"Yeah! Though the blood esper - his name was Antonio Barbieri - was doing his thing even before the balance was all properly shaken out? He got a lot of social backlash for not going combat at the time. It was only later with statistics after his death that it became clear he was far more useful as support than what he could have managed even if he were one of the highest rated combat espers of the time. Which, he wasn't."

"Engineering and construction are way better now, though. It's just more efficient to hire three very specialized guys who can literally sculpt asphalt, metal, and glass, or build complicated framing for normal workers to then work from, or do tricky repair work that would require ripping everything out and then putting it all back to fix. Granted, sometimes it's still cheaper to hire the full construction crew with it, but. Safety standards are way better these days, and espers make it easier to update old construction instead of just. Tearing it all down."

"That's so cool of Barbieri, figuring out where he'd do the most good and sticking to his guns about it! Or he got lucky, I guess, but it was still cool of him. I wonder if he wrote down anything about his thought process." She's totally asking because she wants things to read while thinking about what kinds of patients she should see, but also because he sounds like a badass. "The architecture stuff is neat too!"

Giggle. Da-eun is not offended by the obvious interest in not-architecture. She finds it cute.

"Hmm! It'd be originally in Italian, and if it's been translated, I don't know about it. He's just historically very important for medical espers in particular, his statistics are very stark and convince people that support is really really important? I think he must have figured it out, right, how else do you get 'efficient backlash reduction through blood donations that are only possible with him around,' that's very specific..."

"Yeah, it's really clever! Makes me wonder if I should be, I dunno, trying to help the UN eradicate polio, or doing nothing but diagnosis, or some other clever thing. Probably it's going to turn out that the answer is 'sit in one place and heal people who would otherwise die', but it's good to keep the possibility that there's something better in mind."

"Probably some sort of centralized location where your patients are brought to you, yeah. Or possibly several, actually, that you might cycle between? Hmmmm..."

Ji-woo is now doing math on a nearby napkin about efficient hospital setups. "I would also expect it'd help a lot to aim you at antibiotic resistant diseases and some of the most nasty viruses - ideally you should be leveraged when modern medicine can't, or when it'd be too brutal on the patient's system..."

"Yeah, I'd be great for antibiotic resistance!"

" . . . I wonder if I can do anything about cancer."

"Oooo! Maybe! That'd be great, because fuck cancer! Slightly tricky to test, though, people going through chemo are immuno-compromised, so you might zap them and actually get a bug instead of the cancer. Doesn't mean it's not worth testing, of course, just. A positive result might not be a yes, you know?"

"Yeah, but if I get some people who are about to go on chemo and they get biopsied or whatever again right after, that'll be pretty suggestive! It seems worth trying, anyway, it's not like it would delay their getting chemo much and it only has to fail once to be obvious."