As before, when Causal Web gets more and more guided, she starts using her commscreen more actively, looking and reading instead of just taking notes.

This time, unlike the others, she breaks off the guiding before the process is fully complete. "I need to make a quick phone call right now, while it's still business hours," she says, by way of explanation.

Emily nods and moves to allow her the use of her hands and mouth. It's much easier than it would have been while more backlashed, and there still is skin contact.

Great! She makes the call right away.

"Hello, I'm looking to speak with Peramal." Pause. "Hi, Peramal! I heard about you from someone and I had a question about pricing - can I ask over the phone how much you'd charge for specific questions?" Smile. "Great! So the first one - I was really wondering when the confluence is going to hit? - oh! Darn. But that makes a lot of sense, okay. Got it." (It'd be illegal for her to record this conversation, so she's transcribing rapidly on her commscreen.)

"Hmmm, okay, the other thing I was wondering is - how is the Arsenal game next Sunday going to go? - ah, yes, of course, sorry - no, that's all I had, but I might call you back tomorrow, if I think of something else? Okay! Thank you for your time, have a wonderful evening!"

And she hangs up, indicating to Emily that she'd be okay with resuming higher-bandwidth guiding.

(Well that's perhaps a bit concerning and confusing, but she is to do nothing about it.)

Time for higher-bandwidth guiding! And thinking about the appearance of anodized metal!

And soon they're done with that! And they can both get out of bed and drink water and stretch.

Since they're done for the day, Causal Web starts putting her clothes back on.

Right, yes, all of that, and setting the building to let people through its doors.

She slides into her dress. "I expect to need to do a few more long power uses tomorrow. Does 10 AM work for you?"

"Sounds like a plan! And—" she double-checks her calendar, and her regular guiding is still scheduled for its normal time, and she has no other prior commitments she's forgotten— "10AM works for me!"

"Great. I'll see you then." And she calls herself an autocar and heads out. She has some emails to write, a preliminary report to make for the board, and a few other things to set in place for tomorrow. 

"See you then!"

Emily goes to her desktop and does some preliminary research into ocean- and parks-related charities for any doing work on salinity or geomagnetism, and puts the most promising ones at the bottom of her ranked text file to follow up on researching at the end of the month.

Then she starts mocking up shapes and textures and lights in her 3D modeling software. Nothing looks right, but at least it's something, by the time she has to stop for the regularly scheduled evening guiding.

Causal Web tries very hard to keep good sleep hygiene, and she mostly succeeds. But she's been doing international high profile postcog work for a while, now, and not all of it is as anodyne as Peter Baxter's poor business practices. She knows a few things about the world that keep her up late worrying, some lonely nights.

The next day, she texts Emily to let her know she'll arrive approximately on time.

She knocks on the door at 10:02, looking somewhat underslept.

(Because of the effects of Pemberton Media and football on the confluence— that's probably simply not true.)

"Good morning!"

"Good morning, Emily." She'll head inside and into the guiding room.

(The water bottles have been slightly further depleted, and the empty ones are gone, but the room is otherwise much the same as when Causal Web left it.)

Emily strips down to her underwear, climbs into the bed, and locks the building.

She can undress too, and go over her day plan (as it relates to Emily, anyways) while she does.

"I expect I'll do two or three longish power uses today, possibly getting lunch here after the second one if that's ok with you, and then settle up and head out."

"Sounds good to me!"

She's using digital anchors again, so she'll get into bed facing Emily and wrap her arms around her guide.

And then she can get started.

Today Emily is moving her marbles in an up and down stepping pattern, and making spheres out of paper. It's slightly more complicated to tell the folded paper to tug away from itself in the right way to become round. Spicing things up a bit.

Twenty minutes.

Causal Web is spicing things up too, in that she's doing a sort of branching-backwards special with two okay anchors and a lot of very solid conjecture, and targeting something very specific.

Thirty minutes.

It's on the edge of what she can do, with this much guiding, and accordingly she's a bit clingier than usual.

Forty minutes.

It might mean that she should hold tighter, but they didn't discuss it ahead of time. It's probably the right thing to do, but it might be unexpected, so she shouldn't. And she shouldn't guide more intensely until she receives the signal or the time elapses.

She needs to think about something else. Last weekend she visited a little shop with the wrong shape of interior door handle for the baked goods it was selling. She should determine what would constitute the perfect handle, and later maybe she can make it happen.

Fifty minutes.

Sixty minutes.

She may not and must not guide with her mouth to the other mouth yet, must not open the outer membrane that separates their fluids (like a door, in flaps, for the river, or even fine layers like pages of a book or an onion or dried glue, for the more-living membrane with its groundwater) and improve the efficiency, by fluid-to-fluid or by improved access to topologically inaccessible surface area. She might be stopped.

And she cannot supplant the placeholder in the door with its hardwood replacement (yellow-stained, smooth and long-handled, a pattern of circular holes drilled through on the bias) or fix the salinity of the embankment or go back to the close that she passed last month to walk all the way down one side and up the other or anything else she needs to do, without ceasing to guide her charge. She's still making concrete progress on that one task, the total amount dealt with increasing, even as the amount remaining also increases.

When she finds herself considering abandoning her current duties for more distant duties, there is a rule, and there is an action she needs to take. 

She puts down her marbles, and her paper spheres, and she stops.

The world of course rebukes her for her weakness of will, slowing the effectiveness of her guiding as the differential grows, a gentle but stern slope. New tasks (the number of forks in her cutlery drawer relative to spoons, the arrangement of her hands around the other hands,  the shape of the path through the embankment gardens) begin to be communicated slightly more seldomly, and less urgently, as she demonstrates her inadequacy.

She holds still and maintains skin contact.