Lucy was relatively lucky; she had her phone in her hand when the dungeon grabbed her. This is lucky because both of her hands are webbed far enough away from her pockets that there is otherwise no chance she would have been able to reach it.

She almost dropped her phone three times, getting it into camera mode, turning it to video, and starting recording, all one-handed, but after that her biggest problem was trying to follow individual spider monsters while not having a great angle to see the screen from.

Probably the correct thing to say is “Thank you, how can I be as convenient as possible,” but what instead comes out is, “Holy shit, you’re Traceless.”

"- yes, that's me! Esper fan?" he asks. "Wow, you have your phone on you, do you want me to pocket that on the way out?" He starts unrolling more butcher paper.

“Yeah, at this point the risk of losing what I’ve got outweighs the possibility of getting just a little more video—I read your blog. Yelling About Basic Research is brilliant.”

"- oh, thank you kindly!" He accepts the phone, pauses the recording, and pockets it. Butcher paper butcher paper. "Is that why you were taking video? Doing some of your own basic research as long as you're in here?" When she's all wrapped up the butcher paper goes back in its tube holster and he pulls a pair of scissors. "Gonna get you snipped off here, won't let you fall."

“Yeah, exactly! I mean, it’s just a phone camera, but it’s still data.”

She holds still so as to not make him make a mistake but she’s not afraid of heights qua heights, it was several other aspects of this dungeon that freaked her out!

"I'm usually working with a phone camera too! They've gotten decent especially if you have to trade off against bulkiness at all." Snip, and now she in her butcher paper roll is in his arms.

“I have no idea how good my phone camera is but I was not optimizing for the phone with the fanciest camera because I did not expect to end up in a dungeon.”

"It's not a very expectable event." He makes sure she's securely held and then hops off the butcher-papered bit of web to fly back down between bits of webbing toward the portal. Fortunately the spiders don't see amazingly; if they don't touch the web, and they won't, they're unlikely to take exception to their victim flying away. "It's pretty dim in here, I've been getting candids of the spiders with flash on."

“If I didn’t get anything usable at all I will be pissed.”

"It's not pitch dark, I'm sure you got something!"

“Good. —Oh, crap, I think I have not actually said thanks for the rescue yet—“

"I think it's implied though also it would be valid if you didn't find yourself in a particularly thankful mood."

“I mean today is not my favorite day but you’re Traceless, if nothing else I could tack the dungeon-gratitude onto the gratitude for your entire deal? Research-wise, I mean, I am not—usually—specifically grateful for your particular powerset.”

"I appreciate that! Would I know you from the comment section or do you lurk?"

“I’m fiat-lucy.”

"Oh sounds familiar - I'm going to get the details wrong, forgive me, but you like, volunteer for DDSI or something?"

“Yeah! I want to work there after college but if I can’t, just continuing to volunteer is fine.”

"Sweet. What arm of their work are you into?"

“Right now I’m doing some basic phone bank stuff, but I’m studying data science, so I expect to do more of that later.”

"Is there a specific hypothesis you're keen on investigating?"

“I don’t know about hypothesis but I’m very into the question of dungeon intelligence? And monster intelligence, obviously. I like your cat.”

"You say that but you haven't met him. I started writing up a 'Cricket answers frequently asked questions' post but it was too incendiary to post."

“He may be verbally incendiary but he’s perfectly capable of coexisting with humanity! He’s a person and he’s a dungeon monster and he gets to be okay, that’s so important!!!”

"I love him very much and it is so important that he is a person and I'm going to grab a couple of these spiders, if we can find the core, see about them too."

She does not bounce because this would be a horrible fucking time to bounce but she experiences Bouncy Emotions.

”If that goes well, you can tell them no hard feelings from me specifically.”

"If they talk. Or, well, I suppose I can tell them either way, same as I can call spirits from the vasty deep, but."

“If it goes well enough, I should have said. I’m not assuming that non-verbal means non-sophontic but at this stage of research talking is definitely a better outcome than not talking.”

"So far the zoo folks haven't found any that are obviously smarter than, like, dogs, while not being able to talk, but I confess 'obviously' is a big qualifier there."

“Dogs can get pretty smart, depending on the breed, but fair enough. A persony dungeon creature seems like obviously a better outcome than a not-persony one but even a not-persony one could be considered going ‘well,’ since existence failure on dungeon destruction is also an option. …And also…failing to destroy the dungeon…I was really insufficiently precise.”

"They don't have the core for this one yet, I'm probably going to come back again tomorrow and look if they don't have it by then."

“The dungeon getting away would increase the research value of my video, probably, and yet I don’t prefer it at all.”

"Mood! I don't think this one's priority enough that they'll bring in Columba, though."

“Yeah. And it could be moving! What fun.”

"Could be, yeah. Maybe one day somebody'll have her power but a backlash that lets them use it for more than five minutes."

“Or a partner so compatible you can tie them to her back and give her more stamina that way.”

"Yeah. I had an inkling once that she'd be compatible with my metapartner Arctic but I suggested it to them and no dice, it's hard to predict these things."

“I’ve looked into it some but I’m sure I know less than any actual esper.”

"I mean, not necessarily, if you stared at the compatibility map's raw data enough you might spot something - actual espers are busy and don't have a magical intuition for compatibility before we actually fistbump somebody."

“I’m sure I’ll do a data science project on it eventually but I haven’t yet and just staring at it sounds less efficient.”

"Well, staring here as metonymy for whatever data manipulation sparks joy."

“Quite. Anyway, not yet. So.”

"And here we are." He's spent much of the trip to the portal on foot, balancing on pre-butcher-papered strings of the web, imperceptible but at least not flying; he can last longer that way. "I'm gonna hand you off to the folks with the acetone, I'll leave your phone in the recovery tent, all right?"

“Okay! Thanks so much! For everything!”

"You're welcome, it was lovely to meet you, shoot me an email anytime!"

And he drops off her and her phone and once more unto the breach.

Lucy gets acetoned and reclaims her phone and watches a couple of minutes of the video she took and chortles quietly to herself about how not ruined by the low lighting it is and e-mails the professor whose class she vanished out of that she has been rescued and emails a different professor whose class she failed to show up to that she was absent due to dungeon and not personal negligence and heads back to campus to reclaim the stuff she had with her but not, like, on her.

She is met there by a TA who does the class she vanished out of. “Are you okay???”

“Mhm! I got, like, spiderwebbed for a while, but nothing fell off from constricted circulation, and I had my phone on me. And! I! Was rescued! Personally! By Traceless!”

…She is not so into celebrity espers that she immediately recognizes the name. She googles it.

“…Okay,” she concludes once she has. Like, he isn’t not cute, but.

“He has a blog, let me show you,” she already has the blog open in her phone. She shows her.

Huh. Okay, yeah, the monster cat is pretty cute.

Sigh. Normally Lucy isn’t one of those people who bemoans having to take non-core classes, but her statistics TA would have gotten it.

In the evening she scrapes together a couple of projects she’s done analyzing publicly-available dungeon data and emails them to Traceless, along with a copy of her video.

Good to see you've got your arms free again! I'll make sure LAC has a copy of the video if you haven't already.

Oh good idea, I sent it to DDSI but not LAC.

IME DDSI is more for the kind of information that's already been through a layer of interpretation - like, if a person counts the number of spiders that appear in your video they want that number, the video itself they might store but aren't set up to do a lot with it

Yeah, sounds right. Also to be 100% clear I was a good girl and did my surveys before emailing you.

Thank you! Gotta have those. Any guesses how it was filtering? Spiderphobia or anything?

I am maybe a little spiderphobic now but I wasn’t before, mostly I was freaked out by being tied up by something that probably didn’t care if it restricted blood flow to my extremities until they rotted off and also if I got out of my restraints I would have more problems rather than less.

Huh, maybe the spiders were incidental, or were derived from the webbing theme rather than the other way around.

The people who collect the surveys will have a chance to figure it out!

Here's hoping! Did it interrupt you at anything very time-sensitive?

Nah. Just a literature class. It was kind of alarming to the people immediately adjacent to me but they’ll deal.

Did you see the study about how car ownership and accident patterns changed when dungeons started snatching people right off the highway? link

Yeah! I used it for class last year.

Ah, sorry, should've probably guessed that

Don’t be! If I hadn’t seen it I’d’ve wanted to.

Sorry. Apologies are a backlash side effect so I have very apologetic email habits

Oh, I see. I’m naturally extroverted and not especially apologetic so that hadn’t occurred to me.

Being extroverted seems like it must be nice, or at least it sometimes seems that way. But my backlash isn't extroversion, it just looks like it in bad light.

I enjoy it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. I am complicatedly sympathetic about your backlash because it kind of seems like they all suck but esper powers are so cool.

I have settled into a workable relationship with mine but when I first awakened I hated it soooooo much. But I AM very glad I'm an esper rather than not that, I would've taken it even if I'd known what I'd get.

I’m not gonna lie, I would rather live in a world with both dungeons and espers in it than a world that just didn’t have magic. Even not being an esper, even after today.

I think this may be in SOME ways a nicer 21st century than the null expected 21st century but I'm not positive about that and a lot of people sure aren't around to vote on it anymore because dungeons ate them.....

Well, that’s fair. I’m not opining on which one is objectively better, just, if you assume there’s one universe where espers and dungeons showed up in the seventies, and one where they didn’t, so the total number of people suffering as a result of either situation is fixed-ish, I would personally rather live in this one.

When you put it like that, I agree.

Though I have hopes that with more research and dungeon materials and so on we can make the tradeoff better over time.

100%. It can be the Black Plague of magic. (The Black Plague improved labor conditions because labor became more valuable, sorry if you knew that already but if you didn't hte reference would have been pretty incomprehensible.)

I was aware and managed not to get the reference anyway! ^_^;

I did not anticipate that but fortunately covered adequately anyway!

It’s one of those things that’s true but conversations about the Black Death are usually not about it, they’re about the horrors.

Well, dungeons too are often discussed in terms of the horrors.

Yeah, the Black Death doesn’t have an equivalent of espers.

It has... people who have genetic resistance to the plague...? but it's a reach.

Yeah that would only work if the only thing espers did was not get kidnapped. Although maybe I should suggest “people with genetic resistance to a disease can magically eradicate it” as a writing prompt to a friend.

I wish your writer friend luck with this concept!

I’ll tell her you said so!

Lucy tracks the follow-up on what she can’t help but think of as her dungeon. Did they kill it? Did Traceless get any spiders out? Probably they aren’t going to post a list of rescuees who haven’t filled out their surveys so people can nag them about it.

They still haven't found the core, apparently, so most likely Traceless has yet to catch spiders (they'd be a huge liability if the dungeon got away and they'd just have to kill them then). There is no list of victims of the dungeon.

Hasn’t been killed yet but also hasn’t escaped. Okay.

She messages Writer Friend with the prompt and does some homework and starts looking up possible analyses to do to Traceless’s compatibility dataset and then goes to bed.

In the morning she annoys her roommate with how chipper she is about being dungeon-napped and replies to an email from student health about post-dungeon counseling and goes to all her classes and then lets herself look into the dungeon again.

Core still missing. A spider made a break for it and was killed but the population of them has been thinned out enough that they're starting to harvest the webs.

Good for them.

She really wants this thing to die.

Man, it’s a good thing she said yes to counseling, wanting things to die isn’t a healthy Lucy opinion! Like, obviously dungeons need to die, it’s not the worst possible trauma response, but she would really prefer to feel mildly sad about it.

She checks again the next day.

Core is found, a spider specimen has been caught, and they're keeping it alive to harvest the silk, it's good silk once you acetone off the glue.

Whew.

She hopes the spider turns out to be a person. That would be so cool. Even a non-person animal would be good, but a person would be better.

She keeps an eye on the situation over the next several days.

The dungeon tries to escape and everybody has to bolt for the exit while it's coming apart around them and kill the core before it can get away. The spider doesn't survive the loss of its dungeon, sadly.

Aw! No!

That was HER spider it was not even slightly her spider, what the fuck, she’s going to weird out her counselor so much.

She goes to counseling. She continues periodically emailing Traceless with the results after she does math to magic-related datasets.

He doesn't always reply right away but sometimes she'll get a batch of responses to accumulated emails all at once.

And a couple of months later he gets an email from Lucy’s email address saying that it’s Lucy’s roommate and she’s in the hospital with some kind of psychotic breakdown and the hospital has like a roomful of people who are probably not espers but like it sure would be convenient if somebody could check.

...okay, he doesn't usually do this but usually it's not somebody he knows, since he knows far fewer than fifty thousand people. He calls the hospital to see if they'll confirm that they've got a Lucy who is a suspected awakening, he's Traceless and knows her from the internet and would be willing to come check if they've got her.

Yeah, they’ve got her! And a handful of other people.

Honestly now that he thinks about it they probably shouldn't just tell anybody who calls them on the phone and claims to be an esper that they've got a specific patient! But it is not a problem he is going to solve right now while backlashed. He sends June an emoji, and he and Cricket drive to the hospital and ask to see Lucy, he doesn't actually have her name but there can't be that many albino Lucies.

Lucy is sort of half-sitting, half-lounging on an examination table, her wrists in soft restraints, fiddling with a three-dimensional wooden puzzle thing.

"Lucy? It's Traceless."

She ignores him, continuing to fiddle with her puzzle.

”She hasn’t been responding when we try to talk to her,” the nurse supplies.

"Okay, well, she doesn't strictly have to -" He reaches out and touches her hand.

Oh wow that’s nice!!! She drops the puzzle and immediately attempts to plaster herself against Traceless’s side.

"- yes, she's an esper. Uh, I assume based on the wrist restraints there's something more complicated going on than that she won't talk to anyone?"

“She’ll try to grab things out of people’s hands and won’t listen to ‘no.’”

Cricket, draped on Haru's shoulder, jumps down to the floor when the plastering attempts begin.

"Okay, uh, do you have next of kin info to talk about whether I should... bring her home with me? We're compatible and if I get her farther down the backlash scale maybe she'll have some words, but without it I'd want to talk to her parents or whoever." He will hug her though.

“We have her phone—well, we have her roommate and her roommate has her phone—presumably her parents are in the contacts—” 

The nurse nips out to fetch the roommate. The roommate has the phone number for a mom but not a dad.

"Hi, Lucy's roommate, I'm Traceless, can I get you to extract Lucy's mom's phone number from her contacts and get her on the horn for me?"

“Yeah, sure.” She calls Lucy’s mom and hands him the phone.

He pets Lucy's, uh, hair, that seems minimally weird to do in front of people. Pet pet. Ring ring.

Cricket figure-eights around his ankles.

“Hello, love, how’s it going?”

"Hi, Lucy's awakening and can't talk right now, I'm Traceless, I'm an esper, Lucy's roommate asked me to come by and check her and I thought you should have this information."

“—Traceless, huh? How many pictures did Lucy take when the the dungeon took her?”

"I don't know if she took any stills, but if she did she didn't send them to me, I just got video."

“No, it was a trick question. Awakening. Is she alright?”

"She is... calm. I don't know why she can't talk, but she's compatible enough with me to be" trying to climb me like a tree, "positively responsive in that direction and I might be able to get her to a level where she has some words with more time, I called you first thing."

“Thanks, I appreciate it. She’s not having any dangerous medical problems?”

"No, the medics say she'll try to take things out of people's hands but she hasn't tried to grab her phone so far from me."

“Okay. Well. Thank you for being there for her. I didn’t know guiding worked before you were done awakening but it seems, uh, preferable.”

"It works, but it works as though she were constantly using the powers she doesn't have yet at an unsustainable rate, her backlash will keep pulling up to awakening levels any time I'm not holding it down." Does he have to say "so it might be medically indicated for me to carry your daughter off and sleep in the same bed with her for a week" or can that be subtext.

“…I don’t know how much time you have to devote to the project, or what it might entail…”

"Uh - well, awakening lasts a week. She's calm when unguided so I wouldn't consider it necessarily urgent to supervise her twenty-four-seven - I had to have company twenty-four-seven and it was my parents, not even guiding company - but, like, twenty-three-seven, maybe. The reason people espers don't routinely poke everyone in the emergency room is because it'd be overwhelmingly false positives and where it was a true positive it would almost never be a compatible person, not because we, like - we've all been there."

“—Okay, uh, I know—that the, um, fiction, I’ve read, about espers, isn’t accurate, but—you are in fact just talking about being around her and hugs and so on, right?”

WHY IS THIS HIS LIFE "That is all I mean to imply, yes. Like, maybe without our shirts on but I can be professional about it especially while she can't talk."

“Sorry! I don’t know you and I’m concerned for my daughter.”

"Yeah, sorry, I know, this is kind of weird for me too. We will probably be chaperoned by my talking monster cat much of the time, because the guiding will work better if I'm backlashed and my cat's job is to have conversations with me when I'm backlashed if nobody else is available and she can't talk."

“Thanks. When she can talk, tell her I love her and I’m glad for her and/or will be at the end of the week.”

"And you are okay with authorizing the hospital to release her to me? Do I need to know anything about like, dietary restrictions, meds she's on, anything like that?"

“Yes, I can do that. Uh, she doesn’t take anything regularly, unless she started a multivitamin recently or something.”

"I can ask her roommate, she's the one who emailed me. Can I get you to send a text to my work number so I don't have to keep stealing Lucy's phone if I need to contact you again? I - uh - my cat will give you the number as I presently cannot -" He holds the phone down where Cricket is and Cricket does that. "Is there any other contact information I should have?"

She takes down the number. “I’ll put my email and landline in the text.”

"No other family or anything? What time zone are you in?"

“She has a brother but I’m going to want to talk to him about this before I send you his contact information. I’m in Saskatchewan.”

"Okay, I'll try to avoid calling too early. I'm gonna hand Lucy's phone to the nurse now for the release thingy, okay?"

“Okay.”

Lavinia gives the nurse the release stuff and the nurse does the relevant paperwork and could he bop a handful of other probably-not-espers while she does that, just to be on the safe side, they’re over there.

Yeah, sure, he can pick up Lucy and carry her around to tap people. None of the rest of 'em are espers.

And... then he is going to take off his shirt in the hospital lobby, stuff enough of it into his jeans pocket that it'll stay put, and fly home, Cricket close behind and chattering about Better Off Ted.

The hospital staff don’t let anyone take pictures of the shirtless esper while inside the building but it’s up to him to be invisible after that.

He can't make Lucy invisible so, nah, people can see him flying around, it's fine. He's going pretty fast, though, anyone who wasn't already trying to take a picture of something above their heads won't get a very good shot. Wow, Better Off Ted sounds like a fun premise but the romantic interest character seems really boring.

WHOAH HIGH UP BETTER CLING EXTRA HARD TO THE COMFY THING TO AVOID FALLING.

- okay he doesn't want to scare her, he can slow down and hold her tighter and see if that helps? And if it doesn't he can get an Uber but he's not sure how to convince her to wear a seatbelt.

She’s going to cling extra hard but you know what the view from up here is REALLY COOL, she’s good.

Oh good. He knows she's not panicky about heights in general, he flew her in the dungeon. And the flying will make the guiding work better. And maybe he should find a compilation video of crucial Portia deRossi moments in the show, sounds like she delivered a good performance.

This is really cool! Pity she can’t control the flying thing… unless she can somehow? She has vague recollections of how airplane wings work…but she can’t see any wings on this thing, and if she can alter its trajectory and she fucks it up, this probably results in crashing.

But she does want to know if she can do it.

She experimentally reaches up and pulls on Haru’s ear.

- he laughs, but as long as he can still see where he's going it doesn't affect their trajectory at all.

Oh, so that action makes a noise! This is not super interesting, Things make Noise like, all the time. Well, it's not surprising that she couldn't alter trajectory by tugging on that, it was too small to be a wing. And it's not, like, moving, so it can't be like the small-wing-things at the back of an airplane. The middle one is called a rudder maybe? Not important. 

Eventually he lands at his house. If he sets her down will she stand and be led inside?

Yep! If he attempts to lead her by the hand she will ignore this in favor of continuing to Hug, but she is competent to move while hug. 

Valid to hug. "I'm going to call Ren," he tells Cricket his phone but it is functional that Cricket can hear him say it. He maneuvers Lucy over to the couch and - has to have Cricket leave Ren a message, because he can't be having with that at the moment, but then they can be set up on the couch all three with Cricket purring on an unoccupied Haru location and continuing to explain Better Off Ted.

...Comfy thing is extremely comfy, but after a little while of this she gets bored anyway and attempts to steal his phone.

How about she have her phone instead.

Oh, cool, that works. 

If he pays attention to her phone usage, he may notice that she is capable of using language--on a couple of different occasions, she goes into her notes to write things down, and at one point she ends up reading an article about geology.

Huh.

What if... he sends her a text.

You're having an esper awakening.

...Hm. Her phone is spontaneously generating text at her. That...feels like a thing that can happen? But there's context about it that she's missing right now? 

She's sort of baffled by the second-person pronoun--"you" implies the existence of persons outside the self--but--

Esper Awakening. She recognizes that phrase; it means getting superpowers. Which is great! But also very unlikely. She does feel sort of disoriented right now, but awakening is supposed to be worse than this? Probably? Hmmmmmm.

Well, it takes a week. She remembers that. So no reason to worry about it until then. 

...well, she read it, so that's good. He'll text her mom: It seems like she can read; something other than language, per se, is not functioning right now, but she might get ~anything out of receiving texts.

Good to know, thank you.

She tries texting Lucy:

I love you. How are you doing?

Gibberish. She goes back to her article.

Will Lucy let him get up?

Well, she won't let go, but she has classified him as a moving object and will move with him rather than attempting to keep him in place.

...yeah, okay, she can accompany him to his bookshelf and he will try handing her a book. How's about, say, The Hobbit.

She opens it to try to read it, immediately trips over the assumption that Bilbo being a person who takes actions is a coherent concept, and puts it down disinterestedly. 

Huh. Book of sonnets?

She recognizes poems as discrete works, so when she gets baffled by one she moves on to the next instead of putting the book down. 

Most of them are romantic to some degree, but the ones that are more abstracted hold her interest longer; anything that strongly and directly talks about people gets her to skip to the next one immediately. 

Haru comments on this out loud by virtue of the combination of speech to text + Cricket. Texts Lucy's mom - does her name pop up? - She'll page through a book of Shakespeare sonnets but I'm not yet sure what the pattern is for which she'll keep reading and which she skips past. Back downstairs and he's going to get Cricket's sashimi out for him and fix some instant ramen, Lucy seems like she'll be able to eat instant ramen.

Lucy's mom's name is Lavinia Wayne. 

Instead of waiting for instant ramen, Lucy grabs an apple. She is totally able to eat it. 

She can have an apple, he will not begrduge her. "It'll be interesting to find out if she thinks to throw the core away like this," Haru remarks to Cricket. The first ramen beeps, does she seem intrigued by it now that it smells nice and stuff?

Oh, cool, instant ramen has come to be in edible form without her having to do anything about it! Nice!

She looks around for a compost bucket. If she doesn't find one she'll leave the apple core on the counter. 

What if Haru pulls open the drawer that has the trash in it?

Nope! Produce waste goes in compost buckets. She can pull a compost bucket together later if the apple core is on the counter, but if it goes in the trash, it won't get composted!

Huh. He closes the drawer again. Makes a second ramen.

She eyes his ramen speculatively once she's done with hers, but decides she isn't hungry right now. 

Fork goes in sink and empty ramen cup goes in trash. 

What if he opens the dishwasher?

She'll put the fork in the dishwasher, sure. After rinsing it briefly in the sink. 

Which he narrates to Cricket so he'll have a written record of it to sort out later. Time for him to eat ramen while being snuggled. Can she at least be maneuvered onto his left?

Sure why not. 

Then he and Cricket will speculate about her condition throughout lunch! Does she keep reading the sonnets?

She'll keep struggling through them but she's becoming increasingly annoyed by the incomprehensibleness of it all. 

He tells Cricket Plus Phone which ones she skips and which ones she seems to process and when she eventually gives up on the book he'll send this (disclaimed as being unedited text to speech) to her mom in case she's got any insight. And also to make it less conspicuous that there is nothing but him stopping him from taking advantage of her backlashed daughter. He will just give that alternate universe asshole her mother might be worried about very little space to hide in.

Lavinia thanks him for the info and looks up the sonnets so she can try to put together a pattern. The ones Lucy is having less problems with have more...nature...in them?

If when he's done with his ramen he opens the back door does she wanna be outside or nah?

Nope. Indoors is comfier, plus if they go outdoors the comfy flying thing might randomly fly off again, and there's no reason to expect that if that happened the next place it lands her will have, like, food. 

Inside it is. He shuts the door.

Back to the couch. Cricket runs out of Better Off Ted content and starts instead talking about the latest from Bollywood.

If comfy thing is insistent on going back to Couch this is acceptable. But if it is amenable to being guided, she will go back to the bookshelf. 

- yes, sure, he's curious where she's going with this! Does she want to exchange the sonnets for something?

Yep! She shifts her clinging to free up a hand, and run those fingers over the spines; when she sees a title she can comprehend, she pulls it out and checks the back, and once she finds one where she can comprehend the entire blurb on the back she will go couch. 

Haru's mostly got classic novels! And a couple reviewer copies of books about dungeons. What's she going to land on here?

Oh, let's go with a dungeon book. People are divided enough on whether dungeons have agency that she can comprehend them while assuming that agency doesn't exist.

She put the poems back on the shelf (instead of leaving it lying around; she put an apple core on the counter) and picked up a nonfiction book instead. Couch now?

Couch now!

Was there somewhere for compost?

Lavinia asks. 

No, I guess maybe she wouldn't settle for a trash can?

Maybe. If it were at home she might leave something on the counter briefly if the compost bucket wasn't there because someone was taking it out...

"Cricket, can you check if she minds if you trash her core?"

The drawer has an extra pull attached at the bottom specifically for Cricket. He pulls it open, then hops up onto the counter and bats the core in.

--Well that's not ideal but not really worth attempting to prevent. 

I had my cat (Cricket) throw it away and she looked consternated but not upset or moved to intervene.

I don't know what that means, sorry.

Perturbed? Like it bothered her a bit.

--Sorry, I mean, I'm not immediately able to interpret that behavior, not, I need a dictionary.

Oh, sorry, my bad.

I was ambiguous. 

I apologize a lot as a backlash symptom sorry

Oh! Okay. That seems, uh. Probably better than...whatever is happening right now 

It all depends on amount. I flew home from the hospital to pull down her backlash more effectively but I didn't get myself up to awakening levels, that's not safe for anyone.

That does not make me worry less 

Hopefully she'll be able to tell us what's going on at some point. 

working on it!

The dungeon book ever references people, such as espers or kidnappees, but Lucy is mostly managing to work her way through it anyway. 

Is she going to let him go to the bathroom.

Sure!

...

Oh, alone? Haha no.

She doesn't want to let me go to the bathroom by myself. I can force the issue with the gratuitous use of superpowers without harming her but, also, when I was awakening, I could not go to the bathroom alone, and dragged one or the other parent in with me every time, so this is not inherently unthinkable to me. Best guess how she'd feel about this?

Check how she reacts to being made to let go?

Haru attempts to pry her off him gently.

Is his attempt to make her let go more uncomfortable than guiding is comfortable?

Yeah no he doesn't want to actually hurt her.

Then nope.

...what if he tickles her, does she let go long enough?

Eep! Yeah that’ll do it!

"Keep an eye on her, kitty," and into the bathroom with him.

She tries to follow him but doesn’t do worse than pout when this doesn’t work.

That's good, it'd be hard to hold onto the doorknob from relevant corners of the bathroom. He's out again in a jiffy.

Oh good! She grabs onto him again, this time from behind so the tickle hands will be less likely to intersect with her rib cage.

Valid but makes it kind of hard to sit on the couch.

He texts Lavinia to reassure her about the proceedings.

After a while, she looks up from her book, trying to see if there’s an obvious way to tie the comfortable thing in one place.

Not obviously no.

Hmmmmm.

Trying to carry it around while trying to find a bathroom sounds awkward.

Is there anything handy she could tie it to? Some piece of furniture with legs?

The sofa has legs.

She takes off her shirt.

That is a logical thing to do and he will accept this situation. Professionally.

Will he accept her tying one of the sleeves around his wrist and the other around the leg of the sofa?

....you know what, sure, he can get out any time he wants if he needs to stop her from setting the house on fire or something, he will allow it.

Cricket, on the other hand, will be literally rolling on the floor laughing his ass off.

He can really extremely get out of it if he needs to! It has occurred to Lucy that he might incidentally tug on the knots but not that he could, you know, deliberately untie them.

Okay now that the Comfy Thing is secured she’s going to go try to find a bathroom.

Oh, hey! The room the Comfy Thing ended up in after the Tickling Incident is a bathroom! What a fortuitous coincidence. Pity she didn’t know that at the time.

It does not occur to her to bother closing the door but fortunately the angles are such that this is merely notable and not deeply awkward.

Cricket has no interest in supervising her when he could be purring on Haru,

who is petting him with his free hand and snickering and admitting that it might indeed seem very funny in a week.

And Lucy returns and hugflops. She does not make any move to untie Haru, let alone put her shirt back on; but on the plus side, she didn’t decide to remove any more garments while in the bathroom.

Since Haru is now flopped on Cricket will undo the arm knot for him and then begin to summarize the entire plot of How I Met Your Mother.

Oh hm the shirt has gotten loose. Lucy unties the other end from the sofa leg and toes it around her waist; she likes that shirt and it would be a pity to lose it if the thing starts flying again.

She can do that unimpeded.

...if he puts on music, once his backlash is down enough, something everybody knows like Bohemian Rhapsody, will she sing? This has got to be psychological, maybe she'll sing even if she won't speak communicatively...

!

She’ll totally sing!

It hadn’t actually come up at any point in their communications prior to today, but it turns out she is good at singing.

I put on Bohemian Rhapsody and she will sing even though she won't, like, address me or Cricket

She does like singing. And Freddie Mercury.

He'll let the rest of the album play, then, though quietly enough that he can still hear Cricket commentating.

After a couple of songs she gets up and starts dancing.

She is a lot better at singing than dancing, but she’s definitely having fun.

Thaaaat's counter to the project of getting her guided to the point where she can maybe issue any comments about the situation. He could... dance with her, he guesses?

Well, if he gets up this will successfully jar her out of her dance-like-you-cannot-comprehend-there-being-anyone-to-watch reverie! She is briefly on high alert and then relaxes when he doesn’t, like, leave.

He's not a great dancer himself but he can do moving around vaguely to the beat in a manner which allows for guiding if she's amenable and if she's not then he's going to try to get her back onto the couch.

She does not perceive him as a potential dance partner. Back to the couch.

Would dance, would not dance with me. I think between my observations and the fact that she's compatible with me it's something about how she perceives other people, at least partially, I'm going to ask my mother if she can borrow somebody's pet which Lucy doesn't already know to be a person and see what happens.

Oh, that must be very strange for her. And for you, obviously. I’ll think about how else to test it.

Haru calls his mom. She can't think of an appropriately borrowable pet but says she'll buy a feeder mouse on the way home as long as Cricket doesn't mind eating it post-experiment for them.

Can do.

And here is Ren with a mouse in a little grille-topped plastic box!

Lucy looks up when the door opens but when the comfy thing doesn’t move towards it or anything she goes back to her book.

Ren presents her with the emboxed mouse.

Sounds irrelevant.

Cricket politely takes it into the backyard to dispose of.

No displayed interest in a nonperson animal.

I don’t know if that’s conclusive, she’s usually more interested in people than animals…

Not conclusive at all, no.

Eventually she puts down her book and goes back to her phone.

She gets another text from her mom, and frowns at it.

Then she goes back to Traceless’s text about her having an esper awakening.

Uh. Wait. If you’re awakening as an esper then…the obvious thing to feel arbitrarily really good is…guiding, isn’t it.

Which you get from other espers.

Who have the capacity to see you with your shirt off.

She gingerly unhugs long enough to untie her shirt from around her waist and put it back on.

"So the donuts were actually - Lucy?"

Oh! That’s her name!

“Yes?”

"Hey. You're awakening. Can you possibly describe what your backlash is now that you can talk?"

OH of COURSE that’s where all the confusion is coming from.

“I seem to be missing—concepts? Possibly just one concept, I don’t know. But I’ll read something or hear a song and there’ll just be chunks of—gibberish, like, it’s not that I don’t recognize the words but that the words’ meanings don’t make any sense.”

"Okay. Which words confused you, do you remember?"

“Um…” 

She gets up and grabs the sonnets book.

“‘Heir.’ ‘Thou.’ ‘Husbandry.’ ‘Mother.’ ‘Lady.’ ‘Muse…’”

He writes those down but the pattern is not obvious. "Is there anything confusing in a way I should try to explain?"

“Uh—I assume the reason it occurred to me that I could be perceived is because of guiding?”

"Yeah, I'm pulling on your backlash pretty hard. Your roommate called me and -" Hm. 'Mother' is one of the confusing words. "- then I took you home with me from the hospital."

“Roommate goes on the list of confusing words.”

"Do you know who I am?"

“You’re an esper.”

"Okay, but you don't remember which one or anything?"

“Well, obviously we’re compatible, but before encountering backlash-related confusion I obviously had no way of assessing that.”

"Okay. I'm... the same person who sent you a text saying that you were awakening, you looked at that text a minute ago."

“Right, that makes sense.”

She still has her phone open to that message. She looks at it again in case there’s some piece of context there that she missed and that he expects her to have.

The sender is labeled as “Traceless.”

Oh nooooooo.

She doesn’t entirely remember WHY it’s so much worse for Traceless to have accidentally seen her with her shirt off than some other esper, but it definitely is!!!

"...is that bad for some reason."

“I tied you to the sofa!!!” With her SHIRT. It’d be great if a meteor would hit her or something.

"I could've stopped you, I got out as soon as I wanted out, it wasn't a big deal. I awakened too and also did embarrassing things while backlashed. It's a normal esper thing."

“Yeah, but doing embarrassing things to you is much worse than doing them to a stranger!”

"...'stranger' isn't a confusing word?"

“…A stranger is…a thing-capable-of-perception, that I have not previously interacted with.”

"Huh. Can you tell me if there are strangers in the room right now?" Ren's over there, fixing dinner, and Cricket's on Haru's shoulder.

“No, I could tell you were capable of perception because you had to be an esper because the nice thing I was experiencing had to be guiding and all espers are things-capable-of-perception. If anything else in the room is an esper I could probably tell by touching it but I’m pretty sure there are things capable of perception that are not espers, and I have no way of identifying those.” She considers this. “The sofa isn’t an esper.”

"You're right, the sofa is not an esper. Uh, while you're capable of having a conversation - I can't keep this up literally constantly all week and I need to know your guiding preferences for when you can't remember that I exist, or whatever, in order to express them."

“Oh, uh—I think while I’m not being guided at all I would prefer to be somewhere nobody can perceive me. With phone and charger and preferably some physical puzzle things. I think backlash is usually more acutely unpleasant than this? I mean I’m mortified now but I wasn’t when I didn’t realize I was being perceived.”

"You seemed really chill about it, yeah. Would you rather not be guided in your sleep?"

“No, that’s fine. Actually it’s even better than being guided while awake because I can’t do anything embarrassing while asleep.”

"Okay. Uh, obviously you can choose to keep your shirt on but surface area is linear with guiding and I am quite confident that no new perceiving-things will perceive the situation or judge you for it if you don't, either now or when you're more confused."

“…I would be more fine taking my shirt off if I were wearing a sports bra instead of, uh, this, but probably I can get over myself. And put on shorts.”

"I can... acquire bras and shorts but they're not going to be in exactly your size... hm. At school, are there names posted on your dorm room's door? It'd be yours and one other name."

“Oh! Yes, my name is on the door. In purple construction paper. With glitter.”

"Is there anything else posted on the door, possibly also on construction paper?"

“Oh, uh, yeah, it’s ‘Rosy.’” Why does she have the name of a plant on her door? Probably not important. “In red construction paper with sequins.”

"Great. Can I borrow your phone? This will help with getting you clothes that fit."

“Okaaaay.”

Is there exactly one Rosy in her contacts?

There is not a Rosy exactly but there is someone denoted with rose emojis.

Is this Lucy's roommate? This is Traceless and I forgot to get your contact info to ask about e.g. getting her a few changes of clothes. My number is

Oh, sure, what’s she need?

Week's worth of her clothes, phone charger, any puzzly things she had besides the one. I can have someone pick up a bagful if you want to say where's convenient.

She gives the location of the campus visitor center and asks for half an hour.

Thumbs up emoji. From his own phone he texts Paula; Lucy can have her phone back. "Thanks. Some of your clothes will be here soon."

Wow that was faster than she was expecting! She wonders what he did. “Thanks.”

"You're welcome. Anything else I might need to know to keep you comfortable this week?"

She thinks about this. “Food? I can, like, cook, but I don’t know what there is besides ramen and apples.”

"Dinner will appear in..." He glances over at Ren.

"Twenty minutes," guesses Ren.

"...did you catch that?" he wonders.

“…Yes? You said dinner will appear in twenty minutes.”

"I said the first part of that, but I didn't say the second part! Did it sound like me for the whole sentence?"

“…There was a sound change partway through, but it didn’t occur to me that that meant there were two speakers. Why didn’t you say the whole thing?”

"I didn't know the answer."

“Then why didn’t the other one say the whole sentence?”

"The other one didn't know about the question till I started the sentence."

“So it wasn’t here when I asked?”

"Was, but your question could have been about food in the longer term than just dinner tonight in particular. I can show you what's in the fridge and the pantry, after dinner."

“I’m still confused but okay.”

"Understandable. So, clothes on the way, food handled, you want to be guided in your sleep but if I need to step out for some reason you want to be unobserved, have I got all that right?"

“Right. I mean, if you’re going to step out briefly enough that I don’t forget observation exists then—but no, yeah, that’s correct.”

"Okay. Uh, how do you feel about being perceived auditorially only by one additional perceiver beyond those presently able to hear you."

“Now, or in that circumstance?”

"Now. I can connect to possible perceivers on the phone, it's a classic phone behavior."

“Yeah that’s fine. I’m not making any assumptions about how many observers there are or aren’t, right now.”

"Cool." He calls Lavinia on his own phone. "You're on speaker! Lucy is now aware I exist but it's through circuitous logic going through the fact that guiding implies esper implies that I'm a being capable of perception."

“Lucy! How are you?”

“I…am…fine? Well, no, I’m horribly embarrassed, but apparently that doesn’t count this week.”

"It'd be hypocritical of me to tell you not to be embarrassed but it'd be like being embarrassed about having the flu."

“I tied you to the sofa. The flu isn’t inherently embarrassing.”

“Sorry, why?”

“Well, I didn’t want him to leave, and I had noticed that he moved ever but not that he was capable of observing my actions.”

"Hey, you referred to me in the third person, that's neat."

“Talking to multiple subjects is complicated.”

"How so?"

“Keeping track of which is which is the hardest part. But also third-person pronouns.”

"Well, I think as long as I keep hovering you'll tick down a little from here though probably not a lot, so it might get easier, though I am going to want to stop hovering around dinnertime."

“In twenty minutes?”

"Yup."

“Okay.”

“Be well, sweetheart,” says the voice on the phone.

“I’ll—try?”

"Feel free to get off the phone, just thought this'd be reassuring."

“Would it be obvious why if I were less backlashed?”

"It would be obvious why I said that if you were less backlashed, yes."

Shrug. “Okay. G’bye, phone person.”

Lavinia laughs. “Goodbye. I love you.”

"I'll catch you up if there's more developments," Haru tells Lavinia and hopefully she will hang up because he's been hovering a while and hanging up the phone sucks.

She hangs up very quickly! She has no desire to hear her daughter conspicuously not say “I love you” back.

Being hung up on also sucks but he is a professional. He hovers. He snuggles. "So will jigsaw puzzles work for you or do they have to be three dimensional things?"

“I would like three dimensional things but jigsaws are also good.”

"Are there some in your dorm room?"

“…I don’t think so.”

"Okay. Do you think that even when you're more backlashed you might be able to browse, like, shopping websites, and pick some out, and not buy them yourself since they wouldn't show up here but leave the information about which you like somewhere I can see it?"

“Hmmm. I think I can…leave myself an instruction sheet, for doing that? Worth a shot.”

"Sounds good. Texting me links works."

"I can work with that. Do you have, like, actual paper, and a marker would be better than a pen for this."

"Yeah - well, paper, yes, I'm not positive about markers - do you want to come with me to get it?"

"You can take a marker out of the bag in the backseat of my car if you need one!"

"Ah, okay, thanks Mom - yes markers also, why is a marker better than a pen?"

"More eye-catching."

"Gotcha. I do have a red pen, but apparently there are markers." Hup. Will she come upstairs to get a blank spiral notebook and then to Ren's car in the garage for a marker?

She sure will! 

Once she has both, she tears a page out of the notebook and writes, in red marker:

TO OBTAIN OBJECTS, GO TO: AMAZON.COM, ETSY.COM, 

INPUT ITEM LINK TO TEXT SCREEN WITH "ESPER AWAKENING"

And now dinner's on the table.

And Lucy has managed to get juuuust unbacklashed enough that, with some squinting around, she can tentatively identify twenty-minutes-saying-person and thank them!

"You're welcome, dear!"

Okay good now food eating. Yum. No offense to instant ramen but real food is tastier. 

It's flanksteak in a nice marinade and a side of roasted potatoes and bag salad.

Oh that's really nice.