"Like this week hopeful or like this year hopeful or like maybe before we are dead of old age hopeful."

"...If I had to guess, between the first two.  But that's only a guess."

"I want to go to esper mixers and shake hands with everybody till I find a partner. I will not actually want this any more once I'm done awakening, but I will still endorse it."

"I wish you success in this."

"Iiiiiif we're at a topic change, I'm really fricken curious what it was like being in a car with Svetka Ignatyeva.  Uh, while she was conscious."

"She talked to me. She wanted to know about dungeons. At one point she accused me of mind controlling her and we had a bit of back and forth about how I can't do that. Apparently another thing you have in this timeline that we don't have in mine is really really good masks that glue on so it's not a problem for assassins to be recognizable. What's going to happen to her?"

"If we're lucky, we'll only find out via conventional news outlets.  It will likely depend on how exactly she regains consciousness."

"She accused you of mind controlling her???"

"Yeah, I told her I won't have powers till the end of the week, won't use them then till I have a partner, and wouldn't use them if they were mind control - I guess I might at least consider it if I were being kidnapped, but whatever she thought was happening didn't cause me to not be kidnapped so it'd have to be pretty cut rate mind control. She only had my word on that though so I guess it was not perfectly convincing."

"That's really weird..."

"- Why was she missing a glove?"

"Put her hand on my shoulder at one point but then took it back when she thought I was mind controlling her."

"Hm.  Well, both condolences and 'you're welcome' to you; that's most likely what caused her to lose consciousness."

"...there's something on me?"

"Perhaps residually.  There was something on my windowsill, which she used to enter the house.  It was probably on the exterior of her clothes.  It's approximately a matter of luck that none seems to have gotten on your skin."

"Wow, if I had learned that before I was kidnapped I'd have called it paranoid. Am I at risk of passing out from residual whatever it was?"

"Not especially.  The sedative goes inert about an hour after being removed from its initial surface, or else I'd have told Kennedy and Ariel to be mindful in touching you."

"But the sedative wasn't all that was on the window, was it, Mr. Vogt?" asks Kennedy, sounding like an eager student.

"No, there are microtrackers, which stay functional for longer.  Kennedy was very helpful in relaying navigational information from my phone and getting us to you more quickly than we would have if I were working alone or if poor headached Ariel had been put to the task."

"Microtrackers. What a world. These are cheap enough that you can just dust your windowsill with them?"

"...Me specifically, yes.  Not people in general."

"Oh, understood, but that still says something about the price point, some people have private jets but people do not have... dusting the windowsills... numbers of private jets."

"I have not even one private jet."

"Because you don't want one or because it would be too expensive?"

"I could likely get a private jet within... let's say two months, or so, if I set my heart on it."