"You wouldn't have, she dropped on Bet mid-awakening. She's compatible with - Vallis, he picked a new better cape name and it's Vallis now - and then he awakened too, same power as yours, and they got each other through that pretty neatly, sounded like."

"That sounds... convenient for them, I guess. Given that they both had to awaken at all."

"Yeah, sounded it. Anyway, I'll go tag her the retrieve-this-person pattern we decided on before though your Bet version thinks you're going to want to redesign the whole system."

"Huh - oh, I suppose we'll need something generic plus a personally identifying prefix of some sort. I'll write something up to send to him about it."

"Yeah, that's what he thought you'd say. Anything else before I go?"

"Nothing occurs to me."

"Bye then."

And zoooooooom.

And he sets to reading his alternate self's advice to him.

Dear Lucien,

I'm going to make a lot of assumptions based on us being alternate versions of the same person so it is possible my advice will prove terribly wrong but I suspect not. Lorica seems to have had a particularly terrible time awakening. If you're me than you care about her quite a bit and did your best to do right by her which wasn't enough.

My guess, based on what little she told me of her backlash and thinking through how I would have dealt with Traceless's awakening were I not awakning myself, is that you applied general heuristics about consent to an instance were they should have been overridden resulting in you avoiding harm at the cost of failing to help as much as you could. I had some struggles with this myself but the fact that I was also awakening skewed my thinking enough to overcome this - also I suspect Lorica's awakening made her less able to consider her own preferences rationally but I'm not certain of that. I'm also guessing that the fact that she was Lorica, and not some stranger you were uninterested in, made this worse. 

If the above reasonably describes what happened then I can't say, now that I've gotten this far in hurriedly writing this letter, that I have advice to give you about it that you are unlikely to come up with on your own (ie once you are both in a state to do so you should explain this to her as best you can). Maybe I can at least offer some empathy for mistakes I could easily have made and the offer to correspond about them should talking to your parents prove insufficient.

Yours,
Lucien

The Guide library corresponds to a Brockton Bay middle school, but it's not that hard to let herself out, the school's not in session. She goes and finds May and tappety-taps her.

And Turnaround can pull her to the library.

"Hi! I'm May."

He can tell given the familiarly intense feeling of compatibility.

"Ah, I'd only heard you called Traceless. I guess you know my name already." 

"Yeah. I picked 'Traceless' in kind of a hurry, I have no idea if it's taken here or not."

"I havn't heard it before."

"That's good, though if I could trouble you for a phone I want to check it on Racehorse just to be sure. And to make sure my website hasn't caught fire."

She can have his personal phone. 

"Racehorse agrees it's free, gonna park on it... aaaand... okay, cool, no big obvious flamewars, I should write blog posts and send them over for occasional queuing but things have been hectic." She returns the phone.

"You have a blog?"

"Yeah, even before awakening I was kind of an espers'n'dungeons nerd, it's called Eventualities."

"Oh! You have a very good blog."

"You read it?"

"Yeah, I've commented a few times but under an old username - Percival1721."

"Yeah, that kinda rings a bell."

"Most recently it was from that interview with that esper pair that specialized in underwater dungeons  - I was trying to cross reference their numbers with what Venture told me, though I didn't mention her by name, as well as some newspaper articles I found."