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."

"That's very straightforward! Why would it be hypocritical?"

"So, basically every esper is pushed into dungeoneering. It's sort of what we're for, kinda. Dungeons started appearing and we started appearing. And I...dislike that. I think there should be more thought given to ways esper powers can bring value to the world aside from killing dungeons.

When I got my power, I was pretty bummed because, well, it's 'useless', quote-unquote. In the sense of being useless for dungeoneering, of course. The only esper career path that was presented to me was basically 'professional partner for an esper with an Actually Useful Power'. And at the time, when I was younger, I rather resented that, and thought about how I might use the power I had to make money. Which led to me signing with an agency who was interested in my illusion food idea.

It's more severe in the East, I think, where espers are given letter grades based on their usefulness in dungeoneering and not just power classifications. I have a Filipino acquaintance whose power is cooling things down, and she makes flash-frozen popsicles as a party trick, at her D-rank useless esper meetups.

I do like that construction and healing espers have established themselves in the public consciousness as something which espers can do which aren't dungeoneering, but I think it should be broader. I feel that...power testing attitudes are too focused on dungeoneering ability, or how this ability might help with that. And it should be something more like, trying to push the boundaries of your power, seeing if you can use it creatively, finding uses or weird niches it could fill. As an example, it took me an embarrassingly long time before I realized that my power meant that I could let people taste physically impossible foods."

"Huh! Did you have any other ideas for using it that didn't pan out?"

"Well, I tried seeing if my power could be used for combat, right. My limits for how spicy I can make an illusion go pretty high. But dungeon monsters have different tastes than we do, if they can taste at all — in the few times I've gone into a D-rank dungeon to try it, it didn't seem very helpful.

My power works on animals too but I don't think there's much value in doing that. I suppose I could let dogs know what chocolate tastes like without getting poisoned. Regrettably, being that I am human, I can't go and taste poisonous-to-human things and then transmit that thought to others. Otherwise, I'd want to try out stuff like lead acetate — sugar of lead — and add those to my repertoire.

I suggested to my acquaintance that she should look into using her power for targeted cryotherapy. We do it for skin conditions like warts but maybe if her power is flexible enough and she has the finesse for it, she could do it internally or something. Or she could help with physics experiments that require very cold conditions where they study near matter near absolute-zero — she has poor backlash rates, which makes her not useful for dungeons, but in a lab setting it could be viable.

I basically" and he is making circles in the air with his hands, which is regrettably not transmitted by the medium of phone, "think there should be more creativity in thinking about the applications of esper powers."

"I'd suggest that you could offer new vistas of flavor to my monster cat but he seems perfectly able to eat anything a human can. There are other monsters who might benefit, though; the talking unicorn in Johannesburg is an obligate carnivore and might appreciate an illusion salad."

"Oh, that would be great! Thank you for telling me that — I should contact them."

"There's a whole list on the References page on the blog. Do you think the Eastern ranking system is harsher overall than the subratings people get over here which, if I recall correctly, put you at 'psychic control 1'?"

"I will take a look!

Yes, my power is classified 'psychic control 1'. Well, I haven't experienced it first hand. And the idea of it is...it makes sense. We rate dungeons S, A, B, C, D — so you sort espers based on which dungeons they can take on, or which they would be able to support with. My issue has to do with the...essentializing and totalizing nature of the ranks. It compresses esper capability into one dimension and I feel like this exacerbates the issue where an esper thinks their power is 'useless' and stops trying to consider how it might become useful in nonobvious ways. And it can make things very hierarchical, where higher ranked espers are treated way better than lower ranking ones. Not just in the sense of being paid more or having more benefits, but...socially, structurally. Using only classifications seems like it would blunt this tendency, since there are many classifications and they're less directly comparable — although there is still a numeric component.

Again, I haven't experienced this firsthand and only go by what I read and what my friends and acquaintances tell me, so please don't put that much stock into my opinion."

"I'm a dungeoneer myself with very limited civilian applications, but I often like to think in terms of how dire a dungeon - or a non-dungeon disaster - has to be before you pull in a particular esper. Which as an approach tends to favor powers that would be higher-ranked, because there are more places they could do good and you have to sort those more aggressively, but it inverts the Eastern ranking system's inclusion of backlash efficiency, because people with useful powers and poor efficiency need stricter rationing than equally useful people who can do twice as much. My go-to example there is Columba, who can find dungeon cores."