She's supposed to go back to school in two weeks, is the thing. She's already signed up for classes, and she's already paid tuition, and it'd annoy her to just let that go to waste.

And she'll get some annoyed and worried messages from her mom, who probably won't get it for at least a few months and there will be some very tiring phonecalls Stavi won't be able to dodge in there.

...and she'll miss Kai, and Tom, and Lexi. (She'll try to stay in touch online, but she's not sure she'll succeed. Her friends drift away, when she doesn't get to see them regularly, and she doesn't know why, but she's not stupid. There's a pattern there, and she's at the center of it.)

But - 

but it'd be insane to go back now, is the thing.

The tuition is annoying, sure, but it's chump change. Another semester of school is four months. 

Stavi sighs. She's not stupid. She's just procrastinating, her brain "helpfully" trying to find third options that aren't. there.

Stavi closes her flight search from SFO to ONT and tabs into Slack. Her fingers bang out ctrl+k➡mid-ter➡enter as a header, a simple chunk of message heading, the message body already flowing from her hands.

stv: I'm staying.

(She sees the first ‼️and 🎊 reacts show up, and doesn't need to check to know that they're from Leigh. She can see the woman's screen from here.)

Now she just needs to email the school administration, turn her phone off defensively, and email mom.

The code is good. It works and it's not slow and as Stavi greedily scans the output she can see that she finally fixed the fucking mangled dupes because that last test case was actually definitive (get dunked on, Carl,) and her fingers are only shaking a bit as she writes up the PR description and sends it and then links it in #game-changers.

-and then not fifteen minutes later she gets a DM from Alex and it's about. 

fucking UI timelines?

stv: ???
stv: who fucking cares?

AlexiShin: Stavi.
AlexiShin: The UI is really important.
AlexiShin: I know you're full-time now, and working closely with Leigh.
AlexiShin: And I get that your contributions to the core algorithm have been valuable, these last three weeks.
AlexiShin: But you can't keep ignoring this. We need to sync on a timeline here.

(She's really annoyed. The punctuation gives it away.)

stv: don't think we do?
stv: don't think it matters

AlexiShin: Stavi. 
AlexiShin: Of course the UI matters. The entire algorithm is useless without one.
AlexiShin: Logistics teams won't switch to it just because it's better.
AlexiShin: You're being ridiculous.

stv: 'm not
stv: the ui just doesn't really matter

Alex doesn't respond.

Stavi gets a DM from Leigh, though.

LeightUp: Is there a problem with the alg??
stv: ? no
LeightUp: Oh thank frog
LeightUp: you gave Alex a bit of a heart attack tho, girlie
LeightUp: Why'd you tell her it didn't matter?
stv: bc it doesn't 
LeightUp: ?what?
stv: even if the alg is right and the ui is good and we a good adoption rate
stv: it just doesn't really matter that much

What's gotten into her?

She takes off her headphones and grabs her jacket. (Stavi is already wearing hers.) "Let's go chat on the roof," she says to Stavi, standing up.

...sure, whatever.

Stavi follows the woman who's become her best friend over the past five months away from their desks and over to the elevator, and out onto the armchairs on the roof. 

Leigh sits, and motions for Stavi to sit beside her. "What's wrong?"

She shrugs. "Nothing in particular?"

She stares at Stavi in confusion. "Girl, you've been one of the most dedicated people here to the mission since before you even formally started interning here. I think something is wrong."

"I mean - we'll save lives, and some money, and make some too. And then what?"

Confused stare. 

Leigh isn't stupid. Why doesn't she get it? "...they're going to die anyways. all we'd be doing is changing when." 

Oh. She's burnt out. (Stavi has been working so hard for the last few months, harder than most of the full-timers. Maybe this is Leigh's fault... ugh.)

"...I think you need a bit of a break," she says gently, putting a hand on the young woman's shoulder. "Stay up here for a bit? Enjoy the air. The clouds are beautiful, aren't they? I'll do q bubble tea order, bring you your favorite." 

Stavi really doesn't see how a break would matter, but she trusts Leigh and arguing about it seems kinda pointless, so.

She shrugs. 

Alright. Leigh has to get back to work, but she can set up a doordash order for bubble tea and put Stavi's in her cart for her.

She gives her a shoulder squeeze as she stands up. "It's going to be okay." 

lol. lmao.

Stavi sits on the roof, alone with her thoughts. (They aren't pleasant company. That doesn't matter.)

The wind is making it chilly. That doesn't matter either.

Her phone rings. She picks it up on autopilot. 

Her mom, through her sobs, tells her that Uncle Zalph was mauled by a dungeon monster in work. He's in critical condition. The doctors don't think he's going to make it. 

Stavi doesn't say anything. (why would she?)

It takes her mom a while to notice (she's, understandably, a bit distracted) but when she asks how soon Stavi can fly out and doesn't get any answer, she realizes that her daughter hasn't said anything since picking up the phone. 

"-Stavi, are you there?" 

"yes." 

Her daughter's voice sounds flat, detached, the way it does when she's playing a game or something on her computer.

Anger floods through her. "Stavi, your uncle is dying." 

She knows. "...he was always going to die."

The (loud, angry, illogical) extended response from her mom confirms what Stavi should have already known, which is that she doesn't get it and there's no point trying to explain it.

(It won't change anything, really, if her mom gets it or not. She's not sure why she thought it might. Stupid of her.)

She doesn't bother saying anything else. Her mother yells at her through the phone, for a while, and Stavi hears it all, and none of it matters even a little bit.

LeightUp: I think it's just burnout, Alex. She's been working as hard as anyone here, even Carl and Annie, and we've been stretching her too thin
LeightUp: I know we technically hired her to do UI but core would be fucked without her?
AlexiShin: It was still grossly unprofessional.
AlexiShin: And if you needed her that badly, you should have told me sooner.
AlexiShin: I need to figure out what to tell Annie. And our investors, on Friday, if Stavi doesn't even have a UI timeline.
LeightUp: sigh
LeightUp: I'll go see where she's at with the UI. I know she was working on it concurrently with the core alg work, I saw the commits.

...Stavi is idle on Slack. Leigh takes her headphones off and looks around.

Stavi's chair is empty. (Her laptop and bag are still there.)

Huh. It's been... (she looks at timestamps in her DMs with Alex) almost two hours since they chatted on the roof? 

Stavi wouldn't still be up there, it started raining before the boba was delivered (...she hasn't gotten her boba, either, it's still over on the table). So where is she?

Not in any of the meeting rooms, not in the break room, not over by the window where she likes sitting with coffee sometimes...

This is concerning! Leigh is concerned!

After she verifies that Stavi isn't in any of the (gender-neutral, private-stall) bathrooms on their floor, she asks around.

Nobody's seen her, but Carl (who sits facing the hallway to the elevator and stairs and doesn't miss people walking by) says (in the tone of someone slowly realizing that they have information they did not realize they had, and also they don't like that information) that he hasn't seen her since she went to the roof.

She wouldn't have gone home without her bag or laptop, right? She couldn't have gone home without her bag, it has her keys in it, she doesn't keep them in her pockets because she hates the way they jingle and press into her skin, that was one of her submitted pieces of anonymous trivia at the icebreaker.

...is she still on the roof? She could maybe hide from the rain under the slight awning that covers the door, if she really wanted to?

...it's Leigh's turn to realize that she maybe has information that she didn't realize she had and really doesn't like.

Stavi was exhibiting some uncharacteristic signs of bad mental health.

And Leigh just. left her. Alone. On the roof.

The elevators are currently on the third and fifth floors and going down.

She takes the stairs, running until her lungs burn. (It almost certainly won't make a difference, some part of her observes clinically. Either we're catastrophizing and she's fine, or it'll already be too late. She's had plenty of time to jump.)

The door to the roof bursts open and Alexi comes out into the rain, panting.

Stavi hears it, over the sounds of the rain and the cars below and the chattering of her teeth. 

(She doesn't turn to look. Why would she.)

Oh thank frog she's okay - 

Well, she's sitting the rain almost exactly where Leigh left her, staring into the void and violently shivering. 

(Her phone is on the ground next, face up in a large pool of water, with a massive crack on the screen that wasn't there two hours ago. The screen is dark.)

"Stavi?" She rushes over, stomach churning violently. (what - why is she just -) "Stavi, what's wrong, what happened,"

Stavi doesn't say anything, doesn't even acknowledge that Leigh is there. 

What would she even say? "We're both going to die and everyone who we've ever known or loved will die too and we're all going to be forgotten, someday, and then the stars will go out and none of this will have ever mattered even a little bit?" Why would she bother saying that. It's going to happen either way.

Stavi is shivering uncontrollably and not responding to anything she says.

Leigh calls 911 and explains the problem, right in front of Stavi because maybe that will help her snap out of it and also she doesn't super want to let Stavi out of her line of sight, right now!

     The operator's voice is crisp and calm. "Is she breathing?" 

"Yes."

     "Is she conscious? Does she respond to her environment?"

"I am pretty sure she's conscious but she's not responding at all," not even to this conversation about her right in front of her face.

     "Does she have a history of recreational drug use?"

"No." Stavi doesn't even drink.

     "Is her skin turning pale or blue?"

"...her lips are a bit blue. And she's pale all over."

...While waiting for the 911 dispatch, Leigh is instructed to try and get Stavi inside and to a warm area, and then. Remove her wet clothes and wrap her in dry fabric as much as possible, focusing on her head, chest, and neck.

(This is a very weird thing for a tech VP to be doing three weeks before they exit stealth. Stavi could fucking die if she doesn't so who cares if it's weird!

Leigh calls Alexi and puts her on speakerphone, and tells her to bring the box of spare swag clothes up. And Stavi still isn't responding, so she grabs her best coder's hand and tries to pull her upright.

...Stavi isn't going to fight and isn't intentionally going limp, but it's going to take a lot more than just pulling on her hand to get her upright, because she's not contributing much, either.

Leigh is about half a foot taller than Stavi and hits the gym after work every day for an hour to unwind. She can more or less carry her inside.

And then she can... start undressing. Her subordinate who is six years younger than her and, like, not especially hot but certainly not ugly or anything. (Clips of HR videos from her first job play in her head. She ignores them.)

Stavi would have heard the 911 operator explain this over speakerphone already, but Leigh explains it out loud anyways, as she's doing it, because it makes her feel a bit less insane. (That's a cute bra? brain can you SHUT UP)

(It doesn't matter that she's cold and maybe freezing to death. She noticed she was shivering, earlier, she's not stupid, but it would have been more effort to make herself stop, even if it was pretty unpleasant.)

...Leigh doesn't get it, and Stavi isn't interested in fixing that for her. (She's smart; maybe she'll figure that out on her own. But it doesn't matter if she does or not. It won't change anything, not really.)

(Man this is easily the least sexy clothes removal of her entire life shut up shut up shut uuuuup)

Stavi really does not look good. Leigh hugs her for warmth.

Alex is kind of annoyed at being given an errand like this without much explanation, but Leigh told her to hurry and she did manage the swag in the first place, she's the right person to ask if it really is an emergency.

The elevator door opens and she sees their engineering VP hugging the weird intern new hire who has just dropped a massive headache on Alex's plate. And the girl's half naked. 

She coughs, very pointedly, as she approaches. (She doesn't say what the actual fuck is happening here, Leigh, but only because her brain is struggling with putting it into reasonably professional terms on the spot.)

Leigh doesn't even turn, but she does correctly interpret the cough. "The EMT said I should wrap her in dry fabrics to stop her from losing more heat. Alex, she was just - sitting out there in the rain, slowly freezing to death -" her voice catches. "Hand me some of the XLs."

(What the fuck?) Alex can do that, even if she doesn't know what the fuck. She hands over the jackets. (She looks away while she does, because she doesn't want to see Stavi topless, it's staggeringly unprofessional.)

And Leigh will unhug Stavi long enough to wrap her in them.

The EMTs arrive and carefully move Stavi to a stretcher with a fancy warming blanket.

They try a few different things to get her attention and confirm that she's awake and has automatic responses (the shivering was a clue there but they have to check) but, despite a lack of dilated eyes or any other indication that this might be drug-related, the patient seems utterly uninterested in distinguishing herself from a corpse.

"Could be an esper awakening," one of EMTs says thoughtfully, after they load her into the ambulance. (The driver and other EMT groan in unison.)

...Leigh rides along, holding one of Stavi's hands. It's so cold. She doesn't like that. (Her brain feels... numb. She has her laptop with her. Maybe she'll do some work when they get to the hospital. She certainly wasn't going to get any work done if she stayed at the office.)

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I shouldn't have left you out there."

...it's stupid of Leigh, thinking it matters. But even smart people can be stupid; Stavi is one of the smartest people she knows, and she was alive for twenty years and spent all of them thinking her actions could matter. (Maybe there's just a cut-off, and people smarter than Stavi all figure it out, and so she never meets them. That would make sense.)

"Well," the doctor says, looking at the scan results, "she's either awakening as an esper or had an unusual psychotic break, and if she was showing uncharacteristic psychological symptoms - troubling nihilism, I think you mentioned? - the esper awakening does seem decently likely. Chart says she just turned twenty?"

Leigh nods numbly. (She'd helped Stavi throw the birthday party, just a few weeks ago, because almost everyone she knows in the city she knows through Inferan. It was wild, having a coworker party for someone who couldn't legally drink, but it had been a surprising amount of fun, and Stavi had loved the fancy cake Leigh had sprung for...)

Huh. That doesn't sound right, to Stavi? She didn't think esper awakenings could make you less confused or deluded.

...she's not going to argue with them. it. doesn't. matter. 

Leigh keeps working at the hospital late into the evening, but the next day, she has too many meetings for that to be feasible.

She tries not to think about Stavi's frigid hand in hers, or the way her teeth had been chattering, or the way she'd said "they're going to die anyways" with that utterly flat voice.

(She has a lot of things to distract herself with. She has to get Stavi's changes to the core alg merged and get someone on triple checking that, while she figures out out how to cobble together a UI between herself, Carl, and whoever else they can spare. Ideally before Alex meets with the shareholders on Friday...)

Stavi's hospital stay goes on, one miserable day at a time. She can feel parts of her body becoming more sore and painful as she stays still in the position she's in.

Her sensory intake is filled with a variety of unpleasantries; the combination is often overwhelming. (She's been told, repeatedly, that if she wants anything, all she has to do is ask.)

None of that matters, though, not in the face of the inevitability of entropy. The arrow of time moves in one direction. Stavi's not stupid; she knows how this ends. And knowing how it ends, what else could possibly matter?

It's miserable, obviously; far more horrible than the pain and the isolation and the bad smells and sounds, so much so that those things would be a welcome distraction if they actually functioned as one, or if her suffering mattered at all.

But they don't; she can't look away from the simple truth that she's spent her entire life not noticing. The fact that it's like pressing her face against a hot stove doesn't make it any less true.

(If that which can be destroyed by the truth includes Stavi - well, that's kind of pathetic, isn't it, but doesn't matter, either, so she doesn't need to dwell on it either way.)

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.)