It's okay if she can come up with an excuse. Fortunately, that isn't going to come up because Christa is really predictably going to-

-shake her head as soon as she's finished processing what Tanthe's saying. Reading her is fine!

"Okay! I'd let you read me too but, um, I spend a lot of time thinking about my embarrassing sex-related personal problems when I'm in the Pink, and I don't quite know you that well yet, sorry." Not not true, but it will probably take longer to figure out how to reveal Aire's secret in a minimally painful fashion than it will for Tanthe to feel otherwise comfortable opening up.

"Oh, that's okay! I, um, don't really have anything that private, I think, so I don't mind, but that doesn't mean you have to not mind!"

"That's fair," she agrees, "I probably would've said exactly the same thing if our situations were reversed."

She nods. "So, you said you're a powerful psychic? What all can you do?" She's visibly holding herself back from bouncing excitedly as she asks.

(A small bit of her in the back of her mind is deciding to get over the whole "be embarrassed by thinking of embarrassing things" process that's inevitably going to happen by just digging up her most embarrassing memory at the start. This process has not yet completed by the time she's done talking, it's currently brushing past that time she lost a fight against a goose when she was twelve.)

Losing a fight against a goose is honestly adorable but she's not sure it would be helpful to say so. Aire, any advice?

"I can read minds really well, though it's hard to be sure exactly how well when I've known so few telepaths, and I'm a telekinetic too but I have even less of an idea how I measure up there, I just have reason to think I'm probably really good from the stories in my mom's family."

Aire agrees, it's so adorable it's ridiculous, this is why Aire finds her so pleasing to- no, she shouldn't think about that in detail, she needs to continue to control herself.

Anyway, it'd probably be helpful? Christa's pretty standard in that she likes being liked, and Aire thinks she'd like being thought of as adorable.

"Cool! I'm not that strong myself, noticeably a bit below average, and my control is atrocious."

Hmm, goose-fight is not the most embarrassing memory, even if failing to defend her friend from the horrible goose after solemnly pledging to defeat any hostile waterfowl in the river is pretty embarrassing. She ran away! Slower than her friend, but still!

"Are there a lot of telepaths where you're from? In Peachport there's just my mom's family. I could try teaching you all the meditations I learned from my aunt, though, if you want. Also, your goose-related adventures are adorable."

Oh good! If she's adorable she doesn't have to be embarrassed!

She's not quite sure why her brain has decided this is true, but it certainly has. And the bit of her brain digging up embarrassing memories seems to have been stopped working without the fear of embarrassment to fuel it.

"They aren't too common. I've run into a few, but not a lot. But even though they're not that common, Arcadia is really big, so there's still lots of them in the city, even if I didn't meet that many of them personally. And I'd really like to be taught! I've mostly just tried brute-forcing it, which hasn't worked so far, and spent the rest of my time on my alchemy studies."

"I'd really like to try teaching you, then! I'm not sure how much of it will help, but it sure helped me a lot, it took me years to figure out how to stop reading everyone but I did eventually manage it with Auntie Meri's help."

"Thank you so much! I really appreciate it! I, um, haven't even come close to not managing it, and hearing that it took you years gives me hope that it's probably not just that you're really powerful or something. I can't imagine what it would be like to have family that understood! It came out of nowhere in me. Or, well, my father had his suspicions, but it's not like we ever had a telepath come through town at some point, he was just being nasty."

"Oh, dear. I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe someday I'll get to introduce you to my family! I'm sure they'd love to meet you. Both of you, even. They'll be so happy I made friends out here."

Friends! Friends already! It's nice. Probably that's mostly Tanthe being nice, though. But even so, she can keep being friendly until they're friends for real!

There's a little bit of disquiet in the back of her mind about not just knowing, but if she gets better at controlling her telepathy she'll have to get used to that anyway, so she'll just have to cope.

"That's nice to hear. Does it change anything, having a bunch of people like you in your family? Wait, I guess you wouldn't know, it's not like you've ever experienced being in a different family that isn't full of telepaths."

"I did really appreciate Auntie Meri, growing up. It was nice to have - somewhere to go for answers. My mother isn't nearly as strong; she mostly let Meri teach me, since Meri could demonstrate things better. But it was still nice that she understood that part of me; Papa didn't so much, and I noticed that. Not that Papa's bad or anything!" she hastily clarifies. "I love him very much! But he's a Coiner, not a Fairbridge. Better at things involving innkeeping than things involving mysterious powers."

"Huh. You know, I think that might be a difference between the Dragon Empire and Peachport! It's rare and odd there, but I don't think people would tend to think of it as mysterious powers. Like, I had a lot of people who didn't like me because they were worried about me reading their thoughts and spreading their secrets around. It's often not liked, but people think of it as weird and bad the same way they thought about girls who liked other girls, not as something mysterious."

She's glad Tanthe has a good dad. She only had a good mom.

"...people think girls who like other girls are weird and bad?" she says, blinking. "Really? That one doesn't come up much in Peachport. Anyway, yes, my mother's family's powers are thought of as mysterious. Telepathy and telekinesis and truesight. And people say we have an unnatural talent for astrology but I don't know how true that is; I think we might just have a family tradition for astrology that ends with us being better at it than most people."

Peachport sounds so nice! Also yes they do, it's very sad.

Wait, Tanthe's a telepath, why is she talking? Well, it helps Tanthe know exactly which of her thoughts she wants her to respond to, and it's easier than deliberately mentally marking them, she supposes. Also, it's sort of nice?

"Aw, I wish I had a whole big family tradition to fall back on in anything. Or, well, anything besides being moderately wealthy manorial farmers, which really isn't the same as astrology or generations of psychic abilities. It does keep the family fed, I suppose. But it involves rather a lot more slaughtering livestock than I'd like to have happen close enough for me to telepathically overhear."

"My father's family also has inherited powers but 'lays little eggs made of precious metals' is much less mysterious than telepathy. And it's hard to feel very glamorous about it when you're trying to pick them out of the mess in the bathtub. I am sorry about the livestock, though, that sounds awful."

"It was, um, not fun, yeah. They were good at it though, so they didn't really notice what was going on, at least. It was too fast. Anyway, moving on from that to talk about less sad things, you lay eggs made of precious metals? I don't think that comes across as mysterious to me, but it certainly feels more worth remarking on than telepathy! I've never heard of anything like that! Oh, you hear about some people who lay eggs, that happens occasionally, but not metal ones."

"All the women in my father's line do! It's part of how Peachport got to be so prosperous, never lacking for things to trade. We used to run the town but now we only run the inn."

Christa's brain has classified Tanthe as an Interesting Person of Great Import, and so something in the back of her brain is now sure that there was some sort of grand intrigue that resulted in the Coiners losing control of the town. The rest of her brain is saying that so far Peachport hasn't sounded like that kind of place. And then that second part goes a bit quiet. Is she sure anywhere isn't that kind of place?

"Oh, I was wondering how someplace between the Fringe and the Green got to the point of being a proper port! People don't come to trade for nothing after all."

"We trade with the people of the Fringe and the Green too, but I think it's Coiner gold that got the sailors from Vynait interested, and then of course once you're a town with a lot of trade people come to trade more things. I might have the history wrong, though, I've never heard exactly how the town was founded, just that it was Coiners who got it going somehow or other. Um, and I don't think it was any grand intrigue exactly, I think the inn and the town both got bigger so the same handful of people couldn't run both anymore and my ancestors decided to stick with the inn because it made them more money. Though I could be wrong about that too."

"Ah, I'm glad there wasn't any intrigue involved, even if it would make you even more like one of the main characters in the novels I used to read growing up."