Welp. There is a straightforward solution to this, even if they're not sure what's causing her problem yet. Suk-ja gets an IV and it gets to rehydrating her as soon as possible. They'll also want to be getting at least more than one nutrient in her too, while they're at it, but it's her dehydration levels that are the most alarming and dangerous.

Once she's stabilized, they get started trying to figure out what sort of bug she's caught.

When they notice the mysterious lack of a proper immune response, well. They check her for things that might be causing that, but between that, her age, and how her nausea only barely improves with liberal application of anti-nausea drugs, it's pretty clear cut, as these things go. After everything else is properly ruled out, they diagnose her with an esper awakening and shuffle her off to a low priority wing with a whole stack of brochures for newly minted espers. And a box of barf bags.

She's gonna be an esper? That's very surprising, she thinks with the two neurons that aren't busy experiencing nausea! And good, or at least she'll probably think it's good a week from now even if she can't really process things being good yet. Better than dying of mystery plague.

She sleeps and barfs up stomach acid and stares at the ceiling and barfs up stomach acid. She tries to read the brochures but she can't focus well enough to remember the start of a sentence by the time she gets to end of it, and also she keeps dropping the paper to clutch the next barf bag like a security blanket. She wonders what her power will be, whether it will be strong enough to do dungeons or weak enough that she'll just forget about it and go back to class.

After what she assumes is a week, her stomach starts to calm down enough that she can actually read, and thank fuck, it's going to be over soon. Brochures time!

Most of them are guild advertisements, but a few aren't. The most relevant to her current interests will probably be the boring and starchy government pamphlets.

She will, as the backlash of her awakening begins to fade, feel a subtle something else being drawn out in its place. Typically, it feels opposite and opposed to the backlash, and many espers have described them as being in balance, or perhaps in tension. The feeling of her backlash will hint towards what power she'll have, but she should have an instinctive feel for the general shape of the power as it comes in. Most, but not all, espers have a sense for their own power even before they use it, though some still have trouble figuring it out without directly leveraging it, and all espers will need to practice in order to get a proper sense of their own limitations. There will be a class on the subject, with a testing range they are free to use, available to them once they officially register their status and receive their awakening gratuity.

Along with that are general resources available to espers from the Korean Government. No matter the power the esper gains, they have employment options available, and there are economic benefit programs for them and their families, and several types of insurance policies to offset risks associated with being an active esper, including but not limited to dungeons and backlash accumulation. There's an entire brochure devoted to the pros and cons of keeping one's backlash a secret, with assurances that the hospital is already doing what it can to keep this under wraps.

Then there are the many, many, many guild pamphlets. Big guilds, small guilds, lots of pictures of potential isolation locations that can be arranged for her, assurances of assistance in searching for a compatible partner even should no one in Korea turn out to be compatible...

There's a lot, contained in these pamphlets.

She gives the guild ads only a brief skim for now; no sense trying to figure that out until she knows what her power is. 

Does she care whether her backlash is public knowledge? Kinda, yeah. It wouldn't be a disaster if everyone knew, but it's kind of embarrassing and she doesn't want people on the Internet talking about her bodily fluids. Still, she shouldn't get too attached to it being a secret: if she does enough dungeons she will inevitably vomit in public at some point. But that's only true if she ends up doing dungeons at all, so what can she figure out about her power?

She's definitely starting to feel something fading in as the nausea fades out. It needs to be pointed at a person to do anything, and the thing it will do is helpful. She counts as a person but her power doesn't want to do anything to her at the moment. So she needs to go find some other people to look at and maybe ask them to be guinea pigs.

She goes to look for said guinea pigs in the patient cafeteria, because while she has been receiving nutrients she hasn't actually eaten food with her mouth in the past week and now she really wants to.

There's a sensory element, to an esper's powers, and there's this nurse in the cafeteria line who - if Suk-Ja looks, with her powers instead of with her eyes - has an aura of... ick. That's around him or more accurately inside him. It's gross and bad and doesn't belong. The longer she looks, the more her stomach will begin to turn, and the more certain that there's definitely something there, related to her power.

And that she could make it go away.

Well, this is a weird conversation to start, but you rarely get anywhere by chickening out. She waits for the nurse to get her food and sit down, then walks up to him and smiles brightly.

"Hi! Apologies if this is odd, but I just finished awakening as an esper with some kind of helping-people power and you're the first person who's showing up as someone it would work on. Do you mind if I try it on you and see what kind of benefit you get? Happy to go away if you'd rather not be a test subject."

Blink blink blink, goes the nurse who has had about ten hours of sleep in the past forty-eight hours.

"... uhhhh, and you're sure it's helpful?" Eh. Espers. As far as he's aware when they've got weird senses about how their powers work, they're usually not wrong? "Go ahead I guess?"

She's quite sure. "Thanks!" And, push. Begone, problem.

The ick is definitely gone! There's still a faint unsettled feeling in her stomach, but that problem is definitely banished.

".... huh. My sore throat is gone," he pronounces, after a thoughtful pause.

"Ooh, did I get disease healing, that's so cool! Or maybe it's just painkilling--can you tell if it feels more like a really good cough drop, or more like you actually don't have the swelling anymore?"

"Er, hard to tell, I - think it's the swelling? I. Haven't had an esper fix my sore throat before, sorry. Uh, thank you though?"

"You're welcome! Thank you so much for helping me learn what my power does!"

And she bounces off to get in line herself, because she wants shitty hospital japchae and she's going to get it! And then eat it very slowly and carefully, because fixing that guy's sore throat got her a bit queasy again.

The nurse nods, bemused, and has his own calories, before he can go find a quiet place to be horizontal and regenerate his very fried braincells.

While the shitty hospital japchae is not doing her sensitive stomach any favors, in comparison to what she's experienced for the past week, her stomach is made of steel and her ability to eat food is unmatched.

She gets through like half of it and then decides discretion is the better part of valor and goes to check herself out of the hospital.

It is very easy to do so. She's handed another information packet on her way out, this one focusing on registering with the government. As of the 1989 International Treaty of Reykjavík, hospitals are not mandated reporters for esper awakenings, and so she is encouraged but not required to complete her registration at her earliest convenience.

There's also an attached sheet with a schedule for the next Korean esper mixers in the next year, spaced out every three months and hosted on a tidy and predictable city circuit between Busan, Gwangju, Daejeon, and Seoul. The next will be in Seoul, in three and a half weeks. She will need to be properly registered to attend, but the address for the convention center is already listed.

She goes back to her dorm and buys Min Jee dinner at an actual restaurant as a combined thank you and apology present. She does the online part of registering with the government and makes an appointment for the in-person part. She sends photos of her hospital paperwork to all her professors with apologies for missing class and emails various classmates asking for lecture notes and homework, because she's still undecided on dropping out. She reads guild ads and starts catching up on homework and pokes the local Esper forum looking for a temporary partner. Nothing serious or long-term, just someone who can let her afford to experiment a bit more and find out how strong and broadly-applicable her power is before the government mixer. 

The acute backlash of nausea fades over the next day or two, and is pretty manageable even before that.

Trying to find a temporary partner in three and a half weeks is tricky - not everyone is willing to post their backlash, even in an inclusive verified only espers forum. Is she willing to put herself and her backlash out there to the esper community, or go out of her way to meet people and poke them?

She's holding off on posting her backlash too, but she'll happily spend a while on the train to go poke anyone who'll agree to be at a cafe at a time, especially on weekends.

She gives herself a teeny tiny cut on purpose and determines that her power has absolutely nothing to say about it, and that's all the experimentation she's going to do while she has no way to clear backlash.

Mostly people would prefer if she went to them instead of something like 'meeting in the middle,' but if she's willing to get herself to a nearby cafe-or-something, there are a dozen people she can poke in between now and the mixer!

Only one of them is compatible, and only a little; a young woman who awakened two months ago, with her hair growing in golden roots that offset jarringly from her dark black hair.

"I do, uh - I haven't figured out a good name for it yet, stoneworking? Moving rocks? I've been planning to go into construction, are you free for the afternoon for mutual power experimentation? I haven't had the chance to see if I work on wet concrete yet. What about you, easily testable in an afternoon?"

"So, yes but inconveniently I also need to be in a specific place--I do some kind of healing, and it doesn't do anything on healthy people. I asked the university hospital and they'll let me hang out in the ER waiting room staring at people while I find out what I can fix. I can proooobably ride the train backlashed if we want to do mine and then yours?"

(Because she was smart and hasn't eaten anything but rice today and that several hours ago. And she has a plastic bag and hand sanitizer in her backpack. She doesn't intent to overdo it but if she does by accident she will be ready.)

"Uh - we can meet up after both doing some tests? I wasn't going to go too hard with mine, and I can... probably mix a tiny bit of concrete in the hospital parking lot."

"Sure, that works!" Exchange of phone numbers and plan to meet up at the hospital in a few hours?

Yep! With plenty of time for them to hang out, locked elbows or something, and still make sure Suk-Ja can make the last train to get back. Her new (very temporary) partner is thrilled, and gleefully departs to go get the bag of unmixed concrete that has been sitting hopefully, unused, for a month and a half now.

Yay! Off to go lurk in an ER waiting room and stare at people, in the friendliest possible manner! At least her purple eyes give a hint as to why she's there.

They do, yeah, though the receptionist at the ER verifies her credentials, then requests that she wear a label, and produces a form for patients to sign if they consent to the more active part of her power instead of just the sensing. The form is for Suk-Ja's benefit, primarily to prevent anyone claiming she did a Scary Esper Thing at them without their permission.

Anyway, once she's looking: there are several people waiting in the ER that have an ick, to a stronger degree than the nurse she'd cleared of ick when she'd tested her powers.

Two of them are totally willing to sign this form that says the esper can maybe fix their problem! That sounds great, actually!