"Traceless was here for a minute," he says, "and I told him I've always got one eye out for compatible stealth espers, and he mentioned your name, yeah."

"Traceless was here? Too bad I missed him, would have been nice to say hi in person. We're wildly incompatible in the guiding sense of course but he's pretty cool and we worked well together. One of those cases where having similar backlashes is really helpful. Instead of making things worse."

"I actually got lucky with Traceless" don't say it like that??? "in terms of guiding compatibility, we're not primary partners level but we've got something.  You and I should check - " fistbump?

Sure, fistbump. And then a small wince.

"Well that's not nearly as bad as with Traceless but...Too bad."

He does not actually eep but he says the word "eep" and then he says "yeah, sorry.  Oh well.  Still cool to meet the third Toronto Stealth Esper."

"Three is quite a concentration even in a big city! Interesting that you're even a little compatible with Traceless though."

"I always thought my backlash was weird conceptually for a stealth power," he says.  "I'm - I don't like talking a lot about it and it's not public public, but I don't mind telling people at mixers if it comes up - I'm pathological guilt."

"Huh, that is kinda a weird one and I would actually sort of expect it to be compatible with mine. Mine's a compulsive desire for attention. Which I can't really hide  because I can't shut up, especially about myself. Also, I don't want people to think I act like that on purpose, since I can be..really very obnoxious at times. Because after a certain point I just don't care whether people are upset with me as long as they're responding to me. I'm getting better at avoiding the worst of that but..."

"Oh, that sucks," he says.  "I get it though, my partner's backlash gives him impulse control issues sometimes.  And honestly I don't always love the way I am on mine.  But it doesn't reflect on you any more than any other backlash."

"Yeah, I'm also getting better at not blaming myslf too much after the fact. Just, you know, trying to figure out how to keep it from happening again. Though I have the problem that how hard it is to cope often depends on whether the victims I'm working with are willing or able to engage. I can hide other people so my power isreally good for victim retrieval in particular but I have a hard time if they aren't willing or able to respond to me. Even if I'm on comms I get...pretty upset if someone is right there and seems to be ignoring me and it's hard to stay professional about it. Having a person right there to talk to helps a lot with that because I can focus on them being there talking to me and sort of ignore the unresponsive victim right back. Part of why  Traceless and I worked so well together."

"It sounds like pairing up could work pretty well for you then. Stealth buddies!"

"Yeah. As long as Shadowcat doesn't mind having his ear talked off the whole time."

"He's been known to tolerate that sort of thing."

"We met when I rescued her from a dungeon," he says.  "Three years ago.  She was the chillest rescue I ever had even when things went way south, I knew immediately she ought to be working with dungeon support."  Fondly, and a touch smugly: "And now she does."

"That's a great story. Also, the support workers are way underrated and staying chill in tough situations is sort of a superpower all on its own I think."

"It really is."

She smiles shyly.

"But that's way underselling the story," he says.  "If you think it sounds good in three or four sentences you should hear it told properly."

"Well now I'm very curious. If you wanted to make me curious, then you succeeded."

"Do you wanna tell it again, or shall I?"

"You do it this time."

"Mkay," he says.  "End of the year 2030, I get called out for some recon-rescue work out by the university.  I like doing scouting and mapping, I like figuring out what the hell's going on with a new dungeon.  It was - so the thing I really remember about this dungeon other than the story is how yellow it was.  It could've been a mildewy, like, office building, with no furniture at all.  Tacky yellow wallpaper and damp yellow-gray carpet and really buzzy yellow fluorescent lights.  Important thing about this place, this comes into the story later, it was foxing our lidar, you know that ultra modern automatic mapping tech, so we were doing it the old fashioned way, twine-in-the-labyrinth with red spray paint on the walls."

(Adoring gaze from the audience.)

Sqz.  "So I run into this vic, first person I've seen.  Adorable five-foot-tall woman in a fluffy pink sweater, cool as a cucumber, tells me about her monster encounter - and listen, it was a first-time dungeon, but these monsters are gonna turn out to have been serious business.  She answers all my questions for me to call her in, her morale's even better than mine.  I start walking her back to base camp and she's making conversation, bantering about the dungeon's design sensibilities and the monsters, for all the world like we're on our first date.  I start to feel like she's the one keeping my spirits up.  And then we come to my first monster encounter."

"Now, I don't actually have my power up at this time.  I don't like to have it on all the time, I'm pretty good at mundane stealth, and there don't seem to be a lot of these monsters around, so I'm fairly confident I'll hear one coming.  And on this occasion I do.  But that's me, with my esper hearing and my five years of professional experience.  I stop dead in my tracks overhearing this thing and she matches my energy perfectly, her first time in a dungeon and she takes cues as well as my partner Peregrine.  I don't have to say anything, I don't have to signal anything."

"I take a minute to check it out, I come back, I whisper in her ear what's going on.  She - takes it like a champ is still underselling it.  Like, again, I might as well be telling Peregrine, or one of the DRT guys, for how cool she plays it.  I brief her, I pull back, she's giving me a thumbs up like she wants to make sure I'm okay."

"So I take care of this thing fast.  It kicks my backlash a little but I'm okay.  This is the first good look either of us have gotten at one of the monsters.  Big seven-or-eight-foot tall four-armed boogeyman lookin' guy, slowly dissolving into black goo after he got shot.  And what do we discover but that it got its hands on one of our red spray paint bottles and tried to cross out one of our arrows with it."

"It was weirdly adorable."