Ask Yu for ideas - you don't trust yourself with the responsibility

You've never so fully understood the phrase 'idle hands are the devil's workshop' until this moment. With the steadily growing flutter of excitement in your gut, it's better not to linger on thinking any more than absolutely necessary.

“W-where do you think we should start?” you ask, clapping your hands together and trying not to think of all the ways you could start with Yutong, with just a word.

“Well,” says Yu, putting a finger to her delicate chin in thought (even her chin is cute - how long have you been blind?), “we know you can claim physical items, like Pearl’s hoodie. And we know you can claim immaterial concepts, like where Pearl goes, or my help. Your claims seem apply to individuals somehow, too. Like, Pearl didn’t want to give you her hoodie when it became yours, but she still gave it to you when you asked."

Oh hell. Now you're thinking of all the things you shouldn't ask Yutong to do, but which you totally could with your new powers. Yu's help isn't helping as much as you thought it would. Or, maybe it'd be more accurate to say she is helping, but in the opposite way to what you meant.

Yu, wrapped up with her thoughts, carries on with her thesis, totally unaware of your inner struggle. "But what if, while Pearl was wearing your hoodie, you asked somebody else to give it to you?"

Thank god! A science conundrum! Think about that instead, yes! You can already feel your desire withering on the vine!

"Ah. Of course. Yes. What if I asked someone else indeed," you concur, studiously nodding several times. "Er. What were we talking about again...?"

Yu giggles at your odd behavior, misreading your inattentiveness as a failed joke. "Okay, I'll try to explain better." She holds up Pearl's hoodie, which she's still carrying form before. "Strictly speaking, Pearl gave you a hoodie that didn't belong to her. Because the second you claimed this thing, it became yours. Right?"

"Right," you say, fighting to focus on what Yu's saying, and less on how cute she is saying it.

"So what if you'd asked me, or Jane, or Sully to give your hoodie back instead?" asks Yutong. "It wasn't ours either. Would we have been compelled to take it off Pearl for you?"

You breathe a sigh of relief. Only Yutong could make omnipotent claiming powers sound so boring.

"There's more moving parts to this than I thought," you note, blandly.

Yu nods seriously and looks around the room, already devising an experiment to answer her own question. What a nerd. What a cute, helpless little nerd. Ergh. No. Bad Chase, bad. She's your friend. And you're definitely not that kind of guy.

"Let's break it down to the basics." Yu takes in the room as a whole. "Claim an item here. I want to test how my perception of it changes."

Right. This is just like physics class. Yutong tells you to do stuff, you do exactly what she says, and then somehow you receive an A on whatever it is you're doing. Nothing weird about this at all. Just an innocent experiment with your sexy Asian friend whose 'help' already belongs wholly and inexorably to you.

Your dick stiffens in protest at your rampant thoughts, and you mentally kick yourself. You hop to Yu's command to try to get yourself under control.

Skirting past the Yutong, you pluck a pillow up off the bed. "My pillow!" You hold it triumphantly your shoulder and keep your eyes determinedly fixed on hers. "So? Notes?"

Yu adjusts her glasses, comes closer, and attentively examines the pillow.

"Beyond the obvious, not yet," she says after a moment. "But I feel... I'm accepting it's your pillow. It feels sensible. Logical." She looks intrigued as she wrestles with the idea. "Okay. Wow. Conceptually, that shouldn't follow. And I think I'm only really noticing how weird it actually is because I'm paying attention."

"So can you ignore it?" you ask, frowning at her. "Accept that it's the house's pillow instead?"

Yu strains herself, but shakes her head. "The truth feels... abstract, somehow. Like Newtonian physics versus Einstein's relativity. One just makes more sense." She exhale and backs off a bit from the pillow. "Like, I 'understand' it's not really your pillow, but for all intents and purposes, from my current frame of reference at least, it is."

You're not sure what's more exciting. Yu's warped perception of your powers, or the fact you can wield that much influence over her with a single word.

Yu clears her throat, embarrassed at losing track of herself. "Let's move on," she says brusquely. "Okay. Ask me to do something with it now."

You oblige, dropping the pillow on the floor. "Pick it up." It's the first thing you could think of.

Yutong doesn't move from the spot. She breathes a sigh of relief, and flashes you a brief smile. "There's one question answered." She crouches down next to the pillow next, and pokes it with one finger so she's in physical contact with it. "Ask again."

You oblige. "Pick it up."

The command has no effect.

At Yu's behest, you try a few more variations, to mixed results. When Yutong sits on the pillow, she leaps off it the second you ask her to. When you give her the order not to touch your pillow, Yu finds doing so virtually impossible, until you rescind the order.

But when she's not directly touching the pillow, ordering Yutong to do anything else in connection with it has no effect.

For Yu's next test, you pick up the pillow and try to leave the room, while she tries to stop you.

Yu puts up a good fight, dodging around and body blocking you at every turn. You can't get past her without hurting her. Yet when you order Yutong to let you take your pillow outside, she instantly steps aside and lets you through. Even after you both previously agreed she wouldn't let you out of the room with the pillow no matter what.

Fascinated, Yutong sits on the bed and ponders the implications of the tests.

"Chain of ownership obviously plays a factor," she says, half to you, half to herself. "The pillow never belonged to me the way Pearl's hoodie belonged to her. That must be why, so long as I'm not directly interacting with the pillow, I'm not compelled to follow your commands."

"Science rules," you say, idly tossing the pillow and catching it as you listen.

To be honest, you're having far more fun screwing around with Yu than you are discovering the actual rules behind your powers. What got you so worked up before? This is Yu you're talking about. She's just your dorky friend. You have fun together. That's it. And frankly, you kinda want to keep the ball rolling.

"So, what should we try next?" you ask.

Yu shrugs, and smiles. "Depends on what's most helpful to learn for your power." She brightens, a telltale sign an idea's popped into her head. "Hey, Chase, when you claimed where Pearl goes, she had to go where you told her to, right?"

"Seemed like it, yeah."You recall just a few minutes ago. Pearl wouldn't have been so upset if she had a choice left to her, would she?

"Okay, so here's my question. Was Pearl compelled to obey because of her history of going where she wants," says Yu, "or was it because you claimed an intrinsic part of Pearl herself?"

And you lost her again. "What's the difference?"

"Imagine it like the pillow," says Yu, stealing your new pillow from you midair and squishing it between her hands.

"Hey," you say, indignant.

Yu ignores you. "Pretend like Pearl doesn't plan on going anywhere for the rest of the day. She fully intends to stop using 'where she goes'." She holds the pillow totally still to demonstrate. "Now, even if you told her to go somewhere..."

She pretends to struggle moving the pillow. It goes nowhere.

"... it wouldn't compel her, because she's not in contact with the claim. It's the same way I didn't pick your pillow off the floor when you said to; because I wasn't touching it."

Yu holding a pillow somehow helps you learn better. Visual aids really do make a difference!

"What's option 2 for how you think it works?" you ask, becoming genuinely curious now. Yu must be rubbing off on you.

"Option 2 is that your claims are inescapable," says Yutong. "That, when you use 'where Pearl goes' - because by definition it's part of her - part of Pearl also belongs to you. Whatever you do with that claim, from Pearl's perspective, it's like you're doing it to a part of herself. And she's compelled to act accordingly."

You rub your chin, frowning. "So how do we find out which it is?"

"I guess we could call Pearl in here to check," Yutong suggests, thinking of a plan. "Or, since you already own my help, you could just claim something from me. Something I've never used before, and never planned on using at all."