"I only know about it from a policy class, it's - deterrence law, the type of thing that's there to stop people from trying. I don't think it really comes up in practice." (She remembers snickering at the form, when she first saw it, and then reading about what happened to Moonsong.)

"Makes sense. You awakened in college?"

"In the third week of my grad program, yeah." (...she misses Prof Meadows, rather abruptly. How are her cats doing...)

"Oh, grad school, neat. My hellweek was in high school so I never got that far, I'm pure autodidact since then, what was your area?"

"Policy. I was aiming to work in one of those think tanks that makes DRT recommendations, as one of their people persons." She sounds slightly wistful. "Not an easy field to break into, of course, but I liked to think I could have been good at it." 

"I wanted to be an epidemiologist. But, you know, that was 'given that I can't enter an essay contest to be an esper instead', so."

Aww, that's a charming way to put it. "Relatable, honestly. It took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize that 1 in 50000 did not have an unless you really really want it attached in real life, no matter what the dastardly YA books say, and I was pretty sad about it." For, like, months.

(And here she is now, a dungeon esper with a great power! She worked with Min Woo-young and Skybreaker and Flay this week! It's everything she ever dreamed of! And she's a fucking wreck. Pathetic! Disgraceful!)

"It's such a ripoff, right, like, I think there are some good effects from it striking at total random but I don't think it's net better than there being an essay contest or something."

She chuckles. "It'd have some fascinating effects if it were essay-writing in particular! Imagine, all the young kids who want to be espers when they grow up spending all their time perfecting their essay-writing skills... whatever stylistic and formatting quirks the Judging System rewarded becoming increasingly commonplace as people figure them out..."

"I guess one of the effects it striking at random has is that places with, in this case, poor literacy rates and educational systems, get an equal shot. Except insofar as I bet that makes it hard to train doctors and make hellweeks survivable."

"Yeah, especi-" hmmm actually that's both depressing and not especially interesting, which is a great sign that "- maybe our hypothetical can enforce that our 1 in 50000 best essay-writers have to be geographically distributed in some hard-to-game way, so we don't have to worry about accelerating esper drain for the hypothetical Indonesias of this thought experiment."

"Indonesia does not have the world's worst esper retention rate! This is because in 2022 Andorra-born Milagro moved to Barcelona. But still."

For some reason this causes Cara to freeze momentarily?

"Sure," she says agreeably a moment later, like nothing happened. "In any case, I think it ends up doing really interestingly weird things to education? ...and also to the experience of getting esper powers you can't really use, jeez." 

"Do I maybe need to know what that was about."

"Not really," she says cheerfully. 

- can you maybe try not being a concerning, cryptic bitch for five seconds -

"I really don't think it's important and I'd find it embarrassing to explain," she adds in a more subdued tone.

(It's both not his fault and not his problem that she's this low on cope right now! And she's absolutely not up for explaining how to avoid tripping her up like this.)

"You're like, a grownup and stuff, so if you say so, but I'm really worried that there are going to be things like that which - accumulate and result in some acute or chronic fuckup that I super do not want to commit."

Cara sighs, then takes a deep breath. "I think that's it's super valid to be concerned about that category of error and in general I think it is directionally correct to double check, but - I really don't think it's important and I'd find it embarrassing to explain," she repeats calmly and firmly. 

"...okay. I am, fair warning, full of fun facts of that approximate class and if they keep being a mysterious issue I'm going to need to fall back on trying to teach you sign language or something as failover backlash pica behavior. ...maybe you should actively not learn sign language. Tagalog? Anyway. So I guess for an ungameable geography system everybody could get their essay contest cohort in roughly the same way dungeon appearances work? An essay contest submission box appears like a dungeon portal and you can only put your essay in if... you were one of the nearest fifty thousand people who hasn't gotten one yet, at that moment... hm, you run into an issue where it's not necessarily obvious to these people that there's a submission box. I suppose it could just psychically notify them."

If they were going to keep being a mysterious issue I would have explained it! I'm not an idio lol. lmao. 

She sighs again. "It's fine to share fun facts. If it comes up again" (which it won't!) "I'll tell you what's up and we can figure it out from there." 

And then she's cheerful again. "Yeah, I was imagining it being pretty psychically automated! Something like... all 17 year olds get an envelope from nowhere with their topic, pen, and paper? And they have a week to fill it out and put it back in the envelope and then the envelope disappears as mysteriously as it appears. And the Objective Judging Process handles all issues of distribution, cheating, and such." 

"Does everyone get the same topic? If they don't how is it - curved - I guess there's no reason it has to be fair in that direction, it could be random the same way the powers themselves are. Are the envelopes stealable? Is the paper an implicit length limit, does this penalize people with large handwriting or who speak only French?"

"The topic is something that they can write about, it's curved in some that way that is basically fair though of course people not chosen write extremely and long angry posts online or in papers about how this is not the case, there's psychically enough paper for them to write exactly what they want + scratch paper if they need it, it is mysteriously impossible to fuck with the envelopes or otherwise make it impossible for someone to write the essay that they want to write," she rattles off cheerfully. (She's used to discussing this kind of thing with engineers.)

"Oh, well, in that case people are going to start gaming the one week invincibility period as much or more than the actual esper powers! Everybody spends a whole week impossible to prevent from writing an essay, that's got to be all kinds of useful."