Suburb!! Your powers are requested for a post-apocalyptic themed acid rain dungeon.

"You should go. I only have a little backlash remaining and I'm sure I can find someone else to hold hands with or whatever to guide it the rest of the way here."

"Are you sure?" He knew that Lawrence wanted to be really careful and conservative while working the confluence because of his newness, and absolutely did not want to push him into doing something he's not ready for.

"Yes. I appreciate the concern but I've gone to esper mixers before. I'll be fine."

Lachlan nods and leaves the hotel.

Lawrence will put on decent clothes (a white T-shirt and khakis) and leave the hotel room. There is food being served here. So he doesn't have to eat the leftover Menagerie bait for dinner.

He makes his way over...this is a surprisingly better selection than he expected for 'there is literally several disasters going on at once'. He supposes there are rich esper tastes to satisfy.

The dining room's pretty empty.  There's one blonde esper who glances up at him, sizes him up as a potential threat, and promptly dismisses him as 'not a dungeon monster'.

It's kind of funny how important socializing is, to be an esper. At the beginning, at least. He prefers to eat alone, but...

"Hello, I'm Lawrence. Can I eat here?" he asks, hovering near where the blonde esper is sitting. Wow, her hair is gorgeous. He kind of wishes he got a really beautiful hair color from his awakening...though he does like that he doesn't look obviously like esper too.

"Sure, go ahead.  I'm Sinkhole."  She sets down her fork and offers a hand to shake.

Shake!

Wow, they're really compatible. Or, he's really compatible with her. Not as much as Lachlan, but she is way better than anyone else he's tried.

"I'm very compatible with you," he says matter-of-factly.

"Yeah.  Same."  She's going to gently-yet-firmly pull him down next to her in the booth.  "I think you have a load on?"  She has a little bit, too.  But with this level of compatibility, she won't for long.

Lawrence will allow himself to be pulled!

"Yes, I have some. I'm glad to hear that it's symmetrical."

Well, if Lawrence allows himself to be pulled, maybe he'll allow her to wrap an arm around him?  Only one way to find out.  "Me, too.  Finding compatibility is tough."

Lawrence kind of tenses, but then relaxes. "It is! What brings you to California?" Or maybe she lives here? She looks American. But everything he knows about America is from cultural diffusion. 

Wuh-oh.  "Uh, too much?"  She pulls back a little bit - she doesn't let go, she just doesn't squeeze so much as she had been.

"No, you're fine. I'm just not used to people touching me in general...I'm new."

"Ahhhh.  I was always kinda cuddly.  Just tell me if I get to be too much, okay?"  Tentative squeeze again?

"I will!" Lawrence does not mind squeezing.

Neither does Carol!  It's why she does it.  "Anyway, I'm here for the cars, mostly.  I can do sticky traps."  A barely-perceptible bit of backlash blips up as a purple blob of sticky goop the size of a coin appears in front of Lawrence.  "I worked on slowing the cars enough to let other espers do the rest.  Mostly Pinion."

Pinion...he really needs to memorize esper name. And codenames. There's an app for that, he thinks...Presumably Pinion has a slowing related power.

Lawrence wants to touch the purple goop but it might not necessarily be safe. So he doesn't.

"I do movement control. I've been capturing Menagerie monsters. My power works on the cars too but it's very expensive to me to do so...it kept me and my team safe walking across the road, though."

"I heard we got some hotshot S-rank kinetic esper to wrap up the cars.  But you know how people are about that sort of thing."

"...I'm sorry, I don't actually know how people are about that sort of thing. I've only been an esper for a little over a month." Lawrence begins eating. He has a really bad tendency to just talk and not eat if there's anyone to talk to (hence his preference to eat alone), so he has to consciously remind himself to consume food.

"Oh, you know.  People just talk, especially about interesting stuff.  And bigshot kinetic espers are pretty interesting, especially when you've been dealing with these damn cars all day."  Carol eats lefty, unwilling to give up her new guiding buddy.  Past Carol was a showoff idiot who made her day mildly worse for the sole purpose of showing off to a twelve-year-old child.

Lawrence is right handed so it works out!

"I see." He doesn't, really. "Who are they planning to bring in? I don't know much about the Western esper scene." He also doesn't know much about the Eastern esper scene, but he doesn't need to say that.