Well, it's not a reply, but it's, I will expect you in my office at 7pm this evening for what I hope will be a more productive and calmer discussion.

Okay, it's... something. They email Lorica asking if she still thinks it's a good idea to come with them, still wants to, and will be available at the time.

Yeah, I can be there.

Then they email Yates to ask if Lorica's allowed to come. Surprising her will do no good.

She may attend, but don't get any ideas about ganging up on me.

It's more about her controlling me.

No reply.

A bot lets them in. Lorica is, for a change, reading a book. "Hi Glam."

"Hellooo. How are you?"

"I'm okay, you?"

"I am very nervous and this is not a feeling I am used to and I do not like it."

"Sorry."

They shrug. "Not your fault, nothing to be sorry about, and I understand that's not how you meant the word but it relaxes me to say this anyway." Pause. "It doesn't relax me much, mind." They sit on nothing.

"How much do those facial expressions correlate with what your face actually does?"

"A lot. At the moment they're pretty accurate, except for lacking eyebrows and such that might give them more context. And there's the aesthetic of it as well, being clearly very nervous is underlined by the smile I think."

"It's not a detailed enough smile to have a quality like 'nervousness'."

"Exactly, it's the voice and the words. Sort of like typing 'Life is horrible colon right parenthesis' on the internet, you know? The words give the context the rest of the face lacks."

"Sure. Anyway, any last minute brainstorms to present to Yates to avoid having to be two people?"

"Haven't thought of any she wouldn't dismiss out of hand."

"Okay, so that's plan A is two of you."

"No no, plan A is mysteriousness and a secret identity thing."

"Okay, and plan B is two of you and plan C is 'whatever you say Ms Yates'?"

"...yes."

"I'll do my best, but be advised that my best means making my first pass at the pitch as good as I can get it and definitely doesn't look like trying again if that fails."

"Yeah I wasn't planning on trying things that fail again, she'd probably tell me to go away and come back when I was sure I wouldn't be wasting her time or something."

"Yeah, that's about right."

Sigh. "You know, the thing that frustrates me the most is that I'm not actually sure whether Ms. Yates is very unreasonable about dealing with other people or if I mistreated her really badly or both. She actually told Piggot that I threatened her, and I never even mentioned my powers!"

"Do you happen to remember your exact words?"

"Yeah, uh, that sounds like mob boss talk. 'Some people might find not receiving their protection money on time triggering'."

"Well, Yates isn't a benefit of the doubt person."

Original puts their face on their hands, and copy pats them on their back.

"I can do the talking this time."

"Probably the better idea," agrees Copy.

"Ready to head down?"

Copy suddenly had never been there. "Yeah."

Lorica leads the way. They arrive slightly early and she takes up a position that is vaguely like standing at attention, near Yates's door.

Glam lands. No reason to flaunt the fact that they can fly.

"I am," they say somewhat meekly. "I am truly sorry about the other day. I really didn't mean to threaten or disrespect you."

"Cool, and I don't have a name in mind for the male one, but can come up with one if you prefer me to. If I may ask, why do you think Glam's better as female?"

"Subtle changes only, but it wouldn't hurt, a little more hip and less shoulder. It's all right for people to know internally. We know how to keep things buttoned up."

"Color scheme or, uh, absence thereof, remain same? Mask as well?"

"Glam's costume can stay as-is. For the second persona I'm leaning blue - more saturated than Lorica's - and gold."

"Phylum was taken by a minor villain in Italy," reports Yates. "Some heroes consider it bad luck to take a dead cape's name but it isn't a branding problem; some don't like to take villains' names but the cape in question was never significant outside his hometown."

"What about Genus? Or any other ideas? I never did think of my power as relating to animals."

"Eh. Guess Phylum's good, then," shrugs copy, and original agrees.

"Of course. Blue-and-gold is only one color option; do you like it or do you want more choices?"

"Too similar," agrees Yates. "You could go with some kind of animal headdress option as a mask, perhaps a wolf, or the costume could be less obviously related to the powers. Glam's projected attitude seems kind of whimsical or I'd recommend adding a tail... If the whole thing winds up organic a more earth tones color scheme might work better. Do you prefer to go armored?"

"We don't want you to seem very similar or be associated with one another. A tail is a silly sort of thing to have on a costume, and while Glam's costume is not particularly silly what little coverage she's gotten suggests that she comes off that way when interacting with people."

"You need to be able to do it convincingly and consistently; what else can you do besides 'silly'?" inquires Yates.

"Well, it's no good deliberately adding grump to a persona, there's more than enough to go around. Serious and focused aren't bad traits to play up. So, armor, animal head mask, I'm less and less attached to blue and gold as I think about it - bronze, maybe, bronze armor over grey underarmor and a coyote head mask and possibly an accessory through which to 'channel' your power to generate the animals."

Yates turns her monitor around. "Coyotes look like this. There can be a difference between what your publicly displayed Phylum power is and what hidden depths you can reveal in a more serious emergency; most capes don't reveal all their contingency options. Sticking to mammals, a small number at a time, or animals with realistic capabilities for their species are all reasonable 'show limits' that you can discard under pressure before resorting to collapsing your personae. I don't think Phylum should display the ability to fly under his own power, but animals to carry you around are likely enough."

"Are you Native American?" asks Yates pointedly.

"A 'no' would have sufficed. If you evoke Native American aesthetics and aren't planning to claim, in costume, believably and ideally truthfully, to belong to the culture people will think of when they see you acting that way, then we will have protests to deal with and it is my job to prevent that. You could probably get away with a druid look but you'd need to replace the bronze with leather and deal with the reduction in defensive power."

"If you're in a crowded situation or there's backup for your opponents watching and you don't already have the creatures that you need made, there's no hiding that the animals come from nowhere, and limiting yourself to local species would leave you mostly with small vermin of limited effectiveness plus cats and dogs. I think you're going to have to conjure them, but going through a noticeable ritual first is better than just spontaneously appearing everything. That, or you could have a single animal capable of shapeshifting?"

"Your animal will also need a name if it's always the 'same' animal. But it does substantially differentiate the Phylum power from the Glam power; I think it's preferable for that reason."

"Are we using the druid idea? Something in Gaelic or Welsh would make sense if so."

"I think yes, but advise you to stick to relatively accessible Gaelic or Welsh - names that have assimilated into Anglophone cultures or a fairly straightforward and pronounceable noun. Possibly change the cape name from Phylum to something which matches. Fawn-colored leather armor, bronze studs, green under it, perhaps a gray wolf or some other animal instead of a coyote."

"Beast or animal, and dog, respectively."

"You have a while," says Yates.

"Yeah, won't be a problem."

"Are you happy with your costume or do you expect to make changes to it between now and then?"

"In that case I need a few photos -" Yates produces a camera and snaps pictures of Loen from various angles.

"Ki can be a her, and sure."

"She's not quite a realistic animal. You're controlling her, so that's not unexpected, but you'd pass casual inspection better if you knew more about how your favorite shapes for her moved," comments Yates. "Can you whistle? It might be good to occasionally whistle at her and pretend to be delivering commands that way."

"Excellent. All right, I think that's all we have to cover for today."

"Well, you seem much improved today," says Yates briskly. "Have a good evening, Glam, Lorica."

"You, too," says the only remaining Sadde.

"Yes. Yes it did."

"You okay?"

"...I will be. Not very nice to notice that there is such an obvious trigger I'd managed to completely neglect to notice."

"Huh?"

"I mean - most people can seem reasonable when they get whatever they want. She wasn't reasonable when she didn't."

"Yeah."

Loen disappears. "So, uh, strike against my self image yay." Sigh. "But I guess it's not always that I can improve without my previous disposition causing me problems."

"It's not always what?"

"Like—sometimes I can introspect and think about some aspect of myself and go, 'Hm, this should not be here, I should change it.' But sometimes I only notice there's something that needs changing after it bites me in the butt. The former feels nice and good and yay I am good at self, but the latter feels more like I am a moron for not having noticed it before it caused trouble."

"Well, you have a leg up on people who never figure out how to work on themselves at all."

"I guess. I feel like this is mostly due to practice with my power. Forcing my brain to change the way it works and such."

"I rearrange my brain now and then and it's not a power requirement."

"That's probably why I like you." Pause. "One of the reasons anyway."

"You didn't know it until just now," she points out.

"No, but it's the sort of meta characteristic that probably affects all sorts of different things about you."

"True."

"You can get on the patrol schedule as Glam now."

"He probably does. Most people do. He doesn't act like a loner."

"Maybe."

"The sort of person who it is unwise to treat as a person usually has trouble with the same skill."

"Why does Loen keep blinking in and out of existence?"

"Okay, but in that case why do you disappear between comments?"

"I disappear when I don't really have anything to say and don't foresee it for the rest of the current conversation or something."

"Last time the copy stuck around and spent some time looking bored. I'm just wondering why the change."

"Fair enough."

"He'll probably stay around after I've unmasked."

"Do you want to borrow some robots to throw swordfish et al at once you know your patrol schedule?"

"Yes, please!"

One emerges via cat door to sit on Glam. "Dauntless should be getting ready to go out for the night. Catch him quick to ask about it."

"Yeah, they'll pair you with people."

"You can request not-Boots, if you want, Dauntless is pretty decent about that."

"I let Dauntless put me with him now and then but I don't, like, talk to him."

"Well, I'll go ask."

Here is Boots with a soda and a pile of social studies homework, and Windflower reading a book.

Loen, who has not been introduced to people other than Dauntless yet, waves.

"He's me."

"Long story short, to solve the branding problem my gender would be, I created an alternate self. Glam's gonna be a girl, I'm gonna be a boy. I'll only really be officially here and patrolling and stuff in a few weeks, though."

"You can do that?"

"Aww she's cute," says Windflower.

"And this is what we look like," says Glam, whose mask vanishes.

Loen's mask disappears as well. "Also this."

"What kind of weirdass name is that?" asks Boots.

They both shrug. "I wasn't the one to name myself, and the people who did are no longer present to be questioned about their life choices."

"I like it, it's pretty unique!"

"It's bizarre. Is there one thing about you that is normal?"

"God save us the day you want to be Titaness or Microman and your bullshit does that too," mutters Boots.

"We're parahumans, it's not as if we were all the most normal people around," says Dauntless.

"It's a completely bullshit power!" objects Boots. "The rest of us do like one or two things!"

"Mine's also just one or two things, just applied very creatively." With a few very serious drawbacks, one of which caused them to be stuck with such delightful company. "If anyone has completely bullshit powers it's Tinkers."

"Her specialty's automation, I can think of a few ways to spin that into very different effects and she's more creative than me, she probably could as well."

"What's your actual power, Boots?"

"Strength. Mostly in my legs," Boots says. "'S good for kicking and jumping around."

"You also have higher upper-body strength?"

"Yeah. Not as much but some."

"You could have one identity that's more of a Mover, using the leg strength to run really fast. Maybe not as fast as Velocity, but since you keep your strength while you're running there'd be some parkour as well and you'd be a more effective actual combatant."

"The other identity would be more similar to your current one, perhaps with Tinker-made armor that could give you more of a Brute category. If you also worked a lot on your aim, you could kick other stuff at people."

"Lorica won't make me anything," Boots says. "Armsmaster either."

"My point was more that sometimes powers can have more room for variation than we think of at first. Also that with Tinkers everything's possible but either they must be really interested in helping out or you must have money for that, so not much of a point in itself other than 'Tinkers have really broken powers.'"

"Lorica makes stuff for her dad but not anybody else," sighs Windflower.

"I'd be more than happy to provide but my stuff only lasts half an hour after I stop paying attention."

"But if you go out on patrol with someone else in your Glam persona you could probably help them out," Dauntless points out.

"What kinda Tinkery stuff would you make?" wonders Boots.

"Depends? Can't be anything that gives very detailed feedback, my power doesn't like it when people squint too hard at it, but when I started out I was using Tinkery stun guns."

"We know how that went," says Boots darkly.

"That problem has been patched."

"Lorica?" Echo guesses.

She nods.

"Why does Lorica help you?" wonders Windflower.

"I... never actually asked." Which means she never asked what the public story would be. "We ran into each other a few times, she helped me out with the Leviathan laser, my power allows for a lot of creativity and she likes testing it? I'm not sure."

"I've got a guess," sneers Boots.

"James," sighs Dauntless.

Boots doesn't acknowledge the rebuke.

"Well, in any case, guess I'm not being weird about this anymore."

"What do you really look like when you're not using any powers?" asks Windflower.

She sighs. And points at Loen.

"If you'd never got powers or your powers didn't let you do your freak fag thing would you still be as weird about your 'real' 'gender'?" wonders Boots, complete with air quotes.

"James, am I going to have to write you up again?"

"I would," Loen says, trying to be appeasing. "The gender thing was there before the power. It was actually how I first noticed the power manifesting."

"It answered me, if it doesn't care how I talk why should you?" Boots says with an illustrative gesture at Loen.

"It?"

"...I do care if you call me 'it,' though." Points at self. "He." Points at Glam. "She."

"Isn't it important to you? You said yourself that if someone called you 'she' it'd irritate you, I feel like I have the right to be irritated as well. If it helps, I won't mind if you don't call me 'your majesty.'"

"Everybody can't just make up their own rules," says Boots. "That's not how it works, that's not how anything works. I didn't decide 'hey I want everybody to call me "he"'."

"Well, why not? If you decided to be called anything else because it made you much less uncomfortable or much happier, then I think it'd be pretty okay for me to have the minor inconvenience that is using a different pronoun to ensure your happiness."

"For that matter, I still don't prefer being called he or she most of the time, but that's the compromise I got with Yates."

"If everybody did your thing it'd be impossible to remember. I can't even keep track of you and there's twice as many of you now," says Boots.

"Well, everybody won't do my thing, this thing is done by less than 1% of the population. And the rule's pretty easy in my case: the one that looks like a boy is a boy, the one that looks like a girl is a girl." He gestures at himself and Glam as he says this. "And if there's someone you genuinely don't know or remember, using 'they' is actually a pretty good and grammatically-correct catch-all alternative."

"Most people don't really care if you slip up. Just, saying the wrong thing on purpose as opposed to because you forgot is hurtful, again just like calling you 'she' on purpose would be hurtful."

"I'm not confusing, it's not the same."

"Confusing or no, what it feels like is the same."

"Not everybody you meet has to make a big deal of caring about how you feel!"

"No, but her teammates should, at the very least," says Dauntless.

Dauntless +1. A thing Sadde has only thought about Lorica so far is being thought about Dauntless as well.

"Nobody here seems to care if I think it's stupid," Boots points out, "even my teammates."

"On any reasonable scale, stupid and hurtful don't really compare."

"I could say it was hurting me like," Boots gestures at Loen and Glam in lieu of coming up with a way to refer to them, "say it is, you've only got say-so to go on."

"Yes, you could. Are you going to?"

"Nobody'd give a shit," snorts Boots, "'cause I'm not some bullshit queer who wants protecting all the time."

"And that has earned you a write-up."

"No, there's no need, I don't really mind if he calls me queer, even if he is appallingly wrong about anyone wanting protecting."

"There is a need, even if you weren't offended he still meant to provoke you and that will not fly."

"Look at me not caring if I provoked or not, I wasn't trying," objects Boots.

"Then you should learn not to act as if you were. We're a team, dammit, we're supposed to work together and support each other, and you are supposed to care if you provoked them, because you shouldn't be doing it!"

Echo very pointedly stops paying attention and returns to her homework.

"I don't know why I even come here when I'm not on call," mutters Boots.

Dauntless has literally just explained why. He composes his write-up and sends it. "He's not always like this, Sadde," Dauntless supplies.

"It's fine. Is it okay if I turn the TV on? I'll keep it on mute and watch with closed captions."

"Go for it," says Windflower before Boots can say anything.

So they do.

A few minutes later Loen gets up and scoots over to Windflower. "Hey Betty?"

"What?"

"So I was thinking of some ways of making your power a bit safer? And more useful? If you wanted to talk about that."

"It's poison. Poison isn't safe," she murmurs.

"Not... wholly safe, no," he agrees. "But safer. I'd need some more info about how you work, but if what I'm thinking makes sense we could all but nullify the possibility of affecting bystanders and make it nonlethal."

"What're you thinking?"

"The basic idea is prepping darts with the poison in advance, or maybe using a tinker-made suit of sorts that could generate them in real time but that's probably harder to do and more of a hassle."

"Lorica doesn't make stuff for people besides her and her dad and asking Armsmaster would be even worse," says Betty. "Anyway I tried that. I didn't want to hurt the rats I really didn't but - they were okay anyway, nothing I make works injected."

"Why would asking Armsmaster be worse? And hmm, not working injected is annoying but not insurmountable. Do they only work inhaled?"

"Some of them work when they touch skin but most of them are inhaled. And have you ever tried asking Armsmaster for anything?"

"Can't say I've interacted much with him," he admits. "But touching skin is promising. If we patrol together, I—well, my Glam self could probably make you some form of contact dart." He looks over his shoulder at Glam. "Hey me, can you get me some contact darts?"

"I don't see how I'm supposed to get the poison into the darts. It has to go through the air."

"Hmm, where do you release the poison from?"

"Wherever. I can aim best if I breathe it out but that's still not very well."

He opens his mouth, closes it, looks over his shoulder and says, "This'd be easier if you were the one having this conversation."

"She can generate poison anywhere, has an easier but still not easy time aiming if she breathes it out, her poisons are inhale or contact only, and need contact with the air to work."

"I'm sooooort of aerokinetic, but only of air that has some of my poison in it," sighs Windflower, "and less if it's not very much, and not nearly well enough to keep it from dispersing."

"Hmm... Suppose I designed a dart with an aperture for your index finger that closed hermetically once you withdrew it, would you be able to generate the poison inside it and have it stay there? Or at least have only suitably nonlethal quantities of it escape?"

"As long as there was air in the dart, I guess. And room for poison in with the air. I can't make poison underwater or in my shoes if they're tight or anything."

"Maybe? I don't know."

"Oh. Hmm... Well, okay, it's possible to figure this out. If we have enough success with this we might get a Tinker to reproduce something similar. The nonlethal part is, is it possible to make antidotes for your poisons? And if so, do you have any poisons that disable someone but take long enough to actually seriously harm them that we can apply the antidote before that happens?"

"Miracle Max can do sort-of antidotes. He says they're not really antidotes just symptom suppressants but they'll keep people alive long enough to get it out of their system, anyway. And yeah, I've got a range. I've even got the blue stuff that can't actually kill even a rat however much I make. Poor rats though."

"Oh? What does it do?"

"It's inhalation only and it'll make you cough up blood and puke and get really dizzy and sometimes pass out."

"Hmm, okay, not terribly useful. But okay, if it's possible, then that could be your thing: shooting contact darts with poison that disables someone quickly but lets them last long enough to be given an antidote."

"It'd be better than just sort of standing around because if I do anything I'll hit somebody else," sighs Windflower, "I guess."

"Yeah! And it could be useful against the tougher capes Boots can't kick into submission, and some types of minions."

Nod.

"Hmmm... I kinda forgot what-all we had to test! There was range, and quantity of things, and time, and how range relates to time..."

"Well, okay, simple starter test, give the robot a thing and the robot will carry it away."

Glam produces: a rubber duck. For nostalgia. It is given to the robot.

A robot hops from buoy to buoy, noting its distance from the flock around Lorica.

"Do you have a sense of what's stopping you?" Lorica asks, when the robot has no new buoy to hop to.

Hop hop hop hop hop!

One of the robots does. "Are you dismissing intervening buoys on purpose so they're not blocking your view?"

"Uh. No? Where?" Telescope not good for this, old binocular better. They look. They're hard to find, what with all the buoys, but eventually Glam notices a gap. "Huh. That's new."

"It hasn't been half an hour. Maybe we should check your limit on how many things you can have at once too." Does the robot with the duck still have the duck?

It does! It does still have the duck!

"And it's only some things and not in order." Any pattern to where the gaps are?

There isn't a visible pattern. In fact, not-a-visible-pattern can be described as the pattern—it's almost as if someone picked exactly the right number and distribution of buoys that would make it hard for Glam to notice any are missing very easily.

"Really now. Hmm. I think anything like a direct hard limit on distance is starting to sound less plausible. What if I started making buoys in all directions instead of out in a straight line?"

"Well, if you use more directions than I have robots it will be harder to keep track of them, but sure."

"I meant not necessarily counting them like that, but maybe more spread out, without an obvious pattern. My hypothesis is that there's something related to attention here, too."

"All right, buoys everywhere, go for it." A robot spirals high to get a birds-eye view.

"Hrm. I wonder if I can counteract this by glaring at the buoys."

"Try it."

"Nope, they're just vanishing behind your back."

Sigh. "Of course they are. What I'm curious about is why the buoys vanish but not the duck."

"I haven't told you the duck's status," Lorica points out.

"Ninety seconds ago."

"Oh. Hm. That's. Suggestive."

"Oh?"

"I mean, I'm not sure what it's suggestive of but it's... generally suggestive?" Shrug. "I'm starting to think that my power responds to the accuracy of my expectations?"

"...What do you mean?"

"But if I'm invisible, the fact that I wouldn't tell you about the duck should have likewise been invisible..."

"Maybe? But if my power looks at ways I could come about the information that my duck disappeared, goes through the bot, and then hits a spot it can't see, it might've just thought no decision would be made, or that the information wouldn't go past that node. We could test the same thing, except this time you resolve in advance to tell me immediately when the duck disappears, and then test it again but make it so some automatic alarm not involving you will go off when the duck disappears."

"Okay. Can you give the faraway bot a new duck from here?"

"No."

"No."

"...okay, can you tell me where the bot is?"

"That way. It stopped when the duck vanished. I can see it if I squint." When she squints, her helmet display zooms, but still.

"Look, we know your range goes that far. It had the duck when it was exactly where it is, and the duck didn't disappear until you were distracted by buoys. You should totally be able to give the robot a duck."

"No duck yet."

"Hmm... Actually this is a good test of that hypothesis, can you tell one of your bots to automatically tell me when the faraway bot gets a robot? Or maybe some sort of bleep, or some feedback."

"Sure, that one'll bleep as soon as its sibling has a duck."

Bleep!

"Congratulations. I wonder why exactly that helped and how we can figure out. Duck is getting farther away again..."

"Well it ties in with what I was saying, I think? Accurate expectations. Maybe a better name for it is... reasonable feedback?"

"Hmm, say more?"

"For my power to work I need to... be reasonably confident that it worked, is my guess. Which normally just translates to field of view, right, that's how I normally tell if a thing exists is by looking at it. But this is apparently working off knowledge of the world that I don't necessarily have."

"But you probably do also have some actual range limit because you didn't get a thing to appear on camera in Philly...?"

"...Oh. Wanna see if you can appear a thing in my workshop from here?"

"Yeah!"

A bot projects onto the bottom of the boat a view of the workshop.

Duck on the desk!

"Ha. Okay, so your range qua range is big enough to be legitimately challenging to test, but for other reasons, when unassisted you are mostly visual-or-immediate-staging-area range. Next time I'm around the world at a Simurgh fight after she flies off I'll get you a private feed of some place."

"Yeah, that sounds good." Pause. "I could make my gun remotely."

"And then the Simurgh figures out how it works because she's the fucking Simurgh and everyone present knows your secret weakness. This would be bad. Everyone should only know your secret weakness if I disappear mysteriously and my robots think you did it."

"...that is an actual thing you thought of and arranged, isn't it."

"Who, me?"

"I'm a little bit in love."

"My paranoid threats to your efficacy as a cape are a love potion now. I'll have to report myself for further powers testing immediately."

They laugh. "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't work on most not-me people."

"Fair enough."

"But anyway, I'm not a Tinker, how would the Simurgh copy me? Especially if I was very far away."

"She can fuck people up in ways that don't manifest for years, you don't think she could investigate your power from the opposite hemisphere if it were annoying her?"

"Well, but how would she actually use it? She can't conjure things, she can only build them, and my things are make-believe."

"The problem isn't, 'she copies your gun'. The problem is, 'she sings that the gun is not real into everybody's heads, and they remember that, and not all of them are trustworthy'."

"...she can do that? Sing information into people's heads?"

"I don't know, but I don't think it's a risk you should take at least until you've killed both of the others."

"I mean, unless you've been under the influence before you've probably got uncontaminated judgment and my main advantage is conservatism. But neither Leviathan nor Behemoth could nope you as totally and permanently as she could, so you should save her for last."

"Well I've never been anywhere near the Simurgh so probably not, but you never know, maybe this is a long con and she actually can affect everyone everywhere and the song is just a decoy. If anyone would do something as ridiculously convoluted as that, it's the Simurgh."

"If that's how she works maybe I'm not immune to her after all and she's setting me up, but at a certain point we'll be totally paralyzed if we don't make certain baseline assumptions."

"Yeah, it was mostly wild speculation, I'm just staying as far away from her as I possibly can."

"And keep your guns out of her way until it's worth gambling your whole powerset on it."

"Right."

"Maybe? I mean, I think other people paying attention to my stuff doesn't make it not disappear—unless it does. I'm not sure how to test that without revealing my secret weakness, though."

"When you trusted the robot to bleep at you in response to the duck, you got the duck to appear. If a robot would reliably inform you of what was and was not sticking around, you'd have feedback on it even if there was lots of it and some of it was behind you, no?"

"Yeah, I guess, but I still have limited human attentional capacity, if there was so much stuff around that I couldn't keep track of the bleeps that'd probably be a problem."

"And people who aren't me don't usually get along really well with my tech anyway, I'm just wondering theoretically, but you have a point."

"And in any case there's a truly ludicrous number of buoys around right now, I think on a typical situation I won't be running into these limits. My power seems to leave me some leeway between my not paying attention to a thing and it making that thing go away, namely the half-an-hour thing, though that leeway seems to get shorter as I make more stuff."

Nod.

"You were gonna tell me when my duck disappeared, right?"

"I waited ninety seconds, remember? We were busy with the buoys."

"No, I mean, the new duck. You're gonna tell me when it goes poof."

"Oh. Well, the robot would probably bleep even if I forgot since that was the last thing it was suggested that it do, but yes."

"Can you tell it not to bleep? I have the impression that if you tell it to bleep then the duck won't disappear ever."

"You heard them," Lorica tells the bot.

"Okay, so, in the meantime, what other tests?"

"If you don't have what strictly amounts to a range limit it throws a lot of the original ideas into uselessness. ...But your duplicates have memory. And you could make a lot of those. I wonder if they increase your capacity, or at least don't deplete it?"

"My capacity?"

"The number or complexity or whatever of things you can have going. I wonder if they can remember, or look at, or whatever, things for you."