"I don't know what hotels are like in France," she admits.

"It was actually a hostel, there were lots of us all in one room, but one bed to a customer."

"Going to France sounds neat, anyway. Where in France?"

"Paris. Ren chaperoned, she was really delighted about it, we saw all the obvious stuff like the Eiffel Tower."

"Ooh, did you go up?"

"We did go up!"

"That must have been so cool."

"I think I liked it less than Ren did but I had a good time."

"Do you travel a lot, now, for dungeons?"

"I'm not usually worth teleporting long distances, I've got good powers but they're not very specialist powers so everywhere's got people who can cover the same bases I do. Once in a while I get called around the Great Lakes region for a psychic dungeon that victims can just exit without special procedures but I'm nothing special in the dungeons where you do need a special procedure, because the psychics who can let a victim out can also shield whatever mobility esper they'd have on hand for the fetching and carrying."

"...What about confluences?"

"Confluences hit everywhere at once. There's enough for me to do in Toronto when it comes up, it doesn't make me much more important to have across the world, I just do twice as many dungeons as usual while they're ongoing. - I can't step it up more than that because guiding with June takes so long and we can't do it while either of us is asleep, with you I might be able to do a lot more."

"Yeah, I--didn't ask so much because it seemed like they would have more trouble, it's just kind of a scary thought."

"Confluences are scary. You don't have to do dungeons, or do more of them during confluences, nobody can make you."

"If I weren't gonna they wouldn't be scary, dungeons don't grab espers so that's not going to happen again. I'd do confluences even if I didn't do other dungeons."

"Yeah, that's not uncommon. Typical wisdom is to keep your hand in with a dungeon every month or two so you're not out of practice when the confluence hits."

“Oh, yeah, I can see that.”

"Do you have a sense now of what it costs to do all the things you were doing in there - telling where victims and monsters are at various distances, controlling monsters, controlling monsters more thoroughly - would it actually be more expensive to keep two off the divers than just one, if the one fought the other?"

“No—to that last one. Uh, observing is a lot cheaper than controlling.”

"Twice as cheap? Ten times? Fifty?"

“Mmmmore like fifty but I think maybe not quite that?”

"Do you have to sense a monster to control it or could you just command one to stay still without additionally spending on the sensory aspect? Do you think you could get anything out of flickering between controlling it and not controlling it so that its opportunities to act were too short to do anything with but you spent only half as many total seconds using your power?"

“I think so, there doesn’t feel like there’s an—activation cost? I could try doing control without sensing, but I’m not sure how.”

"If there's no activation cost the flickering might be good. You might also want to hold monsters still so they can kill them."

“I think I can do that.”