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[ Thaaat was not the reaction she was going for, but she's still not willing to try to use his head to navigate her way through the conversation, so hit and miss is to be expected. ]

It's not that hard. A lot of practice on your own once you know the basics is all. Not that it will help against someone high level, but anything basic.

[ sry. habit by this point - he's inherently the most suspicious of the people he's closer to. ]

Okay. Sure. How does it go down?

[ That's at once smart and sad. ]

It's imagery, mostly. A matter of will and being able to frame your head as something someone else can't read. My - a technopath I knew used the idea of his mind as unhackable code. [ Mostly unhackable. ] I just use the classic house with locked doors approach.

[ the fact that she knew another technopath always gets his attention ]

So you make shields by mostly just thinking about making shields and then hoping really hard.

[ she can even sort of talk about him. success! ]

That's one way of putting it. It takes a great deal of concentration to keep your mind organized like that though. At least at first.

You do realize how much bullshit that actually sounds like, right?

[ But he's trying it regardless. He's been having to structure at least the perimeter of his mind - or what he perceives as such - anyway, to work on the electronic communication, so there's some basic groundwork here between his own trial-and-error efforts and the baselines that Emma showed/gave him. It's still a very rocky process though, and in the meantime the effort drops some of what was there. ]

You got any special tricks for it? [ Because he's coming up with and discarding metaphors as he goes along. ]

Yeah, that's what most people say at first.

[ A little more at ease, sympathy in her faint smile. She hops up onto a clear section of her bench, still watching him, and settles in a little bit. ]

The more personal it is, the harder it is for someone who doesn't know you to get past them.

[ Aaaaand that's another sort of pause, because that feels like some sort of trap, to think about the things that are the most personal to him in particular and either share or inadvertently share them. He's not sure how he feels about that, but he's even more not sure how he feels about the areas that come to mind. He doesn't want to think of his own mind as a cave, but it was pretty damn impregnable. The workshop back home isn't bad, but structurally he's not sure how well it'll work. His childhood room (the main one, anyway), similarly using code and firewalls, walls built out of JARVIS and the arc reactor itself - he's not sure what to choose. ]

What if they still do? That seems like it would shake the safety in that memory.

[ There's a reason that years and years ago when she was young and had to teach herself shields she just used the generic image of a house, the one the book suggested. There's also a reason she doesn't recommend it. Her shields don't actually resemble that house anymore so much as they look like a prison, less like rooms than cells locked down. ]

It's a balance. You don't want something sensitive enough that it would compromise you if people got through it, because these aren't a fix-all. Emma? Anyone on her level can rip through shields like this as soon as they put some real effort into it. These are for blocking low-level telepathy types.

[ Hmm. Okay. He'll pick his office at SI. That's reasonably personal but not too important. That'll work. ]

So, after you pick something, you just imagine it being fortified and your mind being inside it?

More or less. Find hiding places and picture putting away anything you don't want seen in there. Cupboards, safes, cells, subdirectories, whatever works.

[ It doesn't take that much to imagine all those shelves with doors on them, creating little cubbies to hide away whatever he feels is important, and then he gets to stashing. The most important things go on a ghost drive accessed by the computer in the office, because if anyone's going to mix their literal mental metaphors, it'll be Tony Stark. ]

How can you tell when you've constructed it well enough?

I had a friend double check for me. [ But that's - yeahhh. She can't really imagine him being okay with her being in his mind. She wouldn't trust anyone in her head anymore, outside of the necessity of Emma's brief sojourn. ] But you should only ask someone to do that if you trust them. Otherwise, you just keep working at it, adding security, trying to be sure.

[ Yeah he figured that was the answer but it doesn't mean he's that happy about it. He doesn't like things that can't be properly tested first, and right now he's not about to let anyone else into his head. There's too much happening within it that he's not totally okay with himself.

Which means that right now there's sort of an awkward moment. ] Okay. [ Uh. Hm. ] Thanks.

[ Frankly right now she doesn't want inside anyone's head. Something's shifted about her empathy after the past few missions. She can feel more raw power behind it and it's not something she particularly likes given how badly empathy has gone for her at various times in the past. ]

No problem. [ Hopping down from the bench, turning to go because she'd like to go sort out how she feels about this. It was weird. ] Thank you.

[ Almost done!!! ]

Wait, for what?

[ Glancing backwards with a shrug, the lines of her body still pulled tightly together. ] For taking it well. It was a nice surprise.

[ There's a decent 'oh baby i take everything well' joke in there, but he doesn't feel like making it right now. ]

I'm surprisingly liberal for a guy who was majority-funded by the government for forty-plus years.

Funded by the government? What for? [ Arrested in mid-step, face carefully blank. ]

[ That's a weird reaction to an off-hand comment, Max. Well, it should have been off-hand. For him it was self-effacing and for her apparently some cause of worry. ]

Weapons contractor.

[ Interest isn't overpowering the mood he's currently in though. The most concise answer is the best one. ]

[ Weapons contractor is - not as bad as it could have been. Still, not the sort of thing to get a great reaction out of her, and she blinks and evaluates for a moment. ]

Right. [ Okay yes still leaving, but that's added onto the list of things to think about. ] See you later.

[ Yeah, he's not his own favourite person either, okay, so he commiserates with that reaction for a few moments, then decides to be awesome instead and brush it off, push it under those shield thingies she was just teaching him how to use. She can leave, he doesn't care; he'll just go back to what he was doing. ]

[ And that's her, super gone and trying to determine a) what just happened, that is possibly the best reaction she's ever had to telling someone she's an empath outside of informing people how much of an asset she would be to a mission and b) wait, weapons contractor for the government, that's definitely something to bear in mind. ]

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