Write-write-write. "Help yourself to as many of those as you want, and let me know when you're all done so I can freeze the rest."

"Is what I was thinkin'," Alice agrees.

Bella shuts her notebook, leans back, and thinks.

Alice eats his pancakes.

"Are you sure you don't have a preference on what it should feel like to have your mind read? 'Cause you're the one who has to live with it," Bella says.

"...You could test things out with squares," he suggests. "Just wish for me to feel such-and-such for a bit and I'll tell you if I like it. Because even if I thought of something I thought I'd like and told you about it, you might not wish for it exactly the way I thought it and I might not think it exactly the way it'd end up."

"Makes sense." She starts out with a stereotypical sensation of 'being watched', which has no direct analogue but is very distinctive.

"...hmm," says Alice. "It's okay, I guess. Dunno if I want it to be the one."

She shrugs and tries the sensation of being patted on the head. "Except," it occurs to her, "that might be confusing if I actually pat you on the head."

"Oh my god, that's adorable," he says, "and also no way, because yes."

Bella bumps it up a level of abstraction: like 'being watched', but 'being touched' instead - noplace in particular, no particular way. "Hm?"

"Ooh," says Alice. He wriggles a little in his seat, as though trying to find the point of contact, and then settles. "Yeah. That. That's nice. I like that."

"Enough that we shouldn't spend a few more squares and minutes trying other ideas?"

"You can if you want, but I like it," he says. "Up to you if you wanna try to find something I'll like more."

"'Kay," he says contentedly.

"What are your thoughts like?" Bella asks. "Verbal, visual...?"

"Not usually," he says. "Well, visual sometimes, like when I'm drawing. And verbal sometimes too, I guess. But mostly they're just," he makes an open-handed gesture of helplessness in the face of inadequate vocabulary, "thoughts."

"I'm leaning towards a visual channel - superimposed on my peripheral vision maybe - but if your thoughts aren't going to readily translate into words or pictures that could be a problem. Hmm."

"Yeah, not really," he says. "Like, when I remember something I remember all of it, not just what it looked like."

Bella's composing multidimensional charts in her brain now. She likes her new memory. "This is starting to feel like what I imagine designing a complicated new computer program would be like," she says. As an afterthought, she expends a pentagon on programming skills. They might help.