Sure, Dragon has an aircraft in the area that can pick up the wayward cape.

"Thank you," Lorica says as she climbs aboard. "I don't have local ID or anything. Did Rete explain the whole everything?"

"Rete explained that you are Lorica and that you spent a month in a different world with different powers and a new body - was there more?"

"More than one new power, the other dimension has its own version of triggering and I did that, but yeah, that's the broad strokes. I can't maintain Rete any more, do you think you can help it if it starts deteriorating?"

"I'm not very good at AI tinkering but I can try my best. Was the other version of triggering a week-long period of trauma called awakening?"

"...yes." That's a weird way to phrase it if Rete explained it. "How did you know?"

"Thirteen days ago someone from such a world, with a personality and background strongly resembling yours, appeared in Brockton Bay. Since then people have started awakening worldwide and dungeons have started manifesting - I'm guessing those were also in the world you visited?"

"...yes, the previous occupant of this body, uh, triggered into me, in a dungeon."

"Mm, we don't as of yet have an explanation for why your alternate self appeared here."

"Does she want to go home?"

"I'm not certain - I assume she'd appreciate the option if you have means of transit."

"I met a cape there who can pull people to his location. Seemed to be a local instance of Tunnel Teen. Works across smaller numbers of dimensions, hasn't been tested across as many as I just traversed though."

"Tunnel Teen goes by Vallis now and since awakening has what sounds like the same esper power, though I don't believe its been tested across dimensions."

"Oh, well, at least that's a much better name."

"I can't say I disagree."

Lorica is pretty quiet for the rest of the ride.

"Would you like to be dropped off at Protectorate HQ - Transit is there now."

"Yeah, that seems fine."

The landing zone is a bit off the main rig, outside the forcefield.

She knows the way. She used to work here.

She goes in and finds her dad. He takes her home.

At least the other her isn't living in her house any more and hasn't made a mess of her room.

Probably it wouldn't be a good idea for her to be the one to inform May and Lucien about Lorica, so long as someone else is going to do it soon.

Lorica appears to have had a Butcher-like power which caused her to take up the body of a person in May's original world. She triggered in place with a new power to traverse dimensions and came home with it. She is also an esper now.

"That's... a development..."

"I..." He leans against May some.

"Yeah."

How's she doing?

I'll update you when she wants to make more known.

"I'm really happy she's alive..."

"I think the thing that's confusing me is that I've made progress with grieving her and now that progress is undone and my emotions don't know what to do about that."

"I was assuming I'd never get to meet her and now I could but it sounds like she... doesn't want to? Maybe she had a really rough awakening?"

"Maybe..." He is not backlashed so he can reason that actually he probably isn't at fault here. Unless she blames him for her death... which probably isn't the case. 

"Could be she missed her parents?"

"I mean, if I could go home I'd want to tell mine I'm okay - if she'll talk to me at some point I'll maybe want to ask her to do that for me - but I don't know, this just isn't a very - lively - posture - I guess she could be backlashed and we wouldn't know what that was doing to her."

"If it was your backlash she'd be want to see us more, wouldn't she?

"Yeah, but maybe it's not, why would it be the same?"

"Related capes generally have similar powers here, though not always and I guess this might not hold for espers?"

"But she was a tinker and her dad's a 'mover' - I guess now she's also a mover?"

"Yeah, her prior power was something of an exception to the rule. Possibly there was a way that were related that just isn't obvious - that happens sometimes."

"Well, I hope she's okay."

"Yeah."

Cuddle. Also, he'll send Rete a message to let Lorica know he's around to catch up if she wants and that he's happy she's back.

She says there is a you in the esper world. The power and backlash seem to match.

"I'm calling it Guide."

"I like you enough that I won't even complain that you are messing with the Hebrew lettering system."

Huh. I guess that's not harder to believe than Lorica and May. IDK if she's up to talking but I'm curious if there were any other doubles - I'm guessing my parents would also be there if I was?

"Lorica says there's another Lucien in the other world, same power and backlash too."

She believes they match based on her recollection of your parents, yes.

Anyone else?

Aside from historical figures one would presume implied by e.g. the existence of the United States she did not detect any.

Okay. Let me know if there's anything I can do for her?

She will want to double-check that you are compatible with her at some point but it is not urgent.

"...which means she's not backlashed."

Okay.

"Uh. Is that going to be weird for you - if I am compatible?"

"Uh - hm.

"So, taking that literally, no, not at all, you're certainly compatible with dozens or hundreds of people who aren't me even if you don't know about it yet.

"Taking it less literally... if I'd finished out awakening at home, I would have done some work on my personal approach to sex'n'romance to make it work better with being an esper, on the assumption that I would need to shop around, might need several partners, could not assume that espers whose backlashes complemented mine would necessarily be particularly exciting to be around on a personal level, etcetera... and instead I awakened with you... so I did not do that. I still can? If it's important?

"And... on this topic...

"...Lorica didn't grow up with espers being a thing and presumably got blindsided by what I'm now assuming was a catastrophically bad awakening and I'm not sure she would like to do some kind of, I don't know, time-share arrangement. Besides, maybe she got on well with the Lucien from Guide and would rather stick with him partnerwise. Though I'm... sort of tentatively guessing that they do not get on as well as you and I do."

"I do not expect to actively want to guide anyone who isn't you though if it turns out Lorica doesn't have the other Lucien or someone else as an option I... I guess I might want to see if a time-sharing arrangement could work? If you were up for it."

"She might not even want to use her esper power much, some of them kind of suck and she's also a parahuman. ...I bet she's really upset about not being a tinker any more, she must like Rete way more than I do if she doesn't normally spend any time freaked out about the concept of robots and she can't maintain it."

Nod nod.

"I really hope she's okay."

"I think she is probably not. But I don't know that we can really help."

Sigh.

"Should I let Rete know I'm available to double check compatibility whenever but am not open to guiding without more discussion with her and you?"

"...how would saying that help in any possible situation."

"I don't know, I just. Want to do something."

When it's a good moment, I'd like to know about the feasibility of visiting home, letting my parents know I'm okay, etc., but it's all waited this long.

Acknowledged.

Lucien, not able to think of anything else to do, will snuggle May instead.

Yeah, might as well get that all out of the way. Where is good to meet, minding I can't fly any more because my suit was not recoverable

Uh, my place in the city is at 764 30th Street if that works in 3 hours, or if Transit can make it out of the city my parents place would work whenever.

3 hours is fine

Then Lucien can drive him and May there in his parent's car - he's sort of terrible at driving but there aren't many cars on the road in Brockton at the moment and he can go slowly.

May isn't much better behind the wheel so she doesn't offer to take over.

Lorica has swapped out the headgear of the Danger Suit for her backup helmet. Having the HUD again is very good. She's waiting at a bench at a bus stop near the building when they arrive.

"Uh, want to go inside? I didn't realize I should be in costume."

"It doesn't make a difference to me if you're in costume or not. I wanted Rete with me." In she goes.

"I'd prefer not to spend too much time in civvies around costumed people - makes it more obvious than I'd like that I'm cape affiliated. Also um.. May - Lorica, Lorica - May."

"Hi."

"Hi."

"I."

Wow, why are his emotions coming back online now.

"I'm really glad you're back. And not dead."

"Yeah, I'm alive. Somebody named Nikki is dead instead. No idea if the Butcher power will have persisted when the Tinker power didn't."

Nod.

She takes off a glove and holds out her hand.

It is obvious before they actually touch that they are just as compatible as Lucien and May.

May taps the back of her knuckles. She shrugs but doesn't recoil, and pulls her hand back.

"So probably I'm looking at life as a shuttlebus for tags from you and him for anybody who wants to go across - I guess you and he can't ever go across if we don't want to render that permanently impossible, I don't have passenger space. I'm more compatible with him than his preexisting partner is so his bandwidth probably depends a lot on... that."

"What the fuck did he do to you."

"Oh, he's being completely reasonable, really, I can't blame him for any of it."

Wow okay, in addition to Lorica having had a very terrible time alternate universe Lucien is also having a terrible time.

"Um. The shuttling plan might be worth it but we'd have to figure out a way of dealing with the Bay's dungeons without me depending on how much of my bandwidth it takes up."

"I think more people're gonna want to go from Bet to Guide. Since Guide isn't ending."

"That does sound nicer."

"Yeah, big selling point. I don't think he can get all the rats off the sinking ship, alas. Maybe a Tinker can rig something up."

"Vista might be able to help with cargo, maybe, but not people."

"Who's Vista?"

"Cape with the Wards who can do space warping, but can't effect people directly."

"I'm not sure that'll hold up on an interdimensional trip."

"Yeah, still might be worthwhile to test?"

"If she's up for it, sure."

Nod.

"Lucien, can we have a minute?"

"Yeah."

He can leave the room.

"What'd he do."

"He wasn't very... creative... about addressing my psychological backlash. I think it played into some of his issues or something. It's not going to come up again, though, because I had a second trigger and got my mental opacity - back, or upgraded, I don't know which."

"You're not about to tell me you're immune to backlash."

"I'm not. After second-triggering mid suicide attempt I traded it in for the non-psychological kind all at once with about a day left on the clock."

"How are you alive."

"After... showing off... how intense she was willing to get about guiding me, his partner - Venture, if we're doing cape names - eventually called an ambulance. I spent the next day in a hospital bed with both of them while a series of strangers rotated through so he'd be using his power enough to approach my backlash. We didn't talk much, I was basically liplocked with him the entire time."

"This was how long ago, have you had time to talk to him about it?"

"Oh, I was going to but after heavy power use he schedules some time to be emotionally incompetent, so instead I didn't."

"So you come home after all that and discover that I've taken your Lucien, whether you'd made up your mind that you wanted him or not he was an option you had, and I'd been hugging your parents and sleeping in your bed, and getting help from your robot, which probably is slowly dying, and obviously there was no way to guess you were alive and it's all what you would've done in my position, so you can't blame me either, and usually when things hurt like hell and suck irrecoverably at least someone made a mistake you can feel smug about but you can't be angry or self-satisfied and there's nothing, yet, to grieve, and the world is still ending and might be doing it harder, and you're not enchanted with the shuttlebus option especially if you have to go back to Guide and kiss the guy you're sort of halfway to over after that disaster of an awakening, but the shuttlebus thing makes sense, and there's nobody in the world whose unflinching top priority is you having a nice time so maybe it will make sense for you to just not prioritize that, and you will have quietly almost died and quietly almost died again and quietly almost died again and quietly go dormant and maybe nobody will notice except your robot and there's nobody it'll tell if you don't want it to."

"Well, the third time I almost died was sort of conspicuous."

"Well. I noticed."

"Yeah."

"I should go to Guide and talk to the Lucien there - Turnaround? - for you. Translate between, uh, whatever we collectively are, and - esper culture."

"I'll have to go pick up a new tag, mine'll have expired, but sure."

"Yeah. Just, I should be in the first batch of people you tag to send there, whenever you get around to that. I already needed to, this is just one more thing on the to-do list before I come back here."

"- yeah, I guess you live here now."

"I do, can't really be helped. I'm at least already not living in your house any more though."

Nod.

"You can come back now," May calls to Lucien.

Here he is, still feeling the absence of anything helpful for him to do or say.

"I'm gonna go to Guide to let my folks know I'm okay and stuff and also to talk to the you there. Do you have any messages for him?"

"I. Hrm. I would probably like to write him a letter but it would be hard to do that helpfully without more context on what happened. It can wait if you'd rather not share." He says the last bit to Lorica.

"Well, what do you need to know?"

"...What happened?"

"At least the parts that are relevant to him."

"I had a bad awakening. There was psychological backlash, his partner eventually convinced him to kiss me, eventually I tried to kill myself, then I had a second trigger before I got through with it and came back for help. All my backlash converted to the organ failure kind on the spot with the second trigger. His partner did some insane shit to try to guide me but did ultimately also call an ambulance. Hospital plus the both of them got me through the last day."

"That's... probably enough that I can at all useful to him, I guess."

"You can ask me more questions, I'm just not sure what would be irrelevantly personal detail and what would matter to you or him."

"You don't have to answer but... it would be useful to know how he attempted to help you and how successful he was, I guess." 

"He kept trying to get me to make promises that I was absolutely not competent to make and would have broken if I'd made them given the backlash. He spat in my mouth a lot until his partner convinced him it would be less unpleasant for him to just kiss me. Kept doing that even after she cracked a few of his teeth trying to get him to bleed down my throat, which I guess is impressive. On both their parts if you're generous with the word. Used his power a lot while we were all three in bed in the hospital so his backlash'd match mine closer. His dad gave me a ride home from the hospital, I don't know if he asked for that or if it was his dad's own idea. I took some decompression time and then wanted to have some kind of, like, relationship conversation, but he was burned out on thinking about anything ever being his fault so I thought maybe I'd wait till he was less burned out for that and go home without waiting on it."

"I am guessing there was a reason you didn't ask to kiss him? Also I'm guessing your time in the hospital was extremely unpleasant but if I'm wrong you can correct me."

"My backlash made me - self-abnegating. I wasn't even formulating thoughts about what would be beneficial for me, let alone making requests. So I was dependent on their creativity and I can think of a dozen things I'd try if I were babysitting someone with that backlash that he didn't but maybe that's just hindsight."

"Oh."

"And you weren't an item beforehand?"

"No."

"Okay. I can probably guess at why he was bad at thinking of things if you want to hear it from me for some reason, otherwise I will write him a letter and you can pass it on - probably I'll do that anyways. Assuming you are willing to wait."

"I'm not in a rush."

Lucien assumes she doesn't want the explanation from him and goes to write a letter to his alternate self. Additionally, he'll save a bunch of Wikipedia articles on cape phenomena and major world events to a flash drive for his alt to read.

"Anything else I should bring? How many people should I expect Turnaround to be bringing back, besides her?"

"I'm not sure of any obvious candidates - maybe someone from the PRT and someone from the Undersiders or something."

"...I am caught up on how you're pals now but I am not their friend and don't want to infect a perfectly nice world with supervillainy."

"I suppose that's reasonable."

"For that matter what would the PRT want with the place. They don't have supervillains to respond to."

"I'm not entirely sure but they came to mind as the group best positioned to deal with contact with a new world."

"...and not, like, the literal government?"

"I think the PRT handled the initial details of contact with Aleph? Though I suppose that very directly involved a supervillain."

"I guess contact with Guide involves a cape too and it's me, but I'm actually feeling very low on bullshit tolerance so maybe I shouldn't try for a big formal thing soon and should just tote May over and back."

"That seems very reasonable."

"Turnaround lives in Jersey City. And I just traverse worlds, not space. How attached are you to Brockton Bay?"

"Fairly? Possibly this would be worth moving though I'd prefer not to."

"If we're gonna we should do it soon before we're too embedded here, but how attached is Turnaround to Jersey City?"

"Plausibly not very, I can ask him. But Brockton Bay doesn't exist there, I'll have to see where I'm at when I land in whatever boondocks are here instead."

"Possibly we can make do with tag couriers of some sort? I'm not sure."

"He sleeps. So I'd still have to make a trip every day."

"Hm? I'm confused - my proposal is that maybe I send a courier with a tag to Jersey City each day and they tag you and receive a tag in turn."

"Oh, yeah, that would work fine."

"What did you mean?"

"That I wouldn't have to make routine trips myself if you two had and frequently renewed tags on someone else who went back and forth often enough."

"Oh, I suppose that can at least help decrease the number of trips beyond what I initially imagined."

"It doesn't take that long, but yeah."

Nod.

"Are laptops there compatible? I have a USB stick with various articles for my alternate self to look at."

"I don't know, because looking into computer technology is pretty depressing."

"Oh. That makes sense... I can put the articles on my Kindle just in case, I guess."

"Yeah."

Lucien does that and then Lorica can have the Kindle.

She tucks it into the inside pocket of the Danger Suit.

"Anything else we should cover before I go?"

"I don't think so? I would like to catch up at some point but now doesn't seem like a good time for that."

"Rete told me what it knows and you've got the general idea of what I've been up to, what's there to catch up on?"

...

"Catch up socially rather than... informatively, I guess."

"Well, Rete can for the time being go back to managing my schedule if you want to tell it when would be good."

"Okay."

"I'll go... find out what's in this area in Guide, and get to Jersey or get Turnaround to send me someone who has one, and pick up a tag, and come back for May. Should I expect you to be here still by the time I get back?"

"Sure - I can pull you back here once you have the tag from my alternate self if I tag you now and then you tap someone else in a pre-arranged pattern."

"You'll need patterns that don't overlap with his." She pulls out the reference sheet.

He can propose alternative patterns.

"These will be temporary I expect, my alternate self will propose some sort of prefix-based system that standardizes indicating which of us is being signaled."

"Sure." She holds up the amended cheat sheet to her helmet for Rete and then tucks it away again.

"Uh, bye I guess. Until later."

"Bye."

Nyoom.

And minutes later she is in a reasonably nice suburb in the location of Brockton Bay in Guide.

Cool. Local phone, text Turnaround that she's back and needs a tag, she is in... this location, according to the map app... can he send somebody or come by himself, she has correspondence also.

He can come himself.

Okay. She's gonna go find a public library and wait.

"Hi, uh, you need a tag?"

"Yeah. Other Lucien sent you this," Kindle etcetera, "I don't know how compatible the electronics are because I'm accustomed to routing every thought I have about technology through a tinker power I no longer possess. Also there's a me, from here, who wound up mysteriously there. We don't and didn't look alike but otherwise same deal as you and him. Except she's got a different esper thing. I'm going to go tag her to be brought over so she can talk to her parents and meet you and stuff, if you're good to stick around a little while and maybe lend her a phone. Her codename is Traceless."

"I haven't heard of her - I'm good to stick around."

"You wouldn't have, she dropped on Bet mid-awakening. She's compatible with - Vallis, he picked a new better cape name and it's Vallis now - and then he awakened too, same power as yours, and they got each other through that pretty neatly, sounded like."

"That sounds... convenient for them, I guess. Given that they both had to awaken at all."

"Yeah, sounded it. Anyway, I'll go tag her the retrieve-this-person pattern we decided on before though your Bet version thinks you're going to want to redesign the whole system."

"Huh - oh, I suppose we'll need something generic plus a personally identifying prefix of some sort. I'll write something up to send to him about it."

"Yeah, that's what he thought you'd say. Anything else before I go?"

"Nothing occurs to me."

"Bye then."

And zoooooooom.

And he sets to reading his alternate self's advice to him.

Dear Lucien,

I'm going to make a lot of assumptions based on us being alternate versions of the same person so it is possible my advice will prove terribly wrong but I suspect not. Lorica seems to have had a particularly terrible time awakening. If you're me than you care about her quite a bit and did your best to do right by her which wasn't enough.

My guess, based on what little she told me of her backlash and thinking through how I would have dealt with Traceless's awakening were I not awakning myself, is that you applied general heuristics about consent to an instance were they should have been overridden resulting in you avoiding harm at the cost of failing to help as much as you could. I had some struggles with this myself but the fact that I was also awakening skewed my thinking enough to overcome this - also I suspect Lorica's awakening made her less able to consider her own preferences rationally but I'm not certain of that. I'm also guessing that the fact that she was Lorica, and not some stranger you were uninterested in, made this worse. 

If the above reasonably describes what happened then I can't say, now that I've gotten this far in hurriedly writing this letter, that I have advice to give you about it that you are unlikely to come up with on your own (ie once you are both in a state to do so you should explain this to her as best you can). Maybe I can at least offer some empathy for mistakes I could easily have made and the offer to correspond about them should talking to your parents prove insufficient.

Yours,
Lucien

The Guide library corresponds to a Brockton Bay middle school, but it's not that hard to let herself out, the school's not in session. She goes and finds May and tappety-taps her.

And Turnaround can pull her to the library.

"Hi! I'm May."

He can tell given the familiarly intense feeling of compatibility.

"Ah, I'd only heard you called Traceless. I guess you know my name already." 

"Yeah. I picked 'Traceless' in kind of a hurry, I have no idea if it's taken here or not."

"I havn't heard it before."

"That's good, though if I could trouble you for a phone I want to check it on Racehorse just to be sure. And to make sure my website hasn't caught fire."

She can have his personal phone. 

"Racehorse agrees it's free, gonna park on it... aaaand... okay, cool, no big obvious flamewars, I should write blog posts and send them over for occasional queuing but things have been hectic." She returns the phone.

"You have a blog?"

"Yeah, even before awakening I was kind of an espers'n'dungeons nerd, it's called Eventualities."

"Oh! You have a very good blog."

"You read it?"

"Yeah, I've commented a few times but under an old username - Percival1721."

"Yeah, that kinda rings a bell."

"Most recently it was from that interview with that esper pair that specialized in underwater dungeons  - I was trying to cross reference their numbers with what Venture told me, though I didn't mention her by name, as well as some newspaper articles I found."

Nod nod. "Well, I hope to get it started up again, though I won't be able to respond to comments in real time from Bet - I'm probably going to live on Bet." She is texting her parents while she says this.

"Because of my alternate self or something else?"

"They have dungeons now. I'm taking point on getting them up to speed on how to deal with that."

"Oh, that sounds... satisfying."

"I'm hoping it's a high ratio of satisfying to people being obnoxious but it's still early days."

"I'd expect my alternate self to be helpful with the obnoxious people assuming he's working with you on this?"

"He is, yes, he's very useful for local context."

"I can't tell whether I should feel transitively complemented."

"You could choose to if you wish!"

"I think I will."

She finishes her texts to her parents, and returns his phone. "I'll want that back if they answer right away but I don't know if they're paying attention to texts from random numbers very quickly. Now, I'm also here to sort of try to translate, for you and Lorica."

"Oh. Yes, I imagine that might be useful. My alternate self sent me a letter which was nice but not particularly actionable."

"I didn't read it so I don't know what he told you but she's - me, basically, except me if I were an American cape instead of a Canadian esper? So I can kind of guess, how she's doing, based on what it would take to get me to act like she's acting. She's not okay at all."

Nod.

"I have picked up on uh, some of this."

"I mean, a lot of it is probably derivable from her awakening, if nothing else."

Nod nod.

"I... don't actually know how to handle this. Except by explaining why I did certain things and apologizing for not doing better."

"I think - forgive me if I got this garbled, but the understanding I came away with is that you've got a backlash compensation behavior where you don't engage with being responsible for things for awhile after a period of time in which you believe irrationally that you're responsible for everything? I think that the timing on that was really bad for Lorica and then I didn't help at all by having in the time she was here shown up in her hometown, attached myself to her Lucien, and accepted help from her family. The saving grace would be that my backlash kept me a polite distance away from her robot; the bad news is that her robot is now unmaintainable without her tinker power and it'll die at some unpredictable point in the future. She's very - unmoored, right now, and there's no one she can straightforwardly talk to about it, just a lot of different un-straightforward-ness-es."

"Oh um. I have never actually had this compensation before... or maybe I did and the things I avoided engaging with responsibility for were things that I genuinely had nothing to do with and so didn't notice. The thing that happened is that in order to allow me to maintain high backlash while next to someone I cared about suffering quite a lot, I convinced myself that I shouldn't take any actions other than guiding and obeying the orders of my support, even if it was my fault, and also to ignore any counterarguments I came up with to this without thinking about them very hard. And it's taken me a bit to get out of that... rut, I guess."

"...I think I probably could have gotten out of that rut faster if I noticed it was important - Lorica seemed conflicted about wanting to talk to me then in the first place so it didn't occur to me to try putting myself back together quicker than was happening by default."

"She doesn't blame you at all for having whatever coping mechanism works with your backlash. But unfortunately the degree to which everything sucks for her while at the same time no one made any mistakes is not sitting very comfortably. - I guess she might think your partner made mistakes, she was less committal on that point."

"I was not paying very close attention to what Lia did but that seems plausible - she can be very stubbornly problem solve-y in a way that can go wrong. And she's acting like she feels bad about something."

"Also um. I am confused by how people other than Lia not having made mistakes makes things worse?"

"Well, this is my extrapolating from being the same personality as her, not something she explicitly said. But: I run on being smug! I can substitute smugness for most forms of motivation! I can run indefinitely on my infinite self-confidence in being better than all the idiots around me... but it really helps if there are idiots around me who are doing stupid things that I, being better than them, would not have done. She's badly off and she's reaching for that and there aren't quite enough idiots around."

"Ah, I guess that makes sense as a way for her to be."

"Yeah, probably don't try saying things like that to her."

"Oh um. Because it sounds unsympathetic?"

"No, because it sounds - bland? Like it's the same thing you'd say no matter what extremely boring fact you'd learned about her psychology."

"Oh, okay. It's just very different from how I am and I'm not sure how to... relate to it."

"Yeah, I think that's - inconvenient, and you will be very much impaired in filling the 'straightforward to talk to' role."

"Yeah."

"I'd really like Lorica to have someone to fill that role and in some ways I seem well positioned for it but I don't actually... know how."

"It's awkward, right, because there are such strong practical incentives for her to get and stay very close to you - she doesn't even know what her esper power is yet - and she can just bull through whatever the obstacles to that are instead of trying to arrange a perfect path through ideal conditions, but that'll affect the quality of the end product, where product here means the relationship you wind up with."

Nod nod.

"I was previously imagining I would like, ask her out after she moved away and then she'd probably say no but if she said yes we'd go on a date and I'd probably be an anxious mess but if she didn't mind that than maybe we'd have a second date . And instead.... This happened."

"After she moved away?"

"She was staying at my place until shortly before her awakening, I probably would have asked her out that week."

"One thing that... might work, might not - is that you could offer to just pretend that whole week never happened."

"Sort of feels like that would be rude of me but I guess I'll trust you if you think it might not be?"

"I mean, yeah, one of the ways it might not work would be if you said it in a rude way."

"Is just saying 'May suggested this idea, does it sound like a good one to you' rude?"

"No, but like, the attitude you're bringing with you into the situation matters a lot here."

Nod.

"I don't have a super clear read on your attitude, which is fair, I'm a stranger to you, but if I'm going to be any help..."

"I'm genuinely not clear on what my attitude is either. I like Lorica and want to be a friend to her and I'm starting to worry I'm missing some important skills for helping her."

"Yeah... hm.

"She doesn't know what her esper power is yet and that's going to bother her, and she'd probably like to be able to evacuate more people from Earth Bet, and those are both pretty practical reasons for her to get over all the things that are bothering her and figure out some kind of workable partnership which involves efficient guiding with you. And I think she will do it, if you don't tell her that you'd rather she leave you alone.

"And I think there's a window, in this process, where she could also have feelings for you... and if you miss that window, she won't. She'll kiss you and maybe have sex with you and she will have no emotional entanglement about it and it won't at that point be an ongoingly available thing you two could do.

"I don't know if that's an opportunity you'd be really bummed to miss, but if you would be then - you've got a bit of hurrying to do on the emotional competence front."

Sigh.

"Yeah. I would be sad to miss that - I'll do guiding for her regardless, but I don't think I'll stop having feelings for her if that happens, and it will be pretty hard to know she could have had feelings for me, but that chance has passed."

"And I think that would be sad and awkward and suboptimal all around, so while I regret that you are being rushed, the alternative seems worse. Do you want to, like, try lines on me, do you have questions, is there context I might be missing that would inform my read on the situation..."

"I guess I'm still a bit confused about what exactly I should be... doing? Is it just a matter of not complicating talking to me?"

"...I really wish it were possible for you and the other Lucien to meet in person without it wrecking the possibility of anyone other than Lorica going back and forth, I feel like that might be edifying, but alas. Eventually, she is going to talk to you. She's either going to offer some - minimally informative open ended opportunity to talk - or she's going to get straight down to brass tacks about scheduling when you two make out for strictly businesslike guiding purposes, I'm not sure which way she'll land but I expect one of those two. And your options effectively boil down to being a gray rock who gets to kiss her for businesslike guiding purposes or displaying contentful emotions to the effect that you want more than that. If she winds up with the impression that you've decided you could just as easily take or leave the entire 'ever having a conversation with Lorica more interesting than "is Tuesday at three good"' thing by the wayside, then she'll shut right down and you will be having a lot of 'Tuesday at three' and nothing else."

"I am a bit worried if I attempt to display contentful emotions I will end up crying and seeming... needy? Or something like that."

"Well, if the thought of crying and seeming needy in front of Lorica is intolerable, after she fucking awakened in front of you, probably go ahead and don't try to date her."

"The bit I'm worried about is that she'd mind, not that I would."

"No. You're - you need to be telling her who exactly she awakened in front of, who you are to her now, and there exist worse answers than 'a near-stranger who would just as soon not interact ever again except that it would be so convenient to fuck on Tuesday at three' but there aren't, like, a lot of worse answers than that, and that seems by far the likeliest answer you might produce as far as I can tell."

"I'm doing a lot of emotional filtering right now because I don't really know - would it in fact not be bad if I ended up seeming needy? I'd expect that to like, add to her emotional burden, rather than help with it?"

"It'd be bad to be pressurey but not bad to want anything."

"I'm not sure what the difference is exactly?"

"Pressure is about making it hard to say no, and wanting anything is about making it clear that there's anything she could conceivably choose to say yes to."

"Does it not make it hard to say no if I'll clearly have lots of emotions about it if she does?"

"No. She can always fuck off to a different universe if she decides she does not want to interact with your feelings."

"Oh. Well, I can refrain from filtering my emotions when I talk to her if that seems like a good idea."

"You can also, like, use words, you don't have to skip straight to the waterworks."

"I don't actually plan on crying, it just seems like a not impossible outcome, or something like that."

Nod nod.

"Are you really sure that seeming needy won't be a bad idea?"

"No, you could super fuck it up, I'm just more confident that pathologically avoiding seeming like you give a shit about her at all is a bad idea."

Nod.

"How might I fuck it up?"

"Oh, I don't know specifically, as I said you can try lines on me if you want."

"I think I'm finding it hard to be emotionally vulnerable around you under these circumstances."

"Yeah, valid, would that everyone in this situation had more tools to hand."

"Possibly if you like, left the room and gave me a minute I could come up with some lines and write them down?"

"Sure, can I borrow your phone to call my folks?"

"Uh, I'm not actually sure I'll take longer than a couple of minutes to come up with a line or two to ask you about but sure, if you want to?"

"Oh, a literal minute, sure." She steps out to wait.

One minute later he has a line written down to ask about.

"So um. Could I clarify first whether you are in fact confident that me trying out lines on you won't weird Lorica out?"

"You should probably tell her you did it but I think it's kosher yeah."

Welp, May can see the rather unimpressive line he has written down in that case.

I really want to have some sort of relationship with you. If guiding and nothing else is where we end up with I'll deal with it, but it'll be really hard for me because I really like you and that's not going to stopbut I'll be sad about that.

"Why'd you cross out the crossed out part?"

"It seemed pressurey, even correcting for you telling me I was wrong about something being pressurey earlier. Is it not?"

It is so tempting to tell him that it's hopeless and give up.

"The note I am trying here to assist you in hitting is that you have to get across that you really like her and that she doesn't need to recover from having had the worst awakening ever in front of someone who is indifferent to her existence. You literally wrote down that you really like her and then you crossed it out. I'm no longer sure you could successfully hit pressurey if you deliberately tried to write a ransom note with magazine cutout letters."

"I don't think I've ever had a crush on someone as much as I have a crush on her. I think if we go the guiding without a relationship route I'm going to have an incredibly bad time for a while and both my parents and Lia will try to argue me out of doing it for my own good but they won't succeed, and maybe after a year or something it will stop feeling like I've fucked up so badly at my only chance at a relationship with someone as cool as her."

"Okay, I advise you to lean into how cool she is and away from the possibility that somebody'd talk you into evacuating fewer people from her sinking ship to protect you from having a nonromantic partnership."

"They wouldn't succeed - honestly, I'm probably giving them too little credit and they'll in fact agree with me once we talk - sorry that's a tangent. I can definitely talk about how cool she is - she's probably literally the most positively impactful person on at least one Earth... Well on at least like a dozen Earths but at least one otherwise inhabited Earth, which is more impressive than the ones she's the only person to have ever visited."

"Yeah, say stuff like that, she'll eat it up."

"Does it help or hurt my case if I mention I have done math to confirm this?"

"Oh my god, that's so cute, I wonder if Vallis has done math about me, that helps, absolutely tell her that."

"Okay, I can do that." Presumably Vallis hasn't done the same math about May because probably May isn't going to be generating a greater increase in wealth each year than any other individual or company in history, but maybe he did other math.

"Anything else?"

"I'm confused about whether she would appreciate comments about her appearance given the circumstances under which she acquired it. She's shown more sense in using her powers than almost anyone I've ever met, and she also has a degree of self-knowledge that's really cool and impressive and I've never seen anyone else have before. If I had to choose one person best suited to ruling the world, it would be her."

"Oh, also she can manage being on Twitter without going insane, which I don't think anyone else has yet managed."

"Probably don't dwell on her appearance, yeah. She looked nice before too but - yeah. The ruling the world compliment is better than the Twitter compliment but it would be hard to overdo this."

"I can provide both then."

"Oh good."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure she's revolutionized at least two fields of science and is set to revolutionize more over time, which is really cool. She's cited in Nature a bunch already."

"It's very cute that that's the kind of thing that comes to mind."

Man, it really is emotionally confusing when May smiles like that and compliments him.

"Well, I can mention it too."

"I think you probably have compliments down, any other stuff you wanna talk about?"

"I can't think of anything else, though I'm sure that's at least in part because I don't know the things I don't know."

Nod nod. "Well, I wish you luck."

"Thanks."

"I would like to phone my folks at somewhat more length than the I'm-alive texts, before I go back to Bet."

Then she can have a phone to do that with while Lucien.... flops on a couch and stares at the ceiling.

She calls her parents. She tells them about Bet and that she was very well taken care of during her awakening and about her powers and the project to handle dungeons emerging in the world. She'd like to give them Turnaround's email as a point of contact who will reliably be in the universe, can she?

Sure.

So she does that. Fortunately she doesn't have a lot of people to update. Her parents are it.

Then she wants to tap somebody in the pattern that means "bring me home". Someone other than Turnaround, because an error in corresponding code to action on Vallis's part would be irrecoverable if he brought Turnaround to Bet.

Yoink.

"Welcome back."

"I am not at all sure that your counterpart's going to salvage things with Lorica."

"Oh. That seems uh, rather unfortunate."

"Yeah. I think I helped but I can't do the whole thing for him."

"Yeah - I tried and failed to give him any actual advice in my letter to him."

"If you want to send me back with an update..."

"I don't think Ill actually have any advice to give in an update, unfortunately. Maybe if you told me more about what's going on?"

She can do her best to summarize the conversation, sure.

"Hrm, I bet this would have been easier if he had known her longer first - his crush on her isn't as big as it could be, I think."

"Yeah, it's not helping."

Nod.

"I'm not really sure what I could say that would be helpful, but maybe I'll think of something later."

Later that day Vallis gets a text from Skitter asking him what a good time for Traceless and her to meet would be (or he can give Skitter Traceless's phone number and she'll ask herself).

May can be shown the message.

Schedule's wide open unless a dungeon needs me.

In that case, Traceless can visit Skitter's territory in two hours - they'll meet up outside a clinic she supports.

She doesn't have a driver's license from this universe, can't reasonably fly for transportation without planning to get laid immediately afterwards, and would find it kind of farcical to take a bus; does Vallis want to share the secret of getting chaffeured around securely as a cape?

"There's a bus that goes by there and you can change in an alley nearby, or you can ask Skitter to send a car - once we actually work for them we'll have a driver assigned to us."

"Weren't we going to work for, like, a weird detente between them and the white hats? - I might want to import an agent, I don't think agents have been invented here and I want one."

"My understanding is that the resources would come from the Undersiders but we won't be working for them exactly?"

"...yeah, I want an agent. Do you want your own separate one, should I recruit an extra? Often partners have separate ones for conflict of interest reasons but I don't know if that makes sense here."

"What exactly would they do?"

"Manage my schedule, screen my work calls, hire me things like drivers and accountants and lawyers and whatnot, when I'm backlashed all I can do is talk to people so in my case basically they'd be a disability accommodation if I had anything that needed to happen before we got down to guiding."

"So basically a secretary?"

"More like a PA than specifically a secretary, I think, but not far wrong. But agents usually have several esper clients and secretaries and PAs usually don't - I'll probably have to pay one a lot more to come here and have only me as a client to start out than I would if I were back home having a normal relationship with a normal agency."

"I uh, think there are people who will do that for parahumans, but it is in fact a much more dangerous, complicated job than doing it for someone normal."

"Yeah, the thing where there's supervillains running around makes it even worse. Trouble with just using Rete is the thing where it isn't a person."

"We can ask the Undersiders if they have anyone working for them who could work for us instead, or we could hire someone with the few hundred thousand Tattletale said they could spare for funding for the next few months, though we probably shouldn't hire two people in that case."

"I think poaching someone from the Undersiders has conflict of interest issues. I know you like these people and I am going to give working with them a serious try but I cannot rely on them just having normal amounts and kinds of compunctions because they labeled themselves 'does not have normal amounts and kinds of compunctions' with bright red marker."

"Yeah, that's reasonable. Though we're probably still going to need to rely on them for medics and mercenaries."

"...mercenaries makes sense but why medics?"

"Cost - we don't have to use our limited budget to pay Undersider employees."

"You know, we could move to Canada, I bet they'd have us."

"What would that help with exactly?"

"Public health care? - does Canada have that in this universe?"

"Yeah - we can totally still send people to the hospital and get ambulances to come and things,  that's not an issue. The issue is that we probably want to have medics who will work with us without getting law enforcement involved if a villain shows up to help or something."

"Do random emergency medicine doctors here seriously make it their business to call the cops on villains who show up with a good reason to be present and and doing things that are not villainy?"

"The ones who are going to show up at dungeons will almost definitely be PRT medics. They wouldn't try to arrest a villain or anything at an Endbringer fight or similar, but if they were treating a villain who got hurt by a dungeon, I'd expect them to escalate the situation pretty often by default. At least until there's an established norm that dungeons are like endbringer fights truce-wise."

"Are you formally a villain? I don't see why I could not personally get patched up as necessary by PRT guys."

"I'm not, and you're not, but the Undersiders are going to show up pretty often."

"So they will need to rely on them for medics."

"Yeah... though uh, I also do actually think that if we set up a team of medics they provide us with we'll end up providing better medical care than the PRT medics will be able to."

"Why's that?"

"I think the Undersiders have more resources that can be shifted to this than the PRT. For instance, the Undersiders have been running half a dozen urgent care clinics around the city since Leviathan hit. There are others, but those are civilian, not PRT, and so won't get deployed to help with dungeons in person."

"Okay. That's short term, though, on a longer time horizon don't you expect dungeons to get resource allocation of their own?"

"They probably will, yeah."

"My world nearly collapsed under the weight of dungeons suddenly appearing, and we were only dealing with the one apocalyptic problem..." Anyway. She's going to ask Skitter to send a car. She's going to a meeting with Skitter and getting in a car she sends is not worse.

The car appears shortly, taking May to another part of the city, busier and farther along in reconstructions than most of the rest, where Skitter is waiting.

"Afternoon."

"Yes - let's walk while we talk."

May falls into step.

"Tattletale tells me you'll be good at handling dungeons."

"I am probably the world's leading expert on dungeons and got a decent dungeoneering power set too, or what will be one once I know how to shoot things, sure."

"And are you willing to uphold a truce?"

"I am willing to abide by a truce. I don't know what you have in mind when you say 'uphold'."

"If someone tries to start a fight you tell them to cut it out - regardless of their reason - and you help out in ending that fight if that doesn't get in the way of dealing with the dungeon."

"Again, that's vague, 'ending the fight'. I don't want to agree to anything and then discover that you and I disagree about what I agreed to."