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!

Yay bureaucracy! She doesn't want to scare anyone or get sued or make the hospital regret letting her do this!

She will totally de-ick those people! Do they mind telling her afterwards what they think they had? 

The first person had a rash that had swollen into an abscess. The rash is still there, the abscess is.... hm. It hurts less, now?

The second is much more indicative of her power: he has had this flu for the past week and it has been awful and now!! It's gone!!!!!! He is very grateful, can he get a picture with her???

She's so glad she could help and he can totally get a picture with her! 

Other people she could theoretically de-ick, over the next few hours: the guy who came in suspecting he had appendicitis and got taken back to see the doctor immediately, the utterly miserable coughing baby whose dad very reasonably doesn't want to try anything experimental, the old lady who smells like cigarettes and declined her offer, and the woman who got stung by a whole bunch of bees or wasps or something.

People she cannot help at all: the teenage boy with the broken ankle, the woman who sliced her hand in some sort of mishap, the elderly man who came in with chest pain and got taken back to see the doctor immediately, and the young woman covered in hives.

The hospital is really grateful for her help, and will be happy to work with her again in the future, and offer her a recommendation if she wants one for whatever she does next.

Her partner shows up at the tail end of this experimentation, beaming.

"I totally work on concrete," she announces, sitting next to Suk-ja for requisite probably-handholding.

Handholding! Handholding is excellent. "Congratulations! I work on infections and I think also some collection of things that includes wasp venom--maybe poisons in general? And not on injuries or allergies or old age."

"Niiiiice. Medical espers are rare, right? I expect you'll find a more compatible partner than me in, like, a week when the mixer's held? But I'm down to come hug you for the good of humanity."

"Thanks! And I'm happy to hug you for the good of people having places to live and stuff. At least until we both find someone more compatible. Are you going to start looking for full-time construction work?"

"Partner first, then construction, yeah. Though I might go for an apprenticeship or something first? Understand the principles before I start shuffling stuff around for people, make sure it's structurally sound? I'm not sure. There's not exactly a firm career path for espers, is there."

"Yeah, I'm still debating whether to drop out, switch to a medical degree, or stick with my original plans and heal part-time. I think it's going to depend on what kind of job offers I get and whether they say they'd pay more if I was a proper doctor."

Nod nod! "At least there are workshops for construction espers, to give us some kind of direction? Not that I've ever been to one, the next is in like six months. But I think someone will figure out how to help you exchange money for human flourishing. Congrats on your sweet power, by the way, it's cool."

"Thanks! I'm really happy with what I got. Will I see you at the mixer next week?"

"Yep! Uh, if I run into anyone I'm compatible with I can send them your way? I hear the demographics are that partners of espers are more likely to be compatible with that esper's other partners' partners. Compared to the average."

"Oh, that would make sense, wouldn't it. I'll do the same."

Nod! "I appreciate it!"

She's totally up for showing Suk-ja the research papers on the subject while they wait for their backlashes to go down, to pass the time.

By the time she needs to head out, both of their respective backlashes are just about squashed.

Research papers and not feeling like crap, both excellent things!

In the week leading up to the mixer she emails a couple of hospitals to check whether they'd be open to hiring her, and on roughly what kind of schedule for roughly what kind of money. She doesn't strictly speaking need any of this information before she goes to the mixer but the more she has a sense of her options she more useful a conversation she can have with potential partners.

Okay, so, usually hospitals don't directly hire espers? They can pay her for her time, but it's not going to be very competitive with what a guild can offer. Also, for her disease oriented power, there's going to be some major coordination, and honestly at some point she might end up with a whole wing of a hospital devoted to her, and she'd probably be at one that's specialized in infection diseases and the like.

If it makes more sense to coordinate through a guild then that's what she'll do! Whatever gets her, her partner, a bunch of consenting sick people, and some money into a reasonable configuration. Also apparently she wasn't being nearly ambitious enough, wow. She can't wait to find a really compatible partner and see how many people she can heal in a day! 

She shows up to the mixer in her nicest outfit, which is only a step or two nicer than her regular outfit, and gets ready to shake so many hands.

The government mixer is about as nice as a government based party tends to be, which means that it's a little bit... beige... and the available snacks are a little bit bland, but there is a large space with plenty of people who have hands that are perfectly amenable to being shaken.

Someone is bouncing on her toes in the crowd.

"Have you found her. Have you found her. Is she here??"

"You know this isn't much faster than just directly looking," snorts the woman whose hand she's holding. "And there's absolutely no guarantee that -"

"Shhhhshshshshshsh don't take this from me! Medical! Esper!!! In my country!!! I am meeting her regardless and if we are not compatible then fine but I am going to network."

"Ah huh," says the woman with long white hair, amused. " - Got her. C'mon. Thisaway."

"Eeeeeeeeeeee how's my hair, is it fine, do I have anything in my teeth..?"

"You want a mirror for that one, not me, I do not want to see anyone's biology from the inside, thanks." She tugs her partner along in the crowd. "I'm going to tell her you had me do this, you know."

"Yes, fine, but! I will first! Say hi! Ohtheresheis!"

It is no longer time to be led around by the sensor esper, it is time to drag her after her as she cheerfully heads over to introduce herself to THE MEDICAL ESPER EEEE.

"Helloooo~!" calls a purple haired woman with orange eyes, to Suk-ja, waving with one hand as she drags a white haired esper after her.

"Hi! I'm Kim Suk-Ja, it's nice to meet you!" Handshake!

Oh, it's very nice to meet her, gosh.

GASP she is COMPATIBLE.

"It's nice to meet you too! I'm Baek Ji-woo, this is one of my partners, Yun Minseo - Minseo shake her hand she might be compatible with you too -"

"Hi," says Minseo, offering a hand.

(Minseo is noticeably more compatible with Suk-ja than Ji-woo is, but both are in fact compatible.)

"- And you are a medical esper, right?" Bounce bounce, bounce bounce. "For diseases, right??"

Two compatible people!!! And one of them is Ji-woo!

"I am! I'm pretty brand new and I'm really excited to do more experimenting with it, find out the full range of things I can do and what makes something more or less expensive. I'd love to talk to you about what being a medical esper is like logistically! How about the three of us grab a table?" She cannot remember what Minseo's power is and it's mildly embarrassing but she is too excited to care!

"Yes, absolutely!!" There are tables, thataway! Come! To the tables!!!

"She absolutely had me find you in the crowd so she could say hi immediately," says Minseo, as she is summarily dragged.

"MEDICAL ESPERS MUST STICK TOGETHER, IT IS OUR SACRED DUTY," declares Ji-woo, as she drags. Suk-ja is new to the Ji-woo experience, so she is not being dragged, but Minseo is fair game.

Yep. This is her life now.

(Her life has actually been like this for years. If she did not enjoy it she would have changed it.)

She does not need to be dragged to keep up! They acquire a table.

"So I know the basic stuff about your setup, but can you tell me a bit more about your schedule? Like, how many patients do you usually see in a day? Do you do them all in a block or alternate between seeing a few and clearing the backlash? How much flexibility is there in that? Who decides who gets an appointment with you?"

"So it's very flexible, because it's based on both who's injured and who needs special attention, what's going on at the hospital, and the load my partners and myself are handling at the time? I don't really... do appointments exactly, I'm for emergencies or internal trauma that surgery would make worse or be unable to help with. Think more like an ICU doctor instead of a general practitioner, for me. There's a system for showing when I'm available, and everyone in my wing flags their patients with how dire the situation is, how helpful I'd be, and how well diagnosed the problem is - I do sometimes help with diagnoses, but it's describing what I'm seeing to people with proper doctorates, not really making decisions myself. I've got a staff that manages me and my time and I've got a pain scale for how bad I'm backlashing - my backlash is pain - but a lot of the logistical work is done by other people, since that's not really an efficient use of my time."

"We do generally try to cram the chaos into a nine to five," says Minseo, dryly. "For a 'what hours do we work in' situation."

"Right, but a lot of those are spent on technical downtime and it's not actually like I'm really working that entire time, those are just the available hours that I might be needed and am available."

Nod.

"That sounds like a great setup! I'd love to have something similar, though probably adapted for how I do disease instead of injuries--probably a little less focus on who needs me most urgently and a little more on getting me people who can't be treated any other way? But that's something actual doctors should decide once I know what I can do in more detail. I'm definitely hoping to have knowable off hours any day there's not an especially bad emergency, because my backlash is nausea and I have to know when it's safe to eat, but other than that I can do basically whatever! Are you guys potentially open to adding me as a partner? You're both compatible and seem like awesome people and it sounds like Quasar really knows what they're doing."

"Yes please we would love to keep you forever!!!!"

Cough.

"Which is to say, yes, we are both open to additional partnerships, and already have a setup for pretty comfortable non-sexual guiding in our trio. We play video games together."

"Awesome! I look forward to getting my butt kicked at video games until I get good!" That sounds like a lot more fun and a lot less drama than trying to have regular lesbian sex with her friends and coworkers while straight. "Are all three of you here today?"

"Da-eun's out in the crowd poking people. You know, usually it's cooperative games instead of competitive? Minseo's the one who's good at competitive, but, er, she's. Kind of the first one down on ability to game."

"Sensory loss. Eyesight first," explains Minseo, as she sends a text to their third. "I've got some setups for gaming while blind but it's a bit of a bitch. Got my rotation in FFXIV memorized though, I have ever out DPSed people while on auto-follow and literally blind. Mostly for bragging rights."

"I don't know what all of those words mean but I know enough to be impressed!"

Smile!

"Unnie's on her way. I can try to explain it all if you want?"

"It would delight me, personally, if you also picked up Final Fantasy 14, just so we can have an all-esper light party set up," snickers Ji-woo. "Da-eun's husband joins us for things but it's not the same!"

"That sounds like fun! I'd be happy to hear an explanation, Minseo. Both of the things you said and also of 'light party' if it's something other than a party where you hang out playing video games."

"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."

"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."