He arrives from his afternoon dungeon, backlashed but not overwhelmingly so, and of course on the phone. He waves at Flywheel as he comes in, mm-hming at whatever the person on the other end is saying (he has his phone volume all the way down, so she can't hear it) and then chirps, "I will totally send you the footage, I'm excited to see where you can get with it! Bye!", and he flinches only a little bit when the other person hangs up.

"Hi Flywheel."

"Hi Traceless." She reaches out an arm - guiding will help him more than conversation, though of course they need to do both. "...you can call me Cara, if you want." Both names have complicated bundles of associations for her, now, but - she only picked one of them for herself, and in the end, it's the one she likes better.

He sits next to her and leans in. "Oh cool. I'm -" he almost but does not quite say his name - "not usually overwhelmingly infosec oriented but -"

"- well, among the topics I think we should have a conversation about is, like. In the unlikely event someone asks you for my name mid-dungeon, what happens."

Yeah.

Cara sighs. "I am used to doing dungeons without getting sound input except for from an emergency DRT channel. In the unlikely event that it comes up anyways... at low backlash I have a lot of steering power. At higher levels... I can steer a bit, with a lot of effort. More, if I've been given contradicting instructions. I think how much I trust the person who gave the instruction matters a fair bit for that, but - I have done very little intentional multi-person testing. Willowbark was really worried about what might happen, if it got out. There was that scandal in Japan, a few years back..."

Hey dipshit, that's a lot of words to say "...it is not perfectly safe to tell me anything though. So if you'd rather not share your name, I understand."

"It's not the worst thing in the world if it gets loose, it's a nickname and I'm not enormously famous and at any rate Cricket is constantly flying in and out of the house far more distinctive-looking than even a more colorful esper and nobody's decided they've got a problem with us yet. But more generally I am concerned that I have picked up a responsibility I do not have the tools to succeed at. It doesn't have to be me, you met me just the other day, I get that, but someone needs to know your deal, and, uh, I think it'd be ideal if it were at least two people, like, a partner and separately an agent, for - accountability and backup contingencies."

Cara nods. "Yeah. I'm not sure if I want Paula to be one of the people; I think she's optimized for your needs, not mine." Deep breath. "And you don't have to be that partner, obviously, if you don't want to. But I can tell you how it works, or at least what I know."

"It's not a good idea for partners to share agents anyway, it's a conflict of interest. I'm - I'd be more than twice as effective as an esper if we were a long term arrangement, which is important to me in spite of the countervailing evidence that I can barely drag myself to a mixer once every couple of years to strike out at it, and I think I am capable of developing the skills you need in a shot-caller and whatever else you have going on, but I don't already have them and guessing on the fly is. Uh. Bad. As a plan. So - if you don't mind, yeah."

"I think you have most of the pieces, but to put them in one place - my backlash makes me less of a subject and more of an object. I progressively lose passive and then active access to my own preferences and needs, including, at high levels, things like pain. I start interpreting requests as instructions, it gets harder and harder to not - automatically follow instructions." 

She clings to him a bit. "Instructions can be pretty vague - the vaguer they are, the more latitude I have to interpret them. They be bounded or open-ended, and if they're open-ended, I won't forget them." Slight pause. "There are things that Willowbark told me that I still..." she trails off, looking and sounding pretty conflicted.

"...is it even theoretically possible to, like, retroactively belay those instructions - if you don't need them for something, I mean, I'm not sure what mix to expect there."

"I think if you told me that I don't need to follow Willowbark's instructions that would, uh, push back against most of it. And I could - write down a list of all of them, if you asked me while I was backlashed, but - it would take a while and I expect it would..." 

Fuck. How to even - "...neither of us knew my backlash did this, when we partnered up. I remembered very, very little of my hellweek. I thought it just made me tell the truth when people asked me questions, which is bad but much less comprehensive. And... it was easy to rationalize, for a bit, and... hard to explain." I didn't want her to treat me like an unprepared kid. Even if that would have been correct.

"Everybody needs powers testing and if you don't remember your hellweek I guess sometimes you need... backlash testing."

"...we did do some, once I fessed up, and I was careful about picking a partner I could trust - a few of the night shift employees at my hell week hospital got a lot of... juicy stories out of me, when they realized. But... yeah, if that had been a formal service, it would have been good for me. I did my power testing with Willowbark, and the first time we did any, I almost died of being bad at math." God, it's still embarrassing, even a year later.

"Of... you have a sensor power, did it hit you in the square-cube law or something?"

This gets a bit of a laugh, though there's no humor in it. "Worse, really. My default range is a meter around me. I kept scaling it up by the radius, and didn't stop to check how much it was backlashing me." He already knows the backlash cost scales with the volume.

"Because your backlash interferes with being aware of it or just because you were excited to have a power - that's not really a relevant question, sorry, it's okay to yank me back on topic when I'm backlashed. Or when I'm not but I'm less rambly then."

"Mostly the latter, I'd spent several days not using my power at all because I didn't want to be backlashed around someone that didn't seem trustworthy. And the sensory aspect of my power is so grounding. It makes me feel like I'm at the center of the world." She rests her head on him. "And noted, but - chatty is good for me, I think, so I'm probably not going to do that much redirecting unless it feels really important, we can always circle back." though obviously I did just admit to keeping something very important from my past partner so you'd have to be an idiot to trust me with tracking that, right. 

"It's really weird that chatty is good for you and we're compatible, like, I guess I have written several articles to the effect that compat is spookily mysterious but I was really expecting all my good compatibility to be something along the lines of June, competing access needs all the way down..."

(Yeah, and I was expecting all my compatibilities shut up, shut up, shut up)

"Well, the chatty is my personality, not my backlash? I think the backlashes make sense, though... yours wants people to pay attention to you. Mine makes me unable to pay attention to me." She shrugs. "...we were talking about past instructions." (Wow, you actually did circle back! Good job.)

"Right. If I were you I'd want a whole list for reference, I can prompt you to write it without reading it myself."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I could... do that and then ask you to countermand specific ones, if you'd be comfortable with that? I certainly don't need to, like, text her when I get out of a dungeon and can't find her." She lets out a bit of a sob. "...sorry."

Squeeze.

Cling. 

...don't stop talking. He's still backlashed.

"I think that's the main points of my backlash? If you have any questions..." 

"Do you in fact need painkillers when you're backlashed, it would not be unheard of not to."

Oh, right. "It's... if I'm backlashed enough to not react I might still feel it when I check. And I definitely remember it like it hurt, even if I was backlashed. If there's time, I'd prefer it, I guess." (She's not bothering hide the fact that she's thinking it through as she answers - if the truth is embarrassing, then she should be embarrassed.)