"Ms. Novak, I have absolutely no idea what to make of this data," she says without preamble. "Or, I have hypotheses, but I'm going to bias you if I tell you them and I'm not confident in any of them. The most model-agnostic reading of this," and she has a map on her tablet to illustrate, "is that the worms are appearing at arbitrary locations in the city, doing heavy but weirdly localized amounts of damage, and then vanishing back underground.

"And if you compare this to Casablanca last time," she pulls up the Casablanca map, "the worms are usually somewhat stealthy and go very far underground at first when leaving the portal but not that stealthy, and you can find the radial lines of reduced but still extant damage radiating from where the portal was, then they reach their apparent goal and their behaviour switches to something you might call exploratory, hitting various locations around that goal one after another, before either moving to a different location or going back to the portal.

"What's most confusing is the timing, though. Previous attacks show patterns consistent with the worms travelling in straight underground lines at approximately constant speed until they reach their location, all having left roughly simultaneously. Tracing the lines from the portal here to the worm attack sites and plotting the times when the attacks occurred does not fit a model of simultaneous deployment and constant speed."

This is confusing and she doesn't like it! She peers at the monitors. 

 (...the initial attack was simultaneous. Not staggered at all. Could they have waited deeper underground...)

Stop. She's not an analyst. And her analyst is telling her that the data is confusing. "Understood. You said you're not confident in any of your hypotheses. Is incoming data making that better or worse?" 

"Well it's making my craziest hypotheses more likely! And you know the saying, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever's left is probably way less plausible than the hypothesis that you made a mistake in your impossibility proofs."

It's a confluence. One of the crazy hypotheses might well be true. The problem is which.

"We're short on time and answers. I want you to take this to a psychic analyst. I'm sending you a shortlist of profiles, but you know what you're seeing better than me - pick one who'll be a good fit and reach out with what you have. Work with Wentworth if they need anything unusual. Got it?" 

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you."

She nods briskly. "Page me when you have something." And then she walks away, briskly. They need her in the rubble clearing triage war room. 

Now who does she have on the list of psychics to help with this bullshit—

—Causal Web. Her. Pearce wants her. Can they afford her?

They can afford anyone who's on the list, at their confluence rates.

Causal Web can be sent an urgent DRT consult request. What does Olive want to put into the initial outreach message?

She thinks Arr- sorry, Infested Wasteland has leveled up this confluence and is doing something really unexpected and she doesn't know which of her crazy hypotheses about how it did that is true. If any. Basically.

Causal Web replies in a little under 40 seconds.

Understood. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Please send me teleportation coordinates for a suitable location to meet in, for myself and a partner with security clearance.

A minute later:

Additionally, please have people gather and bring us rubble samples from as many of the initial attack sites as you can. 

Understood.

She can do both things over a few minutes.

Teleporting in five. 

And indeed, five seconds later, she appears, hand in hand with a short green-haired androgynous esper with several facial piercings and a pair of big headphones. 

She scans her arrival room.

It's a not-very-descript meeting room with a long meeting table on which some pieces of rubble are arrayed and some projected screens with maps.

"Causal Web, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Olive Pearce, DRT analyst," she says, offering a hand to shake.

Causal Web can do a handshake! "A pleasure to meet you as well," she says, a bit quickly. "Thanks for getting everything ready."

"Of course. So, I'm not sure how you prefer to work, how much context do you have and want or need?"

"I've looked over your data while getting ready and I think I have all the context we need," she says, letting go of Pearce's hand. "You're right that something inexpiable by historic trends is happening; good job flagging that quickly and escalating it. With samples from the attack sites and my power, I should be able to figure out what, hopefully without needing too much time." She starts collecting a tiny piece of each sample as Pearce digests this. 

She's so cool. Olive is being professional but Causal Web is so cool.

She finishes collecting the samples. "Alright. I need to sit down for this. Is in here okay?"

"Yeah, make yourself at home." Wait was that a weird thing to say. It was totally a weird thing to say. Whatever she said it.

(Well, Pearce gets a little smile for it, so it can't have been that weird.) 

Causal Web sits down carefully on the floor. Her green-haired guide, still watching something on their phone, shuffles around so that they can get a decent amount of skin contact from behind her. 

She closes her eyes, and holding seven different tiny pieces of rubble in her hands, she reaches.

Sometimes, her power gives her probabilities and possibilities and it's a lot of work for her to prune them down.

Other times...

These pieces of rubble were [collected|summoned|brought here] <= [Ù̸̱͇Ṣ̴̛̈E̶̺̳̔̚Ṙ̶̬͝/̵̬̊Ą̷̯̑̓D̴̼̥̍M̷̪̈́͛I̷͙͚̽͑Ṅ̶̮̙̚] requested that some rubble be gathered for her investigation <= each piece of rubble was once part of a building or road that [collapsed|was sundered] <= each one was [broken|sundered] by a [S̸̞̒a̸͖̬͒n̴̺̼̅̍d̷̦̬̊w̶̯͙͑̈́o̷̅ͅr̸̙̉ͅṁ̵̙̋] from [A̸̡̢̭̟͒r̵̹̆͒͒͘͝ŗ̸̖̯͇̠̑͋͐a̴͖͙̪͕͊͂̚͠k̴͙̤̻͗̈́i̷̧̓s̶͙̼̝͋̿͋͂̄] that breached through the ground <= the [S̸̞̒a̸͖̬͒n̴̺̼̅̍d̷̦̬̊w̶̯͙͑̈́o̷̅ͅr̸̙̉ͅṁ̵̙̋s] appeared in the ground -

Oh no.

(...but does it really matt - obviously it matters, yes.)

Her voice is a bit strained, but she gets the words out as fast as she can. "It made secondary portals, underground. One for each worm."

"What." That was not one of her hypotheses!!!! ...granted, it's not much different from her "teleporting worm" hypothesis but. Still!

Yeah. (This is an unsalvageable mess - no it's not. It's admittedly pretty bad, but they can definitely adapt.)

She leans back into Sam's arms, pulling up her commscreen. "Unfortunately, I'm very sure that's what happened. I'm going to sharing the preliminary findings now, if you don't mind..." (She doesn't really phrase it like a question, because it isn't one.)