Mia Zejrel is already communicating with her partner, David. Quote from their telepathic conversation:

‘Don’t let it get you down, Mia.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Good. It’s not worth listening to them.’

‘I know. But it is true that I spend so much time talking to you…’

‘Come on. You do the work that you have to do. Most of the time, when we talk it’s because you’re doing something mindless, like following a protocol for an experiment you’ve done ten times already, putting together a presentation for your group, or just counting cells.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Besides, honestly, they don’t deserve to link telepathically with you. You should just keep that to me. And your family, if you must.’

‘Heh, yeah, ok. I’ll just ignore every time they look at me like I hate them.’

‘Exactly. Besides, you’ve only got another year left, maybe you can find a job in my lab. My supervisor could use someone with your expertise.’

‘Does he know that yet?’

‘I may have dropped some hints, yes.’

‘Well, let me know when the interviews are. I don’t know if the people in your lab will be any nicer than mine, but at least they won’t have known me for long enough to feel entitled to talk to me telepathically.’

‘And they already know the person you’re talking to, and they’ll see how much we love each other, and maybe they’ll just let us do our own thing.’

‘Not in the lab, though. I wouldn’t want to do our own thing there.’

‘Yeah, that would be a bit unpleasant. Maybe if no one’s in the microscope room, we can try there?’

‘Or we could just go home.’

‘True. Anyway, before you start blushing, what time do you want to do lunch?’

‘I should be done around one, if that’s ok?’

‘Sure, that works for me. Right, I need to get back into lab, we can talk again in an hour or so.’

‘Ok, I’ll try talking to you at eleven. Have fun.’

‘Will do.’

Unquote. While I don’t know if this is due to Zejrel’s limitations on her ability or not, it appears that her partner David cannot initiate a telepathic conversation. He hadn’t last time I followed Zejrel, but now they have acknowledged it themselves.

Zejrel is being watched by one of her colleagues. She is looking at him out of the corner of her eye, and I don’t think she wants to start a conversation with him, but he’s coming over to her desk anyway. Quote:

‘How’s that presentation coming along, Mia?’

‘It’s fine. Should be done by lunch, anyway.’

‘Ok, cool. Make it as long as you want, I don’t know that I have much to present this week.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘You’re having lunch with David, I’m guessing?’

‘Yes. Do you want to join us? We were going to go to the café in the Rembrandt building for a change.’

‘Nah, I don’t really like that place. Anyway, I meant to ask, I need to go somewhere this afternoon, would you be alright running some samples for me, if you’re running some yourself?’

‘Um, sure. I think I’ve got some I could do later today.’

‘Great, thanks! A few more samples hopefully won’t slow you down, and you can chat with David while you sort them out anyway.’

‘It’s not like I talk to him all the time.’

‘I know, but you were talking to him just now, right? You stare off in the distance when you’re connecting with him.’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I’m just staring off in the distance.’

‘Hah, I guess I can’t really tell the difference. Well, anyway, thanks, see you at the meeting.’

‘Yeah.’

—

This is from about 17K words in. As it turns out, I have more or less finished a draft of this novella at about 24K words. That’s not far off from the length of Tales of Moran, so it wasn’t unexpected, but it does mean I’m probably not going to get much further in NaNoWriMo this year. It was a very good experience though, and I’ll definitely make sure to have enough ideas for two novellas next year, and see if I can get 50K words by combining both word counts…

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