Leigh visits a few more times. She gives Stavi status updates from Inferan, lets her know that Leigh talked to her mother and explained that the doctors think she's having an esper awakening.

(Leigh had offered to fly her out, but learned that Stavi's mom doesn't do airplanes, which Leigh was surprised by - she thinks of that as an Old People Thing, and Stavi's mom is middle-aged, not old. If Stavi were meaningfully present, she could have explained that Mom's father had been on an airplane, in the early 70s, and so he died while Grannie was still pregnant with Mom.) 

Anyways, Stavi's mother is going to her uncle's funeral by train, and can't really hop lines and come to the hospital. Leigh facilitates a few video calls, in which Stavi's mom tearfully apologizes for yelling at her and tells Stavi she's very proud of her and that she's lucky to have a kind friend like Leigh and that she just needs to hang on a few more days and that she's loved, she knows her mom loves her even if she can't tell her that right now.

(It's more than a bit uncomfortable for Leigh to be doing all of this for Stavi - they've had a mentor-friend-colleague relationship for the past four months, not one where they'd ever discussed deep emotions, or even their families. This wasn't the kind of tail risk she'd been thinking about, when getting in on the ground floor at a promising startup, a part of her notes, and Alex has been giving her the occasional odd look when she mentions "no updates on Stavi's condition" in their standups. Leigh hasn't found the time to go to the gym for more than 15 minutes at a time since it happened, and her body is brimming with nervous energy. But there's just way too much to do, and she can code from a laptop in transit or in a hospital room just as well as she can from her couch at home, so it's not like she's losing sleep, here, or like she's writing checks she can't cash.)

...she's really uncomfortable. It's almost certainly pointless to try and do anything about it, but...

with what feels like an absurd amount of effort, Stavi shifts in her bed, and -

ouch!

She whimpers, a bit.

It's 4 am and so there's nobody currently in the room to hear it, unfortunately.

lol. what did she think was going to happen.

Okay. Wait. They literally gave her a Call button. To Call for help. If she wanted help. She can press the Call button.

It feels hopeless and stupid to expect that it might make a difference, but - 

she's done things that felt hopeless and stupid, in her life! And some of them mattered, she saw them matter, it's not - she's not - 

It's one of the hardest things she's done in her life, but as the backlash starts to loosen its grip on her mind, Stavi manages to press her call button.

Stavi isn't sure, yet, if she's quitting Inferan or not, but she does do her best, in her spare time over the next few weeks, to finish out everything she started working on for them.  

(She apologies to Leigh and Alex about last Wednesday. Alex gives her a "it was your hell week, don't worry about it" response, though she seems... relieved, to have gotten the apology. Leigh told her that Stavi almost died and that it would have been Leigh's fault if she had, which isn't very fair to her. Stavi gives her an awkward hug and points out that it was her backlash, not Leigh, that almost killed her, and also that Leigh did in fact save her life and get her to a hospital?)

She patches things up with mom, and flies out for a memorial service for Uncle Zalph, who she loved and cared about and who could have had a long happy life if things were different. (She cries, quietly.)

She finds an esper with a mania backlash at a mixer, and schedules some time to test out her power.

Okay, well. This isn't a dungeon power, and she is going to need some startup capital, but. Much like her decision to leave school, the path ahead of her is non-trivial but also very clear.

Her power is unique enough that she can just take the name that describes what it does simply, and so she does.

Under that name, and with the loan money she secures after demonstrating her power to an investor, she hires a private agent who she's done a fair amount of vetting work, and with his help, she founds Psychic Postmortem Consulting Solutions.

For her first few cases, she goes hunting for incidents to make a name for herself with, with offers to unravel them for involved parties with no upfront cost, and payment conditional on a satisfying explanation. (Her main investor and her agent helped her come up with this plan - it'll get her name out there with a bang.)

The first taker she gets is on a high-profile fuck-up where most of a DRT squad, two espers, and several victims all died inside a presumed C-rank dungeon. The dungeon scuffed the recording devices that were present. The victims families, the DRT branch, and the esper agencies all want answers.

It involves more touching dead bodies and demanding access to other people's emails than she had expected to be doing, professionally, but it's straightforward, for her power, to figure out what happened here. (She does ends up needing a fair bit of guiding, though - she pays a compatible professional, and they cuddle in underwear between her uses.)

It turns out that Infinite Blades (real name Truce Payne) went into the dungeon with more backlash than anyone else present was aware of, because her guiding partner had died a week ago and she hadn't stopped doing dungeons since then, due to her not-very-well-disclosed psychological backlash. When the dungeon monsters (hot air balloons armored with spikes that lobbed slow-moving flaming projectiles) ambushed the group, instead of deflecting their attacks with her conjured knives as she had on the way in and was brought into the dungeon to do, Infinite Blades lashed out violently at the one that had appeared above them with an absurd number of blades and then tried to destroy the core, which was visible from their location.

Her backlash killed her before she scratched the core. The balloon above them exploded, raining burning pitch and heavy metal spikes on everyone present. The other esper, picked for his offensive capabilities, was able to take down about a third of the balloons before burning to death.

Ms Payne's former agent resigns in disgrace - the records PPCS uncovers and puts in the briefing show that he had access to the information that Payne's partner had died, did not know her to have other guiding partners (which she didn't), and at no point did this stop him from scheduling dungeons for her.

The lawyers determine that Ms Payne's rather substantial estate will pay out damages to the families of everyone else who died, and also a substantial sum to Causal Web, for her work unravelling what happened. 

Policies are updated. Life goes on.

Her work isn't always like that. Sometimes it's very expensive business postmortems, trying to figure out why exactly a product launch or investment had failed to work out. Stavi likes those, on some level - sometimes she comes back with policy recommendations, reports of bias or malfeasance, or even "this was a reasonable bet in expectation, and you got unlucky", and she always gets to charge a lot of money - and she does do a lot of them, because the money from them lets her invest in things she cares about. 

She evaluates her intake queue carefully for important questions that she's pretty sure her power can answer and that nothing else can, and she takes those whenever she's able, even if the clients can't pay her business rates. She earns a lot of goodwill, doing this, but ends up making a few powerful enemies, too.

She makes a lot of professional guiding contacts, and goes to meetups when she can make the time, but doesn't meet anyone she's compatible with in both senses of the word, especially because she keeps her work close to her chest. She has to keep a low profile, after all.

Her social life isn't as full or as rich as might be best for her. But she's doing important work, and despite what her backlash tries to tell her whenever she works, she regularly makes huge, observable differences in the lives she touches, and that's what matters to her.

(And she recommends Inferan, when she works with DRT chapters and their international equivalents, with a lot of data to back that recommendation up. And sometimes she emails Leigh, from her personal address, to try and stay in touch.)