She turns away, not wanting to make eye contact for this. "...my backlash makes it hard for me to access my preferences," she says, after a moment.

"...oh. Okay. I call big spoon." He gets under the covers and holds them up for her.

"Works for me." She climbs in and nestles up against him.

(...the guiding feels very good. She nestles closer.)

"Ready for me to pick up some backlash?"

"Give me a moment to pull something up in my head to talk about?"

"Sure."

She takes in a deep breath. 

She lets it out. "Okay. Ready."

He reaches behind himself and flicks a couple fingertips through the wall and his backlash leaps. Snuggle snuggle. "Cricket's go-to is always TV and film, what about you?"

"That makes sense! But personally, I have trouble watching shows unless I'm doing it with someone. I was going to tell you a story that feels fine to tell, and hopefully that'll be interesting enough? It's from my high school era, my half-year foray into being a gamer girl, of sorts."

"Of sorts? What's the edge case condition for being a gamer girl?"

"Well the stereotypical gamer girl is playing MMOs or team PvP games, I think? Or is a streamer. But those are the gaming subcultures where it's more marked because the gaming is inherently a partially social experience, right. I was playing social deception games - think like, Mafia or Werewolf, Secret Hitler, Blood on the Clocktower - actually do you know this genre at all? I don't have much of an impression of what your pre-esper life looked like." 

(Some part of her is, actually, quietly satisfied to note how easy the conversation flows from her. Other parts of her find this laughable. She ignores all of them. She's Talking To Traceless.)

"I am aware of it but can't call to mind any specific occasions I've actually played. You're like, assigned secret roles and some of you are evil, right?"

"Yep! And then you have to figure out who's evil and who isn't by talking to people. And there's some websites where you can play them online. I was - am, as it turns out, really good at social deception games. Both the part where you figure out who has what role and the part where you deceive people, when evil. It got to the point where my first account for the big Mafia website was kill-on-sight for a lot of people, because if they listened to me and I was evil they'd just lose." She doesn't sound bothered by this at all.

"Sounds like sort of a game design defect."

"I'm not sure it was, like, optimal play for them, honestly? But if you play people like a fiddle too many times they will sure remember it and not necessarily proportionately to the number of times you single-handedly won the game for them, as well." (There's a lightness in her voice Traceless hasn't heard before.)

Isn't it kinda fucked up to be enjoying yourself when shut up shut up shut up

"Hm, it's - there's an element of a game design flaw in it being possible for one player to sway it that much? I might just have condemned like the entire concept of, uh, sports, but I owe the entire concept of sports nothing..."

"Ahhhhh. Yeah, I think it's just sort of a flaw inherent to the genre of social deception games? They're very sensitive to social dynamics in general and in particular, chatty people who can pick up on what's going on and track what people are saying and guess why. Admittedly, less so when you're thrown into random pools of people online and only know them by usernames - it took me a while to get used to how that changed things - but I ended up having to abandon my first account three months in, for crimes of being too well-known as a terror on Team Mafia." She sighs, vaguely wistfully.

"That's not a faux pas in the relevant circles?"

"Abandoning an account? Or making a new one to keep playing?"

"Well, the second thing, I guess it would be pretty weird to have a norm against quitting the hobby."

She snorts. "Fair enough. It was - people didn't talk about doing it themselves, obviously, because if people know that JujitsuFruitcake is the same person as PotatoCarnage then it defeats the point of JujitsuFruitcake having made the second account in the first place? But I'd seen a few other people do it, by the time I did - two of them were obvious enough about it to get called out publicly, but one of them got away with it by changing playstyles. So I brainstormed four different accounts, gave each of them a classical element theming and an appropriate name and a little personality, and I'd swap between the four of them as I played."

"Are those real username examples?"

Nodding. "Yeah. A real example of a username change, even! ...I wonder how they're doing these days, we never talked outside the site but if you died in the game you got put into a ghost chatroom, and lots of us would talk to each other about life stuff in there, sometimes."