She reaches for her pocket - there is no phone in her pocket.

Right. No phone for backlashed Cara. She slumps a little.

"You can have it but you should stay off messaging apps and I'm not sure how well you'll remember how to do that," he says, handing over the phone. "So possibly you should only phone when I'm present and alert."

She should stay off messaging apps, huh...

She takes her phone back and starts uninstalling discord, instagram, tumblr, facebook, twitter,

"Uhhh I don't know that you need to uninstall them, just, people could give you instructions on them without being responsible about it."

Oops! She stops. "Um - it's not hard to reinstall apps afterwards, and those ones don't store anything locally that isn't in the cloud..." she trails off as she actually stops to think through possible repercussions.

"...it would have been bad if I'd deleted signal, those aren't backed up anywhere, thanks for saying something. I could... delete the shortcuts, set up parental controls for messaging apps, turn off notifications globally?"

"Those sound like fine precautions as long as you're not losing any data."

"No, those are all pretty straightforwardly reversable - I do this when I have schoolwork I really need to stop procrastinating on."

Shortcuts - deleted. Calendar and news widgets - removed from homescreen. Do Not Disturb - enabled. Parental Controls - enabled, forbidding her remaining social media apps.

She hums to herself while she does it.

Pet pet. "Hopefully things framed as imperatives in blog posts don't trigger you but I guess 'while the author is there to belay orders' is a good time to find out."

"-seems like a good time to test, yeah. Can you think of any posts that would make an easy test of this?"

"Uh, I yell at people to fill out their dungeon surveys a lot but if you've never been taken by a dungeon that will probably not land... probably some of my monthly roundup posts have donation drives and stuff."

She selects one and starts reading it.

haru doesn't want her to take orders from the post, haru doesn't want her to take orders from the post, haru doesn't want her to take orders from the post,

9. Racehorse finally fixed the bug that erroneously told people names were free based on special characters, spaces, and punctuation. No, you cannot be Tomorrow Girl.

10. There's donation matching available for various antimalarial charities through July, but donation matching is slightly fake so even if it's not July any more go give them some money.

She reads it, stops, looks at him, and then back at the page, and keeps scrolling, leaning harder against him. "weird."

Snug snug. "Weird how?"

She waves a hand vaguely. "The experience of having one request override another like that is mildly jarring. And - maybe vaguely informative? There's like..." she pulls up a notes app on her phone to type it out, it's hard to hold all in her head. Factors she thinks mattered:

- the command in the blog is more direct (go give them some money) than the thing Haru said to me just now (which has a very obvious command, but it's entirely implied).
  - More Direct > Less Direct?
- the command in the blog is less targeted-at-me - it's for everyone reading the site, and not something Haru said to me directly.
   - More Specific > Less Specific?
- the command in the blog is older than the thing Haru said to me just now.
   - Recent > Older?
- the command in the blog wants me to do something, and the thing Haru said to me just now wanted me not to do something.
   - Negative action > Positive action?

She hands it to Haru to read.

"Huh. That does seem informative, yeah. This kind of thing is relevant for if you want to do dungeons, sometimes victims say some shit and you'd really really want to be - under standing instructions that would overrule them saying shit -"

"I think probably it cares about who is giving the instruction, too. Like..." she thinks back to earlier in the day. "If my mom had texted me telling me to do something that contradicted an instruction from you, it would have been really easy to ignore her? Because she's " kind of shitty notably irrational about Cara because of her own brainworms " less trustworthy than you are. Not sure how that would stack up with victims, though."

"I probably see unusually irrational victims because I go into psychic dungeons that are driving them nuts, but even a bog standard dungeon is going to get lots of people who are stressed out and taking it out on the closest thing to a customer service agent. But I guess brainstorming about how to navigate that will best wait till we know what your powers'll be, you might not even have dungeoneering powers."

"I might not!" she agrees. 

Now she wants to read something about esper powers and backlashes... is there anything like that on Haru's blog?

Sure, she might want Galaxy Brained Opposites.

Ooooh! She does in fact want Galaxy Brained Opposites.

Snuggled reading esper.

...

Not all backlashes are public, of course, but we can still figure out a lot from the ones that are. Yan Xiu has a fever backlash. Does he have cold powers? No! He has the power to lure creatures to him, which then act docile in his presence. What the hell? Well, a fever is an immune response: you become inhospitable to microbes and parasites that wanted you to be your original temperature. What's the opposite of "inhospitable to hostile organisms"? Apparently, according to whatever wacky gacha game our powers come from, it's "inviting to no-longer-hostile organisms". (See also Yan Xiu's photo gallery featuring him surrounded by tamed critters, he's one of the only espers who does as much dungeon photography as I think needs doing.)

This is probably to some extent a just-so story. I didn't, of course, hear about the fever backlash in isolation and independently make up Yan Xiu's power based on what would be opposite a fever backlash. (The obvious thing would be cold powers - and some espers do in fact have power/backlash combinations that straightforward, like Jenny Papadopol (sonar/deafness), Mr. X (telekinetic folding/joint stiffness), or Salve (healing/malaise), But if you gave Yan Xiu a completely randomly chosen other power - say, Tomorrowgirl's precognition - then I wouldn't be able to think of anything at all...

Huh. So basically there are a lot of different kinds of powers she could have with this backlash and it doesn't make sense to think of it as "something that is the opposite of Traceless's power", which - is not really a super coherent category to begin with.

"Reading this makes me wonder if there's like - an esper RPF subgenre where people try and come up with alternate powers while keeping the backlashes fixed?"

"Huh, I don't know, I don't really read fanfiction."

"I've read some crackfic but I bounce off of most of it, it's usually less interesting than talking to people and affords less talking-to-people than consuming popular source medias. But I know a lot of people who are really into it and it's fun hearing them talk about the kinds of things that happen in those communities, you know? If there weren't so many vastly more important things to be doing I would love to be a digital anthropologist, there's so much gold out there that almost nobody knows about or hears about..."