It kind of made Hye-jin feel better, that someone is fully on board with just killing this guy to keep them safe. She would like more of that energy in her life. This entire meeting, it's felt like no one is in her corner, even Tae-gun. She does admittedly dislike how her legitimate concerns got lumped in with Si-yeon's murder opinions. But that's more her discomfort with how Tae-gun seems to be modeling her as way more murder happy than she actually is, and only seems to be remembering the parts where she mentions that killing Kang Jaeha is on the table at all, and none of the context around them.

But that is a fight to pick after the important tactics talk.

"So part of the problem is that it's either really subtle, or really blatantly obvious? I can list some of the things he did for the round two, though, to give a good overview of what he can mess with subtly. Uh... Visuals, audio, he made me feel like my heart was racing when it wasn't - I suppose heart monitors might be an option - he invoked a false feeling of anxiety, false, uh - prickling sensation on the back of my neck? He was trying to force me to feel uneasy about being surrounded by copies of him when actually I found that kind of funny. But I think we already know his options here are 'Yes', so. I don't know how useful any of that is."

"What I'm thinking here is less what he can do, which as you say is 'yes', and more what, out of the things he can do, we're most concerned about. The top concern being the one you've mentioned before, about your powers; under what circumstances would he succeed at using you against your goals in that manner?"

(He doesn't, quite, adopt formal speech, here, but he's definitely dropping the maximally casual patterns he'd been speaking in before.)

"If I were mistaken about a dungeon break, and he made me think a civilian is a monster. Or any other kind of - putting me into a combat situation that I think is legitimate, but pointing me at the wrong thing," she answers, immediately. "I've requested to be sent into dungeons more than the standard for that reason, actually, the dungeon portal would actually effectively cut him off. So, uh. Faking that would also be bad."

He nods.

"For the purpose of this exercise, let's say we have a finite gauge of location security, and if it runs out you land in Kang Jaeha's clutches." Si-yeon's thinking in terms of bits of information necessary to determine someon's location—approximately 34 if you limit your search to the Earth's landmass and 36 if not, to a precision of ten square meters—but the majority of the time actually giving it numbers is unnecessary and you can just work through the logic. He opens a large commscreen of his own then gets a world globe there, and draws a little empty gauge next to it.

"We need to assume that this house's location is unknown to Jaeha; being here fills your gauge to some specific value." They lose a little bit more than 10 bits, just for being in Korea and not in a big city; he rotates the globe and highlights Korea, writes a "?" on it, and fills the gauge to about two-thirds. "Whenever you teleport from here, the security gauge fills some because the total number of possible destinations you could teleport to is enormous," he gets lots of arrows from Korea to around the world and fills the gauge, "and empties some depending on how many people know or perceive your arrival at your destination and how compromised they are." At this point the numbers are useless, but he copy-pastes the gauge to a few possible destinations and eyeballs reasonable values for them for a couple of big cities as well as the middle of nowhere.

"Then, in addition to location security, we have control security: the extent to which Kang Jaeha is restricted in what he can do to you." Another gauge! The first one is blue, this one is red. "If that one reaches zero, he has full control of your environment and actions.

"Its relationship with location security isn't straightforward. If you have maximum location security you also have maximum control security," full gauge in the middle of the Australian outback, "but a very public and populous location also has reasonably high control security because Kang Jaeha can't get away with that much in front of too many witnesses," and a 40% filled gauge near Seoul, which had been marked as low location security. "On the other hand if you are in a completely deserted location with no witnesses that he knows precisely," and he writes Kang Jaeha's name attached to a little dot in Korea then moves him to the Australia and lowers the location gauge to zero, "that also has zero control security," and that gauge goes to zero.

"The reason I'm going into this roundabout explanation is that we shouldn't think about it in terms of trying to completely prevent Kang Jaeha any access to you; we should think about it in terms of tradeoffs between those two types of security, and about interventions that raise one without lowering the other too much, ideally at all."

"In these terms, the body cams are a great tool because they increase control security while sacrificing location security not at all. However, having third parties constantly review them lowers location security and it's not clear that the increase in control security outweighs that."

Hye-jin kind of wants to skip the part where the thing she's been freaking out for months about is being explained to her in a way that she finds overly roundabout.

"Right. One of the ways of countering him is teleporting to different varied locations in an unpredictable manner. That is what I did after the second time he came after me."

Which is to say: can you actually give her something actionable to work from, or are you going to just tell her things she already knows the day after she got shot? Because this is a deeply unpleasant topic to talk about at all. If it's not going to get her concrete ways to keep herself safe, instead of everyone sitting in a circle agreeing how in many ways it's improbable but not impossible for her to get gotten, then she'd really rather skip it.

"Which increases both securities but actually has the same problem you mentioned earlier, of being reactive rather than proactive, and also of relying on him not having gotten enough control of you that you fail to teleport. So those are two other dimensions to look at: reactivity, and recoverability." He writes those down, and then he adds the solutions proposed: body cams increase control security, don't touch location security, are reactive, and are recoverable; third parties looking at the cams increase control security, don't touch location security, are somewhere between reactive and proactive, and are recoverable; teleporting around after being compromised increases both location and control security but is extremely reactive and not at all recoverable.

"What would a proactive increase in location security look like? People have been discussing the idea of tightening security around portals and making everything off-limits to the media; teleport into a tent, then walk through the portal, close the dungeon, teleport out, no one's the wiser." He adds it to the list: increase in location security, decrease in control security, proactive, recoverable. "Going preferentially to dungeons abroad increases location security without decreasing control security, at least not by itself." More dungeons abroad goes on the list. "Decoys! Get body doubles, people who look like you guys, to go places, and wear disguises." Location security goes up (though by just a little bit), control security stays the same, proactive, recoverable.

Juheon is only paying half attention to Si-yeon's talk, and the other half is on Hye-jin. In the middle of that he gets up (though he doesn't stand up to his full height) and backs away from the table to scoot over between Hye-jin and Woo-young. He hesitates for a second then hugs her. "Sorry," he says in a soft, gentle murmur. "I know this is hard and sucks a lot for you. We're trying to help, and I'm proud of you for hanging on. We'll figure this out."

...bwuh?

.... Oh.

Those are good ideas.

And then someone acknowledges that, actually, talking about the thing that's been haunting her for literal months the day after that thing just very nearly killed her is hard and sucks a lot. That going over all of the many, many ways she in particular could be weaponized, or all of the things she's spent months thinking through again and again and again is, perhaps, painful to do one more time.

"Mhm," she whines, pathetically, as the dam finally breaks and she begins crying. Again. This time on Juheon, who she admittedly doesn't know very well but who is compensating well by giving off some excellent teddy bear energy. "I'm sorry, I'm trying not to be a massive bitch that bites everyone trying to help me, really, it's, just." No, she doesn't want to talk about her problems right now, she wants to talk tactics, actually. "Um. T-those are all r-really good ideas, thank you."

...Tae-gun will not make this about himself.

(How did Juheon know this was the right thing to do? Why can't Tae-gun be the one to do this for Hye-jin? Why is he so broken he can't even notice when his partner just, just needs a hug and, and.)

(He wishes he could be what Hye-jin needs.)

"Don't worry about it," he replies to her in the same gentle murmur. "Let it all out, participate as much as you can or want to."

"I'm glad you like them!" says Si-yeon, slipping into his informal register for a moment before going back to what he'd been doing. "So, any more ideas? Even if they're not very polished or impractical or expensive, it's better to have too many ideas to sift through than too few."

"Da-eun was talking about the possibility of physically reinforcing access to portals somehow, though that's control security more than location security?"

"All ideas are welcome." He adds "physical access to portals?" to the list as increasing control, not touching location, being proactive, and being recoverable.

"There are illusionist espers who could literally disguise Tae-gun and Hye-jin, as an overpowered refinement on the 'decoys' idea."

"The fact that they're having to be sent to specific dungeons every day limits how much security they could get but would it be possible for their dungeons to be at least somewhat randomised? Especially the ones they do without a team, the smaller ones. That would give the support teams on the ground less time to prepare but that's also a plus, right, since it means that there's also less warning for anyone else..."

"Illusion espers" go below "decoys", "randomised dungeon assignments" are added as increasing location security and slightly lowering control security "for the same reason having media and onlookers increases it", proactive, recoverable.

She. Really doesn't have to participate in order for things to maybe turn out okay and in a way that'll be helpful to her goals, does she. Other people will come up with ideas without her.

Okay. Good.

Then she's just going to do more of that crying thing, thanks. Hello, she is miserable, hates talking about this topic, hates thinking about this topic, wants desperately to be free of it from her life, feels simultaneously like she's incompetent (because she got shot) and also like she was the only one doing anything (because basically all actionable ideas up until now were hers), and. And it's just a lot, okay. So if she doesn't need to do anything for a higher chance of staying alive and untampered with, then she's just going to cry.

(She would actually also prefer that it were Tae-gun holding and comforting her, but apparently he's too fucking busy acting like she's a rabid tiger he's got to keep under control instead of - something else. She's not sure what. Whatever he's like when fucking Kang Jaeha isn't involved.)

Does it help if Tae-gun looks wistful and miserable? 'Cause that's what he looks like right now, stealing glances at her.

(She's not looking at him right now, so. No.)

"...oh for God's sake, you two. Hyung, just hug her."

...bwuh? [x2]