Longer power use, more efficient power use, shorter notes, which means she should— not do anything differently or pay attention to this pattern.

She will instead close her eyes and try to imagine a web—no, a hollow star polyhedron, each  face covered in lace made of wire wrapped in twine—rising from a pool of saltwater, crystals of salt growing from the fibers.

And in time the guiding is finished. 

She yawns and then stretches.

Stretch! Water bottle! (Water is quite lovely.) Phone!

Causal Web gets up to drink some water and checks something on her commscreen. She sighs, forwarding the relevant email to her law firm. It's still early on the east coast, but Thomas starts his workday at 7 am, so she's assuming - yep, there's his reply. 

LOL!

Yeah don't worry I've got it handled 👍

What a tool though. 

Which is still not Emily's business! She updates her list, to avoid looking.

When she finishes with this and returns from a quick WC break, she says "I need to do another at about that length, and then I'll be done here for the day. Do you want to make any preparations before we start that?" 

That's actually quite a good idea, now that it is brought to her attention. "I'll also excuse myself a moment, then I'll be ready."

She leaves briefly, then returns to bed, ready for a final round of guiding.

She follows Emily into the bed, arranges herself facing her guide again. "Do you want your phone?"

"I'll leave it if you don't need your hands?"

"I don't need my hands this time." She wraps her arms around Emily and brings up her notes. "Ready?" 

Emily arranges herself and then nods. "Ready!"

She takes a deep breath, steadying herself. (She likes using her power, of course. It's what comes after that she hates, and she's spent a lot of time backlashed today already.)

It's worth it. Even for jobs like this - she might not care that much about what happens to Pemberton in abstract, but the company employs twenty thousand people and each one of them depends on the company not fucking up and the money they're paying her will do a lot of good, once she's passed it on.

Alright. Get on with it. She sets aside this train of thought and reaches into the past.

Emily starts her marbles on their cyclical journey and begins a new batch of cubes folding themselves. She might be able to use her power to directly support some possible human goal, perhaps more lucratively but perhaps not, though definitely not against dungeons, if she could be certain that the tasks she might be hired for wouldn't conflict with what might become clear she ought to be doing instead.

But at least the world has given her a predictable task she can reliably achieve, which supports some human goals. And she can follow some other instructions later, when she can weigh the decisions more strategically. She makes her arbitrary cubes and guides and imagines geometric structures.

It's another long one, apparently.

At thirty minutes, Causal Web shifts slightly, but her backlash doesn't stop going up.

She has her instructions to wait. Hopefully her target doesn't attempt to leave, or she'll need to figure out what to do. She could grip tighter to try to discourage it preemptively but she shouldn't deviate from her normal routine of holding still for skin-contact guiding.

The guiding is important, and the liquid in both bodies, and the flow of air—the waves can't cancel out, so she changes the pattern of her breath so her inhale begins halfway through the exhale. It would be good, and elegant, but she must not have her papers fold themselves to encase her and her guiding target together.

She tries to focus on imagining the lumpy iridescence of abalone shell stretched into giant sheets of fabric, translucently thin, pulled tight over a tangled rigid structure.

She only has to focus on that for another twelve minutes before her target's backlash stops rising.

Counting breaths as seconds, both because she should set by the breaths and for a safer margin than counting seconds without reference, she waits for fifteen, then ceases to not guide with her mouth.

It's so much better. Faster, and more, and pleasanter, and correct. Life is mostly made up of having reasons upon reasons not to do the right thing, but sometimes, when she handles those reasons with enough finesse, she gets do the right thing, and sometimes she gets to do it almost as effectively as is possible. This is the last time of the day, probably. There may be no comparable satisfaction.

Oh. Sure, this can happen. (It's pointless, obviously, but it'd be just as pointless to communicate that or to attempt to make it stop.)

Everything that needs to happen is happening. Minor improvements would be possible but the current guiding activity does not demand them.

Causal Web does, after a while, make some minor improvements to the process with her tongue.

Marginal improvement in efficiency that is also a landmark of progress! There is of course only one thing to do about it, which is to continue.

She waits longer to take notes this time, which could mean nothing.

Maybe Emily needs to— no. Guiding is already happening, asefficiently as is available. Regardless, she doesn't know what finger movements are needed for what Causal Web would need to type, so she cannot make that guiding milestone happen with anything but guiding.

Eventually the note taking does happen. (More than last time, if anyone was wondering.)

Okay, everything will be fine and the guiding was successful. (No one would dream of noticing for long. However, that's surely a good sign.)