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Haru sometimes gets coffee at Tim's, when he happens to feel like it on a random morning, or when he needs to be up long enough to finish out a guiding session with June. This morning it's the first thing.
a zanmi is an esper
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come-hold-my-hand
She secures a surface to write on and starts drafting up what looks like a skeleton org chart, muttering to herself as she goes.
"Okay, 1-2 biologists who'd be interested in monster bio... Hmmm, I think Amanda, Molly S, and Wander are my top picks there? Okay, email, text, text... One of the Alex/Bens for policy, I'll start with Ben R and go down the list, they're all super busy right now I think? and hmmm... business students I think would be fine for this... Kylie W., Jin, Harper? In that order."
This will keep her occupied for a while! She wiggles against Haru happily as she works.
traceless
"Tess might be good for something in admin," Haru volunteers, "though I've also considered grabbing her as a PA."
come-hold-my-hand
Oooh, a Haruperson to learn about! She flips around to hug him again, relishing the increased skin contact.
"Who's Tess?"
traceless
"One of my zillion people I call on the phone. She was a blog commenter first, posts as 'cricket's_biggest_fan'."
come-hold-my-hand
"Oh neat! Is she a student here? I was going to see if I could get this set up as a formal thing run by the school - get everyone involved class credit and some school / research funding for it, which - "
She trails off and looks at her phone, and then perks up.
"Oh, sweet, Prof Meadows thinks this is totally workable! She CC'd a few different professors in the relevant departments. I'll keep you posted, but this is looking very possible so far."
She clings more tightly to his back, wiggling happily.
come-hold-my-hand
"That might be doable but it sounds like more effort, and also I'd rob you of your PA lead."
She kisses him on the cheek.
traceless
"Is the university really set up to establish a zoo? Seems like a weird thing for a university to do."
come-hold-my-hand
"I'm not sure! But it's definitely set up to run a small nonprofit to research monster zoo feasibility, and from there if things look good they can hire full-time staff to establish and run it wherever looks good. Organizational scaffolding!"
come-hold-my-hand
"I think so too! ...If you have preliminary notes, I can forward them to the people looking at running this, I'll definitely link them your blogpost about monsters once it's up and I'm guessing they'll want to talk to you pretty early on... I know at least Wander reads your blog, she retweets your posts fairly often."
traceless
"My notes are too preliminary to see the light of day at the moment but I can neaten them up."
come-hold-my-hand
"Don't feel too rushed! This is still very early days." Ohhhh she's having a bunch of fun with this! (If it wasn't obvious in her voice, she's doing her happy wiggles about it.)
traceless
"It'll be really nice to have a monster zoo one day, my power set is pretty good for catching them but they can be so hard to place."
come-hold-my-hand
"It seems like it'll be a really cool thing to exist! I'm excited to do a little bit to hopefully help make it happen."
traceless
"One thing that worries me is that new exhibits will come in on very short notice. Dungeons aren't around for longer than weeks, it's not obvious till the dungeon's dead if the monsters from it will survive, and it's not clear till after that what the monsters need - they often change size or composition in some way. So everybody'd have to be ready to hustle if I grabbed something big or hungry or flighted or poisonous without much warning."
come-hold-my-hand
"Yeah, that's an important part of their job, quick safe intake, short notice..." she scribbles that on her notes page.
She can feel the urge to try and brainstorm solutions herself, but - the whole point of this is to outsource that to people she knows will be better at this than she is. Her role is to get them all talking to each other and pointed the right way.
traceless
"I can probably bankroll a lot of it if I'm doing more dungeons with you than I can with June."
come-hold-my-hand
Hmmm, should she - "I will probably also want to help fund it, I think? Once I have esper money and pay off my student loans," and make sure her friends aren't going hungry and such "but maybe I shouldn't plan on having a dungeon power... How much do security espers make?"
traceless
"...less than you can make taking a cut of my dungeons doing the professional partner thing."
come-hold-my-hand
...Oh jeez, um, um.
Flustered blue girl. "...Oh, uh, I - would still want to guide you without you paying me about it? And I think I would maybe feel weird about you paying me for it right out the gate, after taking such good care of me this week with no expectation of payback?" Also she wants him to rail her and she would feel weird about getting paid for that, even if it makes sense on paper, that just doesn't seem like how this should work, but.
traceless
"If you have dungeoneering powers then it's not customary for money to change hands about it but if your powers are not themselves remunerative then being available to guide me is a rare and marketable capacity! Professional partners don't get a lot of press but there are loads of them, nearly half of espers set foot in zero or one dungeons before deciding that's not happening and aren't healers or anything either."
come-hold-my-hand
The worst part is that she can tell that this makes sense and she's being weird about it, but that's not actually helping her be less weird about it.
Well. Use your words, Cara.
She leans on him. "The idea makes me feel a bit weird, but if it's the done thing, I expect I can figure out my feelings and make it work? But mostly I'm hoping to get a power that will let me do something interesting and profitable, dungeon or not."
There, was that so hard? (...a little, yeah.)