Welcome to Gaia! ::

She resented many things about this life that had been thrust upon her, but she resented, perhaps more than everything else, the way that she kept ending up as some sort of mentor figure against her will.

The resentment was sharpened by the self-awareness that she kept falling into that role because of her own natural tendencies: bossiness, directness, high standards, and being - of course - Exemplary in Many Things. It was a particular type of pain to know that you'd brought your own misfortune upon yourself by means of your own virtues. It was an even worse pain to know that you were on some level good at something you despised.

Generally, she did her best - which was not always very good - to suppress this irritation. But from what she had gathered, this was a person who might benefit from a Firm Hand. She could not fault him for running from Destiny - she approved of this maneuver whole-heartedly and almost envied it - but she could fault him, and did, for running back to it and being useless.

So she was not snippy, exactly, nor entirely standoffish, but she was very brisk, with a schoolmarm quality that kept her from falling back on her dangerous tendency to get purring and dangerous and indulgent when she was bossing someone around.

"Hopefully I have answers, then," she said, returning the handshake with one that was CEO-firm, from a palm that glowed the color of sunlight. She immediately, then, handed over a plastic tote bag laden with the sort of things she herself had found useful, both on her Wonder and others: a very good flashlight, WD-40, a couple of assorted tools, duct tape. That kind of thing. She never knew how prepared other people were, and it was a sort of gesture of goodwill, besides, to outfit him ahead of time. It would hopefully instill in him the value of preparedness.

She gave him, then, a one-over with a quick and scrutinizing eye, that seemed to measure and appraise with its sweeping glance, and leave, somehow, the impression that whatever had been weighed up had been found slightly disappointing. "But it'll be easier to sort them out on the other side. You know what to do?" she prompted, only half a question. As far as she knew, the means of escaping this world and visiting another were some sort of inborn instinct, which required no instruction. But she was always prepared for the possibility of an inconvenient exception.

"The other side. Your Wonder. It ought to come to you naturally," she said, and while there was still a bit of sharpness in it, it was softening.

Joy was always eager to blame people for their own shortcomings. But she was even more ready to blame the Code for being an arbitrary a*****e withholding power from people it had conscripted into magical warfare, so she was already preparing for a good, solid rant about the Code and how undoubtedly the Code was to blame for this inexplicably mental block.

She put out a hand to rest it on his shoulder, not in a companionable gesture, but in the way one might when, say, preparing to walk together into a narrow, dark cavern that might be full of danger. "But maybe it doesn't. Sometimes you get the stupidest ******** roadblocks thrown in your way for no reason, I think. Close your eyes and try not to think of it. Just - sort of - can you actively want? Does that make sense?"

If she was in her civilian form she might have advice on the side of actively wanting. But she let it go. Now was not the time or the place, and he wasn't even her type.

"If you can, do that," she prompted, clearly dispensing something in the way of an order. "Want to go, and you'll feel like you need to blurt something out - like there's a song stuck in your head you haven't thought about since high school - that sort of a feeling."