bottlebay | [voice], within the first week of October

[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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[ Being a psychic type often means being distinctively aware when the "network" buzzes even when not directly in contact with the pearl itself, she avoids a visual though there's something very displaced about what resonates back. For her part, she can tell, this sensation... it's nothing personal, exactly, but more of a curiosity, but that doesn't quite dampen the radiating annoyance she returns, at the fact that someone was trying to intentionally manipulate something they didn't quite have a grasp of.

Funny, how she'd relegated curious minds to children, but this felt very much the opposite. So much so that she's not certain how to deal with the concept, which in turn makes her curious to her own chagrin. Not "human", sure, but not anything else familiar, either. Granted, she's also something a bit different, as much as she's folded up into this Pokémon concept. ]

Tch... do you mind? Some of your more obvious questions should be answered by now.

[Need's emotions are faded and skewed, but she's experiencing a certain envy. In the normal course of things her Mind Gifts have been honed and stretched over centuries, to a frankly broken degree. Now? Doublade are two entities united by a telepathic bond, so she doesn't have nothing, but she's just not Psychic type.

She certainly is curious, in a detached, unhurried way, watching the displeasure and the interest.]

I also wanted to see how many people I can speak to independently at the same time. Looks like that's 'two'. Ah, well. At least I can still multitask a bit.

Handling more than that would just be annoying, anyway...

[ A way of acknowledging, though her own curiosity for further discussion wins out if only because 'Need' seems to have a calmer disposition than most. And distracts away from any other issues she is currently avoiding. ]

Were you able to do more than that before?

I'd gotten pretty good at it over the years. Thought of it as 'splitting my focus'.

[She has a certain dull pride, but thinks it would be pointless boasting to say much more, especially if at the moment she can't. Need... doesn't really believe anything, being a Pokemon included, is permanent.]

Having an easy-to-use communication system makes that less useful, admittedly. Can you connect to people without using these pearls?

Oh?

[ Her own curiosity again, she'd been so focused on trying to keep others 'out' that she hadn't considered more practical uses just yet. Even as she considers the words, she begins to think about how that might be accomplished. Intriguing... ]

Unfortunately, I don't need to be intentionally holding onto it for it to activate if that's what you mean... my interaction with it is from a side effect of being 'psychic'. That said, it might be possible to create a similar effect privately if needed. I simply hadn't considered the use of that before.

[ Ironically, this conversation might inspire her a little later on a quest where talking out loud would be better avoided... ]

So you weren't 'psychic' before. Did you get any training in it when you came?

[Need is well aware of the trouble caused by uncontrolled Mind gifts and is immediately concerned. ...She is a teacher in it but isn't going to immediately volunteer.]

... No. [ It might be that she's too stubborn to ask for that, or too used to figuring things out her own way, but she continues. ]

Mostly because I had arrived here in a different form to begin with, so mostly it just seemed like something I should figure out to adapt to myself.

[ And there's probably just a lack of... trust toward most others that's not easy to shake. ]

[voice], within the first week of October

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sorry, work ate me!

no worries, me too...

why does capitalism etc

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