"Light party is four people - two jobs focused on doing damage, one healer, and one tank. Full party is eight people, two light parties put together. Rotation is the buttons to press in the right order as a certain job to do the most damage possible. DPS is damage per second, higher number better, and auto follow is what it sounds like, you pick a person and your character follows them without any input from you."

"Neat! And which role would I be replacing Da-eun's husband on?"

"He actually mains tank, but so does Ji-woo, so he's cruelly forced to flex to DPS if we're all together. I'm DPS - er, the damage one - and Da-eun herself is a healer. So you'd be a second DPS. If for some reason your only reason for playing FFXIV is just to make us happy."

"Doooo iiiiit we'll be so happy~!"

A woman with wispy looking brown hair and green eyes arrives, takes stock of the scene, and sighs.

".... Are you trying to immediately leverage her into playing Final Fantasy with you," she guesses, without preamble. "Oh, uh - hello, pleasure to meet you, I'm Kim Da-eun, you absolutely do not have to join in on video games if it does not spark joy."

"I expect I'll like it if I try it! Maybe I'll try to get you all to take up crochet, for symmetry. Kim Suk-Ja, it's lovely to meet you too!" Handshake?

Handshake! Nope, not compatible. She smiles apologetically.

"Well, as long as you don't feel like you have to."

"I will take you up on that, actually, that sounds like a great thing to do with my hands while I'm backlashed? I get so bored."

"I've never tried to do it blind but it's pretty repetitive, I bet you could! I've got a bunch of yarn and hooks I can bring for you to try it with."

"So, what's Quasar like? I read their brochure but that's not the same as a firsthand account."

"So, that's - it offers a lot of resources at your disposal, but is less good at, hm, systematic direction and organization?" says Da-eun, delicately.

"It has more money than sense sometimes, but it means well," clarifies Ji-woo. "It actually wants to help you do your best instead of, like - what's best for the guild. Which is, uh. Rarer than you'd think."

Potentially concerning but they seem to have done a good job for Ji-woo? "Ji-woo, do you think they're effective at getting you the optimal patients? Like, serious cases only you can help, rather than whoever has connections? Or whatever system you want them to use."

Suk-Ja is still unsure how much she should be optimizing for "make lots of money and donate it" versus "cure the people who need it most, including ones who don't have a lot of money"; she needs to learn more about her powers to really know what her options are there.

"Yeah, between them and the government, they're effective, and you absolutely get all of my notes and access to my staff. But it's - it was all mostly directed by me, or people I hire, and that's, uh. Jumping in to the deep end a bit?"

"The freedom to do what you want, but also the freedom to screw yourself over a bit and do stuff like - overbook yourself, or miss the big picture, so on."

"Not that any of us have ever done that," says Da-eun, dryly, looking straight at Ji-woo.

"AHEM anyway so they're good but you - will get what you ask for and that can be a lot!"

"It sounds like I'm going to get a lot of benefit from you knowing some already-vetted people who can help me vet people, then! But I want to do some more experimenting before I scale anything up; there are so many health problems I haven't even tried yet. I kind of just want to walk through a hospital curing people and writing down which of their problems I solved until I" get kicked out for barfing in the hallway "hit my limit, unless setting me up with a bunch of people who have already signed consent forms and all have different illnesses would take less time than I think."

"It should be pretty straightforward, there aren't a lot of medical espers, but it's easier for us to all agree on the consent forms necessary than the psychics."

"Really? The ones for sensors are all over the place if we don't stay in our dungeon lane," says Minseo, who didn't actually know the specifics of medical esper bureaucracy.

"Yeah, it's the - I'm going to butcher this name, fair warning - Breisacher phenomenon? Medical espers almost always have the correct aesthetic impression that our powers are meant to be used to help. We don't usually have the fuzzy line like psychics can have, where it's not clear where helping ends and doing what we want begins; my power can't really do shit to break things? We're a bit garbage on dealing with congenital defects because of it, which sucks, but when it comes to setting living systems right, we are so good at it. It makes consent forms really straightforward."

"Yeah! I don't seem to have a lot of--options, ability to do the detail work consciously, that sort of thing. Everyone has either zero or one things I can do to them. Maybe if I saw someone with both the flu and an ear infection I'd be able to pick one or the other or both, but that's about it. So I don't think I could use my powers for evil if I tried."

It's nice, having that kind of limitation. She's not worried she'd be tempted to anything she knew was evil, but there are definitely possible powers that would give her moral dilemmas and possible powers where some people would disagree with any decision she could make about how to use them, and possible powers that would make people rationally scared of her even if she would never choose to hurt anyone. And instead, she heals! She's a very lucky esper.

"Right! Same. I can't even actually heal things as bad as the human body sometimes does; it's more efficient for a broken bone to be set properly and then I fix it, but if I just - threw lots of power at something before it was set? It snaps back into place. Same with healing over windpipes or something, it's honestly kind of fascinating, and there are only a handful of medical espers that aren't like this."

"What are some of those?"

"Anesthesiologist, does sensation and pain suppression, who can use that to cause people to fall over. Arguably a psychic, but too late she's ours now. One with blood control, who was as dangerous as it sounds, but then went full medical esper and did a lot of work getting antigens out of blood transfusions between espers as an emergency backlash reduction method - most of the transfusion machines floating around in hospitals these days came about because of him. Uhhh those are the only ones coming to mind at the moment, they're really rare, and - usually it's pretty obvious the esper could have not gone medical, and chose to? Instead of helpful things that could then become not."

"It's pretty cool that we have enough firepower to throw at dungeons these days--espers and the military both--that some people who could fight monsters get to do medical stuff. It's like, dungeons still harm people, but we're not just trying to get as close as possible to the pre-everything status quo, we can do better than that."