"But they'd be hard to find if by now they could be named BasilTornado or something."

"Yeah - if they're even still on the site anymore, which they might not be! I'm sure not." She shrugs. "It's not the kind of wondering where I expect to get an answer."

"So you had your four accounts..."

So Flywheel tells the story of her four accounts, how she developed each of them and made friends with different people on them and kept careful notes about who each one knew at once in a separate tab, the ways each of their different personalities lended themselves to different playstyles, the way she was getting close to dropping the fire-themed one for the crimes of being too divisive and successful...

Eventually the interruptions get more desultory, and at last are replaced with random mumbly sleeptalk.

She lowers her voice a fair bit, but keeps talking for a little while longer, just in case he's still awake but saying nonsense as he passes out (Lexi did that). And if he's semi-awake, he might still have his backlash, and she told him she could talk to him until he passed out, so she's going to be sure of that.

"Carrots."

Hrm.

She goes silent, experimentally.

"Metatarsal."

Okay. Good. She did it. And now it's just her, here.

She should really get some sleep.

...she should not backlash herself to sleep, it won't convert to chronic overnight if she's being guided and that'd defeat the whole point of what they're doing here.

"Clarinet."

Man. She's been so self-centered about all of this she hadn't even asked the guy if he wants to do real names. Even backlashed she doesn't think about anyone but herself! 

"Pictionary. Crescent."

...it's fun(?) to have a random word generator in her ear to interrupt her silly trains of thought! Now instead of being insane about stuff that doesn't matter she can think about pictionary and

- and the crescent moon, currently waxing like the confluence is (the confluence started at the beginning of a lunar cycle! Isn't that neat!), probably already set at this time of night. Almost all the way to apogee, now, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away from the earth. 

(She hasn't let herself look up exact distances. It'd be stupid, even more stupid than she's been recently, especially including today. But on a bad day, last week, she did look up a few things instead of texting Aunt Rachel back the way she'd planned, and they bounce around in her head, now.)

Would be fucked up if he just woke up in the morning holding a corpse, huh. Probably kinda traumatic, even.

"Sunbeam."

...Oh hey a new word to think about! Sunbeam!

...Stella called Cara that, once upon a time.

Her eyes water. She - she really misses Stella. She really misses -

You didn't have to stop talking to her, her brain notes, helpfully. You didn't have to stop talking to any of them. Nobody made you shut them all out like that. You had unbacklashed free time, you could have used it to get on your personal phone and do more than the bare minimum to make sure Aunt Rachel didn't come asking questions. But you didn't. Pretty stupid of you, huh? 

She knows, she knows, she knows.

But... she was busy, busy with power training and busy learning how to be a dungeon esper, busy like you get with a high-stakes internship, and busy with - figuring out her backlash and her relationship with Tia and - how to manage the complicated interplay between her backlash and her relationship with Tia and Tia's backlash, and it just - it kept feeling like the wrong time, and, and, and -

"Leaf."

Leaf? Turning over a new leaf? Local Hockey Team, the Toronto Maple Leafs? Shut up brain she's throwing a tantrum over here!!!

She could text Stella tomorrow, if she wanted. There's a lot of people she could text. Maybe she should!! Something like...

Hey sorry for ghosting you for a year! I got the magical powers I wanted more than anything for most of my life, but it turns out spending a week alone in a hospital was kinda hard on me so I got a bit tipsy and seduced a milf I met at an esper mixer and accidentally almost killed myself with my powers in her hotel room! So I moved to Cleveland to live with her while she took care of me and taught me how to use them, obviously, and I didn't tell anyone because I was pretty busy and felt a bit weird about it?

Anyways our relationship got kinda weird but I'm back in town now and also she just died so I have a bunch more free time! Wanna hang out? 

💙💙💙 Cara

"Bagel."