"No." (She scrolls through a news feed while presumably at least partially listening to the voice on the other end of the line.) "No, I'm going to tell them the truth, Mister Baxter."

She drops the cheery facade. "The truth is that your so-called specialist is an esper who goes by the codename Peramal, a psychic who straightforwardly and accurately advertises his service as a tool of self-discovery and goes out of his way to make sure his clients know that he is not a precog."

(Oh! Well, that's good about the confluence, then.)

"The truth is that you willfully deceived Peramal about what you were actually asking him to do, which was to help you convince yourself and your company that the billion pound decision that you wanted to make was a good idea. And you did it because this would have been incredible for your career if it had worked out, and so you ignored the actual data available to you and led the stakeholders to believe that you'd contracted an independent analyst firm to validate your work." Her voice raises slightly, as though she's very intentionally talking over someone. "And unlike the last two times you did this, your gut feeling was wrong! The restructuring was an unmitigated disaster, and you've been spending the last six weeks trying to discreetly cover your tracks."

She laughs, harshly. "No. No, you canno -" Pause. "Mister Baxter, you may not have known who I was yesterday, but I happen to be the best postcog that money can buy and as such I make enough money that it would be financially irresponsible of me to accept a bribe from you, even if -"

"- Unprofessional? Mister Baxter, you fired six hundred and seventy-nine people with no warning, disrupting their lives and Pemberton's entire advertising operation at great expense to the company and no real gain to anyone, even you, all because you chose to hire a psychic to use as a magic 8-ball instead of actually trying to figure out whether your darling plan was actually a good idea. That was unprofessional."

(Yikes!)

Emily is over here labeling birds, but looks up when the call ends.

(He actually be might be stupid enough to end up in prison for this, which is really something.)

"Sorry about that," Causal Web says brightly. "People can be so unreasonable when they're upset." She's already mostly finished putting her clothes back on. "If you can send me the billing invoice now, I can get you paid right away for your services."

"Not a problem!" ('Congratulations on getting it sorted,' would probably be engaging too much with the specifics.)

She scrolls on her phone to the email from when the agency was scheduling this, then searches for related emails, to find the one from the workflow management system that has a link to enter final details and corrections for the guiding that occurred. She double-checks that it's populated correctly, then submits it to the site. She starts putting her own clothing back on. At the top of the next minute, Causal Web gets an email with the invoice from the system; there's nothing unexpected.

Yep! (She thinks for a bit and then pays 40% extra, since Emily did a lot more backlash matching than Causal Web usually sees and also was extremely professional throughout the entire thing.)

"It was good working with you," She says warmly. "I'll reach out the next time I'm in town for work, if that works for you?"

"You as well! And yes, that works for me!"

"Excellent." And then her car is here - she waves goodbye at the door, and heads off to go present her findings to the board.

Emily waves back. What a lovely esper to work with.