He arrives from his afternoon dungeon, backlashed but not overwhelmingly so, and of course on the phone. He waves at Flywheel as he comes in, mm-hming at whatever the person on the other end is saying (he has his phone volume all the way down, so she can't hear it) and then chirps, "I will totally send you the footage, I'm excited to see where you can get with it! Bye!", and he flinches only a little bit when the other person hangs up.

"Hi Flywheel."

"Hi Traceless." She reaches out an arm - guiding will help him more than conversation, though of course they need to do both. "...you can call me Cara, if you want." Both names have complicated bundles of associations for her, now, but - she only picked one of them for herself, and in the end, it's the one she likes better.

He sits next to her and leans in. "Oh cool. I'm -" he almost but does not quite say his name - "not usually overwhelmingly infosec oriented but -"

"- well, among the topics I think we should have a conversation about is, like. In the unlikely event someone asks you for my name mid-dungeon, what happens."

Yeah.

Cara sighs. "I am used to doing dungeons without getting sound input except for from an emergency DRT channel. In the unlikely event that it comes up anyways... at low backlash I have a lot of steering power. At higher levels... I can steer a bit, with a lot of effort. More, if I've been given contradicting instructions. I think how much I trust the person who gave the instruction matters a fair bit for that, but - I have done very little intentional multi-person testing. Willowbark was really worried about what might happen, if it got out. There was that scandal in Japan, a few years back..."

Hey dipshit, that's a lot of words to say "...it is not perfectly safe to tell me anything though. So if you'd rather not share your name, I understand."

"It's not the worst thing in the world if it gets loose, it's a nickname and I'm not enormously famous and at any rate Cricket is constantly flying in and out of the house far more distinctive-looking than even a more colorful esper and nobody's decided they've got a problem with us yet. But more generally I am concerned that I have picked up a responsibility I do not have the tools to succeed at. It doesn't have to be me, you met me just the other day, I get that, but someone needs to know your deal, and, uh, I think it'd be ideal if it were at least two people, like, a partner and separately an agent, for - accountability and backup contingencies."

Cara nods. "Yeah. I'm not sure if I want Paula to be one of the people; I think she's optimized for your needs, not mine." Deep breath. "And you don't have to be that partner, obviously, if you don't want to. But I can tell you how it works, or at least what I know."

"It's not a good idea for partners to share agents anyway, it's a conflict of interest. I'm - I'd be more than twice as effective as an esper if we were a long term arrangement, which is important to me in spite of the countervailing evidence that I can barely drag myself to a mixer once every couple of years to strike out at it, and I think I am capable of developing the skills you need in a shot-caller and whatever else you have going on, but I don't already have them and guessing on the fly is. Uh. Bad. As a plan. So - if you don't mind, yeah."

"I think you have most of the pieces, but to put them in one place - my backlash makes me less of a subject and more of an object. I progressively lose passive and then active access to my own preferences and needs, including, at high levels, things like pain. I start interpreting requests as instructions, it gets harder and harder to not - automatically follow instructions." 

She clings to him a bit. "Instructions can be pretty vague - the vaguer they are, the more latitude I have to interpret them. They be bounded or open-ended, and if they're open-ended, I won't forget them." Slight pause. "There are things that Willowbark told me that I still..." she trails off, looking and sounding pretty conflicted.

"...is it even theoretically possible to, like, retroactively belay those instructions - if you don't need them for something, I mean, I'm not sure what mix to expect there."

"I think if you told me that I don't need to follow Willowbark's instructions that would, uh, push back against most of it. And I could - write down a list of all of them, if you asked me while I was backlashed, but - it would take a while and I expect it would..." 

Fuck. How to even - "...neither of us knew my backlash did this, when we partnered up. I remembered very, very little of my hellweek. I thought it just made me tell the truth when people asked me questions, which is bad but much less comprehensive. And... it was easy to rationalize, for a bit, and... hard to explain." I didn't want her to treat me like an unprepared kid. Even if that would have been correct.

"Everybody needs powers testing and if you don't remember your hellweek I guess sometimes you need... backlash testing."

"...we did do some, once I fessed up, and I was careful about picking a partner I could trust - a few of the night shift employees at my hell week hospital got a lot of... juicy stories out of me, when they realized. But... yeah, if that had been a formal service, it would have been good for me. I did my power testing with Willowbark, and the first time we did any, I almost died of being bad at math." God, it's still embarrassing, even a year later.

"Of... you have a sensor power, did it hit you in the square-cube law or something?"

This gets a bit of a laugh, though there's no humor in it. "Worse, really. My default range is a meter around me. I kept scaling it up by the radius, and didn't stop to check how much it was backlashing me." He already knows the backlash cost scales with the volume.

"Because your backlash interferes with being aware of it or just because you were excited to have a power - that's not really a relevant question, sorry, it's okay to yank me back on topic when I'm backlashed. Or when I'm not but I'm less rambly then."

"Mostly the latter, I'd spent several days not using my power at all because I didn't want to be backlashed around someone that didn't seem trustworthy. And the sensory aspect of my power is so grounding. It makes me feel like I'm at the center of the world." She rests her head on him. "And noted, but - chatty is good for me, I think, so I'm probably not going to do that much redirecting unless it feels really important, we can always circle back." though obviously I did just admit to keeping something very important from my past partner so you'd have to be an idiot to trust me with tracking that, right. 

"It's really weird that chatty is good for you and we're compatible, like, I guess I have written several articles to the effect that compat is spookily mysterious but I was really expecting all my good compatibility to be something along the lines of June, competing access needs all the way down..."

(Yeah, and I was expecting all my compatibilities shut up, shut up, shut up)

"Well, the chatty is my personality, not my backlash? I think the backlashes make sense, though... yours wants people to pay attention to you. Mine makes me unable to pay attention to me." She shrugs. "...we were talking about past instructions." (Wow, you actually did circle back! Good job.)

"Right. If I were you I'd want a whole list for reference, I can prompt you to write it without reading it myself."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I could... do that and then ask you to countermand specific ones, if you'd be comfortable with that? I certainly don't need to, like, text her when I get out of a dungeon and can't find her." She lets out a bit of a sob. "...sorry."

Squeeze.

Cling. 

...don't stop talking. He's still backlashed.

"I think that's the main points of my backlash? If you have any questions..." 

"Do you in fact need painkillers when you're backlashed, it would not be unheard of not to."

Oh, right. "It's... if I'm backlashed enough to not react I might still feel it when I check. And I definitely remember it like it hurt, even if I was backlashed. If there's time, I'd prefer it, I guess." (She's not bothering hide the fact that she's thinking it through as she answers - if the truth is embarrassing, then she should be embarrassed.)

"Okay. Sorry. I knew the guy was as eighteen as he looks and I should have pushed back more, the time sensitive thing about his power's no excuse to flail that much really."

Cara shrugs. " I don't think that's your fault; we hadn't talked about it." And nothing actually bad happened she shouldn't say that lol. 

"While I am known to overapologize as a backlash symptom and was also Canadian to begin with I do think I fucked up there but I'm glad it did not have more dire consequences."

Cara doesn't really agree that he fucked up! ...but it's weirdly reassuring, that he insists he does. 

(She's scared about going through the list of things she's been told. It's correct, so she'll do it, but - it's -)

Say something. "I should... think about who else I want to tell about my backlash. An agent makes sense... I wish I could tell my aunt, but it's not a good idea."  

"I certainly don't know enough about your aunt to say otherwise. Paula knows all the Maple agents and can probably recommend you someone if that's better than reading marketing copy."

"She's just - not good with high pressure secrets. And it'd be - asking a lot of her? I've been... distant." (She sounds kinda miserable about this.)

Speaking of being 'distant", you should maybe check your phon later. Traceless is backlashed.

"...is that a... backlash thing, or..."

"...not exactly, no. I just..." left my social life to rot because I was a selfish coward "...Tia's place was in Cleveland, and that made harder to keep up with people around here, and suddenly my life was really different and there was a lot I couldn't really talk about..." and that's, like, maybe a third of the reason but she's not sure he wants to hear her sob story so she'll pause and try to evaluate that and also figure out if there's a way to tell it that doesn't make some part of her want to scream until her throat is raw

"Are there things you couldn't talk about besides your backlash?"

"Well, Tia was... kinda private? But..." Sigh. "...no, it was mostly that I didn't know how to talk about it. Like - you know how sometimes people have an internship where they're working really long hours and it kinda eats their lives for a while, but they're learning a lot and it's really good for their career so you just wish them good luck and mark on your calendar when the internship ends and in the meantime you just send them posts or memes that make you think of them every so often so they know you still care about them even though they're gone?" (...she might be typical-minding a bit, there, but she's tired.)

"Not specifically but you're making me nervous about the emotional health of some people who work at the zoo."

...yeah, whoops, definitely typical-minding too much. "I think most internships aren't like that - the ones I did mostly weren't. But they definitely are for, like, engineers and quants and some polsci people, and of course med students get that for years."

She droops a bit. "Anyways, I was thinking of it like that. I wanted to impress her, you see." (do you want to maybe try and aim for as subtle as an elephant and tone it down a few notches???) "And that made it easy to... fall into a pattern where I wasn't leaving myself much spare time and didn't do much with it when I had it."

"She would have... found it unimpressive...?" he says tentatively, in a tone suggesting he might have tried a meaningful silence instead if he could do that.

Thanks, Traceless's backlash, the silence probably would have been worse that's not actually true, knowing he wanted to but couldn't is worse.

"Not exactly, but she found my hard work and dedication impressive and reassuring, in a way that I really valued." Ugh. "Because of how things started out, she was really worried, felt like she needed to be a bit strict to keep me safe." Deep breath. "Totally understandable, obviously, but it wasn't my favorite thing, and me working hard helped a lot with not staying in that dynamic." 

(She feels weirdly distant from her body. Whatever. It's been a long day.)

"I'm not sure I would say I totally understand her feeling like she was in a position to be or not be 'strict', she wasn't your math teacher."

Cara shrugs uncomfortably. "She was my - mentor? Partner? Person helping me figure out to be an esper? And I almost died, it was - it was what was best for me?" (She hears the uncertainty in her own voice, and hates herself for it.)

"I think she set herself a task she did not have the tools to succeed at."

"...But she did succeed? She kept me from killing myself and taught me how to use my powers, helped me figure out how to be a good combat esper, trained me well, and, and -" Why does talking feel so absurdly hard, why does it feel like trying to shout through a thousand-feet tube

(She's breathing a bit faster than is reasonable, for the situation.)

"She succeeded at some subtasks."

Cara is shaking. "I really don't think it's - her fault - that I'm like this -" contemptable? broken? weak? all of the above?

Wow, breathing seems like it should be happening slower than this? Isn't that, like, a choice she makes? Why -

"- sorry, I - didn't know her personally, just - are you okay, uh, in an acute sense -"

Well, she's having a bit of a panic attack, so probably not!

"Sorry - just - need to -" breathe, stop being a fucking baby, you can't help him with his backlash, can't do anything if you're freaking out like this!

"Is this one of those things where a paper bag is supposed to feature?" he says a bit helplessly.

Stop! Making! Him! Miserable!

She can breathe like a normal person, actually. It's not even very hard, she just has to focus.

"Sorry," she says shakily. "Um, I'll be okay, just," (in, two, three, four, five) "need a few moments to breathe,"

"Okay." ...he hangs on for a few seconds of silence and then as some threshold of backlash is crossed pulls his phone out and sends some random texts.

She can get her breathing under control in another five or ten seconds, though she'll wait a bit longer to say "Okay. Sorry. I can talk now, if you want to switch off of texting."

He hits send on a dungeon picture to somebody (looks like igloos) and pockets the phone. "You don't need to apologize."

"I mean - I feel like I should have been able to notice that it was going to be a problem, and said something like can we talk about this when you're less backlashed or something..." (...maybe this is being a bit silly...) "...I'm also Canadian, though, so."

"We can in fact talk when I'm less backlashed if that's what we ought to do, I'm down to the level where I can text now, I was not anticipating the need for sudden breaks in the conversation but it is not exactly startling that it happened in retrospect."

"I do seem to have some unmapped sensitivities around here, so maybe waiting for it to easier on you would be smart. But also, like - you didn't sign up to be my therapist." 

"I don't even have a therapist to try to channel, I tried it after hellweek on general principle but I have a therapy-resistant personality."

"...I'm used to talking to my friends about my problems; historically that has worked better for me than therapy, though every therapist I've seen was in a position where they had major input into my life and so I tended to treat interactions like them like interactions with a teacher or parent." Which is to say, treating them like an obstacle to be optimized around and not a person to interact with openly. 

Also, historically she had smaller problems and more friends. "Did you find it actively unpleasant or just non-useful?"

"Unpleasant. Not unbearable, but since it was also useless there was no reason to continue to bear it."

Cara nods. "That makes sense, yeah." 

Sigh. "I am not actually sure I can make therapy work for me but it's one of the things you're supposed to do in this sort of situation, I think, and I don't - want to make a habit of having panic attacks at you, it seems rather rude."

"That's not really how I'd describe it, just means it'd be more comfortable to time some topics for low- to no-backlash hours. Presumably it would be more comfortable for you if you were less prone to them though I'm not actually sure how much that's a therapist thing as opposed to, say, a beta blockers thing."

"...if you're still sure about it when you're not backlashed, then yeah, that does sound nice." He has the relevant context and has been both reasonable and careful with her so far.

Slightly clingy Cara. "I'm not really sure if therapy would help either. It's hard for me to tell if I've gotten any better at the skill of being a therapy patient."

"There's specialists in psych backlashes though I think sometimes that just means they've read two books and a case study, they're always specialists in like eight things."

"I'm not even sure if psych backlash is the right specialty, but - I guess I would need to be able to tell them about it and trust that it'd stay with them, which is important to be able to filter on." She sighs, then looks at him. "...do you want to be guided more effectively?"

"We should maybe talk about that, too, I don't feel like I definitely know what pages we are or should be on about it and, now, there is no longer a retroactive S-class on our doorstep."

"Okay, yeah, probably. Um -"

 hey idiot, that means you need to think about it -

Cara buries her head in his shoulder. 

"I think," she says, feeling rather distant again, "I should probably just stick to cuddles for now, unless we need to make out for tactical reasons?" 

"Works for me. Do you wanna define tactical reasons - like collaboratively, I am not assigning you an essay question - or does it leave enough margin for error as a phrase on its own?"

"Um, if one of us is needed for a dungeon later that day? ... and I don't like being above a 4 on my backlash scale. Can't use my personal phone." 

"Legitimately unsafe, or just a precautionary instruction?"

"...my backlash pings on text that I perceive as directed at me, which can be pretty fraught on some parts of the Internet." She's off Tumblr and mostly off Twitter and so only rarely randomly sees posts that tell the reader to kill themselves immediately, these days, but... 

"I guess you could like at least install ad-free games on your work phone? Unless that's too prompt-y too? Or if it doesn't block pain but does block boredom?"

"I have some old emulated games my work phone. It's - about the same with boredom as it is with pain. I remember it afterwards, but... it's unclear to what extent you can say I'm experiencing it?" 

"Sounds philosophically confusing."

"That's in my top ten complaints about my backlash but not in my top five." 

"Is there actually an ordered list?"

She thinks for a bit. "...No. It might not even be in the top ten, honestly. I have kind of a lot of complaints." 

"That is so fair, really."

She sighs. "It could be worse, I guess? I do really like my power." Helped kill Arrakis with it, even. 

"Yeah, your power's a really good draw, though it does sound like it would have taken a ton of practice."

"Yeah. My busy internship paid off, I suppose." There's a complicated mix of pride and bitter grief behind her words. 

"You awakened - how long ago -"

"...thirteen months ago." The training was more useful in the first several months. 

"Well, that's more than a summer but some internships run that long, I guess."

"Yeah. I was... aiming to try and switch to a different schedule, but it kept being easy to put off." Just like the other parts of that conversation. (coward, coward, coward)

"...did she have a psych backlash too?"

Ooops. "...Yeah." She should tell him, probably, but - how to even put it -

"Opinions are divided on whether undisclosed backlashes should stay that way posthumously."

Cara sighs again. "I don't want it shouted from the rooftops or anything, but - her backlash made it hard for her to trust other people, give up steering power. She found it really exhausting." and she wasn't the only one.

"...was she maybe not making sure to keep it down, or was it retroactively punishing, or..."

Cara looks away. "...we never talked about that part of it. But... I'm pretty sure it was a bit of both? She really did try." Augh augh augh 

"I guess that explains the agent situation."

"...she had a partner die because his agent fucked up." The backlash was part of it, sure, but she hadn't always done it like that. 

"Whoa, what did the agent do?"

"Scheduled her back-to-back dungeons and didn't do a sufficient backlash check in between, since they were both simple dungeons on paper. She was too backlashed after the first one to raise her own objections, and then she just... stopped shielding herself and her allies while the core guardian was shooting at them." 

"Wow. Is that agent thoroughly drummed out of the industry already?"

"Yeah. ...he was convicted for it. Three counts of negligent manslaughter." Tia hadn't talked about it, but Cara eventually went and read the court record of her testimony. It'd been both heartbreaking and a bit chilling. (She'd found it so easy to hear the words on the screen in Tia's voice, and almost as easy to see the ways in which she'd been very intentionally painting the man in the worst possible light, downplaying how unlucky it had been.)

"Assuming he's not in for life he also separately needs to be drummed out of the industry. Espers are irreplaceable and random and it is essential to compensate for that with replaceable, highly selected support."

"In the states, having a felony conviction for the relevant kinds of negligence makes it illegal to work as an agent for an esper who has not signed and notorized a form that just says I UNDERSTAND THAT MY AGENT HAS COMMITTED FELONY NEGLIGENCE. The Moonsong Memorial Act, I think it was called." (She did a small presentation on it, a lifetime ago.)

"That sounds familiar but I can't look things up yet. I get deployed Stateside now and then but not in a way where I need to be up on their agent legislation."

"I only know about it from a policy class, it's - deterrence law, the type of thing that's there to stop people from trying. I don't think it really comes up in practice." (She remembers snickering at the form, when she first saw it, and then reading about what happened to Moonsong.)

"Makes sense. You awakened in college?"

"In the third week of my grad program, yeah." (...she misses Prof Meadows, rather abruptly. How are her cats doing...)

"Oh, grad school, neat. My hellweek was in high school so I never got that far, I'm pure autodidact since then, what was your area?"

"Policy. I was aiming to work in one of those think tanks that makes DRT recommendations, as one of their people persons." She sounds slightly wistful. "Not an easy field to break into, of course, but I liked to think I could have been good at it." 

"I wanted to be an epidemiologist. But, you know, that was 'given that I can't enter an essay contest to be an esper instead', so."

Aww, that's a charming way to put it. "Relatable, honestly. It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize that 1 in 50000 did not have an unless you really really want it attached in real life, no matter what the dastardly YA books say, and I was pretty sad about it." For, like, months.

(And here she is now, a dungeon esper with a great power! She worked with Min Woo-young and Skybreaker and Flay this week! It's everything she ever dreamed of! And she's a fucking wreck. Pathetic! Disgraceful!)

"It's such a ripoff, right, like, I think there are some good effects from it striking at total random but I don't think it's net better than there being an essay contest or something."

She chuckles. "It'd have some fascinating effects if it were essay-writing in particular! Imagine, all the young kids who want to be espers when they grow up spending all their time perfecting their essay-writing skills... whatever stylistic and formatting quirks the Judging System rewarded becoming increasingly commonplace as people figure them out..."

"I guess one of the effects it striking at random has is that places with, in this case, poor literacy rates and educational systems, get an equal shot. Except insofar as I bet that makes it hard to train doctors and make hellweeks survivable."

"Yeah, especi-" hmmm actually that's both depressing and not especially interesting, which is a great sign that "- maybe our hypothetical can enforce that our 1 in 50000 best essay-writers have to be geographically distributed in some hard-to-game way, so we don't have to worry about accelerating esper drain for the hypothetical Indonesias of this thought experiment."

"Indonesia does not have the world's worst esper retention rate! This is because in 2022 Andorra-born Milagro moved to Barcelona. But still."

For some reason this causes Cara to freeze momentarily?

"Sure," she says agreeably a moment later, like nothing happened. "In any case, I think it ends up doing really interestingly weird things to education? ...and also to the experience of getting esper powers you can't really use, jeez." 

"Do I maybe need to know what that was about."

"Not really," she says cheerfully. 

- can you maybe try not being a concerning, cryptic bitch for five seconds -

"I really don't think it's important and I'd find it embarrassing to explain," she adds in a more subdued tone.

(It's both not his fault and not his problem that she's this low on cope right now! And she's absolutely not up for explaining how to avoid tripping her up like this.)

"You're like, a grownup and stuff, so if you say so, but I'm really worried that there are going to be things like that which - accumulate and result in some acute or chronic fuckup that I super do not want to commit."

Cara sighs, then takes a deep breath. "I think that's it's super valid to be concerned about that category of error and in general I think it is directionally correct to double check, but - I really don't think it's important and I'd find it embarrassing to explain," she repeats calmly and firmly. 

"...okay. I am, fair warning, full of fun facts of that approximate class and if they keep being a mysterious issue I'm going to need to fall back on trying to teach you sign language or something as failover backlash pica behavior. ...maybe you should actively not learn sign language. Tagalog? Anyway. So I guess for an ungameable geography system everybody could get their essay contest cohort in roughly the same way dungeon appearances work? An essay contest submission box appears like a dungeon portal and you can only put your essay in if... you were one of the nearest fifty thousand people who hasn't gotten one yet, at that moment... hm, you run into an issue where it's not necessarily obvious to these people that there's a submission box. I suppose it could just psychically notify them."

If they were going to keep being a mysterious issue I would have explained it! I'm not an idio lol. lmao. 

She sighs again. "It's fine to share fun facts. If it comes up again" (which it won't!) "I'll tell you what's up and we can figure it out from there." 

And then she's cheerful again. "Yeah, I was imagining it being pretty psychically automated! Something like... all 17 year olds get an envelope from nowhere with their topic, pen, and paper? And they have a week to fill it out and put it back in the envelope and then the envelope disappears as mysteriously as it appears. And the Objective Judging Process handles all issues of distribution, cheating, and such." 

"Does everyone get the same topic? If they don't how is it - curved - I guess there's no reason it has to be fair in that direction, it could be random the same way the powers themselves are. Are the envelopes stealable? Is the paper an implicit length limit, does this penalize people with large handwriting or who speak only French?"

"The topic is something that they can write about, it's curved in some that way that is basically fair though of course people not chosen write extremely and long angry posts online or in papers about how this is not the case, there's psychically enough paper for them to write exactly what they want + scratch paper if they need it, it is mysteriously impossible to fuck with the envelopes or otherwise make it impossible for someone to write the essay that they want to write," she rattles off cheerfully. (She's used to discussing this kind of thing with engineers.)

"Oh, well, in that case people are going to start gaming the one week invincibility period as much or more than the actual esper powers! Everybody spends a whole week impossible to prevent from writing an essay, that's got to be all kinds of useful."

"Ah, no, they don't let you do that either. It's a very comprehensive thought experiment; they copied notes from the people who set up the good trolley problems, you see." 

"Aw, man, but if every teenager got to be invincible for a week as long as their tasks were reasonably aimed at researching their essay that would be so neat."

"It would be! But tragically we had too many people try and throw the switch at exactly the right time and split the front and back wheels between the tracks, bringing the trolley to a stop for a perfect Hollywood ending, and now the thought experiment police are on guard for this kind of shit." She sighs. "It's so sad, but these are the cards we've been dealt." 

He snickers. "Well. English class was always my favorite but it would have been a pretty dramatic swing even still if I'd known to expect an essay. ...do you think the envelopes raining down in 1971 is more or less confusing than the slight uptick in ER visits followed by people manifesting superpowers, I think probably more? Less obviously complementary to the dungeons."

"More seems likely! Like if they don't come with any special knowledge besides you have an essay due on this topic probably most people consider them dungeon related and don't do them? Which means the first crop of espers is all people who have that experience and think yeah, I'll write that essay, why the fuck not?, which probably does fascinating things demographically..." 

(Her brain tries to mock her. She ignores it. She's having fun.)

"I might have done it if the topic were interesting or I was bored? Or like, according to the product of those two functions."

"Huh! Even if the only thing people knew was that they Probably Had To Do with dungeons? I think... I would have done it at fifteen but not at seventeen." She pauses, and there's a bit less cheer in her voice when she adds "...well, actually, in the seventies I definitely would have done it at any valid awakening age, for cultural reasons."

"Cultural reasons? - I guess not all topics would bend this way but I actually sometimes drop, like, a 'please stop eating people' letter into dungeons that are gonna get away alive, on the very remote chance that any of them have absorbed enough human memes to read. It will not work but printer paper's cheap and I wrote it as a thought experiment in the first place. So if I got a 'something to do with dungeons' essay prompt that wasn't, like, please rate all of the species of penguins from best to worst, or something, it'd have turned out kind of like that probably."

"It was difficult to be trans in the 70s," she says, brightening up as he keeps talking. "...can I read that letter?" (It's - such a good thing for someone to do, actually. Printer paper is very cheap!)

"Yeah, it's a little - would attract annoying comments, if I blogged it as an open letter, but you can see it, I have it on a hidden page, password to it is 'stopeatingus' all one word lower case." He sends her a link.

"Yeah, that makes sense!" He's still backla- she can just say that. "You're still backlashed, so I'll read it later. When did you start doing that?"

"It was... after the library dungeon, when was that... The books didn't make sense, but if I pull up photos of Bookworm Library -" His phone obliges and he looks at the timestamp. "Looks like that was six years back. The books didn't make sense but some of them did have individual correct words in them. I have it translated into French and Tagalog too, in case a Rosetta stone helps."

"Yeah, if any of them were the type of things that wanted to communicate but weren't sure how, it'd matter." 

if Arrakis could communicate, if it'd tried to surrender, would you have spared it? Would you have listened? Would you have just killed it, like a good soldier? Would you have had a choice?

"It never does anything. But they get - bigger, meaner, why not smarter, if I am merely doing this fifty years too early I endorse looking kinda silly for fifty years in order to nail the first moment when it matters."

I sure hope Nightmare isn't getting smarter she's not saying that.

"I think it's really cool thing to be trying," she says instead. (She agrees that it's not going to work, but - you miss every shot you don't take, and it'd be so sad, to miss this one.)

"Thank you!"

She squeezes him. (Will his backlash accept that as a response, for a moment?)

There was something she had stashed to mention later... 

Ah, right. "Real quick, before I forget... I'm below the backlash range where it would have mattered, but for the record, it can sometimes snag on indirect things, like the way you double checked after I froze." She sounds apologetic. 

"...ah. Is it like maximally perverse about that or is there some way to in fact double check things?"

"It's - if you're worried about tripping it, it'd be safest to follow up when I'm below a 3 on my own scale," she says, still apologetic. I know it's stupid. 

"I can't write notes to self when I'm backlashed and it's not fair to you if I text somebody about you..."

ah well in that case- shut up.

"Can you text my personal phone or will that not work?" 

"I can do that if I'm at reading-the-comments levels but not at the high end of texting levels, the possibility that someone might happen to be looking at their phone and see a text right away even if in practice that's not common does a lot of work for me. Once you have an agent I could text them?"

She tries not to think too hard about her likelihood of noticing that he's doing that and responding to that, because that might make it more likely to happen. Burn that bridge when we get to it. "Seems like a plan." 

"Okay. Man. Psych backlashes."

"Yeah. ...sorry, I know mine's a huge pain." (He seems really interested in trying and isn't annoyed about it yet, though, which is nice.)

"You've got one year of experience managing it so there may well be headroom, and while we both need outside support I can at least hotswap nearly arbitrary people in that role, yours being a pain for me doesn't really register here. It'd be like complaining that people coming out of the evil carousel aren't chatty, that's just not top five features of the situation to track."

How is it not - you're being dumb about this, Cara. Pay attention.

"...if you're sure." She can't fully keep her dubiousness off her face. 

"I'm not saying it's not a feature of the situation but we can maybe worry about it once I know how to not accidentally mind control you!"

...she clings to him and tries not to cry.

"Okay," she whispers.

Hug. "I don't wanna mind control you."

"I - yeah." She feels weird about calling it mind control but she's not the one calling it that, is she. "Thanks." 

"You are very literally welcome in the sense that there is zero gatekeeping on my desire to not mind control people and it is a free service everybody gets but admittedly most do not need."

"I appreciate your commitment to this even in the face of inconvenient backlash." 

"Thanks." Sigh.

Oh, he - hrm. 

She's pretty sure he thinks they're not on the same page but also doesn't think he can fix that right now which she supposes is basically true, because she's a lying - oh fuck off it's not lying to not tell someone all her baggage! They just met!! 

That doesn't really give her something to say. And he's backlashed. 

"What was your dungeon like?" 

"It was a sex-themed one, you sure you want to hear it? Within the category not that horrifying."

(Probably fine - 'probably' is not the standard we use for 'will this palliative smalltalk give us a panic attack , dipshit!)

"Hmmm, maybe not that one right now, if that's okay. Were you working Sunday?" 

"Yeah, the evil carousel showed up again, I ran it in Cleveland a few years ago and it got away and it hit Shenzhen in between and on Sunday it was in Ottawa. The current dispatcher administration really likes being able to assign people with experience on a specific dungeon to the same one again, Paula said she sounded so happy that I'd been in Arrakis in Casablanca so presumably she was also happy that I was in the evil carousel in Cleveland. Anyway, we killed it in Ottawa, so no more unicorn horns but also no more psychically tormented carousel prisoners who try to bite me on the way out."

"Bite you? -I don't do much rescuing for the obvious reason, it's usually better to use me for scouting, sensing, and  combat. Was the evil carousel making them hostile in general or specifically bite-y?" 

"I'm versatile but I'm down as 'prefers rescues' because the system is not capable of implementing a preference as complicated as 'rescues are only better than sensing and combat if the vics will talk'. The evil carousel was sort of... pushing the 'I will do anything to make that noise stop' button? And the ones who wondered if maybe biting me would make the noise stop had been in there a while. The awful music was itself not supernatural in nature, recordings of it sound the same but don't do anything and it didn't ping my psychic immunity any more to be closer to a music box than farther away."

"Huh! I've spent very little time in psychic dungeons, we" (by which she means mostly Tia) "thought it'd be unsafe."

 Though..."- I bet there'll be some I can operate safely in, if I'm working with you?" 

"I can't shield other people, but if there's one big enough that they've got a shielder on hand, plausibly. I can't, like, hit back at a psychic dungeon particularly well, usually if I'm in one it's either because they're trying to manage a little one without a shielder and I have to solo the whole thing, or else they really need one of my other powers - sometimes it's flying, so you'd be good company in one of those."

"We could probably trade off providing the flight pretty easily, with some practice." She's not going to suggest the antipsychic strategy she's thinking about - it's obviously pretty fraught, as a followup to I don't want to mind control you. 

"Yeah! In particular my flight is great at stopping on a dime before I crash into anything; if I were carrying you, you could launch us, we could zoom through the air on pure physics, and I could land us with just a little touch of power."

"We'd lose the energy, but that's useful to keep in mind... Is it expensive for you to take us up and then just drop us? That's easier for me to work with." 

"Flight in general is expensive, my cheap stuff is the stealth and anti-psychic package. When I can, I rely on it more as a better-to-have-it-and-not-need-it kind of seatbelt situation for tricky parkour nonsense. It's made it really annoying to practice, I'm approaching diminishing returns on improving the skill but only after a decade of guiding being a complicated rigmarole and my practice flight company being Cricket, who can't guide me down, only keep me company. But a brief burst isn't too bad."

" possibly not worth doing outside of a pinch, then." She shrugs. "The compatibility seems very good for dungeoning together even if we don't have a ton of power synergy." 

"Yeah, it's supposed to help a lot."

"Well, we can try it out and see how it goes. Tomorrow, maybe?" (Allegedly she was going to take a day off when Arrakis left but maybe they can just ignore that? She's had most of today off, really. And the dungeons won't take a day off, so...)

"...I think tomorrow is a really good candidate for your day off but if you have other plans I guess?"

He's right, which is kinda upsetting, because it would in some ways be much simpler than to do a few dungeons tomorrow rather than the things she's promised to do on her next day off (find a time to meet up with Stella, have a long call with Aunt Rachel).

Well, choosing simple over obviously important has not been going great for her!

"I don't have other plans and taking tomorrow off makes sense," she says, a bit hollowly. "There's people I should catch up with." (It hurts, noticing how much she doesn't want to. This isn't who she wants to be...)

"...do you need anything with respect to that?"

Headshake. She still has Otto! on her both her phones and no plans to pick up any backlash, so... 

Ah, wait. 

"...I might be pretty sad, after? So snuggle guiding is fine, but if you need someone to chat with, maybe plan on doing that by phone?" (It feels bad to admit, but she's trying to be less of a fucking idiot, so -)

"By default I was going to sync my days off with yours since guiding is not really the same thing as free downtime."

"Ah, got it." He's an introvert and presumably wants to spend his day off doing introvert things. "That works for me too."

But, hmmm."...my aunt will probably want to meet you, at some point. I guess we could do a bit of that via video call tomorrow if you were cool with that, and she'd find that reassuring... but I will not be at my best as far as social facilitation goes, and you obviously don't have to if you don't want to."

"I can do that. I retain meeting-people skills even when I'm not driving myself flagrantly insane in that direction on a given day."

And he doesn't seem disinterested in the idea, anyways. They can do a short hello. (She should text both of them tonight, then...) "I'll text her about it once you're less backlashed?" 

"You can do it now, my magical brain damage is convinced it's about me and I'm not carrying too much now for that to suffice."

"If you're sure." She can boot up her personal phone and text Aunt Rachel back.

Yes, I'm sure I'm safe. 

I'm working with an esper who goes by Traceless now, a lot's happened. 

I can do a video call tomorrow, if that works for you? Catch you up on some of it, maybe introduce you to him if you like. 

Yes! I'd love that!! Does noon work for you?

Love you so much, Carbar.

Worried about you, of course, but you know I'm proud of you for chasing your dreams and helping people.

Noon works for me! I'll check with Traceless but if that's not good for him I can always introduce you later.

Love you too! See you tomorrow.

She leans into Traceless. "Does around noon work for you?" 

"Sure, I can hop on a call during lunch tomorrow. Speaking of do you have dinner thoughts?"

She catches herself before saying whatever's good. "Korean?" (Not tteokbokki, though. She's waiting to have that with Tae-hwan.)

"I don't already know a place, I'll ask Tess." Text text.

"I know a few." The silo is near enough to the U that she knows most of the restaurants around here, actually, which she could say with her words if she wasn't being a petty littl-

...man. She knows a lot fewer of the places than she did three days ago, presumably. And more of them will shut down because their owners or critical employees were hurt and killed. New places will spring up, of course, but -

(She slumps, a bit.) 

"Bapbo and Mama Lee's are both good."

"I’ll have her see if they’re open. Bapbo spelled the obvious way or is there wacky romanization?"

"B a p b o."

Sigh. "Sorry. It's just - it's hard, thinking about - all the destruction." 

"Yeah. The museum getting hit really bothers me."

Cara gives him a squeeze. "Yeah. It sucks."

(...but...) "...we'll rebuild it all, eventually, and some of it will be better after, but - it's still hard."

"The museum had irreplaceable dunmat exhibits. I don't actually know how many got wrecked or whether stuff will be salvageable out of the rubble but I used to love the corner of the natural history section with, like, the levitating pencil and all that." Sigh. "But it's dead now."

"It's dead now, yeah." Oh, but - hmmm.

"...last I heard, they'd moved dunmat exhibit in the space crystal part, right? And I think that was the only part of the building that was untouched." She still has her phone out, and can do a quick search - "yeah, looks like it." 

"A weight off my mind. The levitating pencil is safe."

"A weight off the display surface beneath, too," she says, grinning.

(This is stupid. Why is she saying this. It's fun. Fuck off! Oh? Are you having fun, then? ...fuck off...)

"There were adjacent items that sat on the display surface. They were just a little less overtly magical to child-me. Lots of stuff lights up, less stuff levitates."

She thinks about a young Traceless (only he wasn't Traceless back then, yet. Who was he? (She doesn't get to know. She's not safe to tell!)) staring in awe at a floating pencil. He must have been such an interesting kid. She wonders if it was basically ok for him. (She'd guess yes, by the vibes, but she doesn't have a lot of clues so it's not a confident one.)

She thinks about herself, age 11, already dreading puberty and knowing that trying talking to her parents about it again wouldn't help. 

She thinks about - no she doesn't!!! 

"And now here you are, capable of levitating just like the pencil," she says, smiling. "Maybe that's how it works." (Her tone makes it very clear that she's joking.)

She feels sick. She feels like she's controlling her body at a distance. She feels like a fraud. But none of that really matters. Obviously she's going to be miserable anyways. She might as well build rapport while she's doing it. Successful espers spend their time efficiently, after all.

"Would that it were so, controllable power manifestation would be a bigger breakthrough than nearly anything."

"Maybe it's only a small influence and most people don't remember the inciting event so it's gone undiscovered! Clearly we should speculatively be funding a program where every elementary school in Seoul sends kids to go hang out with Min Woo-young at work for a day." 

She wants to throw up. She's not going to, she's not a kid and she's not sick, but she wants to. She's horrible.

"Well, that wouldn't replicate whatever got him his power... uh this might be a backlash symptom but did something I said bother you?"

"N-" it's rude to lie "-not in a way where you did anything wrong."

She sighs and drops her cheery mask like a stone into water. "...lots of things are going to make me think about - my recent unpleasantries, sometimes via circuitous and unpredictable routes. I couldn't list all the things that will make me randomly flinch even if I tried, and I wouldn't want people to be avoiding them even if I could?"

It probably wouldn't be reassuring to add you have no idea how many of these you've missed and she's definitely not going to say it's viscerally embarrassing to me when I don't successfully conceal my problems because it'd be even more embarrassing to say that, but she can't really help but think it at least he can't read her mind.

"That makes sense but inveighs in favor of phone based socialization pica when I'm at high levels at least unless we're going straight to sleep."

Blegh. "Is that true even if the conversation is useful for me and I endorse having it even if it's sometimes unpleasant?" Does it help if I try and hide it better If it does asking that is anti-productive! He can weigh in on it if he notices it happening or concludes it might be and has opinions.