Somehow this has ended up being his life.

All right, what are they looking at here?

Agents have fairly uniform copy ("I strive to provide the best possible working environment and negotiate ideal contract terms for espers I represent" and such). There are also specialties, which are less bland - Juggernaut probably wants a combat esper agent. All the finer grained information seems to be classified as an agent's "interest": they might say they are "interested in" psych backlashes, international deployments, media appearances, field teams (where a pair or group of espers are reliably deployed together, either for power synergy or because they can't last five minutes without a guiding partner on hand), rapid emergency response, bespoke loot handling procedures, etcetera. All of these people will take a phone call for personal fit check!

"Media appearances," she groans, when they run across that one. "Okay, okay. Do I want someone who's interested in psych backlashes? I hear 'interested in psych backlashes' and all I'm getting is like, 'I love it when I get to represent someone so crazy they can't tell I'm scamming them', but that might just be my cynical and untrusting nature talking."

"As far as I can tell you don't even get crazy crazy on backlash, you just get, like, miserable. But maybe you still want to start with somebody who's interested in psych backlashes? Just because there might be something we're missing about how that plays out?"

Do any of these people list an interest in... what would they even say... forthright communication? Strong personalities?

Nobody says outright that they have an interest in that quite so specifically, but there's one who gets more specific than "psych backlashes" and says they're interested in "altered states that create impediments to communication, and routing around those creatively". She also represents June Yamanaka.

That looks like a start. He passes her number to April.

April will grudgingly accept that this process requires phone calls. Ring ring.

"Phoebe Gallagher speaking, how may I help you?"

"Hi, I'm April, I'm a new esper looking for an agent. You sounded promising because I'm really cranky and blunt as a person and my backlash makes me even crankier. I don't know what dealing with that is gonna look like but it probably needs dealing with."

"Sounds like it! Are you cranky and blunt but want everybody else to politely get out of the way, or cranky and blunt and you want the bumper cars version of life where you bonk into other cranky bluntness?"

"I dunno, kind of between those? I don't want people to start fights with me for no reason but I don't want them to bullshit me either? I also have a, uh, best friend slash PA who can probably help translate between me and anybody who doesn't like my cranky bluntness."

"That’s useful." She knows a cat who could use one of those. Poor Paula. "Are you planning to be public with your backlash?"

"Good question. I haven't decided yet, so I guess I'm at least not starting out public with it? It's going to be hilariously obvious that it makes me cranky, but I don't know if that means I might as well write down 'it makes me cranky' even though that's not technically what it does..."

"No shortage of backlashes that do that as a side effect. How about your power?"

"Invincibility kinda-sorta shading into superstrength in a weird way. The lady at the powers testing place gave me a Melee 4 and said that if I didn't end up hitting 5 she'd eat her hat."

"Ooh, invincibility, fun. Anything besides the power and backlash that might point you at some dungeons over others? With a power like that you probably don't park within the province, so it'll matter if you speak other languages, hate spiders, can't legally travel to Europe, had a bad breakup with a DRT guy..."

"I'm pretty bad at languages, I have, like, shitty high school French but I wouldn't want to count on myself to run a dungeon with it. And I really want to, like, have some kind of mentoring situation or something before I totally launch myself into the deep end dungeons-wise, it seems crazy that as far as I can tell I could just sign up to run a dungeon right now if I felt like it and nobody would stop me even though I awakened last week and have no idea what I'm doing. But yeah, with a power like mine, in the long term I should probably end up going wherever they need stuff punched to death even if they have to assign me a local DRT guy as a translator or whatever."

"Oh, you for sure shouldn't run one by yourself right now. I'd get you a dungeon buddy for your first few. Translators can't handle everything - if a dungeon wrecks comms and you can't make anyone else invincible and you run into a vic, you can talk to them if you can talk to them and can't if you can't. But, loosely, there's combat where you cover a victim's exit, and combat where the vics have all been extracted but there's a boss monster guarding the core, and I'm guessing you're the second kind?"

"Not that I've ever tried either, but in powers testing when I went hard I kind of tended to... make anything I touched into shrapnel... which is not something you generally want to be doing if you're trying to rescue somebody..."

"Plus most psych backlashes are awkward with the customer service aspect."

"My entire personality is awkward with the customer service aspect. But the backlash does make it worse, yeah."

"Do you have a partner yet?"

"I have a line on some people I can guide with, but no primary, and it would be cool to find one."

"You don't need me for that, the mixers wouldn't be much good if you had to already have an agent to get into them since they mostly serve to stir new espers into the pool, but if nobody's recommended that you hit up some mixers yet, I'll be the first. You should know that I won't represent any two espers who are partnering or forming a field team. You can work together but if you're outright partnered, it's by default a conflict of interest - it's possible to get a team agent but I'm not one. You can see the list of who I'm already working with on my Maple profile."

"Yeah, I took a glance at the list and didn't recognize anybody. I'll check out some mixers if I see any in reach, but do agents help people find partners if the mixers aren't cutting it?"