brockton bay, meet glam

[mxglam]

It's the anniversary. Glam would very much not like to celebrate.

It’s their last day on Winslow High - they’re being transferred to Arcadia on Monday - and also their last day without a patrol schedule assigned.

And the PRT released a small announcement on its website about Glam joining the Wards. Now their wiki page doesn’t get erased, of course - they’re no longer speculative. They wonder what it’s got on them.

Comments

[thinkering]

Ding! goes the robot.

"Now I'm going to tell her nothing's going to happen while we go on some conversational tangent. Your ball go."

[mxglam]

It goes! Slower than the second time she told their ball to go after Windflower was around, but faster than the third.

[thinkering]

Bleep.

"Real ball go."

[mxglam]

Real ball: no go.

[thinkering]

"And now I'm going to tell her to step out of the room for some control data. Real ball go."

[mxglam]

Rolls a tiny bit, the least it's rolled so far other than the times it just twitched.

[thinkering]

"Your ball go."

[mxglam]

Goes exactly as much as the very first time she asked their ball to go.

[thinkering]

"Okay, she's back now," Lorica lies. "Expecting, quote, 'more of the same'. Your ball go."

[mxglam]

Goes slightly faster than it just did, not as fast as when Windflower had actually been there and been told to expect more of the same.

[thinkering]

Windflower actually returns to the room. "Told her we're going to do the hovering thing, like your suit."

[mxglam]

"And I'm supposed to still make it slide?"

[thinkering]

"Yeah."

[mxglam]

It slides almost exactly as fast as the very first time.

[thinkering]

"And the other one."

[mxglam]

Doesn't move.

[thinkering]

"All right, that's probably enough. Chart me, bot," says Lorica, and the bot appears a chart on the wall with columns for Glam's expectation, Windflower's, and the result.

[mxglam]

The effects of expectations can be very easily divided in three components: what Glam expects will happen, what Windflower expects will happen, and what Glam expects Windflower expects will happen. Making a couple of numbers up for the various combinations, but keeping them consistent, paints a pretty clear picture.

The results are best when Glam's and Windflower's expectations agree and Lorica was speaking the truth about them, and worst when Glam's expectations are directly opposite Windflower's and Lorica was also speaking the truth about them. When Windflower was expecting nothing, there was still some passive resistance to Glam's expectations, though small compared to when she was actually expecting something to happen that was not what was going to happen.

[thinkering]

"So - she might have been helping when she was set up to help. Unless I'm just not that good a liar."

[mxglam]

"I... well, you don't exactly have a body language," they point out. "And I didn't consciously know when you were lying or what. My subconscious might've picked up on it? But in any case..." They squint at the charts. "It does look like she helped, yeah."

[thinkering]

"But only to a certain degree, she wasn't like having twice your usual ability aimed at the effects. Shy of that."

[mxglam]

"Mm yeah. Now I'm wondering if everyone has the same lower weight or if there's, like, diminishing returns." They look at one of the parts when their expectations were at odds. "She was better at hurting me than helping me, though, I think?"

[thinkering]

"Yeah. We can run another test, get my dad or something..."

[mxglam]

"We'd need your dad and Windflower, there, and they'd need to be told different things, so the test would take like four times as long, but yeah, we could do something like that."

[thinkering]

"Well, it'd be easy to tell them different things, my dad's helmet talks to the bot."