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Edie is, frankly, not thrilled with their current situation.
The years since Charles Xavier's death have not led her to forget everything he ever taught her about telepathic ethics, particularly the fact that the exact kind of behavior this place openly encourages is very specifically a no-no.
Not to mention the fact that she's hardly guaranteed to be the most accomplished telepath here, or the fact that there are plenty of ways other than telepathy as she knows it to get got. The two of them have other concerns besides holding onto their principles.
However, those concerns do not involve avoiding starvation and desperately attempting to aid any fellow refugees they can find while dodging genocidal killer robots. Sometimes the devil you don't know really is preferable to the devil you do.
The array of minds spread out before her is astonishing. One of them is so high-fidelity it hurts to look at. Several of them are various less remarkable flavors of not quite human. One of them is a puzzle that she realizes, with a start, is some kind of fully sapient artificial intelligence. One of them is vaguely unpleasant, and passively psychic in a way she is, fortunately, able to shield herself and Emily from; against her own telepathy, the woman's mind feels like a buzzing swarm of wasps. Not very pleasant. The woman turns in Edie's direction and glares, to which she responds with only a raised eyebrow.
One of the minds feels like fire, and when she peeks closer to get a sense of the person's likely threat level, the very first thing she runs into is a wall of DO NOT WANT. This person is NOT comfortable with ANY form of nonconsensual mind interaction, and Edie withdraws guiltily, feeling like some kind of nonsexual peeping Tom.
The auditorium is relatively full, but the two of them are still able to find seats adjacent to each other but nobody else, turning to face away from each other so as to widen their collective field of vision.
