Simon will tell Damian that Traceless is calling, now. He goes to the other room.

"Hello, this is Citrus."

"Hi Citrus, it's Traceless for our interview! Anything you want me to know before I start, topics I should avoid or conversely be sure to cover?"

"I don't think there is. No topics that should be proactively avoided. I definitely want to talk about my illusion food business."

"Well, I'm not running an advertisement but it'll certainly come up. If anything does come up that you want edited out just let me know, okay?"

"Yes, that's alright. And I will, thank you!"

"So! How does your power work?"

"I can create olfactory and gustatory illusions with accompanying tactile illusions. That is to say, I can make people taste and smell things, and also feel texture and temperature to go along with that. It requires a good degree of — well, it would be inappropriate to say 'visualization', because it has no visual component whatsoever...let's call it imagination, instead. I imagine a certain food, or a certain taste or smell, and I send that to the person. The power can also do spicy, cooling, or numbing sensations. So, I can do wasabi, mint, and Sichuan peppercorns.

By its nature as illusory, it doesn't provide any nutrition or satiation.

Rather obviously, it has no dungeon application whatsoever. The closest thing I have to support ability is filling your nose and mouth with the smell and taste of nothing in a dungeon with a bad smell, and the closest thing I have to combat ability is making a monster taste really spicy food. Or, I suppose, having them taste and smell something really disgusting in the hope that they get nauseated."

"I have wound up in a dungeon with a really bad smell once or twice, but in general anything you can substitute for with mundane gear, you should. How does your power interact with the action of chewing and swallowing?"

"That part is awkward because people have the natural instinct to chew and swallow. I don't get any sensing from my power. When I started, I had my clients keep their mouths still, or wear a mouthguard, so they don't chew on something that doesn't exist. Alternatively, I have stuff like textured vegetable protein or jelly or some other food with appropriate texture that they can eat, which I impart the taste and smell to."

"Which I'd imagine would also help close the satiation gap. You offer this as a service, right? What kinds of reasons do people tend to have to seek you out?"

"I do!

There are people who are committed to vegetarianism or veganism for ethical reasons but who still want to eat meat, and find current meat substitutes unsatisfying, or unable to be cooked in dishes that they like. My power doesn't involve animals at all except insofar as I don't restrict myself to not eating animal products and do use what I eat as inspiration.

There are people who have conditions that prevent them from eating certain types of food. Typical allergies or sensitivities, or conditions like phenylketonuria or alpha-gal syndrome. Also people who cannot eat food through the mouth and require enteral nutrition — tube feeding — or cannot eat at all, like with total parenteral nutrition. Intravenous feeding, basically.

There are people who just want to have a wide variety of food available to them at once, like at a buffet, especially if the foods that they want to have together aren't typically served at the same buffet. Buffets are typically themed, like, seafood buffets, or Korean cuisine buffets.

There are people who want to try eating a bunch of new foods, so I have them submit a list of foods that they do like and I try to figure out what they might like based on that — I typically try to arrange it in courses, like you would at a restaurant. I worked at a fancy Chinese restaurant before I awoke.

My power can also create taste and scent combinations that would be impossible to create in real life. I can make a pastry with a peeled hard-boiled egg in it, or raspberry milk with pop rocks — I did the latter for a birthday party."

"Do you do a lot of events like parties, or is it usually a single customer at a time?"

"I typically do a single customer at a time, in terms of power use. But often a party might hire me, and they want me to do something like give each person a few minutes. I can do multiple people at the same time with my power, but they have to be given the same illusion. It's too much...I have to focus on deeply imagining the illusion and if they're different dishes, I don't have the mental space for that. I have developed the finesse to do minor alterations — say, someone wants more salt and the other less, or one wants it spicy and the other wants it mild.

It also costs more backlash to do more people but I have pretty good backlash efficiency. My backlash is pica — I get strong urges to eat things that aren't food. At low levels it just means that I eat...things that are edible but not food, or not in a way that one would consider food-like. Like wanting to eat a handful of dried basil, or chew ice. A fitting backlash, I'd say." He laughs.

"It makes sense! Does it make those things pleasant, or just compelling?"

"I'd say the latter, but satisfying a craving feels satisfying. Something like...it hits the right spot, or it gives you exactly what you're looking for. But I wouldn't describe it as causing me to like the food, or think that it tastes good, if that makes sense.

There are actually cases where I give myself backlash deliberately. As part of my job, I have to eat a wide variety of food. So, I have to eat food which I don't really feel like eating, or which is off-putting to me. In these cases, I accrue some backlash on myself so I'm more inclined to eat it. My backlash doesn't change my taste perception, only judgement, so I can use the memory for my power."

"Does your power work reflexively?"

"It does! I've developed the habit of refraining from doing so, though. Otherwise it's too easy to fall into a backlash hole where I use my power on myself to satisfy a craving, which gives me more backlash, which gives me more cravings, and so on."

"Oh, that makes sense, though I suppose in an emergency if you were staring at a bottle of cleaner... can you extrapolate from smells, for things that taste pretty much how they smell?"

"So long as I can imagine it and it has a taste or smell, I can convey that. But whether or not it's accurate to the original is another story — I care very deeply about realism and authenticity. To the extent an illusion can be real and authentic. I often say 'food illusion' when I describe my power because it conveys the correct intuition, but any taste or smell is something my power can produce. So, the taste of metal or cloth or dirt are things I can do. Someday, I want to try Haitian mud cookies and add them to my repertoire.

At my place I have an electronic child lock system for the drawers and cabinets, where I have to solve captchas asking me to distinguish between food and non-food to verify that I'm unbacklashed. That way I don't accidentally drink a bottle of lemon body wash. I did that during my hell week!" he says, cheerfully.

"It's why I picked Citrus as my codename." Laughter.

"I had been going to ask what you named yourself for but my guess was that it was your favorite flavor!"

"Oh, it is. I love citrus as a flavor and scent. But I thought that what happened was funny — in retrospect, at least — and it's what proximally made me want to pick it."

"Do the captchas actually stop you, if you really want to open something, or just remind you that you shouldn't? That is, does your backlash actually interfere with your rational understanding of what people eat?"

"They actually do stop me, yes. It wouldn't be difficult to force a drawer open, but it's a lock, still.

Yes, it does interfere with my understanding of what is food and not food. I retain the concept of likes and dislikes. If I knew that someone else liked citrus flavors like me, and I was backlashed, I might think 'Oh, they would probably really like drinking this lemon body wash!'"

"Oh dear. So I can see how your power relates to your backlash easily enough; do you have an equally obvious opposite for a partner?"

"I think so. I'm also being a professional partner — which I suppose is somewhat hypocritical of me — to a useful-for-dungeons sensor whose power is smell and touch sensing. He helps with search and rescue both in dungeons and out. His backlash is sensory intolerance."