"We'll see! Do we want to meet sooner than whenever the range visit happens, for mutual practice and clearing? If I'm going to talk about it, it might as well be when you're backlashed instead of doing your own thing."

"Efficiency, I love it."

"Mhm! So, uh, todayish tomorrowish, when is good? Are we gonna see each other every day, or less than that, or what?"

"Probably every day once we start doing dungeons but maybe not that often before then. I'm on leave from school till the end of the month, but will still be showing up part time after that to pass tests and stuff, and I might wind up needing more time on the gun range than you."

"I kinda want to hammer esper work as hard as possible but I guess I'll fill the rest of my time with more meetup events. Like, you seem pretty cool, but more options is always good?"

"Yeah, wouldn't blame you in the slightest."

Over the next couple of weeks she goes to more meetups. Starts attending SCUBA lessons. Goes to their gun range appointment and very cautiously practices- She finds a trick to hold up her projectiles and vector her power from her eyes at the correct angle and can indeed achieve fairly terrifying speeds on small enough objects. It turns out pushing on things at longer ranges ramps the backlash cost quickly, so 'keep pushing until the projectile hits' is suboptimal. At mutually convenient times for later babbling about her story and talking about Haru's blog and whatever else is on their minds, she practices with the balances and clay. Putting out steady, precise amounts of force and creating nice flat surfaces therewith are both tricky- She can widen out her pushes to large areas, and even do two slightly different operations at once if they're very simple, but it's extra to focus on, and accordingly expensive. She's making progress (and videos most of her practice and uploads it somewhere her agent can see it), but it's not trivial. 

She doesn't get much chance to practice the defensive aspect of her power. She does discover that she can push herself away from things without affecting the things, and pseudo-fly that way, but uh... Way too dangerous. Even running around and using this to go a bit faster makes her feel like she's about to crack her head open. Pushing defense might make that safer but that's expensive and also just, much more risky than she considers worth it right now.

"You could practice flying over a net," Haru remarks after a flying attempt, from where he's lounging atop her with Cricket topping the stack. "The kind circus performers do trapeze over."

"I could. I could also practice pushing defense only to the level necessary to block whatever's coming towards me. I'm getting better at precision and multitasking but also. Both of these things sound extremely scary to actually attempt."

"Why's flying over a net scary? I could fly with you if you want, be there to catch you?"

"Hmm. Hmmmmm... Hm? Ugh. I wonder if maybe I'm just scared of heights. I get the same NOPE from the idea of bungee jumping or skydiving. Or the Grand Canyon."

"Oh, that's rough. And my flying's great for barely-off-the-ground altitudes but yours kind of isn't."

"Ugh, I hate it. I probably should try to get over it in as assiduously safe a set of conditions as I can arrange."

"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."