy, healthily, is wider than the set of states I would be liable to occupy based solely on my own inclinations.”

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"Oh, yeah, before I awakened I was planning to, like, save myself for true love and monogamy and stuff and then I had my hellweek and popped up on the other side like 'well that's inconvenient, no more of that'. And I am basically fine with this though it turned out not to have been quite so essential as I imagined since June's so - hidey - and my secondary's not exactly what I had in mind as an opportunity I couldn't pass up, at the time."

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“Honestly I don’t know if casual sex is ever going to be my thing but I can imagine myself juggling a handful of friends-with-benefits arrangements—but I think my point is that—if we try to be something, I am not by default expecting monogamy, and also as an addendum if at any point I am not doing anything non-monogamous this does not bear on my expectations for you.”

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"That makes sense and I think it straightforwardly vice-versas."

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“—I like you a lot, I know I said that already but I like you a lot a lot. You’re so—thoughtful—is the word I want to use but it’s a massive oversimplification, like using one word for someone’s backlash. You’re careful and you think things through to their logical conclusions and you’re—creative, in a having-good-ideas way, I know the word is mostly used for art—you already knew about smallpox eradication day—you don’t do the stupid thing where people suffering is good if you don’t like them—there are things where—I’m not disappointed in everyone around me all the time because it would never occur to me to expect those things from them, and then you just do them, all the time.”

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"- that might be the nicest compliment I have ever gotten in my life, wow."

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“Oh. I’m glad.”

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"I like you a lot too, you're - a number of people read my blog but not a lot of them internalize it to the point where they'd be taking video while kidnapped, just in case it turned out to be important, you know? And you're - practical and easy to strategize with, about backlash handling and the dungeon approach and stuff, and you're smart and - energized? Animated? I'm not sure I know exactly what word I want but it's something in that vein. And I could see myself going on to like you even more than I currently do."

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“Can I kiss you?”

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"Yes absolutely."

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Kiss! She has not done this a whole lot and her first attempt is kind of shy and chaste, but he can feel her lips curving delightedly against his.

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Has she considered that kisses are a way better source of that lovely fizzy guiding feeling even from zero backlash if: you open your mouth a little.

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OH WOW. She is sure considering it now!!! She flings her arms around his neck and presses closer.

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Mmmmmgood. Mmmmmakeouts. It's not too escalatory to have an arm around her waist without her shirt in the way, right?

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It absolutely is not.

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Yaaaaaay she's so kissable.

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Lucy has tried kissing before. It was fine? It was skin contact, and she is generally in favor of that. But she didn’t have that much chemistry with the people she tried kissing in the past.

This is—an entirely different experience. Usually when you read someone having the experience “oh, so this is what the fuss is about,” they had previously been sort of confused about why people go on about things like sex and kissing. Lucy had a perfectly good working model of that! She reads smutty fanfiction with reasonably high amounts of enjoyment!

There is, nonetheless, a big difference between modeling and experiencing, and Lucy is having an emotion reasonably glossed as “oh, so this is what the fuss is about.”

She’s not sure how much of it is esper compatibility and how much is how much she likes Haru, but they are both definitely contributing.

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Haru has never kissed someone he... liked. He has kissed several people who were Better Than Nothing While Backlashed, which is a recommendation threshold of basically nil, and the only one he kept going back to was Sparkler. He likes Lucy, though, and she's almost as compatible as June is and a whole lot more interactive about it, and in short this is the best kissing event of his life and he is very tempted to get carried away but their conversation did not cover the topic of how far away Lucy might like to be carried.

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“I um,” she says after a while, “I had an arm implant and I have heard those work less well for espers—so right now probably we shouldn’t—”

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"Yeah, you want the copper IUD. Alas that I tossed all the condoms."

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“I will totally get the copper IUD but I have not yet. But um.” She’s really emphatically not backlashed enough to not be blushing as she says this, but she says it anyway. “Nobody ever got pregnant from oral.”

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"That is truuuue." Kiss. "Upstairs?"

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Blush giggle. “Upstairs!”

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What if he scoops her up and carries her up the stairs, what then.

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Eeeeeeeeeeeeee is what!!!

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Then up they will go into his room, where the bed is not really big enough for people to literally sleep together but does have enough elbow room for figurative versions.

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And figurative versions—happen.

Lucy is a virgin but she is an enthusiastic, imaginative virgin who has read a lot of porn and also hits on the back-of the neck thing early.

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Haru is not a virgin but his experience with girls is fairly limited, so he's in an exploratory mood, at least before she finds the back of his neck, after that he's in a helplessly moaning mood.

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OOOOH. She likes that. She likes that a lot.

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If she likes Haru helplessly moaning he has good news about things nobody ever got pregnant from.

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Oh, excellent. She totally sees what all the hype is about this too.

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Which would put her solidly first place in the list of Haru's sex partners to date only she was basically already there.

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Gooooood. Good good good. Snuggglesssss.

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Mmmmmsnuggles. "Do you want, things," he says, coherently like a person whose brain is still totally working.

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“Yes. But I’m not in a hurry, I really like what your face is doing right now.”

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"Kay. Then I will wait before I do any other things. With my face."

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She kisses him on his adorable cheek.

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Kisses are good.

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Yeah~<3

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"Mmmmmglad I met you."

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“Me too.” You might think she couldn’t improve on her baseline level of snuggle! But you would be wrong! She is even cuddlier right now than she was during hellweek.

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Probably because she can model how he might want to be positioned at all in the process, Haru bets that helps.

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Yeah that definitely helps.

She is going to be perfectly content to snuggle until he’s recovered enough to reciprocate.

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It doesn't take that long. He could have done it right away if she had not wanted to enjoy him being afterglowy first. Here goes nothing.

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OOH SHE GETS THE HYPE ABOUT THIS, TOO.

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Yummy <3

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Wow her brain chemicals are doing some neat things about how much she likes him. More kisses?

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Oh yes.

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Prrrrflop. And kisses. Probably Lucy should leave at some point but she doesn’t wanna.

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There's no rush. They can hang out here on top of each other in his bed for quite a while.

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“So, uh, for the record, I would like to—consent in advance to guiding sex when I’m nonverbal. Uh, as soon as I let you know the IUD situation has been taken care of.”

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"Cool. I don't think I need an advance directive because as long as I'm convinced you exist at all, which will happen as soon as you touch me, I can behave in a loosely rational fashion; but if it somehow comes up, go to town."

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“I do really appreciate that one of us has a backlash that leaves them capable of making decisions!”

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"It'd be so awkward otherwise, we'd need third party handlers."

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“I’d trust my brother to do it but you don’t know him yet at all.”

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"Perhaps at some point we can be introduced."

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“That should totally happen! Not until his school has a break, though, unless you want to travel.”

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"I try not to teleport places too much, so I don't casually make long trips, and my dad lives in B.C., not Saskatchewan. Hardly urgent."

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“Yeah. Although I would also like to meet your dad sometime.”

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"Sure. I usually go in the fall, now that I'm not beholden to the academic calendar, the leaves are killer."

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“Ooh. I am still moderately beholden to the academic calendar but I’m sure I can take some time off.”

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"Presumably you get holidays. Do they give you Thanksgiving, it's next week."

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“Oh. Right. Yeah.”

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"Bit fast, I assume you also get Christmas."

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“I do. Mom and Wilbur will be disappointed if I don’t come home for the winter holiday, though.”

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"Valid. We can share calendars and figure stuff out." Smooch.

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Smooch! “There’s a little part of my brain that thinks it’s funny that says it’s a pity I don’t have anyone from my hometown I want to dramatically upstage, because showing up as an esper would do it.”

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"At, what, like, a high school reunion? I guess it would be attention-getting but it's purest luck..."

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“Being an esper isn’t a personal accomplishment but it does make you hot and rich! If you are the kind of person who wants to make, yeah, your old high school acquaintances jealous.”

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"I was still in high school when I awakened so it'd be a bit lost on my old classmates."

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“Yeah, the whole concept is very silly and I don’t endorse it.”

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Haru nods. He stretches, kisses her again, and then starts re-clothing himself. "Are you staying for dinner?"

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“I’d love to, but if you’d rather I fucked off for introvert reasons, I totally understand.”

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"You weren't particularly draining to be around when backlashed, I'm topped up."

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“Oh good! I’m less draining to be around than most people to my brother but we’re twins so it practically doesn’t count.”

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"I've gotten used to doing a some of my introverting around June, who - is there, but is emphatically not paying attention. Whenever I'm less backlashed than her I can send Cricket home to nap and work on a blog post while she finishes up. And you were very much there but not paying attention, just in a cuddlier fashion."

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“Cool.” She gets dressed. “In that case I would love to stay for dinner.”

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"Cool. Ren's getting Chinese takeout, what should I tell her to throw in for you?"

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“I’m a big fan of vegetable lo mein. And spring rolls.”

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Text text.

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Lucy can help set the table if that’s convenient.

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And soon enough Ren arrives with takeout and hands Lucy the spring rolls and veggie lo mein.

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Brilliant. Lucy is not going to discuss much of what happened since she and Haru arrived, for obvious reasons, but she can tell Ren all about the dungeon!

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Ren is delighted to hear about the dungeon but she's more curious about the civilian applications, she's got a special ed teacher friend who would really like a power like Lucy's some days!

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Would Ren like to hear about shrimp colors and ant pheromone trails? Lucy is totally into the idea of helping people with difficulty communicating but hasn’t actually done any yet.

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Ren would love to hear about shrimp colors and ant pheremone trails!

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They’re so cool! Also she will show Ren the dancing ants video.

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"Gracious. You could do animal actors, maybe."

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“Maybe. I think that would probably eat more backlash than I want to spend on it, like, short clips for YouTube is one thing, but I think I would mostly rather do dungeons and science. …But you’re right that it’s an option.”

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"I think often the animal action is broken up into pretty short segments, but really you've got so many choices."

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“I know! I love my power so much!”

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It's a few days later when Haru texts Lucy:

Do you want to come to BC? There's... nothing to recommend the town where my dad lives but if you come I don't have to ring my secondary in Vancouver if I get called to a dungeon while I'm out there. I'm really selling this, aren't I
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You don’t have to. I’d love to come.

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When's your school break, I'll get us tickets
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She emails him the dates.

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And she gets CC'd on the flight itinerary. It's first class.

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Which makes sense when she thinks about it but also wow.

Is first class as nice as everyone says?

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You still have to spend the entire time on an airplane but it makes it easier not to get into the habit of ordering teleports unnecessarily.
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The person who claimed there was caviar admitted they were joking about that.

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It'd be lost on me, you saw how I eat. I can just afford takeout more often now
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Yeah. I don’t like to make judgment calls about food I haven’t tried, so I can’t confidently claim that caviar isn’t worth the hype.

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I have actually tried it, Ren likes fancy sushi on her birthday! It was fine? I don't think I'd want to eat it by itself with a spoon
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Oh, yeah, it’s not surprising if it’s better in sushi. Lots of things are.

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Cucumbers
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Oh, for sure. Anyway, I have never flown first class before, so that’ll be a new experience.

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much like being in a plane at all for the first time, it's fun for the first twenty minutes and then it is boring
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At least there’ll be more legroom for the boring part.

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Yup, you can recline quite a ways too
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Got my paperwork sorted out, by the way. And an appointment to switch out which foreign objects are stuck in my body.

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Oh, when might that be? he asked for completely innocent reasons
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:P day after tomorrow <3

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Do you wanna go out for Italian or something that evening, he asked for also completely innocent reasons,
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I would love to. What could be more deceptively innocent than Italian.

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Deception? Me? How dare
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Did I say anything about you being deceptive? Are you secretly Italian? Because that would be a neat trick, considering.

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Ciao bella?
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GASP. I have uncovered your secrets.

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you have correctly divined which Axis power I am ethnically derived from
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The hard part was ruling out Germany, as much science as you have on your blog.

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the spukhafte Fernwirkung is very misleading
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Okay she needs to use Google Translate for that one. And then…

Does she dare?

She dares.

Had to look that one up. I’m only familiar with eclectic fragments of German, such as “Hast du was dagegen, wenn ich dich so wild liebe, dass dir dein Name erst wieder einf llt, wenn ich ihn dir ins Ohr schreie?”

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goodness gracious <3 mine was an Einstein reference but yours is spicier
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You learn all kinds of things from fanfic! That one was not an esper AU but it was plenty spicy anyway.

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we don't have a monopoly on spice! just an unfair advantage.
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Oh, for sure, but like, usually when I mention fanfic to you it’s got espers in it.

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What's this one about and why does it have spicy German?
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Well, you see, it’s about an English thief seducing a German spy.

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What's it fanfic of?
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It’s a BL manga set in the Cold War. The thief alternately helps and hinders his love interest, a West German intelligence officer, while also committing art thefts. At one point, for convoluted reasons, the thief kidnaps the Pope.

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Art and Popes. A diverse set of things to appropriate
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Well, the Russians sure weren’t expecting it.

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Do Russians care about the Pope? Aren't they Orthodox when they're not being Soviet atheists?
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Well, yeah, but there was some kind of spy mcguffin in the Vatican

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Mcwhatnow
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Oh! Do you not know McGuffin? It’s a literary device referring to an object whose only plot significance is to be desirable. So, like, in Harry Potter, the Philosopher’s Stone counts as a mcguffin because nobody actually uses it for anything.

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Why is it called that?
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I do not know!

 

Wikipedia says it comes from a joke about meaninglessness.

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I guess that makes sense

Paula found me a dungeon, you want to meet up after? (Have you picked an agent yet?)
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I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of options but I’m doing my due diligence in researching them. And sounds good.

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See you at my place at like 4:30ish?
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Perfect.

She shows up at 4:24

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Cricket lets her in. "He isn't home yet."

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Shrug. “I’m early.”

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Cricket rustles his wings and goes back to watching Ninotchka.

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She’s fine to wait.

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Haru's truck pulls into the garage and he comes into the house, already on the phone. "- gonna hang up on you in a second, I'm home now, thanks Tess."

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Oh, if he’s on the phone he’s probably backlashed, she should immediately go hug him.

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Yes she should; he slumps onto her gratefully. "Talk to you later, bye!" Phone goes off and back in his pocket. Face goes on Lucy's neck. "Hi."

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“Hi! You sound like you’ve just done a dungeon.”

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"I did! Toronto got a visit from the Dr. Seuss dungeon and it's going to be around for weeks because we don't know where its core is so I took a shift. I got amazing pictures but alas did not get to go capture a lorax and a bevy of Sneetches."

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“Oh dear. Does ‘the Dr. Seuss dungeon’ mean it’s a repeat?”

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"Yeah, it's from the late eighties, it's a big jerk now and Seuss lived to see it - well, not in person, but to know about it. The official name is Solla Sollew but people also call it Whoville, and, of course, just 'the Dr. Seuss dungeon'. None of it is exact copies of any Seuss stuff, if I nabbed a lorax it wouldn't look precisely like the book one, but the style is straight on, the colors and the plants and the architecture and the monsters."

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“Oh, man, is there anything from the birthday one? I loved the birthday one.”

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"I don't think I remember the birthday one, what's in it?"

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Quick Google search. “Well, there’s the Birthday Bird, and the telling-time fish, and an assortment of pets—the book asserts that you get the biggest one, but I always found the smaller ones charming.”

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Haru peeks. "Nothing exactly like any of those but the style's Seussish, there were similar 'birds' and 'fish' and weirder stuff."

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“Yeah, fair enough. I probably shouldn’t get excited about the possibility of removing monsters from a dungeon that keeps escaping, anyway.”

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"I would really like to have a whole habitat for Seuss creatures in a zoo somewhere but the place is too big for Columba to find the core in and regular searching hasn't made any headway."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I hope the giant crocodile dungeon doesn’t turn out to be universal in its monsters having no idea where the core is.”

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"I don't see why they would usually know? Maybe boss monsters know but a lot of dungeons don't have an identifiable boss."

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“Oh, no, I suspect it’s normal, but if even boss monsters don’t actually know—I guess it might not really matter, tactically speaking, but it would be so cool to make a boss monster bring the core of its dungeon to the entrance, break it, and then immediately exit. Has anyone captured a boss monster before?”

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"Not that I know of, they're normally guarding the core and often too big to get through the portal. It's probably happened ever, but it might have been thirty years ago and promptly slain by third parties or something."

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“Well, as far as ambitions go, capturing boss monsters goes beneath all the actually specifically useful stuff, but it’s still on there.”

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"It'd be cool to have them but they're really big, it'd be hard to place them and hard to warehouse them in the meantime."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, if they bring their cores to the entrance, they wouldn’t need to be warehoused long. But, also, there could be interesting data if boss monsters survive dungeon deaths at a different rate from non-bosses.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why wouldn't they need to be warehoused long if they bring their cores to the entrance?"

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“—Mm, because I wasn’t modeling the logistics well enough. The idea I had was that you could destroy it immediately, but if there are still victims inside you can’t do that, and there’s no reason to leave the core alone until you’ve got all the victims out.”

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"And once you've got the monster out and the core destroyed, the monster, if it survives, has to be somewhere until there is a place ready to receive it for the long term."

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“Oh, I guess I misunderstood ‘warehouse.’”

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"Yeah no it is often a literal warehouse."

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“Wow! I, uh, hope that’s just the not-people-y ones.”

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"I've never captured a peopley one myself, most of them aren't. If I had to put a peopley one in a warehouse I would at least order up some amenities for them on a temporary basis."

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“Yeah, I’m terribly biased, I never thought about dungeon monsters at all until I read about Cricket on your blog.”

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"Most of them don't survive the dungeon, and the ones that do are mostly just - critters. You might be able to distinguish between a smart critter and a person that can't talk, but my guess is those aren't commonplace in part because of how weird it is that any of them talk at all - they don't do it in dungeons."

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“I wish more monsters survived the deaths of their dungeons. It just feels so unnecessary for them to die, when we know that some of them survive.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I don't have even a guess about what controls that besides that the monsters usually - only usually - need to be biological to come through alive."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I wonder if there’s some pre-existing factor, that I might be able to learn to pick up on. Has there ever been a group of the same thing where one survived and the others didn’t?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not off the top of my head."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I am guessing but not assuming that nobody dragged a megacroc out of that one dungeon.”

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"Too big and unwieldy, but also they haven't found the core yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, still. Don’t love that.”

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"It hasn't been that long, the median time is on like day two but it's not that unusual for a dungeon where it's dim and wet to hang on for a week while the search is underway."

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“Yeah, you’re right. …After I got taken by the web dungeon I restricted myself to checking on it once a day because it felt bad to see that it wasn’t dead yet.”

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"Lots of dungeons are a lot more navigable for normal SWAT teams than those two."

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“Probably I’m not mostly going to be working in those dungeons though.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You might, your suitability probably depends mostly on the monster loadout? I'm not sure exactly what kind of monster loadout you're ideal for - might be similar to mine, I'm good with fewer monsters and bad at swarms of them."

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“That’s true. It might take some experimenting.”

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"Mm-hm." What if he kissed the side of her neck.

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Eep! She is delightedly surprised by this! Less delighted than he is by kisses to the back of the neck, but that’s a high bar.

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He ran out of things to say and also she is so kissable! Kiss kiss kiss.

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Kiss kiss kiss! She is so onboard with this. He is pretty kissable himself.

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"Upstairs before Cricket scolds us?" he murmurs.

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“Oh, yes, excellent idea.”

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Up they go and then he can kiss her properly.

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Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.

The wait until the day after tomorrow is suddenly much more annoying than it was ten minutes ago but oh well, there are options.

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There are options and they're pretty good!

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“I really like you,” she murmurs afterwards.

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"I really like you too." Nuzzle.

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Nuzzle smooch smooch.

Two days later, a few hours before the planned date, she texts him saying she’s signed with an agent.

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Congrats, who?
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Rebecca Anderson

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I'll tell Paula. Is she a Maple?
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Yeah! I wasn’t overridingly prioritizing that but it was, like, a factor.

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Yeah, makes it easier for them to find us dungeons together. Do you want to do a shift in the Seuss dungeon? Read some Sneetches, see if anything can lead you to the core?
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I would love to!

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I'll tell Paula, you tell Rebecca! But make sure she knows not this evening :)
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NOT this evening, no <3

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<3

Italian place is here
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Be there with bells on!

 

When she shows up to the Italian place that evening, she is, in fact, wearing earrings with a bell motif.

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"I thought that was just a saying. Do they ring?" He might want to flick one.

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They are made of glass and make a delicate chiming sound!

"To the best of my knowledge it's just a saying, but hey, I had the earrings and they're pretty."

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"Well, they're cute and you're cute." Elbow-linkage on the way in, yes?

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Yes!

(She wasn't actually sure what the restaurant's dress code would be, so the rest of her outfit consists of a little red dress suitable for a range of formality levels, a choker with a pendant of oddly-shaped swirling fused glass hanging from it, white tights and low-heeled red pumps. So she's probably covered no matter what.)

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She's a little overdressed, but in the plausibly deniable way where maybe she dresses like that to go to the grocery store. Haru is as always in jeans and a T-shirt. In they go and get menus with a variety of Italian foods.

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Absolutely nothing in the outfit was purchased for more than twenty dollars! This is fine. Lucy likes gnocchi and will avoid calamari like the plague. 

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Haru's getting the fetuccine alfredo with chicken and broccoli in it. If she doesn't say anything about calamari he will not know.

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"Do you want to split an appetizer? I'm good with any of the appetizer options except the calamari."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't like squid? They have a good stuffed artichoke."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't eat cephalopods. Squid less emphatically than octopi but octopi are so smart. Stuffed artichoke sounds good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Did you get a chance to read any cephalopods at the aquarium, remind me -"

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"I did not. But also I only get, like, senses, and to a limited degree the context necessary to interpret those senses, I thankfully do not straight-up read minds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know octopuses can open jars and stuff but I don't know them to be smarter than, like, pigs? I'm maybe not up on the latest in this department."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't immediately cite my sources but a figure I vaguely recall and can't be confident in is there are supposed to be octopi as smart as a human five year old."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How do you even assess that when they can't talk - or do they have them using picture boards or something -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it's mostly about problem-solving?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Five year olds are pretty good at solving problems but limited by their motor ability, I'm still not seeing how you do the comparison straight across."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I really don't remember where I got that number, sorry."

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"Well, I will not require of you that you eat any cephalopods, certainly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I also won't eat monkeys but that has never come up."

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"I don't think I've ever seen them on a menu, no."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Clue movie has a dinner of monkeys' brains, which turns out to be a plot point."

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"Is it? I don't think I've seen that or heard Cricket summarize it, he watches a lot of movies but he's like. Five."

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"It is but I guess that's kind of also a spoiler, I just lowkey expect you not to care about those. The reason it's a plot point is because it's so weird, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think good stories hold up even if you know the twists."

Permalink Mark Unread

“One of the twists in the Clue movie is that it has three separate endings.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh, how's that work?"

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“In the theaters they would play one at random, apparently. On the DVD I watched as a kid you could pick one or just do all three in sequence.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I should see if it's on Cricket's list, I bet he'll form a strong opinion about which ending is the best." Their stuffed artichoke appears.

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“I suspect I know which one it is but maybe I’m just biased because I have a favorite.”

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"Oh, what makes it better than the other two?"

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She ticks off her fingers. “So in one ending Miss Scarlet does it, in one ending Mrs. Peacock does it, and in one ending everyone does it.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"What, they're like, collaborating or they all by sheer coincidence simultaneously attempted -?"

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“So the Clue movie opens with all the guests arriving and being issued their pseuonyms—the color-based names from the game. We never do learn any of their real names. Already present are Mr. Boddy, his butler, his cook, and his maid. By the time the movie is over, not only Mr. Boddy has been killed, but the cook, the maid, a stranded motorist who shows up asking to use the phone—this is an old movie, to be clear, from before cell phones—and a singing telegram girl. In the first two endings, the same person commits all the murders; in the third, everyone is killed by a different person. And the butler also dies.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"...wow. That sounds hard to set up with all the motives making sense so if they did pull it off I'm guessing that's your favorite?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“It is my favorite, but the motive angle was actually not that complicated. Mr. Boddy was blackmailing all the guests, and the other victims were his informants.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, huh, why is it your favorite then?"

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“Well, partly I don’t love the fact that of the two endings where one person does all the murder, both of them are women, when the suspect list is fifty-fifty. But mostly it’s for the bonus twist where in the third ending, the so-called butler turned out to have been the real Mr. Boddy the whole time, having instructed his actual butler to pretend to be him to the victims who had never met him in person before.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"So when you say 'the butler also dies'..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, the real butler was the first victim. But the otherwise-butler who is in fact Mr. Boddy also dies, trying to escape when the FBI shows up.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"In the other two endings he's in fact a butler and doesn't die?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Right!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wonder if that was rough on the actors playing consistently with all those possibilities."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hmm. I don’t know. But the butler—usually a butler—was played by Tim Curry, who’s, uh, a way, so that may have helped.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"A way?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“He’s—deeply camp, and has a magnificently wide range.”

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Their food shows up. "I'm not sure if I've seen anything with him in it, I haven't actually watched many films."

Permalink Mark Unread

“He does voice acting, too!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, if he was in Civilization maybe I have heard his voice."

Permalink Mark Unread

“He probably doesn’t happen to have been just statistically but it wouldn’t especially shock me.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can I steal some of your gnocchi?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Trade for a bite of yours.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Help yourself." Theft! Omf.

Permalink Mark Unread

Theft! This is a good place and both dishes are tasty.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I should warn you that Charlie is going to attempt to take us fishing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Huh. I have never fished."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's really boring."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will your dad be offended if I bring headphones and an audiobook?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then I can handle a boring activity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He's got a boat, now, I insisted as soon as I had the esper money to afford it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kind of boat?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just a little fishing boat with a motor. He named it Sunday."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that's cute."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I had to badger him into naming it at all."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah. Less relatable. My graphing calculator is named Deep Thought."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's the... Hitchhiker's Guide computer?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah! Is that something you recall or is it something you've absorbed through pop culture osmosis, I need to know if I need to read you the series."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I read Hitchhiker's, though it was a while ago. I gravitate most strongly toward older stuff but I'll take a run at anything that's obviously influencing the literary conversation and Hitchhiker's did that for sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does it not count as older?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's younger than dungeons!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, that's fair. I read a lot of stuff in that general time period. So when you say you read Hitchhiker, do you mean the whole series, or just the first book?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I read the... first four? I'm not sure if I got around to the fifth one."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Fair enough, I wouldn’t call the fifth one mandatory.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I might've read it and just forgot."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hm…oh, I think the first Pern book was written before dungeons.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I tried Pern and bounced off it, I think I just don't care for McCaffrey."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That’s fair. I like her fine but everyone has different tastes. It was deeply impactful on the genre, though.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I believe it. I lean a bit sci-fi over fantasy? I like fantasy but I'm less plugged in to what it's doing."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Well, Pern is actually sci-fi in a silly hat. But most of the dragon-riding stuff it influenced isn’t.”

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Haru hand-wobbles. "It reads like fantasy."

Permalink Mark Unread

“That’s the silly hat! But no, you’re right.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wish somebody'd snagged a London dragon, those were cool apart from the mayhem and carnage."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I know, right?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gotta figure out how to establish a monster zoo so I have a great excuse to put bounties on anything I can't go catch myself."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hm…what do you need to found a zoo…besides money.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I already have a job, so I need someone who isn't a dungeon-capable esper to manage things like establishing a site for it to be built on, developing the staff and the slack and the institutional responsiveness necessary to take in new creatures on short notice when they don't know what size they're going to be or what they'll eat or if they'll still breathe fire should they survive their dungeons at all, and ideally a return on investment plan that probably involves charging admission."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t know if my trying to see if I know someone who knows someone whose life’s ambition is to run a zoo is the best way to do that but I can certainly try.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't hurt! I might put out feelers on my blog, anyone whose life ambition is a monster zoo in particular probably stands a decent chance of being a reader."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Yeah, that seems sensible. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to reach out to people who run existing zoos, asking for advice…”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're right, I should absolutely call all the people I currently call when I want to place a monster."

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“Yeah! Ooh, and the monster zoo would need an aquarium element, a lot of places keep those separate…”

Permalink Mark Unread

"I maybe want, like, an artificial island, and then freshwater monsters could just be fenced in the lake."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Do ex-dungeon monsters generally get along non-destructively? There are definitely animals in a normal zoo that it wouldn’t be a good idea to house together.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not a lot of data. Vadodara monsters are friendly to other animals under the same conditions as they are to humans but that's, you know. Most others there aren't enough of them that anyone wants to put them in the same cage and see how many monsters live through the experience. But I can have a partitioned fence."

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“Yeah, that tracks.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"No chance of getting things together in time for this appearance of the Seuss dungeon even if you can make a lorax lead you straight to the core somehow, but maybe next time it shows up. I can dream, anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I can also dream but will not allow my dreams to get between me and core destruction.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you find the core I can get at least a small number of monsters, littler ones that can go in normal sized crates and get a spot in a normal zoo, just not an entire dungeon-ecosystem-habitatful."

Permalink Mark Unread

“It’s not that likely anyway. But still.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, Solla Sollew has evaded many teams in the past and will most likely continue to do so."

Permalink Mark Unread

“But wouldn’t it be so coooool if my power were the silver bullet that could take out several tricky recurring dungeons.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Get you a shield and point me at Nightmare's core and I've got the mobility and the psychic invulnerability to pull it off."

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Wistful sigh. “Probably nobody’s that good.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"No excuse not to at least investigate the prerequisites for the possibility, though."

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“Oh, of course! And it’s not that I think we’ll never get Nightmare, I just think probably when it happens it’ll be, like, some really cool combination of a hundred cleverly-leveraged dungeon materials or something, not one guy with a standout power.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Another reason to have a monster zoo, some of 'em can probably ongoingly generate exotic materials. Cricket's fur and feathers don't seem to be anything special, but..."

Permalink Mark Unread

“What about any of the critters you’ve homed in zoos? Any of them make anything interesting?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a landfish that weeps gasoline, but it's just normal gasoline. There's a turtle that probably has a useful shell, because the other turtles in its dungeon did, and it's growing bigger, but you'd have to kill it to get the shell."

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“Huh. Normal gasoline isn’t bad, though.”

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"Sure, but it's like, a teaspoon a day and it seems to bother the fish when they try to get the samples."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Less useful. Still pretty neat proof of concept.”

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"Yup! Eventually there's going to be a shark with useful teeth or a snake with useful skin and we'll be able to collect sheds that do something."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Oh, shark teeth! That could be so neat. I don’t think the megacrocs were part shark, which…I was going to say was a pity, but, uh.”

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"I don't think it would've made them any more dangerous, really."

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“Quite possibly, but when I hear myself say, ‘you know what this incredibly dangerous monster needs, is to be part shark,’ I feel a need to stop and check myself for orbital lasers and a volcano lair.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, a volcano lair, snazzy."

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“More snazzy than it is practical, I’m afraid.”

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"Isn't that always the way."

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“Hmmm. I dunno, you seem really snazzy and amazingly practical.”

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"But I don't have a wizard tower or my own space station, so I'm not as snazzy as I could be."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Neither is a volcano lair! The space station option is much snazzier.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"On balance I think I agree with you, now that I think to compare them directly."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Volcanoes are cool, but—space.”

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"Alas that our powers have basically no applicability for going to space."

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“Until I locate a space monster.”

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"Dungeons almost invariably have air! There might be spaceworthy monsters but it'll take a lot of looking."

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“If…hm. Actually, if we got spacesuits and a monster that’s, like, really good at navigation, maybe you could fly us up to a space station…no, we’d have to jam the both of us into one suit for guiding purposes.”

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"I can't keep up flight that long and also can't fly in very open air far away from things."

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“Sorry, I want to be really clear that that wasn’t a serious suggestion.”

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"Gotcha." Their pasta is dwindling. Haru catches a waiter's eye and makes a box gesture.

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“Oh, are we not getting dessert?”

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"Oh, well, if you're still hungry I wouldn't dream of denying you dessert..."

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“I think the dessert I want isn’t served here.”

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"Then maybe we will have to go somewhere else." He boxes their leftovers briskly and taps his phone on the waiter's doohickey.

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She takes his arm again as they leave.

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"You wanna fly to my house?"

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“I would love to.”

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Scoop! Up up and away! He has to look where he's going, but only occasionally, and can sneak a kiss or two without being in any danger of crashing.

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Ee! Ee! Eeeeeee!!!

It's not that just being with Haru isn't inherently romantic. She really really likes him. But flying in his arms with kiss-stealing is so romantic. Her brain is filled with bubbly cartoon hearts. 

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"You're so pretty," he informs her. "You are pretty and also I like you a lot."

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"You are also really pretty and I like you so much."

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He spins in the air on the way down to the doorstep of his house. "You should probably know that I have not actually had sex with any girls besides you before so I don't know anything about what I'm doing that you haven't seen."

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"We'll be pretty well-matched, then!" EeeEe spinning!!!

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He kisses her again while he's fingerprinting the door open.

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Kiss kiss KISS kiss her skin is fizzing from her lips to her fingertips to her toes.

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He carries her right into the house and shuts the door and twirls across the floor and flies up the stairs.

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"Your power is sogoodforthis."

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"I really like flying and it is so much more fun with you in my arms." Kiss.

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"You keep saying things that make me melt."

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"Oh no, don't melt, I'm trying to have you for dessert."

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"Lots of good desserts are melty though! Maybe I am gelato."

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"But one doesn't normally melt it on purpose in advance of eating it up."

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"Not in advance, no, but certainly in the course." She leans around for a demonstrative neck-nibble. 

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"Mmm my dessert is eating me," he mumbles, depositing her on his bed and climbing in after her.

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"--Possibly important to clarify: this is all just flirtatious metaphor and I am in fact emphatically not into vore."

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"Yes, it's just a bit. So to speak." Nibble.

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Oh good. Wriggle wriggle off comes the dress.

 

Haru can no doubt recall from Nonconsensual Comedy Week that she does not normally wear matching sets of lacy underwear. However,

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However! Today apparently she is! Gosh. Those can stay on decoratively for a bit, he's planning to take his time here. Perhaps he can figure out how the jewelry comes off before he tries to decipher a bra.

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The earrings have hooks and the necklace has a clasp! It is relatively straightforward.

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All those things can go neatly on his nightstand before he returns to kissing her and his hands, free of their jewelry-related errands, can resume wandering.

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She is so in favor of his hands wandering. One of hers creeps to the back of his neck and starts kneading.

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That's a good spot. If he twists around a little she could put her mouth on that spot.

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She could! Would, even!

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Oh well that's very distracting. He can still run his hands over her skin but it's much more locally-chasing-that-guiding-feeling than deliberate goal-oriented petting now.

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Whaaaaaat if she attempts some Strategic Wiggling.

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Yes, he's very biddable in this way, where would she like those hands to be?

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She has some ideas. How about here?

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That's a good spot, he agrees completely.

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Oh good.

If she keeps kissing the back of his neck, will he eventually get a bit more coherent again?

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Does it count if he very coherently attempts to remove her bra?

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Good enough!

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Oh look what we have here with that out of the way.

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THIS IS GOING TO MAKE IT MORE DIFFICULT FOR HER TO KISS HIS NECK.

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A tragic sacrifice on both their parts really, but he cannot resist.

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Lucy cannot argue. Because words are not happening right now.

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Will she wrap around to producing words again if he is very very encouraging?

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Define words! She can produce his name.

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That counts! "Yeees?"

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“Haru please—”

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Please what? Please also remove her underpants? He'll guess it's that.

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YEP THAT WORKS.

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Oh good, he's such a good guesser. Now whatever is he supposed to do with all this newly visible real estate.

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Well. Well. This is, strictly, territory they’ve explored before! It’s very good territory though.

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It is! It deserves a thorough reexamination before they proceed, like how you have to reread the first books in a series when the new one comes out.

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WOW HE IS SO RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.

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It's because he's very smart and has good opinions.

But then he wants to go back to kissing her and investigating the new vistas that have been opened up.

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Ah—okay—good idea—

It is a good thing they are both equally inexperienced at this because otherwise the inexperience could get embarrassing.

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He's had penetrative sex before! From this direction, even, albeit distinct in some details. Sparkler let him top one (1) time to confirm that Sparkler did not like it probably specifically so Haru would know what he was missing. This is also how Haru knows anything else about what he likes in bed, in the abstract mechanical sense that he likes anything in bed when the person in bed with him is Sparkler. Which isn't that much. He really really likes Lucy and this is really really good and he's trying to slow down to be attentive and not premature about any anything but fuuuuuck.

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Well. Well. One good thing about fanfiction erotica is that it showcases a much more diverse array of situations than Mainstream Porn. If anything premature does happen, she is prepared to roll with it.

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Well, depending on what one's standards for prematurity might be the ensuing happenings may or may not be premature. Also, conveniently, if one is the sort of person to be turned on by the sensation of guiding, there's a lot of that happening all at once very suddenly.

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Ooh right fluid transfer.

 

 

 

”You know, if you’d asked me before hellweek, I’d’ve guessed that all the erotica was exaggerating about guiding sex.”

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"Do they get it right?" Nuzzle nuzzle.

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Nuzzle. “Not all of them. But overall, more accurate than I would have guessed.” Smooch.

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Smooches!

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Smooches are great and smooching 💖Haru specifically 💖 is wonderful.

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It doesn’t take long after that for Lucy’s new agent to schedule her for Solla Sollew.

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Haru's there too. Victims wind up in weirdass places in Solla Sollew, it's a really... creative... dungeon.

"The good news is," he says, when he and Lucy are driving there first thing in the morning, "the monsters aren't that tough. The guys with guns can keep them off you while you do your sensor thing no problem, everything in there goes down to bullets even if the elephants take bigger rounds than the loraxes. So you just sit tight and tell me where I should be going to grab everybody it's kidnapped overnight, and I will go collect them from on top of a pile of turtles or a boarded-up Seuss-architecture tower or a giant glass bottle full of beetles or whatever."

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Lucy nods, and reaches out for victims, and also double checks to make sure that the monsters in this dungeon don’t know where the core is either.

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There's a victim over there in the oobleck. There's one up a tree in a nest. There's one on the train that runs through half the dungeon. There's one in a pond stuck in the muck. There's one in a cave in the snowy mountainous area. There's one in a cage with a monster in a circus tent.

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Also, this Sneetch has a pretty good view of the core, inside one of the Seussian contraptions behind all the gears and levers and pulleys and mechanical arms.

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“Haru I found the core.”

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"- holy shit. Where."

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She points and describes the location and distance.

“I checked the monsters and one was looking right at it.”

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He checks against their map of this incarnation of Solla Sollew. "In here?"

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“Yeah, exactly. A little bit closer to that side than this one,” she gestures, “but only a little.”

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"Brilliant." She gets a kiss. "I'm gonna go get that and then grab the victims and then we can take the break and then I'm going to catch a ton of monsters."

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BEAM. “Wonderful.”

She’s helping to kill a named dungeon! This is so amazing!

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Haru kisses her again and then bounds off down the narrow railingless unsupported stairs that are all over the place in this dungeon and makes for the relevant contraption. The monsters ignore him, of course.

Permalink Mark Unread

That is so cool.

Lucy starts marking victim locations on the map.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's good to know there's somebody in the oobleck, they need to bring out the solvents for that and give the victim a gas mask.

Permalink Mark Unread

Hm! That’s not excellent.

She could make monsters retrieve victims, but she’s assuming that’s a bad idea for trauma reasons?

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"It won't help with the oobleck," says the SWAT guy. "The monsters get stuck in it too. The one who's in the circus cage though, maybe that one?"

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“Yeah, I didn’t mean the oobleck one.” What’s the nearest monster to the circus cage situation.

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The one that's inside the cage with the victim.

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Aaaaand can that one open the cage, or does she need one on the outside. Or, like, is it small enough to fit through the bars.

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It can in fact get an arm through the bars and unbar the cage door!

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Excellent! It shall do that, then. And open the door and—is the victim, like, conscious and motile. Also is the monster big enough to pick them up if the answer is no.

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The victim is conscious and only slightly scratched up! The monster is several times their size but might have a hard time locomoting with a limb dedicated to carrying a person.

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Okay, she will attempt to have the monster lead the victim to safety. If the victim looks disinclined to follow then she’ll try to have it scratch “I am being controlled by an esper” into some dirt or something.

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The victim escapes the cage at the first opportunity but doesn't want to stay near the monster. Actually he's making a beeline for the cotton candy stand.

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That’s so valid of him. He can have some cotton candy before she uses the monster to gently herd him entrancewards.

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He grabs some of it and then - well, herding is the right word, he's trying to stay out of claw range.

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Yeah, she figured. As long as she can reasonably consistently get him fleeing the monster in the direction of the entrance, it’s all good.

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Well, he's trying going up a staircase that looks too narrow for the beast, and it doesn't look like he's as stable in so doing as Haru is, but maybe he'll be fine!

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—Is there another monster nearby that she can use to dissuade him from doing that. A flier, maybe, or just something smaller.

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There's lots of weird Seussian birds, flapping hither and yon on their objectively underfeathered little wings. They're decorative and don't attack, so people don't bother shooting them.

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But will the guy she is attempting to rescue run away from one.

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Yes, but, like not toward the big beastie, so, farther up the stairs.

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Sigh. This is objectively not an efficient use of her power. She updates the rescue teams on his not-cage location and looks for another not-oobleck person she can dislodge.

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The train turns out to be a monster. She can make it follow whichever part of the track she likes and come to a stop so the lady can get off.

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Oh maaaaan that is so cool. She lets the lady off at the best spot for heading to the entrance, but before she does that she is going to make some Harmless Birds peck an arrow into the ground with the label “this way to rescue.”

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Haru's back with the core. "Lucy you are brilliant and also there were so many sneetches can we take a break."

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“We absolutely can.” Smooch. She does also update the rescue teams on Train Lady’s situation before they leave, though.

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He takes her hand and they can jump through the portal and go hide in a tent.

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Lucy had some idea of how much backlash Haru was going to accrue, and was freer with how much exactly she was controlling some of those monsters accordingly. She’s so helpful! Among other adjectives.

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Then they can have lovely mutual guiding till they're both at safely low levels and he's ready to climb back in and retrieve victims.

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Excellent! Hopefully cage guy does not need significantly more rescuing than when she last saw him, such as perhaps because he fell off of some stairs.

“We’re gonna kill a named dungeon,” she trills delightedly on the way back in.

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"There's named and then there's named, but we're gonna kill a famous one!"

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“I am so hyped, this is fabulous. Pity we probably can’t get the train out.”

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"The train?"

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“There’s a train that’s a monster! I made it let a kidnapping victim go. But it runs on tracks and it’s, you know, train amounts of heavy, so it’d be a bitch and a half to even get to the entrance.”

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"Oh damn, that would be so cool but it probably wouldn't fit."

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“Exactly!!!”

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"Lower odds of survival than the crittery ones though."

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“Yeah. Even if it could fit it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort. But if it was just the lower chance of survival I would be all over it, because damn.”

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"I do wanna see if we can dig up some of the trees."

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Nod. “I’m going to direct a whole bunch of the harmless little bird-things out of the portal.”

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"I'd actually rather have you on the big ones that are harder for me to drag around in their cages, I can catch the birds."

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“Well, fair enough. I can’t control them from the other side of the portal, though, so I’ll have to be careful to go through at the same time and get them secured on this side before going back in.”

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"No, we can bring the cages in, just have you walk the monsters into them and then close them up and shove them through."

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“Ah, gotcha. I look forward to getting better acquainted with monster extraction practices.”

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"You'll have your own custom ones, considering."

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“Well, of course. But we’re partners! So the ones you already have are relevant to how we’re going to do it together, going forward, which I expect to happen less than always but relatively often!”

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"My protocol is I get a cage, I walk right up to the monster, and I put the cage around it and close it."

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“That makes sense. But also, wow, yeah, those must be annoying to haul around.”

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"That's why I usually get little ones, though once they're boxed up I can get help with them."

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“I think there’ll probably be some monsters where it’s easier to make sure I cross the portal at the same time than to drag the cage through.”

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"Probably! You could ride an elephant out."

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“Like Hannibal in the Alps!”

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"Hopefully it doesn't freeze to death!"

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“Nothing freezes to death in a Dr. Seuss book.”

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"Not off the top of my head, admittedly."

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“It would be tonally inappropriate! …Possibly unless you count Dr. Seuss Goes to War, which is a collection of political cartoons he did during World War II. Very different from the stuff for kids.”

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"I think that's not taken as an inspiration for this dungeon, any more than it seems to be grabbing from any of the stuff he published under an alternate pen name."

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“Which is good on more levels than just not freezing to death.”

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"I dunno, Ren told me the other day that when I was tiny I liked 'would you rather be a bullfrog'."

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“Ah, well, I only meant the war one.”

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"Mm-hm."

And eventually they should go rescue people, though Haru's of no particularly help with the oobleck either and just braves Seussian stairs and such to retrieve folks from precarious locations.

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And Lucy continues to let people out of various non-oobleck forms of confinement and otherwise productively rack up backlash to get rid of Haru’s with.

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Eventually all the victims are out, even the oobleck one who stinks of acetone and looks pretty miserable, and they're still waiting for a big batch of cages and somebody to come with equipment to dig up the Truffula trees, and they can go take another guiding break.

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She is SO ENTHUSIASTIC, guiding sex is AMAZING and they are gonna KILL A FAMOUS DUNGEON and EVACUATE A TON OF MONSTERS FIRST and there are TRUFFULA TREES.

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It's slightly frowned upon to have actual sex in a guiding tent, that's what silos are for. It's just so they don't get papped while making out and putting their hands under each other's shirts. Guiding sex is for when they go back to his place after he catches lots of Seuss-creatures.

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Oh right social norms are a thing. That Haru’s backlash interferes with keeping track of less than hers does. What about making out, is that acceptable, it also involves fluid transfer.

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Making out is very acceptable. Observe how he is making out with her.

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Oh good.

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And then the cages appear. Haru ordered quite a lot of them. "I'm going to be monopolizing half a warehouse," he remarks. "Maybe a whole one. I'll have to open my own tiny theme park, stat..."

Time to go catch a ton of birds, and sneetches, and loraxes, and a whole ant-farm village of Whos, and turtles, and miscellaneous nameless bipeds with cravats and beady little noses, and as many one-off monsters as Haru can fit into the available containers. Truffula trees and other Seussish flora is dug up and toted out and ensconced in pots to complete the tableau. Lucy can ride the big monsters out and straight into their cages. It's a long day.

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It is a long and PRODUCTIVE day and Lucy gets to ride big monsters! Including at least one elephant!

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Solla Sollew elephants are much smaller than real ones, conveniently for the project of getting them out intact.

And once the critters are all loaded up on trucks and on their way to be warehoused until Haru's got a place to put them and the dungeon's killed, they can go back to his place. For guiding sex.

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Lucy twirls giddily as she steps inside.

“Are you going to Solla Sollew? Parsley sage rosemary and thyme,” she sings.

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"Oh no, you're cute, who told you that was allowed." Scoop.

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Eeheeheehee

“I did.” She kicks her feet up delightedly.

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"And I suppose you're the authority on such matters." Up the stairs.

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“Well, Solla Sollew doesn’t get a say, ‘cause we’re killing it.”

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"That's true! 'Cause you've got a very cool power."

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“I have a cool power and you have a cool power and we’re a great team and also going to have to open a zoo.”

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"Yes. But first we have some self-care and each-other-care to manage." Nibble.

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Neck nibble. Back of the neck, to be precise.

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"Ah that's one way to - ahhhh -"

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She wants to take such good care of him.

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She can do that! He appreciates this very much!

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Oh excellent.

Any fluids that happen had better end up in guiding-appropriate places but aside from that she’s not feeling any particular obligations to do things in particular ways. And Haru reacts so delightfully to having his neck kissed.

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There are multiple possible guiding-appropriate locations and he will let her have her pick of them when he warns her that it's about time!

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Oh, good, choices are fun.

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Choices are fun but so is being driven to trembling incoherence by his partner. So many things are fun here.

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If that were not the case it would suggest that she was doing something wrong!

If it was brought to her attention Lucy would absolutely be willing to cop to this implying that Sparkler was doing as many as several things wrong.

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Who's thinking about Sparkler? Well, the narration is thinking about Sparkler but Haru sure isn't.

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And Lucy doesn’t know he exists!

 

 

 

 

Blissed-out guiding snuggles.

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"Mmmmmmmyou'regood."

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“You are also good.”

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"I do not deny it."

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"We would both be pretty great even if we weren't killing Solla Sollew."

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"Probably we will not personally land the killing blow. But you found it and I grabbed it so that's pretty close."

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"It is close enough! Landing the killing blow isn't what's important."

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"I shall have to write a blog post about the late Solla Sollew in a few days."

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"Oh man, you totally do."

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"Might be a mutliparter. Also I need to interview you at some point."

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"Yeah! --Although I might be too giddily delighted to make important decisions right now."

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"We can schedule the interview for some time when you are fully calm and rational."

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"Good plan! Although it may be hard to stay that way, given the givens."

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"The givens of being interviewed?"

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"Of being interviewed about being instrumental in killing a major dungeon! While still really new at this!"

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"Everyone will be very impressed," he nods.

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"I am never going to be over this, possibly unless I manage to find the core in Volcanic Range or Nightmare or something."

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"You probably shouldn't go into either of those - you could make a case for Nightmare, since I can go in there reasonably enough, but Volcanic Range'd toast us."

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"I am not by default planning to go into those but I am leaving open the possibility of some kind of team-up where that makes sense."

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"Yeah, fair enough."

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"Especially if using monster senses to find the core turns out to be more than a freak one-off."

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"I think I'd expect it to work maybe... five to thirty percent of the time, but that's a pretty wide spread."

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"And even five percent of the time is potentially a lot! There are more than twenty dungeons it would be inconvenient to call Columba in on where finding the core is non-trivial!"

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"Yeah, you'll have an important niche in big dungeons like that, Columba burns out too fast to get anywhere in a dungeon that's been around more than twice."

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"I really hope that someday we will be able to talk to dungeons and my ability to learn things about animal senses will be more exciting than my ability to locate dungeon cores, but wow, I love my power."

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"You got very lucky with it!"

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“I got so lucky with it. I’m generally glad we don’t use the ranking system they do in east Asia but I have to admit I’m sort of curious how they’d rate me. Not that I’m going to try to find out.”

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"It's not entirely about the quality of the power, they also factor in backlash accumulation rates and tactical skill."

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“Tactical skill will improve with time, but I was also thinking of the fact that I have a less debilitating backlash than many.”

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"You do! I can ask a contact in Asia how they'd guess your rank would come out if you want."

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“I think I should not do that because if I ask only because I expect to get a flattering answer, and then I get a less flattering answer than I’d hoped for, I expect to be disappointed, and I don’t endorse that.”

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"Fair enough."

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“I read a book one time that had the quote, ‘egalitarians adjust to aristocracies just fine, as long as they get to be the aristocrats.’ Buying into the ranking system only if I get to be high rank would be aesthetically offensive at best, and I know I don’t want to buy in if I would be low-ranked. So.”

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"The guy I had in mind to ask told me I'd be a B with June, but that I could probably swing an A if I had a higher bandwidth partner." Squeeze.

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“Well, you do have one of those now.”

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"I do!"

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Would he like some further demonstration of high guiding bandwidth.

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Oh now that she mentions it that sounds great.