"They'd be responding to mental states. It's definitely a thing that's possible to do but I don't know how to do it."

"Oh."

"If you think it's worth trying to figure out before I give them out -"

"I'm not, um, Advice Lorica right now?"

"Right. Sorry."

"It's okay."

He works and sings.

After he has been there for a couple days:

"I wanna take my helmet off at some point."

"If I were a bad person I'd know everyone's secret identities by now anyway, but I'll leave if you want."

"Don't read my dad's mind."

"I wouldn't. But in the situation secret identities are protective against - I'm sorry, you're sick, it's not really important. It was good seeing you."

"Thanks for coming."

He goes home.

I am off the loopy painkillers and down to regular ibuprofen now.

I am glad to hear it but will continue not to argue the secret identities thing, it's not really very important.

I can explain it if you're curious but yeah.

I guess there are benefits to having how pretty people are be irrelevant in interpersonal interactions? Because Elves sometimes privilege prettiness too much and I don't think it's especially correlated with other positive traits. It's not the silliest thing the PRT enforces.

The PRT doesn't enforce it in contexts like that and actually encourages intra-team unmasking. It has nothing to do with how pretty anybody is.

Yes I didn't think that was the reason just an incidental benefit. I wouldn't even have to read minds, I can borrow peoples' senses without paying their thoughts any attention.

I could track people's Internet usage and figure out who they were, if I wanted, plenty of people could unbalance the whole masks thing, it's just people don't.

Which is weird - would villains really rather get imprisoned for life than look up the name of the people they're fighting? It's like everyone is mostly play-acting.

I mean, there aren't a lot of situations where unmasking directly trades off against life in prison. Going around targeting people in their civvie identities is a pretty good way to get a kill order and more heat, not less.

It's not that it's bad for there to be this sort of taboo-enforced truce it's just that it's weird. 

Little bit. It holds together in part because we keep it up even when there's no strong reason to.

Has someone compared rates of targeting civilian identities in precincts with different policies about unmasking around teammates and so on?