"Thanks for toting over his stuff, Ms. Gagné."

"It's really the least I can do.  I hope you'll let me know if there's anything more I should help with."

"I think we're otherwise basically set to weather it here."

"It's awfully kind of you."

"The reason you can't get most suspected awakenings checked by an esper is because they're usually false alarms and because most espers aren't compatible enough to help anyway, but we've all been there and know how much it sucks, I wasn't going to turn around and leave him in the hospital."

"What happened, exactly?  You mentioned some of it on the phone, but..."

"The other week he was in a dungeon. Not one of the bad ones, he was mostly just hanging out with a monster standing guard over him. I came in and escorted him out of there and kept him talking the entire time because my backlash makes me lonely. He was interesting to talk to so I swapped numbers with him, I go for that with the like top percentile of conversationalists I pull out of dungeons so no specific person is ever under any pressure to keep me company while I'm casting around for somebody to call on the phone. His nurse, when he was in the hospital with his awakening, noticed my codename on his phone and figured it'd be a good way to get him and a few other people she was worried about checked for whether they were espers or just having normal medical problems; she looked me up and called my agent and my agent called me and I went over to check it out."

"Mmhm...  Hm."

"That's basically what happened from my perspective, too.  Except the part where I started awakening, which was just like, I continued to work at Starbucks except that I thought it was all fake and if I did anything wrong I would get tortured.  .....And I almost tried to fight the paramedics but I didn't really, because it turns out that even though I was already what I thought was the maximum amount of scared of being tortured, I was in fact more scared of it when - physically threatened.  Conveniently."

".......Do you mean to say they physically threatened you, or did you just think -"

"- No, no, I just.  Yeah, I just thought it.  I mean, they put me in the ambulance even though I was resisting, but not.  We don't need to sue them.  They were helping."  Even though that was one of the worst moments of this.  ...So far.

"They probably didn't have a strong reason to think it was an awakening but any of the other things it could've been would've also been dangerous, either to him or to bystanders. Though I'm glad to hear they don't need suing."

"It's awfully convenient that it's not any of the other things.  Do you have any guesses on what your power might look like?"

"I didn't come up with anything plausible earlier.  But Haru might have a better idea than," I?  I is correct but also incredibly pretentious.  His only options for finishing this sentence risk sounding hateable or dumb; there's no good one - "me."

"I did a quick check to see if anyone else is public with paranoia backlash but didn't find anything - a lot of people don't publicize their backlashes for various reasons and a lot of the people who might aren't posting in languages I can read. At a wild guess maybe some kind of shielding or warding power, so you wind up with 'being safe' opposite 'feeling unsafe'."

Oh god he could have just said 'than I do'.  He's so dumb and he still would have been if he had said plain 'I'.

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?  You'd like that."  She gives his non-Haru shoulder a quick rub.

"Yeah."  What are the chances it's that, though, instead of something awful.

"It could be something not remotely obvious, though. Like, I have a just-so story for why flying makes me lonely but it's a stretch."

"Distance from things, is that it?"

"No, not distance from - stuff can't perceive me or interact with me if I don't want it to, and that includes the ground. If most people don't want the ground to touch them this has no magical force, if I don't want the ground to touch me I fly."

"Hm!  Did you have any interesting guesses for yourself, when you were awakening?"

"It's kind of a blur."

"You thought maybe you'd have a monster-repelling field or be able to banish dungeon victims back to the overworld."

"I guess those would have made sense, sure."