A nod and more notes.

"I presume you can't drop me directly on one of the Spear Fleet ships. Are they docked somewhere, like a station or planetary spaceport, at or after drop-time?"

"No, the spear fleet is mobilized from the moment of insertion, and begins out of range of the insertion system. At a considerable delay, it might be possible to insert you in on one of their ships, but at that point it's plausible the fighting would have more or less already begun." 

"Well that scuppers my whole plan," Hailey replies, scratching out a whole section of ideas.

She looks through the list of resources, frowns, flips through again, and then hums.

"It looks like my best bets are maybe enhancing the Third Fleet's ships and officers, pitching in myself, and trying to bootstrap some kinda bombardment angle?"

She shakes her head.

"What's Danger Sense do if the danger's moving too fast for a few seconds to make a difference? Like if you need a minute or more to react in time?"

"The effect might extend to being able to warn you about being within the threat range of someone actively trying to hunt you, but it won't extend past a few seconds warning of the triggering condition regardless of the exact scenario." 

"Bollocks. That's definitely going to be a tough one. Probably I need enhancement capabilities and instant credibility. Charisma, psychic paper, and magic to try to reinforce the hulls?"

She shakes her head. "I'll come back to this one." A few more notes, and she looks at the next mission.

"Does the betrayal depend on Jev making it to the meeting? And does the revolution have magic of their own?"

"It's not nesscarily the only way for Jev to cause problems, but it's by far the primary concern, here. They have some access to magic, yes, though of a lower quality and quantity then their opposition." 

"Okay, that's doable. Probably stun Jev, deliver him to them with an explanation that he got caught and his mind bent, let them fix his mind if their magic can manage it, or clean it up myself if they can't. Can you include a photo of him so I can recognize him, or do I just need to talk my way into their midst? I assume the Midnight Club is a public establishment of some sort?"

"That can be included easily enough. As for the midnight club, it is part of a hotel complex." 

"Brill. So that's the magocracy handled."

More notes. "Is anyone resisting Artea's recognition, suppressing it, or is it just her lack of connections and social skills? Also, does the existing academic milieu have any meaningful periodical publications?"

A moment after she asks the question, though, she frowns. She's... really been distant. Normally she wouldn't care, but this is her handler, and the pain's muted now.

"Nn. Sorry for being so curt. Been on tilt my whole life, and the light pools are some of the first things easing that up any."

"I understand. Certainly, going through the process myself made an enormous difference for me, though it's only in retrospect that it stands out against access to modern pharmaceuticals and the opportunity to have real allies. And... do tell if there's anything more I can do to make you feel more comfortable or... centered. I know it can be far from the easiest thing to just... push forward, even if it might be the most 'natural' thing to do." 

Her eyes flick down slightly, and she sighs quietly, before pursing her lips slightly.   

"It's less necessarily that there's a dedicated conspiracy then that there's a large number of social and practical factors that are simply not on her side for the people who would help to be convinced to find her worth entertaining. There's no true comprehensive periodical, though there are a handful of loose organizations with mailing lists and meeting notes that detail their work to a degree."  

She looks down at the desk. "Just... Bear with me. I've not tried to actually relate to another person in most of a decade. Out of practice."

She smiles faintly. 

"Of course." 

Her eyes glance over to her monitor, for a moment, before she drags them away. 

"Would it help to hear a bit about me?" 

"Yeah. Would." She nods softly.

"I was born on a world with an... inordinate focus on martial arts. Every skill, every trade, every practice that was not the martial path itself was considered at most a 'side hustle' fit only for the strong, and at worst something that marked you out as someone volunteering to be enslaved. If you studied architecture, you were expected to keep yourself fed and knowledgeable, so that you could be picked up like a book off a shelf to work beneath a martial artist, and to thank them for the privilege of their protection. I wasn't forunate enough to be born with enough talent in the esoteric arts, wealth or natural fitness to become much of a warrior, so I was simply left to farm. I was scouted by fixfic in my twenties as an agent. I remember being so..." 

She stares off into the distance for a moment. 

"So excited that I could do something meaningful, that I could be one of the people who were allowed to have meaning. I took a mission in a world of low technology and the wuxia package, for few other options seemed like they would truly make me strong, and because I convinced myself that it was the best option, for the improved skill in martial arts would not fade, even if some of the physical benefits might." 

She slips her hand up to her head, and gently strokes a finger beneath her eye. 

"I... distinctly remember spending most of that mission bloodied and bruised in bed, because for all that the package gave me everything that it promised, it merely made it difficult to injure me with the conventional weapons they had on hand, and harder still to put me down, it was far from infeasible for a sufficiently large bomb or gun to take me out of the fight, and when I could attend oh so many fights in so short a span..." 

She shakes her head a little ruefully. 

"I spent more time being fussed over by nurses and debriefing them on my insight on how to best fight with the changing weapons of the era then I ever spent fighting, and to this day I'm still not entirely sure if it was that what mattered most, over the contributions of my own presence on the field of battle. I remember being... quite shaken. I looked into other powers, other missions, other ways to excel, because I oh so sure that couldn't be it. Eventually, I got the hint from my..."

A faint chuckle breaks through her usually rather placid face. 

"'Mission Mommy' - she always insisted I call her that - that I needed to take missions with partners, and try to work more purposefully with people. A number of the stories of what I did on those missions are not exactly mine to share, but I found that I did, in fact, enjoy the martial path, amongst others, for all that it wasn't something that I truly wanted to... be my life. So I ended up with the package permanently, and amongst the other things I've done, I've ended up working in the administration, refining the reference methodologies for multipresence techniques, and mentoring and managing agents like you."  

Huh, some of that rhymes. Craving a particular thing, being out of place...

She winces at the thought of spending so much time laid up from overdoing it on the fights. That's very much the kind of mistake she could make.

Then she snickers at the phrase "Mission Mommy," shaking her head in amusement.

"Not working with partners near enough sounds like my kind of cock up, yeah. Sort of daft shite I'd do." She smiles thinly. "And someone was being cheeky, matching us up. Shite rhymes."

She leans forward a little. 

"How so?" 

"Out of place, craving being Strong Enough that you can outpace the bloody awful shite that did or could've happened to you, craving a particular package down to your bones, stubbornly getting into perhaps too many fights, staying distant when there's an argument company'd do you good until someone calls out how you've lost the plot?"

She smiles wryly.

Her head slides to the side, a little rueful glint in her eyes. 

"I've always wanted to be strong, true, but I've met a number of agents that have a... true calling to their path. It's inspiring, in it's own way, to see people who can scarcely imagine being anything else but what makes them the finest fighter or wisest wizard. I'm not like that, for all that people who were like that back home were utterly lionized and for all that I thought that was what I was 'supposed' to be, for a good long while. But... It really does make me feel so much more... complete, despite that." 

She slips a little lower into her chair. 

"And as for the mission... I don't think it was so much wrong as it was an inevitable part of fighting that kind of war with those kind of powers - it's easy to imagine endurance powers as just another facet of untouchable superiority, until you have that power and realize that with enough mobility it fundamentally changes how a protracted campaign flows. It was... disillusioning, in a way." 

She smiles faintly.

"But yes, I 'see it', as it were." 

"Maybe this'll work out after all," she grins. "Got a handler who gets it better than I expected, at a weird but brill new job, and a shot at getting to keep magic of my own. Mebbe I'm due some luck, after all this time!"

A hand slides up and fusses through her hair as she smiles wistfully at that. 

"So my hunch is that Artea needs a bit o' spit an' polish, some help shining up her notes for a paper, an' a few introductions. Maybe some help getting around. But it's basically all social work."