"Fair enough! Can you move it if you want?"

"The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is that it--and by it I mean the portal, not the pocket dimension--doesn't actually exist right now since I closed it; I could open a new one in the same spot as the old one but it is not in any way easier to do that than to open a new one somewhere else."

"I will ask the provincial guy where a good place for it might be that I can reasonably transport you to in my car."

"I don't have to open another one immediately, or anything. There...isn't anyone, who's--awake--in there. Except my familiar and I can call him to me without opening a portal."

"The cute little dragon?"

"Yeah!"

"Okay. What are your immediate - plans, desiderata for possible prospective plans, whatever -"

"Healing, probably. My powers have a theme--not everything I can do adheres to the theme, but I'm a lot better at things that do--and that theme is more or less 'making things better,' and in terms of people that mostly cashes out to healing and--chasing away adverse influences--you actually seem like you have some adverse influence on you right now, I sort of have a sense for it."

"........I have backlash from using my esper powers."

"I don't really have the context on 'backlash' or 'esper' to know if that maps to what I'm sensing but it seems sort of curse-ish?"

"Esper derives from ESP stands for extrasensory perception but it's a catchall for the thing where magic humans started popping up at the same time dungeons did in the seventies even when our powers do not involve extrasensory perception. Power use causes idiosyncratic acute symptoms, generic chronic ones if we don't get it taken care of quick enough. It is very curse-ish, but we can tame it down by hanging out with other espers, but not every pair of us works well. I have a partner but I am not currently dramatically insane with backlash enough that I have to run to her immediately instead of talking to you."

"It is possible that you have something else on you and I'm sensing the something else and not the backlash but it shouldn't hurt to let me clear it up anyway but it occurs to me that I did just start existing as my current self a very short time ago and the things I think I know about how I work could be wrong. I would like to try but won't without your consent and it would be totally reasonable for you to withhold it."

"It is plausible I should not be the test subject and you should be talking to, say, somebody who is in the hospital because their partner died while they were under stupid amounts of backlash and they haven't been able to find a new one. Mine doesn't generally put me in the hospital."

"Totally fair." She can probably do something about the dead partner bit, too, but she doesn't want to say that out loud until she's actually tried, say on her own currently-dead loved ones, who are actually something more complicated than 'dead' and should hopefully be comparatively easy. ...But some of her abilities are complicated and she really doesn't want to claim to be able to solve death, even not at scale, and then fuck it up. "And if I'm in a hospital I can also do normal healing, I'm very confident I can do that."

"There's probably red tape about that. I will bother my agent about it." She sends Paula the recording so far.

Just to make absolutely sure she can do regular healing, she carefully bites the webbing between her thumb and forefinger on her non-dominant hand until it bleeds, then lets a flicker of light dance over the wound and then it's gone. 

"That's so cool! There are healing espers but they're so rare."

"I'm sorry they're rare, having enough healing is really important, non-magical medicine can do some stuff but there's stuff it just can't. That I know of. Yet."

"Do you have good bandwidth?"

"...Depends on what I'm doing? The more complicated something is to fix the more time I have to spend on one person--and if it's complicated at all I have to do it one at a time, I think, I could," little flash of healing light, "over a wide area, I think, but the most finesse I'd have is excluding, like, bones that'd heal crooked." 

"Does a wide area mean a room, a parking lot, a stadium, a city..."

"...Depends how much mana I have. Uh, instead of getting backlash, I have an amount of a thing called 'mana' that I use up to do magic with. Right now I have enough mana to do a parking lot but not a stadium, I think."

"Where do you get mana from?"

"So, as a magical girl, I have a 'theme' and a 'virtue,' and I already told you my theme, and my virtue is--I think the best English word is 'benevolence,' or maybe 'agape'--and the more I'm in the headspace of my virtue the faster I accumulate mana. Probably I could be in a headspace where I don't accumulate any at all but I haven't yet."

"You say 'a' magical girl. Are there more, are magical girls the new espers and pocket dimensions the new dungeons?"