"I am not at all sure that your counterpart's going to salvage things with Lorica."

"Oh. That seems uh, rather unfortunate."

"Yeah. I think I helped but I can't do the whole thing for him."

"Yeah - I tried and failed to give him any actual advice in my letter to him."

"If you want to send me back with an update..."

"I don't think Ill actually have any advice to give in an update, unfortunately. Maybe if you told me more about what's going on?"

She can do her best to summarize the conversation, sure.

"Hrm, I bet this would have been easier if he had known her longer first - his crush on her isn't as big as it could be, I think."

"Yeah, it's not helping."

Nod.

"I'm not really sure what I could say that would be helpful, but maybe I'll think of something later."

Later that day Vallis gets a text from Skitter asking him what a good time for Traceless and her to meet would be (or he can give Skitter Traceless's phone number and she'll ask herself).

May can be shown the message.

Schedule's wide open unless a dungeon needs me.

In that case, Traceless can visit Skitter's territory in two hours - they'll meet up outside a clinic she supports.

She doesn't have a driver's license from this universe, can't reasonably fly for transportation without planning to get laid immediately afterwards, and would find it kind of farcical to take a bus; does Vallis want to share the secret of getting chaffeured around securely as a cape?

"There's a bus that goes by there and you can change in an alley nearby, or you can ask Skitter to send a car - once we actually work for them we'll have a driver assigned to us."

"Weren't we going to work for, like, a weird detente between them and the white hats? - I might want to import an agent, I don't think agents have been invented here and I want one."

"My understanding is that the resources would come from the Undersiders but we won't be working for them exactly?"

"...yeah, I want an agent. Do you want your own separate one, should I recruit an extra? Often partners have separate ones for conflict of interest reasons but I don't know if that makes sense here."

"What exactly would they do?"

"Manage my schedule, screen my work calls, hire me things like drivers and accountants and lawyers and whatnot, when I'm backlashed all I can do is talk to people so in my case basically they'd be a disability accommodation if I had anything that needed to happen before we got down to guiding."

"So basically a secretary?"

"More like a PA than specifically a secretary, I think, but not far wrong. But agents usually have several esper clients and secretaries and PAs usually don't - I'll probably have to pay one a lot more to come here and have only me as a client to start out than I would if I were back home having a normal relationship with a normal agency."

"I uh, think there are people who will do that for parahumans, but it is in fact a much more dangerous, complicated job than doing it for someone normal."

"Yeah, the thing where there's supervillains running around makes it even worse. Trouble with just using Rete is the thing where it isn't a person."