"...your... cat...?"

"He's a monster cat. He speaks Japanese, but I had to teach him to read, and he's still terrible with kanji. His name's Cricket." He sends a text that just says いいだよ and switches over to the photo album. "Wanna see?"

"Sure!" Wait was that the correct amount and type of enthusiasm. Fuck.

Seems to pass muster! Here is a portrait of Cricket. "If you ever meet him you should be warned that he's a dreadful misanthrope, he likes me and almost no one else. Though he did not manage to find anything to complain about the last time I kept Park Yoo-min on the phone for hours - do you know him, I forget what guild you're in, is it also Quasar? -"

"Ah, no, Juno, and I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with Park Yoo-min-shi." He should say something about the cat. "The cat has wings." Holy shit Kang Jaeha you're acing this. "They look surprisingly good, I wouldn't have thought." Nice save.

"He's a menace - I have to let him outdoors, you see, you can have the argument either way about regular cats but this one's a person and I can't keep him under house arrest, he kills pigeons and it simply does not work for them to try to fly away."

"So what's the secret to getting him to like me, too?"

"Park Yoo-min went with gratuitous flattery but I've seen the same general strategy backfire before. Or you can be me. He liked me immediately and I'm not really clear on why."

"Well he clearly has good taste, that's one thing he and I have in common." Yessssss he generated that one on his own that was good.

Haru giggles. "It was funny, Ren - my mother - got me in touch with the esper community and said that I had announced I had to get a cat and someone was like, do you want this one, please, take him, we can't just kick him out because we need him for the four dimensional dungeons, but he hates us all and we are barely keeping his loyalty with sashimi. So I went to be introduced and said like five words to him and he trotted right up to me and started purring and everyone was so relieved."

"He used to be a 4D dungeon monster? I wouldn't have thought." Kang Jaeha can you please make yourself interesting.

If he could his partners wouldn't leave so often.

"Yep, and he can still navigate them. Sometimes when he's cranky he complains about how flat everything on Earth is. The monsters from that dungeon were all animals that don't normally have wings, with wings, often inflated to giant size and with bonus spines or venom or whatever, Cricket himself was venomous." All of this information is available on his blog and literally does not need to be rehashed. It doesn't even help. But Haru is trying to cooperate with himself because he can be tempted to do some incredibly stupid things while he's badly backlashed and he needs backlashed-Haru to trust the-rest-of-Haru not to sabotage him, even now that the-rest-of-Haru is on the upswing. "Here we are. Can we get a booth, please?" So he can scoot right up next to the miracle sanity dispenser. And have sanity dispensed.

Sure, the wait staff can get them a booth and throw them only very slightly homophobic looks.

...how about they stop that shit.

Oh. Okay.

Thank you.

"It's probably not literally the same but if I imagine suddenly being stuck in two dimensions it does sound stifling."

"Yeah, I'd -" Huh, he'd been trying to read the waitress's nametag and she turned away suddenly, he likes making obviously silly guesses about how to read the kanji if there's any ambiguity, if he comes up with something nobody's said before he can often get a laugh - "- I'd be surprised that he isn't physically uncomfortable in 3D space, but I guess he was deployed outside his dungeon here in our 3D world in the first place."

"It can't have been all bad, if he found you and seems to like you very much."

"Yeah, but if you had to run me over with a steamroller before I could meet my future best friend I'd object more than Cricket seems to! Though of course the alternative to being outside his dungeon would have been being inside it and I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that monsters go on in any way after a dungeon collapses with them inside, same way as we have to declare any humans trapped in such a dungeon dead. So really it was this or nothing and I guess I'd take the steamroller if I had to, I like existing unless I am being heinously irresponsible with my magical powers."

"—you get that bad on backlash? And your partner doesn't like interacting?" This means that Jaeha himself would be a better idea, doesn't it? Yeeees it doooooes even if he can't get Haru to think this the way he usually would.

"I try very hard not to get that bad on backlash! I do like three dungeons a week in a normal week and if there's an emergency for which only I am suitable she can donate me blood. But I awakened like everybody else and it turns out I can be so lonely I want to die, it sucks real bad."

"...ah. I'm sorry. How long have you been with her? Have you considered, ah..." See this is a time when he'd just get his power to do the work. And now he can't. "I suppose getting a third person involved would exacerbate her problems..."

"Since I awakened. On a magical level I'm more compatible with her than you, though only by, I wanna say ten percent?, and it's quite important to the guild to have her partnered, she's a speedster who draws monster attention and she can cover a big team by making all the monsters chase her while the other espers do rescues or wreck the core. And I do not, strictly speaking, have to socialize to recover from backlash, I'm really just gobbling up placebos by the fistful over here. She wears heavy-duty headphones and hides under a blanket, and I bother people on the phone and pet Cricket. I think I'm just about an ideal case for her - well, I guess ideal would be someone who could give her blood transfusions and had nurse training so they didn't need to do it in a hospital with medics swarming around, but I'm at least close - but on my end it, uh, could be more comfortable, in the sense that scratching chicken pox is more comfortable. And... could be faster."

"There are absolutely more efficient ways to guide someone," he agrees. Now he should say something that has any content. "But for a restaurant I suppose this will have to do."

"Wouldn't want to make the waitstaff uncomfortable!"