the place to be

[point_b]

Bella finds it.

"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."

"You c'mere. Easier for you."

"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."

"Okay, fine, where are you?"

"Garage."

So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.

"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."

"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."

"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.

Nothing happens.

The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.

Comments

[whatamithinking]

"Yeah, the only way we're all going to be awake at the same time 'tomorrow' is if Milliways time-warpery shoehorns it."

[point_b]

"But it might!"

[whatamithinking]

"It might well! Particularly given that as far as anyone can tell the time bullshit and the door bullshit are operated by the same entity."

[point_b]

"What an irksome entity that is."

[whatamithinking]

"No kidding. The only option I can think of that doesn't have really unfortunate implications about their ethics is if the interface got mistaken for a video game or something and whoever's doing it doesn't realize they're messing with real people."

[point_b]

"I can't even think of a good video game goal that involves trapping Lorica in here without her computer."

[whatamithinking]

"Neither can I, but that doesn't mean no one could," she shrugs. "And some people are just trolls. Which doesn't actually say terrible things about their ethics if they don't know people they're trolling are real."

[point_b]

"Yeah, I guess. I tend to be nice to my game people if I'm playing Civilization or whatever, but Alli drowns Sims and laughs."

[alli_oop]

"If you weren't supposed to be able to drown them then it wouldn't work like that."

[iamnotpolaris]

[whatamithinking]

"I don't tend to play video games since the lack of minds behind the characters puts me off, so I can't comment on my own habits."

[alli_oop]

"What about puzzle games?"

[whatamithinking]

"Those can be fun, but they don't have any opportunities to be a troll or not, so I wasn't counting them for relevant habits."

[alli_oop]

"What about, like, multiplayer stuff?"

[whatamithinking]

"It's alright, but then you're judging how much of a jerk you want to be to your friends, not fictional characters."

[alli_oop]

"It could be total strangers on the internet."

[whatamithinking]

"If it's total strangers on the internet, I can't feel their minds, and then we're back to square one."

[point_b]

"What is your range? And parameters for finding people within it?"

[whatamithinking]

"My range is...pretty wide. Several miles at least. I'm one of the three most powerful known telepaths back home. If I know what someone's mind feels like, and I check to see if they're there, I can find them if they're within my range. It's also possible to check for other things--if I were alright with reading peoples' minds I could look for 'the person who knows this thing' or 'dudes named Gilbert' or something like that, and one thing I have searched for in the past is 'intention to cause harm.'"

[point_b]

"What kind of information will a search like that turn up for you about people who aren't named Gilbert or don't know the thing or don't intend to cause harm?"

[whatamithinking]

"Very little. It's a case of...it's less that I'm checking each mind to see if it has the information and more that I'm checking the mindscape for instances of the information? Gilbert's the sloppiest one, for that I'd have to check for prominent emotional attachment to the name, and then I'm getting false positives from people whose loved ones have the name and I have to check for context."

[point_b]

"Gotcha. How do intentions register? If somebody's deluded about it, say, or prone to impulse harm but not actually planning on it?"

[whatamithinking]

"If someone thinks they can harm me and intends to try, it counts. If someone might do harm but isn't planning to when I check it doesn't count."

[point_b]

"Can you do 'don't object to mind reading' and only get anything meaningful from people with that characteristic?"

[whatamithinking]

"...Eenh, that one's a little less...either you know something or you don't, but how you feel about something is a sliding scale. I can establish a threshold and say that someone has to be at least this okay with the idea, but at that point I have to give the individual mind a poke to check where on the scale it falls. I can still get, say nothing other than one's opinion on being mind read from a given mind, but it's not the same kind of thing."