"Less than half a dozen years, would be my guess?"

"Well, I guess that's not long enough that the Earl and Countess'll likely be obviated by power loss."

"Yes... if the king doesn't know about it it's not impossible that informing him about it would be helpful, but I'm not confident enough in any of that to warrant the risk, I think."

"What's the associated risk?"

"That he denies it and wrecks our reputations so no one will believe us."

"I assume anonymous report is out of the question."

"Such a report would be dismissed out of hand, I expect."

"Uh-huh. God but it's stupid here."

"How would it be handled in your world?"

"A malfeasant psychic esper? Well for one thing you wouldn't employ one as an investigator, at least not for their powers! If one ran around psychicing at people they might not get caught - and it's possible nobody would follow up on a single anonymous report, but if enough of them added up that'd get looked into. I'm on a list of people my government can call to deal with the situation if anything like it is suspected because I can throw them off."

"How do they prevent one person from submitting multiple anonymous reports?"

"There's - degrees of anonymity, and being not only unidentified but also not correlated with your other reports via the same submission protocol would require some finesse most people don't have. Certainly if the subject of the investigation was like 'that's nonsense, somebody has it out for me' they'd need to take that possibility into account but it would be bad form for the accused to conspicuously retain access to potential victims during the investigation. ...I'm starting to wonder if the servant forgot what I sent her for but it doesn't really matter, do you want to go to some other room of the house instead of sitting there in a dripping skirt -"

Lucette looks down.

"... oh. Yes, another room, and a chance for me to change into new clothing, would probably be for the best."

"I'm backlashed but not bad enough I can't give you privacy to change," though he's saying that through his teeth a little.

"I suppose you could close your eyes, if that is significantly better?"

"It if you'll talk to me but not that much of an improvement if it just lets me be silently in the room."

"I will be able to talk to you."

"Then yes please, I can close my eyes and turn my back."

Then they can go and do that and he won't be able to see her blush because this is definitely not allowed but it's fine and culturally normal where Haru is from and she wouldn't want to make her culture's failures weigh even more heavily on Haru than they are right now.

"How long've that guy and his wife been empowered, do you know?"

"Perhaps a decade and a half?"

Skirt gets unlaced first, which is definitely not something to do in front of a man, but doesn't actually involve showing any skin or undergarments until she takes it off. 

He's staring at the wall. "He's formally employed as an investigator? How long has he been one?"

"King William III - the current king - appointed him when he was elected five years ago."

Why are there so many small buttons on this skirt. They seem completely useless and might just be for appearance's sake, except for some reason she has to undo every last one of them to get the skirt properly off.

"Presumably his power was involved in the decision so the king's definitely in on it."

"-are you sure it was his power? Now that I search my memory, I believe his family typically has abilities involving metal."

She could pull the buttons off by hand and that would make this whole thing go much more quickly but then someone would have to repair them which isn't at all reasonable. And Haru might notice she broke them which wouldn't be reasonable either. At least she's almost halfway done.