Yoo-min walks in a couple of minutes after Tae-gun's arrived.

"Tae-gun! Good to see you, I was half-expecting you to not show up."

"What is it."

"Straight to the point, huh? Well, as you may have guessed, it's about the new girl."

Uh huh.

"You guys are, like, super compatible, right?"

"Probably."

"Well, I think you should hear her out."

"...huh?"

"I think you're going to try to flee the room whenever you catch whiff of her. I think that's a mistake."

"...it's none of your business. I don't take partners."

"Didn't say you should partner with her! Said you should hear her out."

"...what does that mean?"

"Literally what the words literally mean. She has things she wants to say to you; you should hear them."

"Why? You could just tell me if they're that important."

"Oh, I don't think I could, actually? At least, I can't do the, the whole thing she does, getting super invested in it and having a bunch of opinions."

"You've got plenty of opinions." To Tae-gun's frequent chagrin.

"Look, like I said, I'm not asking you to partner with her or anything. I know you don't take partners. Just, you know." Shrug. "Hear her out," he repeats.

"Fine."

"Atta boy," he says, patting Tae-gun on the shoulder.

He flinches. He and Park Yoo-min aren't as compatible as he is with Marza but they're still compatible enough that that felt—nice. Uncomfortably so.

Tae-gun prefers not to be exposed to that kind of nice any more than he strictly has to.

Yeah, buddy, he gets it.

Well, no he doesn't, but, still.

Marza sets herself to power training. This turns out to consist of a few days' worth of figuring out how to activate the power (and how to do so safely even when wearing neither high-grade ear protection nor photochromic lenses), then about a week of working out how to not activate it when she's pissed off. Chuuni she may be, but she is not going to be blowing out lightbulbs when she rants. That would increase the cost of ranting unacceptably.

Her powers are straightforward: concentrate negative charge in an area, optionally with another area of positive charge, resulting in a redistribution of energy in the form of an explosion of charged plasma. That is to say, lightning. If she's careful, she can keep it from shattering wineglasses further than a few feet away. If she's very specifically not careful, and gets the angles right, she can knock over a truck with the thunder from a bolt that's slagging a second, adjacent truck. She can't do very much truckmurder, but if she's more conservative with what she's doing, she can sustain combat pace for a while. Not as long as some absolute freaks S-Rank espers, especially since her backlash starting at her feet makes it so hard for her to actually move from target to target – but if she had a good partner, she could probably keep it up just fine.

And then she can do the obstacle courses and what have you. She was a highly kinaesthetic person even before getting superpowers; she was (and has not legally stopped) pursuing a degree in classical dance. She's strong, fast, and coordinated. Her grasp of tactics is surprisingly firm for a total civilian, but she does sometimes get tunnel vision when there's blood in the air. She hates to retreat, for all that she understands that it's sometimes how you win.

That'd be a high-B or low-A, depending on her performance live. She can take her pick for being Officially Declared B- or A-rank, depending on whether she wants to risk maybe being downgraded after some action or hope for an upgrade (the low sustain is what's docking the most points, here).

Well, if she got demoted she'd kill everyone in this room and then h find it disheartening, so she should probably start at B.

"B-rank buddies," she says to Yoo-min, clearly not thrilled but bearing up admirably. "For now. Also, is it a coincidence that my shiny new anime hair color is one that I already dyed it sometimes?" She runs a hand through her newly crimson hair. (It's also gloriously smooth, the way that hair gets when it physically cannot be damaged without concerted effort. Bedhead: not an esper-level issue.)

"Kind of but kind of not! We all tend weird colours—not everyone, Tae-gun's got black hair and his eyes are only a little unusual, for example, and his old partner Kang Jaeha for example has brown hair and black eyes—but there's some trends, and it always—well, we always look hot? And whatever we end up with always looks hot on us? And for some reason when people dye their hair or wear contact lenses or whatever prior to manifesting they'll get those colours naturally more often than not." Shrug. "Whatever's giving us these powers wants all of us to be anime protagonists."