"Okay. Thank you. Um. ... Cuddle me when you can, please, I think I was very irritating to him as a person but I don't know for sure and, uh. ... I handle tense situations well but I still would like a hug."

...well she doesn't need clothes if they're going to be cuddling, right? He leaves them on the bedside table and kicks his shoes off and removes his jacket and then he can cuddle yes.

Hye-jin snorts and snuggles up gratefully.

"We're going to need to get you a list of what to do if trying to verify that I'm not in an illusion partially created by my own mind, you're just doing everything I suggest. .... I don't have my phone or my chip for the commscreen, can you poke Woo-young for novel ideas to make me think I'm not living an illusion?"

"Wouldn't that be worse, though? 'Cause if the ideas don't come from you and you're in an illusion then they'll be ideas that he picked because he can simulate them."

Arghhhhh he thought about it. Fuck. He hates thinking about it.

"Well, okay, yes, but in those circumstances then it means I'd be wasting his time and processing energy getting him to come up with new and exciting ways to regale me with whale facts, which I feel is a victory in itself."

He snickers.

"Okay."

Woo-young links them a forty-five-minute-long video about how science communication was ruined by people peddling String Theory for decades making all physicists look like crackpots.

Ooooo, that sounds great!

"Also, the longer I make him waste time the better off I am, aren't I? He's on a time limit and needs this whole thing to be secret, whereas I? I will be missed! .... Oh you know what I should do, try to type up everything I remember, that would be very clever of me. ... Gimme your commscreen, pretty please? I'll keep watching science facts in the background."

Commscreen!

"...do you not just want a new chip, though?" he asks, summoning the little chip cube.

"Well, okay, yes, but. Look I mostly just want to get as much information as I remember down as quickly as possible. ... I'm going to include the burns I thought of but didn't say because I was in public and it would make me look like a crazy person." She'll poke the chip cube.

Sting, chip!

Ow. Okay! Typing up what she remembers! While watching Science Facts in the background. ... Science facts should probably be paused until she's done, actually, they are not doing their proper job of making her firmly feel like she's not in a dreamlike illusion trap thing.

She gets to the part where he tells her that she's not good enough for Tae-gun and pauses to look at him. He... is resolutely not looking at what she's writing, that's fair. Okay. On she goes, while the memory's fresh. "A copy of this will be available for you to read if you ever want to," she informs him quietly, but then it's back to typing while keeping the screen carefully angled away from him.

He nods, without looking, and he will definitely not read it.

Woo-young will. If he needs to then... Hye-jin and Woo-young can tell him. Otherwise, no, he does not want to know.

Woo-young is getting her updated stuff life and texting her as he reads it.

we're going to have to assume that he aborted the least fruitful inroads

though i gotta say this is a bit scattershot

...not totally, though, he was clearly aiming places that aren't

uh

completely nonsensical

Yeah, it honestly felt like he'd been overthinking what he wanted to say to me in order to get under my skin for like, the entire time he's been off grid.

Which is admittedly both funny and very sad, get a hobby, dude

I think Volcanic Range is probably what set him off, this seems, like. Pissed at me in particular, and a lot of this was trying to put me down in any way he could grasp at.

Gonna watch science facts now though

have fun with science facts

we're gonna need to figure something else out other than your IUD though if he's gonna be doing this

alright if i review the video/audio footage?

Absolutely, please do. ... Let me know if that guy behind me in line really did want a picture, I feel bad.

approximate timestamp?

oh wait nevermind he was 100% fucking with your sense of time i'm sure of it

i'll just watch and let you know

K. Thank you.

I'll try to figure out other birth control options besides like

'Wheeeeee backlash to cause a miscarriage, there is no way this could possibly go wrong!'

or some shit like that.

yeah

we'll figure it out

Tae-gun's not going to apologise for the ninety-third time for how his own mess is spilling all over everyone he cares about because he has pattern recognition and Woo-young would yell. But it's still his fault.

No, shut it, you. It's science facts time for your iPhone from Hell brain, too. No dumb autocompletes about how this is all your fault.

Okay, so, solutions, such as they are, are:

Tae-gun is getting a vasectomy. (And some of his sperm frozen, for if he ever wants to have kids.) This is not an immediate solution, since he won't be free of little swimmers for a while yet, but it's not the only one being used. Also, it's just genuinely good practice, Tae-gun probably should have done this years ago and only didn't by way of, in order: partnering only with men, and then avoiding all partnerships at all. He is fine having this problem solved now that it is actually a problem for him in particular.

Hye-jin's getting another IUD, fastlined through Quasar. There was some debate about other birth control options, hormonal injections featuring heavily, but those might react badly to her body, and furthermore might not even work, with her secret regeneration that is definitely not getting put in front of any doctors for proper testing. Furthermore, they are in fact in the middle of a confluence. Best to put the thing that was taken out back as soon as possible so that the combat esper is definitely dungeon capable. This sucks and hurts a bunch, but it's not the first time she's been through this, so. She'll just be mad about having to do it again in under a year after she got the fucking first one put in. Damn you, Kang Jaeha.

They will also all be more closely tracking their time, or to be more accurate, having a program that will track their respective times for them and dump it onto the out of country database. They are given new and exciting emergency teleport button accessories.

Hye-jin will also... grudgingly.... stop poking the proverbial lion by hanging out near her house so much. Grumble. Grumble grumble. There are other, more unpredictable, more all-over-Korea places that she can go be outside and enjoy a conversation with an ordinary person. Grumble.

From the girl who had the Kang Jaeha shopping experience!

In order:

It's not that I think I'm good enough for him, exactly? It's that I trust his judgement, and he seems to like me an awful lot. I understand that difference is confusing for you, but I hope you can grasp it eventually.

All ranks are arbitrary things humans have made because we like putting people into boxes. A lot of people have powers that can be many different ranks, it's how they apply them that matters. So, I don't worry too much about them, how about you?

Actually, speaking of: you sure do talk like you know about the specifics of my life when you don't, really. It's rich hearing that I'm bad at friendship from you, you know. Try a mirror next time you want to do that speech about driving everyone away, I think you need it more than I do.

If you were right about everything, I don't think you'd be in the situation you're in. But sure, keep digging, bud, that grave of yours isn't deep enough! I'm sure doing the same thing that you have for the past half a decade will work eventually! Just keep doing that thing over and over and over again, you'll get a different result!

You're right, it's weird to act like I know a guy I've only known for a couple months. Not quite as weird as acting like I know someone who has spent a solid two-thirds of the time he's known me actively avoiding me, though. Especially when that time period is something like 'half a decade.' Kind of a long time. In the ways of the noble scientist: my data's more recent than yours.

You're so sure that he'll forgive you, but I don't think you even understand why he left you. You just think everything will go back to the way it was if you tear him down far enough that you're his only way to live.

It won't, though, even if you do manage to make him that desperate. I'm not the one who destroyed your perfect fairytale life. You are. You did it long before I got here. Take it from an expert: you can't un-burn a bridge, only build something new.

But you're not. You're just destroying things that seem like they're in your way. It's a chasm, not a mountain, dumbass, destruction will get you absolutely nowhere.

Please actually do something useful with your life.

The problem with squeezing all of his dungeons on Friday to have time in the evening is that they don't have that much time after the last one to deal with backlash. Enough to get going, probably, and Hye-jin is mostly fine, but he's about to meet two of his gorgeous and smoking hot ex-partners and he's kind of still a bit horny and he already had trouble being teased by then when he wasn't horny. 

...should he maybe get Hye-jin to lock him up? If he doesn't turn on his self-reinforcement power his cock definitely won't break through the cage! That way he'll definitely be safe from being too horny around three people whom he's really compatible with and who could definitely overpower him if they tried and they'll be in a restaurant's booth so no one will be alerted to the fact that he's helplessly at the mercy of a roomful of espers taking turns using his body for their own pleasure without any concern for his feelings or consent while he's squirming and unable to resist because he can't use his enhancement powers because if he does his cage will break and he can't let that happen—