"Maybe not at the same time as using your own power to fly, since it's tricky? I can fly you around."

"That should work... And I've been getting some work out of 'it's not as bad as awakening' for motivation. Yeah, I want to try both some time."

"Oh, by the way, if you run into anybody else you're compatible with at one of the mixers I want to hear about it, odds are higher than genpop that I'm compatible with them too at least a little."

"For sure. Nothing yet except one girl who was less ugh but not even worth getting her number. We both kind of made contemplative faces and then shook our heads simultaneously. Little moment of connection."

"I'm so mad that the people who said they wanted to put three thousand of us in a room and check all the combinations turned out to be embezzling their funding, that would have been cool."

"Fraud is everywhere, man. I saw this Kickstart for an anti-dungeonnapping electronic device? Which is obviously bullshit? But because of the way they phrased it, just implying things about electric fields, never actually saying it'll keep you safe, it's not actually an illegal lie. Like, the same people who sell anti-static wristbands to people who're afraid of cell phone towers."

"Wow, I didn't see that, fuck that."

"...It would have been really cool. Get all the annoying checking over with at once, like. I feel like trying to get more than fifty people to do something at once becomes exponentially difficult to organize."

"Yeah, they were going to do it right after a confluence when everything that can possibly be done by normal SWAT teams, is done by normal SWAT teams, and bribe everyone to show up for science at a nice resort, and they collected quite a lot of investment in science - you'd need a lot, for bribing that many espers - and then it was not all where it was supposed to be."

"Typical, really. Anything without strong enough oversight that actually holds it accountable can and often will devolve into graft due to the individual and collective incentives of the people involved. It almost feels like the second law of thermodynamics."

"I think it mostly frustrates me not that someone wanted to do fraud but that they chose this vector for it. Selling products that don't work, that's whatever, it's annoying and should be cracked down on but it's basically the cost of doing business. Research fraud about dungeons which kill people every day, I feel like if you successfully think of it I expect more followthrough."

"...You feel the same way about, oh, car manufacturers and safety regs, or medical research? And maybe they've discredited the idea but someone can try again."

"Medical research yes. Anybody co-opting a vaccine program for things other than getting people vaccinated against diseases should be tried at the Hague. Less so about cars, I guess I'd have to think more about why. My mom and I don't have a car at all, might be part of it."

"I see it as... A sort of scale. Everything is connected and such. Everything has risk factors... Uhh... I was going somewhere with this..."

"I wanted to be an epidemiologist. I mean, I wanted to be an esper, but I figured it wasn't something to plan on, so."

"I was going for electric engineering... Ah, my point was, regulating things and trialing people has costs too, in time and effort and trust and freedom? So ideally society would do it in ways where it's worth it. Like dungeon and medical research. And not where it's not."

"Yeah, I don't think everything has to be a high-trust occupation. The untrustworthy would starve. I just don't want them burning the commons when people are getting eaten for lack of espers who have compatible partners."

"Mmh. If I find someone else I'll mention you if they're amenable, at least."

"Thanks. Bonus points if he's a cute queer, but that's really secondary."

"Ugh. I have feelings about partner expectations."

"I have no such expectations of you! Just, it'd be nice, eventually."

"Yeah, I know, and I'm maybe even a bit disappointed but- It seems like you could have the thought 'I have to, for better guiding and clearing more dungeons' and that would be. Very thorny and bad."

"I sorta have that thought but I don't think it's doing me harm, really. I don't have to any specific time but, since I do want better guiding and to clear more dungeons - those things fucking kill people and I get to be a superhero! - then insofar as I can alter my approach to the facts on the ground, I want to do that in a way that leaves me open to hooking up with people when that makes sense, even though, had I become an epidemiologist instead, I'd probably be saving myself for a serious long term relationship that I expected to turn into a marriage."

"I'm gonna have to think about that. I hadn't really, before. Just a blob of vague anxiety."

So for Toronto-based would-be-dungeoneers the onboarding process is relatively well-developed. They're going to be shadowing an established dungeon esper, Rhombus, who does force field things that he uses for mobility and to slice monsters in half. He'll be able to protect them while they go through a bog-standard dungeon, one which would usually not even involve espers because it's straightforwardly traversible and is not actively torturing people particularly horribly. It does nobody any good if the baby espers get eaten by psychic bobbit worms from the fourth dimension so they don't start them in one of those dungeons.

This one has been cased by a sensor; it's a small, aggressively hilly dungeon, the monsters are these deranged armadillos covered in knives that roll up and down the slopes of the landscape, but they go down fine to armor piercing rounds, and the kidnap victims are being kept in armadillo-casing-esque pods, though most of those are empty and some of them are secretly armadillos lying in ambush, so you have to open them carefully in case of civilians inside and be mindful that it might sprout knives at you.

Rhombus wants, before they go in, an introduction to their powers and how they guess they might ideally interact with all these things.