[voice], within the first week of October

[hasapoint]

[You feel something reaching out and touching your mind... Poking it, actually, like a prodding finger. It withdraws and tries a softer, finer touch. That withdraws too, and there's a pause. Looks like Need can't get around her powerloss and covertly use peoples' senses/look into their minds just by using the pearl network. Unfortunate.

After a moment, Need allows her presence to bloom into the connection and make itself known. If you can gauge this kind of thing at all two things are immediately evident. One is that she's very old. Not tired, not fragile, but distant and distorted to the point where her mind doesn't really feel human. The other is that she's female. There's nothing stereotypically feminine there but it's very clear. She's something crushed into a tiny space a very long time ago and also: she/her.]

Someone always figures out how to make a teleson. [Telepathy via technology.] How far does this reach? Does it work between people who haven't met?

[Need is far more accustomed to speaking mind-to-mind than using anything else, so her "voice" has a particular quality to it that I'm gonna keep rendering as italics.]

Where I'm from it's possible to visit other realities, where things might be very different, and be fully embodied in them but one's actual body remains behind. The more difficult part is getting back to it. I wonder if that's happened here.

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[telewarped]

[Upon contact, this mind—which at the first brush felt almost pliable, its natural defenses rendered weak by weariness and frayed nerves—turns prickly, like the raised hackles of a cat.]

Uh, can I help you?

[The words are spoken aloud rather than purely thought, but a vague impression of her is sent through the psychic connection still between them: young, stubborn, girl with a question mark at the end. Unlike Need, she seems tired beyond her years, but she still finds it in herself to listen to Need's theory and respond (however rudely).]

Maybe, maybe not. Lemme know if you ever figure it out, 'cause you'd be the first.

As for your questions: you tell me. Pretty sure I'd remember meeting some creepy old lady who gets her kicks from poking around in randos' heads.

[Never mind that everyone does some amount of poking around once they start using a Grumpearl; she gets the sense that Need has done this before and was trying to dig around on purpose.]

[hasapoint]

Give me a few decades to work on it and I'll get back to you.

[She says that with a faint, distorted confidence, like she really does believe she can figure it out eventually. She does think that, actually. There are people who learn faster than Need does, but she's thorough.]

Hah. That's fair. It wasn't my intention but, very well, I won't do it again.

[Establishing psychic contact with someone unfamiliar in Velgarth takes more effort and reaching past the surface than is required with the Grumpearls. Need considers saying this and decides against it. also, it wasn't her intention to be noticed. ]

[telewarped]

Wasn't your intention, huh? I find that hard to believe. Seemed to me like you've done this before... Felt like it, too.

[A flicker of uncertainty. Unless she misread it...?]