Finals week flies by quickly. Olivia is too busy studying to think too much more about her brand-new bisexuality or her possible future with Alison. Alison herself is less busy – she says she’s confident in her CS classes and none of her other classes this semester have real finals – but she mostly keeps to herself and doesn’t mention anything about their relationship or Olivia’s orientation. Everything between them is normal except that Olivia is expending ten percent of her mental energy on reminding herself to act normal.

Her last final is early in the morning, and afterwards she and Alison pack up their things into Olivia’s car for the several-hours drive back to their hometown. They stop for lunch about halfway, at a chain restaurant by the interstate, which is when Alison starts talking about using her powers. She fills Olivia in on the research she’s been doing, ending with “... so long story short, I think you might have the right idea about me becoming a therapist or whatever, but I’m not sure enough to switch majors yet. I’m still hoping I can solve the transmission problem so I can change the world on a larger scale. Very carefully of course; I’m still not declaring myself empress.”

“Yeah, scalability is important for any non-combat use of superpowers,” Olivia agrees. “Empress or not. Like, you know about Momentum Man?”

“The retired cape who generates most of Australia’s nighttime electricity? Hell yeah. There’s really neat engineering there, he rotates between three different generators so he doesn't have to stop when they repair one, and they had to invent one-of-a-kind cooling systems to keep the power plant working at the temperatures he generates…” Alison keeps going, lost on a tangent about Momentum Man’s impact on the economics of the solar power industry.

Olivia notices that Alison nerding out is cute, the same way she felt when they were younger and Alison was her “boyfriend”. She almost says so, but she thinks better of it and focuses herself back on the actual topic of conversation. “Honestly he’s a great example of how people are wrong to think paranatural powers are just for fighting or saving people from disasters.”

“Yeah?” Alison asks. “I guess the costumed crime-fighting has a pretty high ratio of flashiness to impact relative to something like turning a big generator.”

“So a lot of people still think powers are specifically suited to cape stuff, and there are lots of theories that claim to explain why they’re like that. The popular crackpot explanation is that whatever mysterious entities cause paranatural awakenings like to see humans fighting each other. But the consensus among actual parascientists is that most powers aren’t actually optimized for capes, people just have a cultural bias towards coming up with cape-like uses for their powers instead of thinking more creatively, especially young people who’ve just awakened their powers for the first time. Like, the most common recurring superpower is “point-jumping”, where you can teleport to any place you’ve been before. Every year we get multiple new capes using that power to save people from burning buildings or whatever, and they usually only last a few years before they retire from hero work and get a job for NASA ferrying supplies to the moon base. Or teleport backpacks full of hard-drives all day for one of the big tech companies, which turns out to be the fastest and cheapest way to move exabytes between data centers. Um, sorry, I can tell you’re trying to communicate something with your face but I can’t tell what.” Olivia is not very good at parsing most people’s expressions, but at least her best friend is usually comprehensible to her. This time she’s not sure.

Alison blushes a little. “Nothing! I just, y’know, I think it's cute when you get excited about your area of interest. I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t say things like that right now.”

Olivia wants to ask ‘were you flirting with me?’ but instead she just says “Don’t worry about it. Thank you.” They keep talking science while they finish their lunch, but Olivia is distracted by trying to pick apart how Alison is feeling towards her. When they’re back in the car and Alison is content to just listen to music, she has time to consider whether she should have asked Alison to clarify her intentions.

Olivia is pretty sure that she does want Alison for who she really is, but some part of her is still uncertain. The problem is how much she’s attracted to Alison’s power, despite not having any reason to think she’d want to use it sexually. She doesn’t even know what kinks Alison has, if any; they never got nearly that intimate when they dated in high school. It would be okay if Alison didn’t have any interest in abusing her power that way, but Olivia is still hoping that she will.