"This is part of my job," he replies calmly, but then yeah she vanishes in another flash of light.

The location she finds herself in is a large, white, sterile room with a one-way mirror, a table and a couple of comfortable chairs, and a heavy-duty metal door barring access outside.

One of the chairs is occupied by a person. "Good morning, María Espe—"

"Death would be preferable to you spending five seconds saying my legal name every time you address me for the rest of our conversation," she interrupts. "Call me Marza, or Azkala, or I can come up with something else if you want, and whatever honorifics you want to sprinkle on top of it. Please."

"—of course. My name is Kim Ha-yoon." She doesn't say it's a pleasure to meet her because she's getting a certain vibe from her. "Do you need anything? Water, food, coffee, a bathroom?"

"Thank you. I genuinely do not intend to be as much of a huge bitch as I am currently being, but I find it best to nip the foreign name thing in the bud, I just spent not fewer than six hours and twenty minutes trapped in a sarcophagus with no sensory input and then blew myself up, and I am in fact a huge bitch. I don't actually know if I need food, water, coffee, or a bathroom; I'm not actually feeling the biological urges but I think you might know better than I whether it's a good idea to fulfill them anyway after being sustained by a dungeon."

"It probably is, especially after awakening as an esper in the fashion you did. Come with me?" she asks, standing up.

She stands. Winces; her feet are still a little bit numb.

"...did that medical scan when I was leaving indicate anything about my general state of health," she asks, following along. "Like nerve damage. I'm slightly worried that I might have damaged my nerves, and I wouldn't whine about a broken leg or something but nerve damage is the kind of thing you want to address promptly."

"No, you seem to be in perfect physical condition. My first guess would be that that's related to your backlash." Open door, it wasn't looked, here's a nice corporate corridor with a water cooler and a coffee machine and some muffins in a basket and doors to bathrooms.

Order of operations... restroom, water, food, more water. Coffee's for nerds.

"So my backlash is my feet falling asleep?" she asks when she's done. "It's definitely an ironic personal hell, but it's not that personal. Or debilitating."

She starts leading the way back to the room. "Well, that's the thing, we don't really know. How much do you know about espers' awakenings and backlashes, so I can calibrate myself on how much to explain?"

"Knew a kid in high school who awakened, Feli. He got itchy, for a week straight, every part of his body. Had to tie him down. He turned out to have some kind of temporary regeneration he can distribute, no good for dungeoneering but he does recovery and disaster relief."

(And camshows, because he turned out to be able to orgasm hands-free by psychic itching and pelvic floor tricks and it looks pretty cool when he does it. She's not going to say that, because unlike Lee Tae-gun this lady does not look like she makes amazing faces when sexually harassed and has given Marza no reason to assault her customer service voice.)

"Anyway, he gets itchy when he heals, so I figured the awakening was just frontloading a ton of backlash? And... well, I guess I did spend a while completely numb, but I didn't think it really counted if it just happens to you."

She nods. "Awakening is frontloading a lot of backlash, as you say," she says as she sits back down. "But—backlashes are complex and multifaceted, in the same way powers can be. Someone with, say, fire powers could get hypothermia but they could also get cold and rude or slow and tired or emotionally blunted or any number of things. And even that first while of backlash frontloading doesn't always reveal all of it, and it never gets as bad as espers' most acute crises can.

"And from Lee Tae-gun's preliminary report, it seems like you may have run into a—small loophole that allowed you to skip over most of that. Do you know how esper partnerships work?"

"I am not fucking a man who speaks only in customer service voice," is what she says, leaping adroitly past approximately five entire branches of conversation that may or may not actually have been in order. "This is not fanfiction and my willingness to bully him into making horny-panic faces does not extend to prostitution. If it's fuck or die I'll find Nightmare and explode in it."

"—you do not need to have sex with—or even partner with—Lee Tae-gun!" she says, looking kind of alarmed. "Sexual relations are not at all necessary, nor even that common a component, of esper partnerships."

"Good. Okay."

Huff.

"Sorry for vaguely accusing you of being a pimp. I know less than I thought, apparently, about esper partnerships. Please continue."

"Right," she says, a bit thrown but recovering quickly. "Using your powers will incur what we call acute backlash—which is the type we've discussed, with symptoms psychological, physiological, or both, as the case may be. Not dealing with it for long enough, or incurring sufficient amounts of it in short periods of time, will cause what we call chronic backlash—damage to your body and energy, manifesting as chronic pain, lethargy, weakness, and eventually organ failure and death. 

"The way to 'deal with it' is to spend time near someone with a compatible, or complementary, backlash. We call that process 'guiding', and every esper who uses their powers at all needs guiding if they want to avoid all of that. In theory, every esper can guide every other esper, but some backlashes are so incompatible they might as well not exist. Compatibility is also a matter of degree, and espers can be more or less compatible with each other; it is also not perfectly symmetrical, and it can be the case that one member of a partnership benefits much more than the other. Occasionally espers form three-way partnerships, with esper A guiding esper B, who guides esper C, who guides esper A. I believe there are two active four-way partnerships in the world right now, and I don't think there's ever been a five-way. Compatibility is also believed to be a function of personality match, though there's some controversy about how exactly that works.

"Things that increase efficacy of guiding are having similar levels of backlash, physical proximity, touch, and, ah," she clears her throat, "fluid exchange, which coupled with the fact that being guided itself often feels—pleasant—to both espers is the reason why closer physical relationships happen between partnered espers as often as they do, but there are plenty of partnerships that don't involve anything closer than platonically watching TV shows together in between missions.

"And if a new esper manifests in the presence of a compatible esper with sufficient amounts of chronic backlash, the new esper's initial backlash may be entirely absorbed by the more senior one. This happens extremely rarely, as the amount of accumulated backlash the more senior esper would need to be carrying for that to happen is—debilitating to most."

Sigh.

"One to ten me on how close that man is to having his organs explode if I don't cuddle him, please."

"...I... do not have information on Lee Tae-gun's backlash status." Pause. "But he hasn't had a partner in over half a decade." Her professional opinion is that she does not actually understand how he's currently alive, but she does not need to share that.

"I do not have that information, but means nine or higher." She rolls her head over the chairback. "This is so obnoxious. He's spent five years slowly dying of excruciating superhero disease, and he still smiles like a bank teller... anyway, I don't need to look desperate, I assume if I'm supposed to lie on top of him like a therapy cat I will be bureaucratically assigned to do so, and this conversation isn't supposed to be about him. Uh. Do your scanners figure out what rank I am or do I do some kind of obstacle course or what."

She purses her lips. "What happens next is up to you, to a great extent. You can choose to to not engage with any of this at all and resume your life as a civilian. But if you want to work as an esper—it is not a game, Marza-nim, and I do need to impress upon you that you will need to take it seriously."

"I'm sorry, Kim Ha-yoon-shi. Nim. –that wasn't a dig, I just really suck at honorifics. I promise that I know this is serious, and I know that lives are at stake, and I promise that I can act like a human being about it at some point. But also, I have been conscious for something like twenty hours, seven of which have been spent sustaining an extreme manic state to prevent myself going permanently insane while being tortured by a dungeon, and I am going to need to give myself alcohol poisoning if I want to sleep tonight instead of falling unconscious where I stand when the adrenaline rush fades. And I can shoot lightning at things by wanting to do so, but only if I am prepared to blast myself mostly unconscious. This has been a bad day. My coping mechanisms are atrocious, and I apologize again for my tone, but if you need me to behave like a person now then the thing to do is sedate me, and the most offensive thing I will do is snore."

"Well, we can do that, if you mean it." God knows they've had to deal with espers going through much worse times than this.

"I don't say things I don't... yes. I am currently in an altered state that neither of us wants me to be experiencing, and I consent to being removed from it."

She considers.

"I am being glib but still not joking when I say that you can put me on top of Tae-gun like a therapy cat if you want, including while I am unconscious."

"I—don't have direct contact with Lee Tae-gun," she says, trying to interpret the first-name under the light of Marza clearly not being totally acclimated to the culture despite her pretty good mastery of the language itself. "But I'll pass that along." She stands up again. "Would any room here work fine? This facility is set up to be able to deal with—well, Lee Tae-gun himself, if it came down to it, so you needn't worry about your powers."

"My requirements are that whatever I sleep on should not be made of solid granite. Anything short of that will be acceptable."