[ Steven takes the elbow in stride with a snort of his own. If he's tried to give a little coaching to an official non-New Hire employee because the intersection of creepy, weirdly friendly matter-of-fact approach to torture and forced recruitment is vaguely familiar... well, that's between him and the Jorgmund staffer who refused his professional expertise.

(But he thinks his personal life advice went over okay. He hasn't checked back in. Gotta give them time to tell one of those forty million Karens how they feel, because there's no moving on either way if they refuse to move at all.) ]

That's... kind of a lot of situations to cover. The short version is, my mom racked up a few thousand years of bad choices that she never dealt with, and I got left holding the bag. Heh, once those consequences started to roll in, it was like a new huge problem to figure out every week.

[ One of the handful of things he's ever openly a bit salty about: mom issues. It was a legitimate surprise that Jorgmund apparently didn't have anything to do with her or the Diamonds at all. ]

After a while, you have to start looking for happy outcomes. Even if you don't know exactly how everyone's gonna get there. Why keep trying otherwise?