"Need a hand?" the voice belongs to an older woman from somewhere behind Reve.

As Reve opens her mouth to reply, the woman cuts her off. "That was rhetorical. You obviously need help. And I wanna check something."  She reaches out a worn hand. "Let's get you up."

What???

But she's already reaching her hand out to Mystery Old Woman, who 

...is guiding her, hand clasping hers tightly, and she's looking down at Reve with a very smug face indeed.

"Oh. Ohhhh. Wow? T-thanks?" The sensation! Of guiding! Is distracting! Especially when it's arriving via unexpected handholding! With an esper in a pyromancy getup who can't be younger than fifty! 

Reve has a lot of questions but the only one that gets past her filter is "how???"

"Esper hearing doesn't fade with age, little Hourglass. I heard you explain your power and your backlash to three different people, tonight, and it sounded like we'd be compatible. And we are, so I have an offer for you."

She doesn't wait for Hourglass to ask the terms. "I'm Scarlet Inferno; famous dungeon esper, back in the day, though you're probably too young to have heard of me. Here's my offer: I'll train you, we'll guide - skin contact only, I'm not in the cradle robbing business - and when I think you're ready, we'll do dungeons together. I will do my best to teach you the most important things for dungeon espers - you will do your best to learn, which includes keeping notes, asking questions, and taking initiative, when the time is right." She waits. 

Reve finishes coping the offer's exact text to her phone. keeping notes. asking questions. "What would you be getting out of this?"

Scarlet's got an excellent smug smile. good job asking the right question, kid.

"Compatible guiding with someone who won't try and fuck me after I've told them no, a power that compliments mine so well I bet we'll be duo-clearing A-class Dungeons by week 8, a chance to train a mentee with everything I've learned - I don't want to write a book about it, you understand, It'd be horribly dull - and lastly, it's something to do for the next 8 months, before I retire and become a full-time doting grandma."

Stars above.

Reve wants to say "when do we start?", and she thinks that's probably an okay answer. But - she wants to do better than okay.

"I'll tell my agent to expect to hear from you with a contract to review and sign," she says, trying to sound like Serious Law People do in TV.

The woman - Scarlet Inferno (Reve needs to look that name up!) - laughs, not at all unkindly. "You'll get it tonight," she says, and strides out of the venue.

"Can you move them? Can you change their strengths once active? Are there limits on the shape beyond continuity? How does the initial cost compare to upkeep?" 

The girl doesn't know. Scarlet sighs. Hourglass's power testing was not up to her standards.

She buys a collection of metronomes, a few varieties of perpetual motion deck doohickeys, and some simple motorized toys. She designs a long battery of tests and runs the girl through them, exhaustively, explaining what she's testing and why it might matter. 

"Leave that bra on, girl," she says drily. "I'm not touching your tits! My daughter has seven years on you." 

She sighs. Hourglass isn't hitting on her; it's just her backlash making it impossible to think things through.

"Pull up YouTube on your phone. Pick something to watch." She'll sit still for slow guiding if she has something to look at that is more interesting than her surroundings, even with this much backlash. 

"...Chronic." Scarlet is testing her on identifying backlash types, which she's been doing at the start of every training session all week.

"...do you just use your power before bed for this, when you want it to be chronic?" 

"I roll a die at 9:00 p.m. and use that. It'd be a bad test if I was deciding based on my whims, or if you knew the odds I was randomizing at." (It's still not a great test, of course. If Hourglass was careful and observant enough, she would pick up on changes in Scarlet's demeanor caused by her backlash, and guess from that whether it was chronic or acute. But she doesn't think Hourglass is that sharp with people, and she does the test first thing every morning, just in case.)

"Anyways, you're correct; it was chronic." She claps her hands, the way she always does when she's moving to the next topic. "Let's do the variable strength tests for projectile redirecting, like we talked about yesterday." 

She grins. "Don't move; try not to get hit." And as Hourglass opens her mouth to ask some question or another, Scarlet pulls out a truly massive nerf gun she'd kept hidden behind the kitchen island and opens fire.

HEY 

"Why is professionalism one of the things you're teaching me?" 

Scarlet just raises an eyebrow at her.

(Reve doesn't roll her eyes. It's fair to ask her to think shit, she knows she asks before thinking sometimes. but...) "I did think about it. I'm still stumped. It feels... incongruous? with the rest." 

Scarlet nods. "Alright."

Hourglass still has a bit of backlash, from their earlier sparring, and she's been managing it fine all afternoon. Now's as good a time as any to clear it.

She settles down on the rented silo's snuggling couch and removes her jacket, beckoning the young girl over with an arm outstretched - Hourglass obliges, bouncing slightly. (Scarlet has given up pointing out that the bouncing makes her seem young and inexperienced - it takes a lot for her suppress it. Either she'll grow out of it or she won't.)

"I'm teaching you professionalism because I think you'll need it. I've told you before that your power is genuinely exceptional, and you have the drive to see it used to its fullest, but it's not the power of a lone star, like Skybreaker" (she smiles fondly) "or that Lee Tae-gun fellow." (Her Korean pronunciation is near-flawless.)

(Reve blushes a bit, as she usually does when receiving genuine praise from Scarlet.)

-Nodnod.

"The true strength of your power lies in what you can do when working with other espers, which requires learning what they can do beforehand and then working with them to get the most out of what you both can bring to the table. We've been going over different kinds of power interactions to look out for and how you can test them in the field since day one, and we'll keep doing that for as long as we're working together, but all that prep is useless if you can't get a stranger to take a minute to plan with you before going in. And professionalism is the core skill for doing that." 

(As is often the case, she can feel Hourglass fidgeting in her arms, and it's a bit distracting, but the girl is paying attention, so she doesn't comment.)

...huh. It is?

"Over time, your skills and reputation will grow, and so will the range at which DRT allocators request you for assignments." It was a lot more hectic, back in the day, but Hourglass isn't Scarlet's first pupil in the modern era, just her most promising one. "By the time you're half my age, you'll have worked with espers and mundies from thousands of different background intersections of race, class, and culture, and what is comfy and normal to you would drive a fifth of them insane - that's just how the world works. Professionalism is our mutual attempt at codifying an unmarked set of behaviors where most kinds of people can meet as strangers and work together; it's better than anything you'll develop on your own, and it's the type of thing that make most people take you more seriously."

She sighs. "And it's not especially fair, but with your size and your backlash" and, frankly, her personality "you're going to have work extra hard, sometimes, to get people to take you seriously right at the start."

Her lips quirk up. "I find it dull too, dear. Believe it or not, there was a time when I swooshed my cape dramatically and brainstormed one-liners on the ride to a dungeon." (Hourglass cackles, her entire body shaking, and Scarlet smiles as well.) "But it's the kind of dull work that can save lives, yours included, so it's something I'll train you in." She is not letting this girl get killed in her first year on the job, not if there's anything she can do about it. It would be a tragedy and it would be a waste.

She and Hourglass practice the obvious and non-obvious synergies with their powers for two weeks. During the second, Scarlet preps the girl on dungeon protocols, and runs mock communication sessions going over various common (and uncommon-but-dangerous scenarios).

When she's satisfied the girl has them down, she starts from the top, this time with Hourglass's backlash in play.