He's not completely sure his Korean is up to emergency dungeon shit but there's not really a way to find out besides live fire situations, because for some reason nobody does drills. Haru doesn't know why they don't do drills. They'd be great, they could play paintball pretending it was a dungeon and then go eat karaage about it afterwards. ...that's the backlash talking but he's still good to go, he can't insist on sitting with poor Yamanaka long enough to turn into not only a sane person but a sane person who specifically doesn't want to play paintball and go to a restaurant with his pals. Lots of sane people like those things.

Anyway, here he is! Is he on scouting duty or is there psychic shit or both?

Both, though the pre-briefing document he got was somewhat sparse on the details due to the dungeon having upgraded to emergency status pretty quickly and also due to it being apparently really hard to safely scout due to very violent monsters.

The dungeon is in Gangwon-do, which is a popular touristic spot in January with numerous famous ski resorts, which means it's managed to kidnap quite a few people, not all of whom are locals, and that kind of thing always has the potential to turn really ugly really fast. When Haru gets there, the dungeon portal—a pitch-black circle floating above the ground, its edges glowing red and swaying and crackling ominously—is already surrounded by yellow tape, the support staff's tents are already up, and the rest of his team's on site: aforementioned teleporter, an A-rank battlefield control and combat esper, and a B-rank melee combat esper who is also the team lead for this expedition.

"Welcome, Swan Haru-shi, it's great to meet you!" says a very tall fit man with silver-green hair and pink irises, extending his hand for a handshake. "I'm Park Yoo-min, and I'll be your team lead today."

Can he nonverbally talk this guy into a fist-bump instead. Espers should introduce themselves with fistbumps. It's lower commitment than a handshake and gets across what needs to get across (the seating arrangements for passive guiding via elbow-bumping when they all go get karaage debrief after). "That's me, nice to meet you," he's specifically not amazing at honorifics, he's gotten the hang of the Japanese ones well enough since he's lived there for most of his life at this point but the entire concept is weird and unintuitive to him, he doesn't even call his parents Mom and Dad when they're not actively listening to him do it. Is shi one of the reciprocal ones. "What do you need to know, what do I need to know?"

...fist bump? Fist bump! He digs that.

(They're not compatible, but not horribly incompatible either. Kind of meh.)

Okay, the fist bump is, in Yoo-min's opinion, a perfect excuse to drop some of the formal tone. "I read your file and I'm gonna ask you to tell me everything about your powers in your own words but you seem like exactly what we need here. Lemme get you up to speed on all of us, though.

"My powers are touch-range lightning generation, as well as lightning absorption and redirection. My partner Choi Seungjoo—"

("Nice to meet you, Swan Haru-shi," says a boy who looks younger than Haru, blond and with salmon-coloured irises, bowing as he does.)

"—has momentum redirection powers, which are also aces for this dungeon, and Min Woo-young is the best teleporter on the planet."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Swan Haru-shi," says a boy about the same age as Haru, with very long light-green hair tied in a ponytail and brown eyes behind large round thin-rimmed glasses. "Please forgive my sunbae his tone, he's a bit too used to only talking to people he knows."

"Not true! He fist bumped me! He started it!"

"I'm secretly Canadian. I thrive on informality." Do these additional people also want fistbumps? Haru has two hands. "Being the best teleporter on the planet is very cool, unless you only got that way because the better ones are hanging out on Mars without you, but somehow I suspect otherwise."

Alright, fist bump. (Same as Park Yoo-min.)

...sure, why not fist bump. (A teensy bit more compatible than the other two? Not much.)

"Sunbae's exaggerating, I'm just B-rank."

"Am not! I'll let Haru—is it okay if I call you Haru? I don't know how Canadians do it—anyway I'll let him form his own opinions."

"Haru's fine, Swan's fine too if you prefer."

"Well I'm Korean and you won't see me calling anyone by their last name if they don't make me," he says. "Anyway! Give me a rundown of your schtick?"

"If I don't want something to perceive me or touch me I get my way. I will not usually go around being invisible to you but I could if I wanted; my usual dungeon function is to go poke around their insides without them knowing I'm at it. This is cheapest in terms of sensory and psychic contact I want to avoid but I can at greater expense fly, if I really don't wanna have to touch the dungeon even on the floor. So for very reactive or psychic dungeons that will mess with people when it spots them I'm a good scout-slash-infiltrator. Also my extremely public backlash is that I get lonesome as fuck so if I heroically swoop in to save anybody they have to like pitch me on their favorite anime or something till I can go home to my partner and monstercat."

"...monstercat?"

"Sunbae, mission," says Choi Seungjoo, poking Park Yoo-min lightly on the arm.

"—right! Distracted, Haru can tell me all about monstercat afterwards.

"Anyway, this dungeon is a leeeeeettle bit of a headache for approximately everyone because the sensors have been having one hell of a time with it. It's mazelike, and it has monsters, and the monsters seem chill, but they're actually really bashful and shy: if you look at them, or sense them, or whatever, they go from chill to unchill faster than you can say 'minotaur'. We've had a buncha sensors go in to try to look and as soon as they perceived a monster using whatever senses they're using the monster would immediately rush them. We've also tried other stealth espers and the monsters noticed them too! Which is why you're perfect, you can stealth and they won't see you looking!

"The dungeon's just as lonely as you, though, if substantially less ethical about it than you are, and it's kidnapped a bunch of people. Whom we can't find. Because of the monsters."

"Ha ha ha, yes, I try to keep my backlash levels well below the point at which I would start even fantasizing about kidnappings, I like my sanity. It doesn't break the tech with weird physics, just with monsters? So if I go in with a map doodad it'll behave?"

"Yep! Great minds think alike, it seems! My main idea for what you could do would be scout and map as much as you can, leaving relays behind that we can use to create a proper map of the place using the arcane sorceries we call 'maths'. Once you've got a good overview of the dungeon and have found the kidnapped civilians the three of us are going in. Woo-young, overview of your powers, please?"

"It's reference-based," he says. "I can do 'the person next to that other person' or 'the green box in that room' or things like that, and likewise for the destination. I don't do distances and directions directly."

"Huh, but it doesn't work in such a way that we can just get a list of everyone the dungeon took based on who's missing and have you grab them?"

"Not if I don't know where the reference is, myself. —or, yes, in theory, but the backlash cost grows really fast the less I know about where the target is. I'm—kind of new, I've only been at this a couple of months, so we haven't tested my power that extensively yet, but some preliminary testing's gotten me bedridden with a single teleport because of that. Uh, because my backlash is losing motor ability."