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Tanthe meets Aire in a "bar"
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Aire tilts her head for a moment in thought.

"How did Peachport get news about all this, actually? We got word rather recently and the Dragon Empire's right in the middle of the Untainted. I only got here a couple days ago myself, and the southern coast of the Fringe is far enough away you must have set out before I did. Do you get enough travelers from the Pink to get word that way? If so I'm rather surprised they can make it through the Fringe. I'd head it was nearly impossible to survive in. Unless that's just exaggerated, I guess; the hostility of the Pink certainly was."

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"Oh, the Fringe has plenty of people in it. ...they're mostly mushrooms, but they're still people. I agree it's a hard place to live if you're not, yourself, a mushroom. But I also travel really well, I run fast and I don't sleep much. And I had advice from my myconid friends to get me through the Fringe. Traveling in the Pink was trickier, though I did meet some surprisingly friendly folks when I stopped to ask for directions."

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“Huh, given my experiences so far I’m genuinely surprised you found the Pink tricky. I suppose that might be because of my own ability to speak Tentacled, though, that rather cuts through a lot of potential problems. If you can speak Tentacled and manage to find a Tentacle Orb to carry you places in exchange for pleasure, which really isn’t that hard, you don’t even have to walk."

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"...the 'in exchange for pleasure' part is what held me up," she confesses hesitantly.

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Head tilt.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

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"I don't... um. It's complicated. Well—I guess if you're a telepath you might—see, I sort of, get carried away," she says, her voice stumbling awkwardly around the words. "And. Mess around in people's heads. If I." A gesture so vague it only communicates meaning through the bare fact of its existence. "So. I didn't want to—risk doing that to anyone? But it's hard to talk about, to Tentacled, they sort of... see some things before others, I think. So I, um," she's blushing now, "may have had to run away very fast, the first time I tried to ask for directions." Then she brightens, just a little, and her sentences get steadier. "But! I learned from my mistakes! And the second time was fine. And even the first time, it's not that they weren't perfectly nice people, it was just a misunderstanding is all. I should find them again and apologize, on the way back, if I can."

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Aire’s primary reaction to the way in which Tanthe is apparently a strong enough telepath to directly alter people’s minds is incredible envy. And then immediately following on the heels of that is incredulousness at how nice this girl is. She wants to go back to apologize. For running away, not even hurting them. This girl has three people’s worth of ethics in her, and as far as Aire is concerned one person’s amount of the stuff is already too much to be healthy.

She works diligently to not let this display on her face; she noticed how good at reading her Tanthe was last time she had inconvenient emotions. Instead she just replies to what she said.

“Your shields are actually strong enough I’m not getting anything through them; it’s my occupant that’s the telepath, unless someone’s wearing me, and they’re not a particularly strong one. Or focusing on much besides enjoying themselves.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a strong enough telepath to alter people’s minds accidentally before. Not having a choice must be terrible.”

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"Yeah, it was... not the good kind of surprise," she says wryly, looking down at the table. Oh, right, she has a glass of beer. She sips it again and comments, "It's interestingly novel but I don't think I could get Papa to serve it even if he marketed it as exotic."

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“There is a bit of an odd aftertaste to it, isn’t there? But. A surprise? That’s the worst way to learn.”

She's visibly holding herself back from asking more. Like what exactly happened. Or if everyone ended up okay.

 

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Tanthe nods sadly.

"I was... a bit of a late bloomer, in many respects, and the first time I tried kissing someone, a couple years ago..." She shakes her head and sighs. "I just, everything was so much and the next thing I knew I was—all over his thoughts and not in a good way. He's fine," she adds quickly. "He doesn't remember those few minutes very well but he's fine apart from that. He was very understanding about the whole thing. But. I have not tried kissing anyone else."

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“Ah. Yeah, that’s an astonishingly terrible way to learn that about yourself. At least everyone turned out okay in the end. Well, if you count your apparent inability to ever kiss anyone without mental shielding as ‘okay’, which I think I actually don’t. But how did you not- oh, right. If it’s on the edge of the Fringe Peachport’s probably not that big. So nobody else who has mental shields. Or nobody you weren’t related to.”

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"Yes, exactly. And my mother's shields are bad enough that I used to see through them without trying, and even Auntie Meri's I could get through if I tried hard enough, when she used to test me on them. I'm... I wouldn't have wanted to chance it, even if I'd met an adventurous sailor with solid-looking ones."

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She thinks she has a handle, now, on why she’s felt throughout this like anything even vaguely resembling overt seduction would be a failure. Not, as she initially thought, that perhaps Tanthe would realize she was in danger. Or not just that, at least. No, it's also that Tanthe would think of herself as a danger to Aire and react accordingly. And so, the first thing she needs to do is to dispel that idea. 

“Ah, I understand the concern. Well. In the Dragon Empire shielding is relatively common, especially among students of the Collegiate. In my time there I encountered well north of a hundred people who were shielded in some way, including some rather powerful people. None had shields noticeably stronger than mine; apparently there is potentially a rather large advantage in willpower to be gained from being a skinsuit, in addition to the standard variation among people. So, if you wanted to learn whether there exist shields strong enough you can’t see through them no matter how hard you try, you do have the opportunity.”

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"Really?" she says, her voice very small.

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"Yes. Really."

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"But—what if something goes wrong?"

As soon as she asks the question, though, she shifts from lost uncertainty into problem-solving mode.

"...if telepaths are common where you're from, you probably know more than I do about them, or at least know things about them that I don't. You should tell me what you learned about them in the Dragon Empire, in case any of it is useful for making sure the test is safe."

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Aire nods.

“So, the information that’s most pertinent to you here is that there’s substantial variance in telepathic strength, both offensively and defensively, and one can end up very strong in one subarea while completely incapable in another. I myself have no native telepathy with anything whose ears aren’t full of my tentacles, but that doesn’t stop me from having abnormally strong shields. That plausibly comes down to mental shielding itself being entirely separate from the ability to exert psychic power, as some people think, but Christa has also read about both incredibly strong telekinetics with no telepathy, and incredibly strong telepaths with no telekinesis.

From what Christa knows, the deciding factors with telepathy come down to the trio of experience, initial psychic might, and raw strength of willpower. From what was known in the Dragon Empire, willpower alone is the deciding factor in strength of native mental shields. But willpower is hard to actually measure beyond the impressions a telepath gets, so they could be missing something and fudging things to make the theory fit. But it does explain the odd coincidence of why I both can function despite a number of things that would leave Christa debilitatingly distracted and have anomalously strong shields.

Christa’s also never actually encountered someone who has strong enough telepathy to alter people’s thoughts permanently, but there were rumors about that kind of thing, so I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out.

Most likely, we can learn if you can break through my shields by slowly deliberately increasing your psychic pressure, and I can let you know if I’m feeling strain before they go. Even if they do, the most likely outcome would just be a bit of a headache on my part. Similarly, that’s what you should expect to happen to you if you exert all of your strength in one go and bounce off.”

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For some reason, after all this very important and useful information, the thing she blurts out is, "You put tentacles in people's ears? Wouldn't that tickle?" She's leaning to one side to try to squint at Aire's ears for a moment before she catches herself. A hovering eyeball darts in a little closer; she calls it back to its orbit, blushing.

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She laughs.

"Christa's never complained of that actually! I'm not quite sure what stops it from being unpleasantly ticklish, but it certainly seems like something does."

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"...and speaking of ears," she says, puzzled, "—sorry, I realize I should be thinking about more important things, just—where do they go? Your ears look like a normal shape and size as far as I can tell, and I don't see a seam or anything, so are you just stretched ever so thin over your friend's ears, or is there a seam I can't see, or are you doing something else, or do you not know? Ears would be so hard to mold another ear over, they're thin and they have a very particular shape and they don't vary all that much in size or structure!"

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“I haven't actually investigated all that much myself, but the general way it works is that shapeshifting is solving all the oddness. My occupant is even shapeshifted a bit to allow me to interact with them even if they’re inside me, and to let them fit inside if they’re big enough that would be trouble otherwise. I haven’t ever peeled myself apart to let someone else see more precisely what’s going on, and, uh, Christa’s not really in a state where I should be doing that right now, I think. I know, I know, you didn’t ask, but you’re rather glowing with curiosity, and normally I’d offer, but due to the obvious thing I'm not.”

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"Oh, of course, I wouldn't want to bother her," she hastens to agree. "That's so fascinating, though! Maybe another time."

Which prompts her onto a line of thought that ends, after a second or two, in a more subdued question: "...is she going to be okay?"

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“I think so. She’s a rather durable girl. I think she just needs some time for the shock of it to wear off. Even if she’s not thinking much, she’s still putting it further in her past with each passing day, and that helps with emotional intensity.”

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"Okay," she says, nodding. "Let me know if she wants someone else to talk to? I'm pretty good with people, I think."

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“I will. But. Did you want to try testing yourself against my shields? That is what we were talking about before we got distracted, after all.”

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