3.25.2021

Entering the theater a few days later, still a little bit tender and on her guard, Rose decides to spend some time backstage during the warmup meditations to read the crowd and psychically vet individual audience members. She is on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. Needless to say, this makes everyone happy. Any amount of time intertwined in Rose's fibers is blissful and worth the price of admission.

For the most part all she finds are a few sore spots that would have gone unnoticed before: a disgruntled but harmless atheist looking to debunk her, a tired husband tagging along to be supportive of his wife's interests but inwardly closed to anything new, a young screenwriter hoping to hit on a few ideas and maybe a few ladies.

Out of the hundreds she reads, the only suspicious person is a plainly dressed, single man with no glaring issues except for his unusually large number of connections. His fibers read on the surface as typically human but sieving more delicately she finds one or two very thin threads that look like they were intentionally hidden amongst all the others. They are different and she can't identify their type or source. Not having the time to trace them, Rose extra carefully dials down what those connections can send out of the room and attaches markers so she can follow up later.

Showtime! She feels better. The audience is stoked. Looks like she'll get them to the summit again tonight. She doesn't think any more about the plain man with the unusual fibers but he can't take his mind off Rose. Attending the show as an OGP spy, gathering intelligence that would help them undermine her act, and casing the security setup for future actions against her, he was perfectly groomed to slip in unnoticed and get away clean. Yet the consequence of receiving so much of Rose's attention and her touching his fibers so precisely is that, instead of completing his mission, Roy falls hopelessly in love with her.

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