"Maybe.

You said you were telepathic?"

"Yeah. You have to be to be a therapist in my plane."

"If you met Riley, would you be able to tell what it was like to be her?"

"If she wanted me to. I don't do that without permission."

"Would you be able to ask for permission telepathically?"

"Uh, I guess, yeah."

"Her mind is on the other side of my door. I guess you could also tell her about us that way."

"I could try but I don't know if it'll work from - that - direction."

sigh

"I guess it might not.

Shall we try now?"

"If you want, but I might want to know more things before I try to explain them, especially to a kid."

"I don't know where to start. Riley has five emotions? Me, Joy, Anger, Fear, and Disgust."

"- do you combine somehow to make other emotions, or are other things that I consider emotions handled some other way?"

"Sometimes two of us working together or at cross-purposes give Riley complicated feelings about something? What other emotions are you thinking of?"

"Uh - surprise? Excitement? Boredom? Confusion? Frustration? Loneliness? Embarrassment? I imagine some could just be specialty applications of you five, like it sounded like you were handling guilt more or less on your own?"

"Surprise and confusion happens while we're all still trying to figure out how to respond to something. Joy also does excitement, I do loneliness, Anger does frustration, Disgust does boredom and Disgust and Fear do embarrassment."

"Relief? How do you all handle empathy for other people - how does stress as a general parameter work - what's going on when she's generally apathetic -"

"Joy does relief. We all do different bits of empathy- I do being sad for other people, Joy does being happy for other people and so on. We don't do stress intentionally but me, Fear, and Disgust all do it unintentionally sometimes. Riley doesn't generally get apathetic without getting bored, but I assume if she did that would mean none of us were doing much."

"I guess you're all the same age she is?"

"We're all twelve. Only Joy started the same second Riley did, 'though, the rest of us are a little bit younger."

"...aww. Were you... babies? In the way that humans are?"

"I don't think so- we knew how to walk and handle things and talk to each other from the beginning, even 'though we didn't know what we were yet."

"How'd you find out?"

"We did what felt right and when I guided Riley people said she was sad and when Joy did they said she was happy and so on."

"Huh. I don't thing people frequently narrate to small children that they're disgusted, did Disgust use to have a different name until you learned the word?"

"We used to call her 'Eww'."