Mountain, meet Endbringer | Glowfic Constellation

"That is very suggestive! That symbol is used on media-playing devices to indicate a command that will return the media being played to a previous point. Hmm, if she just turned those people back to wherever they had been earlier then that is not as worrying, they are probably fine, but the Protectorate should be informed at once."

"Hm, she'll be hard to catch if she can just go back to where she woke up or something. I have a phone, should I call them or will you?"

"Worry not, I have relayed this conversation to them already! We thank you for your help with this."

"I probably won't do this kind of thing very much, I am just so bored since I am still not allowed to sell things. So much paperwork."

She nods gravely. "Yes, bureaucracy can take a while, but it is for the greater good, and to guarantee the safety and well-being of the people."

"Well I think I will go home now. Have a nice day, Mouse Protector."

"You, too, honorable Mountain!"

Why 'honorable'? Well, it's not like she'll reject the title.

Off she flies, restlessness satisfied.

She arrives precisely on schedule for the second round of power testing.

The second round of power testing is, as announced, more thorough. They test her precision and fine control, then go outside to test her range and large-scale ability, first with crumbling abandoned buildings and then an isolated field in the middle of nowhere.

Her fine control is not quite down to the width of a human hair, but she can do all the tricks she listed, from merging gemstones together to pulling most kinds of metal from most kinds of ore to mixing and separating alloys.

She can totally repair crumbling abandoned buildings. Or are they asking her to topple them? Either way.

Repair one, topple another, there's a whole day's worth of testing to go about.

She's very patient about it since it's actually making progress.

Indeed! They ask a few more questions and eventually are done, informing her she will be contacted again soon.

Is soon measured in hours, days, or weeks?

A week, two at the very most.

Yay.

She puts that rogue's assistant job ad out for real now.

Any news from the engineering guy she hired to help design her own personal power plant?

Yes, he has blueprints!

And some people start responding to the ad as well.

She picks out the ones who seem professional and competent based on their responses. People who just sent resumes with nothing else are immediately tossed. She calls the places they claim to have worked at to verify this and tosses any who were lying. How many sufficiently okay candidates does this leave her with after a week?

(She raises her mountain another 300m and works on the non-electric parts of those blueprints.)

Four candidates remain!

And she is also called and asked to come to a certain registry at her earliest convenience to sign a certain document and get her license card that proves she can use her powers in the ways listed in a certain publicly available registry.

She emails the list of companies that were seriously interested in her that she's been approved to sell her services by the PRT and they should expect follow-up communication within a couple of weeks. She doesn't actually go pick up the card until it's relatively convenient - it's not like she has any jobs lined up immediately, or that she needs money *right now*.

She emails the four candidates that they made the shortlist, when is a good time for her to have a chat with them? And updates her public announcement that applications are closed and if you haven't heard from her yet you didn't make the list.

And what are the salient distinguishing characteristics for these four candidates?

This one used to be a villain's henchman and claims he decided the moral issues were too much of a sticking point.

That one used to work for this fashion magazine and her boss was insane, and she'd welcome something more normal like working in a mountain.

The other one worked for the PRT for a while but decides she'd leave because of "irreconcilable differences of opinion."

And the fourth used to live in Madrid before it was destroyed, and has been working as an errand boy for various people. He claims he has a minor Mover power that helps.

None of these people scream 'perfect assistant' at her just from what she's seen so far.

She arranges interviews and asks questions, mostly things like 'how do you organize your own schedule' and 'I want you to install satellite internet on my mountain, you have $10000, what is your approach' and 'what is your stance on this hypothetical moral conundrum'.

Does former villain henchman have sufficient business knowledge? What exactly was fashion magazine lady's job before she quit? PRT person presumably has relevant legal knowledge, right? Does errand boy want to keep working for other people? Any other insights to their personalities? She doesn't want to hire someone she doesn't get along with.

Ex-henchman is very pliant but uncreative. He does not care too much about what he's made to do, fumbles through a description of something that would very much not work for the internet, and is clearly fishing for Mountain's preferred answer to it. He has very little business knowledge to speak of.

Fashion magazine lady's job before she quit was basically "doing everything and anything her boss asked for, including stuff like getting her hands on unreleased book drafts for her boss' children." She is impeccably organized, has a very gather-lots-of-information-and-call-upon-her-myriad-contacts approach to install satellite internet, and has very strong feelings about moral conundrums. And in general, she seems to have a fierce, challenging personality.

PRT person does indeed have relevant legal knowledge. She's also very organized with her schedule, in a different way than fashion magazine lady but not strictly better or worse than her. Her approach to installing satellite internet is mainly figuring out how the mountain differs from anywhere else and what would need to be changed in the usual approach. She is carefully amoral about conundrums. She's very professional and doesn't express much in the way of personality.

Errand boy's power consists in being really agile and good at parkour to a preternatural degree, using some luck manipulation to guarantee he doesn't have trouble moving. He can use the luck manipulation is small amounts for other tasks than moving, and he'd probably want to keep working for other people. His schedule is somewhat messy but in a structured way, and once you get the logic behind it it's actually quite elegant. His approach to installing satellite internet is similar to PRT person's, and he also has very strong (if naive) feelings about moral conundrums. He's quite eager to please and somewhat excitable.

Ex-henchman is out. She works out an arrangement for errands with errand-boy but does not hire him full-time.

She's not quite sure about fashion lady's personality, but the pre-existing web of contacts cinches the decision. Welcome! Here's the first week's pay advance, here's the login and password for the email account I've been talking to companies with, you don't need to move to the mountain yet it's not finished (and doing that at all is still not necessarily required), here's my detailed explanation of my abilities but you probably already know that, here's some lawyery things the lawyer said you'd need, your first job is to arrange some jobs for me as soon as possible. My schedule is almost totally open, I want to work about ten hours a day weekdays and four on weekends.