"I. This isn't a routine? You really are like that, right now, somehow?"

"Like what?"

"Peter do you like butterflies?"

"Hey, that's my question! You're stealing it!"

"What's your mom's name."

"Why are you talking about my mom out of a sudden?"

"You just never told me about your family." He can't believe he's actually doing this.

"I like my family very much. I miss them."

"Peter, do you like butterflies?"

"Hey, that's my question! You're stealing it!"

"...I'm gonna go get a drink."

"Okay!" Back to swimming.

Peter had fucking better get back to normal in half an hour or Eric really will chuck him off a mountain.

And at the half hour mark Peter stops in the middle of a sentence, a certain light coming back into his eyes, blinks in confusion, then says, "Sorry, Zach, I forgot what I was saying. Anyway I'm gonna go chat to Eric over there."

"Okay! Hey, Tae-hwan, do you like watching TV?"

"A little bit. How about you?"

"Not really."

"Peter, what the fuck," says Eric, sipping from his second mimosa.

"How'd I do? Was I acting just like them?"

"Was it an act? It didn't look like one. Answer this question very carefully because depending on what you say you may find your hair tasting of orange juice."

"Oh, it wasn't an act at all, I just didn't know if when that happened I actually acted just like them or if there was still some difference."

"You were just as empty and slow as they were."

"Yeah. Sorry. It's, uh—you can just kinda decide to do that. As far as I can tell you gotta have, like, a reasonable end limit and a goal, like—okay, I want to just hang out and swim and chat with people for the next half hour, I'll do that, and there's a kind of, like, mental motion? And then you time skip to the end of that and your body got auto piloted by whatever auto pilots everyone else's bodies."

"...and you come out the other side just fine?"

"Far as I've tried, yeah. And there's some real perks, like, you know how a university term is just a week and that is not long enough for anything?"