#Raz shares the apartment with her for a couple years and then eventually moves back in with Lili once she settles into the Psychonauts

[2hoothoots]

you mentioned phoebe, now you have to dish on phoebe!! what's she doing?? what's she like as raz's roomie??

phoebe!! she's a cool kid!

i think out of all of the campers, Phoebe seems the most set on becoming a Psychonaut. she's just as passionate about it as Raz himself, and i think when they move in together she's been working a couple months as a new agent. she'd been sharing an apartment with Quentin, but after taking a year or so to think about his options he decides the Psychonauts aren't for him and goes to study music at college. so they're both young adults who have just started out on what they always thought would be their dream job... and figuring out what that actually looks like, in practice.

i think Raz and Phoebe make really good foils, because in so many ways they're so similar! they're both very passionate and dedicated people, they're both longtime performers (Raz with his acrobatics, Phoebe with her music), and obviously they both really care about the work they're doing with the Psychonauts. and that makes it a lot of fun to highlight their differences, too!

for Phoebe, her music is about expressing herself, about taking her feelings and letting them out through performance. she doesn't make art for anyone except herself. but Raz can't get over the fact that whenever he performs, it's for a crowd, and he needs people to enjoy it - because growing up, if people didn't come to their shows, they didn't eat*. he can never really get over the idea that his art has to be for someone, that it has to be good to be worthwhile.

i think they both have very strong opinions on their work, too! Raz's specialty is psychotherapy, projecting himself into peoples' minds. i see Phoebe as much more into the talking therapy side of things! they have long arguments about appropriate boundaries with patients, and hands-on vs hands-off techniques, and about how this study showed sixty percent improvement in the first session with this technique (but that study cites that the long-term benefits are less in comparison, so actually-)

in my head, there's a bit of a teething period for the first week or so when Raz moves in, and after that they just click. sometimes too-similar personalities can be like oil and water, but i think they're on a mutually compatible wavelength. they're diving into deep conversations at 1am, because they each see enough of themselves in the other person (and are both unrepentant armchair psychoanalysts) to get into the really revealing stuff. they write and record a concept album together about having a tense relationship with your family growing up, Phoebe on drums and Raz on acoustic guitar and both of them sharing the vocals. it sucks! but it's cathartic for them both! Phoebe's still got a copy of it on cassette somewhere in the back of her collection

(* the Aquato family are poor, but in my head they were never seriously at risk of going hungry. however Donatella definitely catastrophised enough times about a show going wrong and the whole family having to eat watered-down gruel for the next month that it stuck in little Raz's mind, hahaha)