"I mean - I don't want you to have to do that, that does not qualify as a good outcome."

"I'm not going to try to, but I've already screwed up a few times asking questions I didn't really want to force you to answer and not noticing before I'd obviously started to ask a question." She shakes her head. "Even if I got to be perfect at walking the tightrope - I mean, what if we dated and then for whatever reason it wasn't working for me - would breaking up be worse than just never starting?"

"I'm - not sure. My guess is yes and no. I would have a specific reason for being unhappy, but I would knw why it didn't work out for - whatever reason. And that's preferable, I think. It's - with my dad we got to the point where I was genuinely fine answering any question he'd ask, the same's probably going to be true with you, I just need time to get used to you."

"And how does - investigating that avenue compare with the possibility that there's some other artifact that can un-touch you?"

"I think that searching for an artifact that can manage that would waste valuable time and - genuinely not be worth the effort and the side-effect that would go along with it. Maybe I'd be proven wrong, maybe we'll find something that can manage it, but it's - I think I'd prefer trying the other avenue over working for ages just to rearrange my head again."

"And - the necklace itself is the most promising avenue for undoing mental effects, anyway - okay," sighs Annie. "So - I don't need to squish any attempts my brain makes to develop a crush on you? Is I think the conclusion?"

"You don't," he agrees. "... How would you squish attempts to develop a crush on me?"

"Paying attention, mostly. I do a fair amount of conscious management of my thoughts."

"Oh. That's - useful and also kind of impressive."

"It is useful! Most people just think it's weird."

"I categorize things into numbers and make extremely complex algorithms to sort my opinions of people and how useful they are," he shrugs. "The only thing that worries me about policing your own thoughts is - accidentally changing who you are. And I like who you are now, you changing that would be distressing."

"Ceasing to have the ability to change who I am would be a bigger change than any I'm likely to make," she remarks. "It wouldn't happen accidentally, anyway. How does the math version work?"

"Well, for one, I can't change my head," he says. "But I'm pretty good at weighing how important I consider things, and - organizing the results of that. Into number forms so they're easy to compare to one another - I spend ages calculating how important something is to me, get the number from that, and then I compare that to other things on the same scale."

"What's the scale like?"

"In what way? Do you mean in - what's my range on the scale, what makes up my method for figuring it out...?"

"Both."

"Hmmm... Absolute highest single number was a sixty-seven point three. It's for making the knife go away. The average person tends to rate a seven. It becomes harder and harder to get higher numbers as you get up the scale. I weigh things I find important and how important it is that they be attended to or not, or - how much they matter to me. One point is how much I care about a person who has zero personal qualities aside from being sentient. Er - you also broke my scale, I have no idea how to even begin at figuring out what number you are."

"Is the rest of it still functioning even with me leaning on it like that?"

"Oh, yeah, it's working out fine. You're just - sort of my mental number equivalent of 999999, I'm sort of working around it because it's rather bewildering."

"I guess that makes sense. I don't do it with numbers like that. Just - rankings, relative ones, felt out rather than calculated."

"I'm sort of - obsessively accurate. So."

"What's next, after me and getting rid of the knife?"

"Saving my sister."