Carol, on the other hand, doesn't have much in the way of guiding needs aside from a place she can get guided and ideally a good reason to not be talking.  Talking never helps anything, when she's backlashed.  She's wearing her armored motorcycle leathers.  It makes her look hot and it keeps her backlash costs down, if she winds up getting stabbed.  And she hates her backlash.  Hopefully it won't be necessary, though.  Honestly, if a car hits her, she's going to have to get an emergency teleport to a silo, and maybe a gag so she doesn't mortally insult whatever pro guide she can scare up.

She's a little bit nonplussed by the huge-ass overengineered wheelchair, but she's had two years' practice at not letting her real emotions touch her face.  "Hey.  Pinion, right?  My name's Sinkhole."  She offers a firm, confident hand to shake.

"That's right. Looking forward to working with you." Pinion, being fresh, has no problem returning a firm, confident handshake! The compatibility is a pleasant surprise.

"Huh! I hadn't expected much compat, but that's not bad." Lower than she'd want for a primary guiding partner, but for a teammate in the field it's a solid perk.

She feels a desperate longing for a moment.  It doesn't show up on her face.  The last two partners she had with this much compatibility had done fine for pro guiding, but they weren't socially compatible with her, as her agent might describe it.  "It's always a nice surprise."  Especially if they put up with me for more than an hour.  She drops her hand back to her hip.  "I'm glad your little ATV there didn't get nabbed by the dungeon.  I'd have to explain how I lost my teammate to a trip around San Diego county."  Her mouth curves, revealing a few pearly teeth on one side.

Pinion's standards are set by 20 years of a primary partner with compatibility at a three-foot distance. She is intellectually aware that she's had it better than most, but the reality is still sinking in.

"Hah, if it had tried to take me for a joyride, I wouldn't have let it get very far. The whole reason I came down was to tell misbehaving vehicles to sit down and shut up." She gives a wry grin. "That being said, without it I'm basically a jellyfish on crutches when my backlash is bad, so here's hoping it doesn't get any ideas."

"I understand.  My own backlash is anger, usually pointed at dungeon monsters.  I'm pretty good about keeping on top of it, but I'm not really annoyed with you, it's just the backlash talking."  Casual, relaxed demeanor.  Is Pinion looking like she's going to be cool about it for now?

"Oof, that sounds rough. I gotta say, I don't love my backlash, but I do not envy people who got psych ones."

The briefing mentioned some tips for how to approach Sinkhole when she's backlashed, which mostly boiled down to "only say anything to her if you absolutely have to". Which works out fine for Pinion, since talking is a pain once her lips and tongue are starting to go slack and her jaw is threatening to pop out. But it does suggest:

"We should probably set up some nonverbal cues we can use for communicating when backlashed. Once I'm at the point where my speech starts slurring, I can't manage any complex dungeon sign either, cause my fingers will just kinda pop out and get stuck in weird positions. So I use modified versions for some common signs." She demonstrates her versions of "no", "go back", "that one", and "guiding" that rely less on specific fingers. Thankfully "stop" and indicating most common directions already use a flat hand, so those didn't need tweaks. "For numbers, instead of holding up individual fingers, I'll bop my hand like this for a count."

Better to establish conventions now than to have frustrating miscommunications later.

Carol feels mildly nauseated at the idea of her fingers just falling half way off like that!  No wonder the woman's in a chair.  "Here, can I get photos of those signs, for reference?  I uh, I don't love my backlash, but.  Yeesh.  Yours is...whooof."  Aaaauuuugggghhhhh.  How does she even run dungeons like that?  I guess mostly she doesn't?

"No problem." She begins going through them again, one at a time. "Honestly, it was a huge pain at first, but I've mostly learned how to deal with it." Well, that and she's used to having in-field guiding just by standing next to her partner, which made the backlash accumulation rate wayyyy less ass. "I know all this seems like a lot, but it's mostly just contingency. An ounce of prevention and all that."

"I'd be a raging hypocrite if I gave anyone a hard time about backlash.  Pun intended.  One last thing before we go catch a car, what's your preferred guiding strategy?"  Externally, she's pretty brazen.  Internally, she's pretty nervous.

Ack. Right, yes, that. "For now I'd rather stick to just skin contact and no fluid exchange, except in case of emergency. The chair actually has a sort of jump-seat that can be folded out", she demonstrates, "which lets someone sit behind me and get their arms around me, or I can pull up alongside you and we can hold hands. Those are probably the main techniques for guiding in the field. On longer breaks, out of my chair, I can do a lot of the usual cuddling type stuff, I just need a lot more fancy pillows. If my backlash gets really bad, I'm not going to be able to move at all on my own, and we should stick to chair guiding until I can again, or just call it for the day. I have a temporary silo rented and a professional guide lined up, so in the most likely scenarios where I'm really in a bad way, you shouldn't need to do more than is needed to get me to a teleport."

"Sounds good to me."  She's a professional, she's not disappointed.  She smiles warmly down at the older esper.  "Do you want to hold hands while we're trying to catch one of these things?  I think we're expecting one in the next few minutes, if they follow the same route they used the last two times."  Well, I won't give up hope just yet.  Maybe I'll meet someone else here.

Yay, that seems like it went okay! Honestly, compatibility with Sinkhole is good enough that the professional guide is feeling a little redundant right now. But she doesn't want to just assume someone she's only just met will want to deal with full guiding responsibility for someone who has to be handled like wet tissue paper when sufficiently backlashed. They can see how well they work together and if it turns out things are going well, she can bring up the idea of expanding the guiding relationship a bit then.

"Sure, holding hands is good!" At least for now, while she isn't too concerned about all the little bones in her hand staying where they're supposed to be. Later on she'll probably want to switch to linking arms or hugging, but the girl's already seeming a bit overwhelmed with all of Pinion's particulars, so let's cross that bridge when we come to it and try to not scare her off entirely right now.

Then Carol will caaarefully rest her hip against the wheelchair and lightly take Pinion's hand in her own.  She doesn't say anything else.  It's nice.

She doesn't get her hopes up, though.  One of the things she's supposed to work on is enjoying the good moments in life where she can.  This one's okay.  But 'okay' is good enough for Carol, today.

It's not long before the high-pitched whine of an electric motor being pushed past its limits by supernatural means is audible.

"I think that's our cue!" She waits until she has visual on the front of the pack, then pins herself to the ground, readying.

She kneels to the ground next to Pinion, gently squeezing the other woman's hand between both of hers.  "Last o-" holyshitthey'refast.

Sinkhole barely has the time to react.  She doesn't lay down a full-strength sticky trap - she's afraid that if she did, the wheels would stop and the rest of the vehicle would keep going.  The vehicle blows straight through the weakest version of her summoned purple sticky goop.  But she conjures more and more goop as the car goes, fast as her neurons will let her.

If she wasn't working at speed of thought, this whole attempt wouldn't even be possible.

The car is going damn fast. She hardly has time to think between when the it comes into view and when it's almost past her. But Sinkhole's slowing it down, and it's still solidly in range. She takes one more fraction of a second to do some unconscious backlash tradeoff calculations - how expensive is another gob of that purple goop, how expensive is another 5mph that she needs to arrest in that much mass. And then -

the car is no longer moving.

???  This isn't fast ???

The car's wheel turn, left and right, in a very confused manner.  The wheels spin.  Rubber squeals and burns against the pavement.

Under the weight of Pinion's power, though, it can't meaningfully move.

A family bursts out of the backseat, a mother and two kids.  The mother clutches the younger one(three, perhaps?) while the older girl staggers out under her own power.

They don't look happy, exactly, but they're no longer trying to break a land speed record and that's something.

Meanwhile, the DRT squad that's been on standby for the past forty minutes zooms in.  Two motorized pallet jacks in the front, two manual ones in the rear.   It's a bit like a gang stealing hubcaps - the wheels come off the car, and the vehicle is towed extremely hastily to a nearby parking lot.

Heck yes first try. She would do a fistpump or a high five but she shouldn't risk her elbow, so instead she turns to Sinkhole and smiles.

"Nice job! That purple stuff made a big difference, without it I would have definitely needed a break between cars but as-is I think I could manage one more before I need a breather. How are you doing?"

Sinkhole feels hardly backlashed at all to Pinion, but calibration is good and asking is free. Er, heck. Asking is usually free. Hopefully this isn't yet the level where asking questions is more annoying than it's worth.

Carol has more options for checking on physical vulnerability backlashes than most people.  She asks her power how to completely destroy the hand in between both of hers, gets a feel for how much effort it would take to crush it between her fingers, and realizes wow, this woman is not kidding about how easy it would be to ruin her utterly.

In real time, she gives the hand a very light squeeze.  "It's where I get my name from, after all.  It's my cheapest power.  I'm, hmm."  She does some mental math, a thoughtful look crossing her face.  "Maybe ten minutes of this away from being zeroed?"  I was willing to burn some backlash to see how easy you were to break, so.  Plenty of headroom on backlash.

Nora remains entirely unaware of Carol's new hands-on understanding of precisely the degree to which she is made of jello on rubberbands.

"Heh. Sounds like I'll definitely be the bottleneck today. After the next one I'm expecting to be basically at my safe cap, but I think we can probably guide me back in an hour or two, rinse, and repeat."