42.

"Forty-two."

Louis gives Dr. Duncan an unimpressed look.

"She's from another universe, it's not like she's gonna cold-read me," Dr. Duncan argues.

Louis pinches the bridge of his nose. "Alright. Pop culture references aside - I'll put up a rudimentary shield. Should stop a baseline psychic, but any mutant above Psi-1 would have no trouble. Darren, think of an actually random number this time."

"- what is forty-two a reference to -" She starts attempting to read.

"A widely beloved science fiction novel posited it as the answer to 'life, the Universe, and everything'," Louis says absently. Darren is thinking of the number 153, but it's pretty fuzzy.

"Hundred and fifty three?"

Darren nods.

"Alright, one level up," Louis says.

When she goes to check, Dr. Duncan's mind appears to be encased in a shell of some kind. In the vaguely synesthetic sense of telepathy, it has NO ADMITTANCE written on the front.

"...no admittance?" she says. "Uh, I don't have any combat arts training except being able to knock people out, and that I don't know how to do through this. I can try randomly flailing but it will be a little like trying to beat down a door with a carrot."

"Well, try what you can," Louis says. "If you can't break through we'll just move on to manipulation."

"Okay." She sets about trying to beat down a door with a carrot.

It stands firm.

Louis eventually nods. "Well, the disparity between defense and offense is a bit odd, but oddity is to be expected from an interdimensional visitor. I'll take the shielding off, and we can start on the fun stuff."

Fun stuff includes: "zapping" Dr. Duncan's brain so that he loses his train of thought, causing him to see a vase of flowers floating in midair, temporarily preventing him from saying the phrase "I am an elephant," causing sudden inexplicable feelings of fear/happiness/irritation, and making him raise his left hand above his head.

"Um, a lot of this stuff is stuff I could do but would normally not do without someone around to fix it if I screwed up in some unfortunate way, are you pretty confident you can handle all of that?" she asks Louis. "Bearing in mind that my mistakes may be weird in some way compared to local psi mistakes."

"Very confident," Louis says. "Reversing a sudden change to someone's mind is easy, especially when I've been paying attention throughout the process."

"Okay then. Some of this would be easier if I'd thought to bring my textbook but if you're playing safety net I should be able to work it out from first principles." She wants verbal consent from Dr. Duncan again, and then she can... do everything on the list just like that.

"I can't keep doing this all day," she mentions. "If you need to know what I can do when I'm at full capacity and there's a lot more to come, I might have to come back later."

"We're actually pretty much done," Louis says. "Do you have any specific capabilities this test hasn't gone over that you'd like tested?"

"I mentioned I can knock people out. I can do a coffee-like thing. I was using arts for translation till I got this spell done. I have minor teekay I might train up. I can lucid dream? Uh, separately I have some arcane magic, I don't know if that counts as part of the same test."

"Knocking people out from a standing start is actually quite high-power by our standards, usually you'd see that as a psychic knack rather than a principled technique. Coffee-thing isn't something I've heard of but I wouldn't be shocked if it's out there, it sounds handy. Psychic translation is a thing, telekinesis is a separate test, lucid dreaming is not considered a superpower, and arcane magic is another separate test."

"Okay. Do you want me to knock out Dr. Duncan as a demo? He'll wake up with a headache but I can fix that. I don't know if you need to see it to rate it."

"Yes, let's see that," Louis says thoughtfully.

Dr. Duncan preemptively sits on the floor.

"If you could just again confirm..."

And when Dr. Duncan has just again confirmed he is unconscious!

"Good, good," Louis says. "Can you also wake him up again, or should that fall to me?"

"I'm not as reliable at that but I can usually -" Yup, there he is. She fixes the headache too.

"Excellent!" Dr. Duncan says, clambering back to his feet.

Louis claps his hands together. "Alright. Ordinarily, ranking is easy, because defense, oppositional power, and versatility scale together in psis from our world, but obviously in your world they don't. Offensively you've got some punch but no penetrative power, defensively you're a fortress, and utility-wise you're more versatile than anyone I've seen since Sahar - she was a student a few years back whose knack was the ability to appropriate and use the knacks of others. If it was accepted practice I'd recommend a split rating, but it isn't, so I'm going to recommend a rating of Psi-3 with a knack for high-level shielding." Darren nods and marks something on his clipboard. "Any questions?"

"What are the material consequences of this rating?"

"Few and far between," Louis says. "It will be displayed on your official MID - the Mutant ID card, which before you ask does in fact get issued to nonmutants who attend Whateley - when you receive one. You can use it when explaining your powers to disambiguate them, though this particular rating will only serve to ambiguate them further because it's hacky and weird. I honestly can't think of any other implications of the rating."

"If you get a high rating you can brag about it," Darren mentions.