"...you have a codename in the West?" He is SO CUTE.

"Yep! It's not an amazing codename, they don't want to require anything like birthdate for esper IDs so the names themselves have to be unique. Like racehorses. I went through a lot of ideas that turned out to be taken."

He's always found the Western custom of giving espers codenames kind of weird but it is really goddamn cute to think of Haru as "Traceless".

Maybe he should just say that with his mouth.

"I've always found this custom a bit strange but I have to confess that I find the idea of you being a hero called 'Traceless' very endearing."

"I think you might just like me or something."

"I think I just might."

Is it time for more kissing, Haru thinks it's time for more kissing.

Yeah, so does Jaeha.

The prospect of having Haru move in with him is beginning to sound less concerning. This might actually work out alright.

Haru seems to think it will work fine if the way he can be induced to moan Jaeha's name in Jaeha's bed in Jaeha's house is any indication.

God, Jaeha is so addicted to hearing his name like that. He's keeping Haru. He's definitely keeping him.

Juno is... a Korean guild. That's something that can be said about it. It has a rigid corporate structure and hierarchy, and it is offering to pay Haru more than Hasegawa is (because they want to keep their anti-Nightmare star happy), and it doesn't have much else going for itself. It is certainly not offering to eradicate any diseases, nor any particular benefits other than "it's where Jaeha currently is". It doesn't seem like they've been informed of Jaeha's own feelings of imminent departure, though.

Bleah.

Hasegawa is a smaller guild than either Juno or Quasar, and while they do offer Haru a raise in response to his projected increase in dungeon clears, it's not actually quadruple. Then somebody makes a slightly too-barbed remark about Cricket's legal status and Haru texts Yoo-min to see if Cricket can possibly be teleported to Korea in advance of any signatures being signed so that nobody has to have a day in court over that. Haru is in Seoul again to sign things not long after.

What the fuck. Yeah of course.

Jaeha's going to be signing things with Haru; since they're planning to become officially partners, it's easier on everyone to just bundle all of that into a single meeting (but separate contracts, of course).

Excellent! These documents seem to be in order. It seems like they're planning to share a house to silo in? Quasar has shared ones if necessary and is able to offer them personalised silos, and for Haru specifically it can also help him get set up with somewhere to live if he'd rather live on his own.

Haru is planning to live in Jaeha's house. So as to have suitably redundant institutional protocols, though, should this arrangement fail catastrophically somehow, he can crash somewhere else - an empty silo if there's really no notice, but also he's modestly compatible with both of Tae-gun and Juheon and he also has a standing invitation (from Yamanaka care of her brother, not from Hasegawa) to go back to Yamanaka's place if he's ever in a bad enough way to get on a plane about it. Cricket is available for 4D dungeon navigation as a subsidiary of Haru, he will pawprint something saying so. Haru requires generous emergency exit clauses that kick in if he ever somehow finds himself spending more than a week continuously carrying any positive amount of backlash, which, again, he expects to be managing fine but if something should fail catastrophically he will absolutely not be making things worse before he figures out how to make them better, he wants to be alive and kicking in fifty years.

They can talk it over with Lee Tae-gun and Lee Juheon! The exit clauses seem reasonable, and Kang Jaeha-nim seems to also have something about his backlash?

...yeah. He, uh, wasn't really joking when he said Haru'd need to sign a contract over that. He feels kind of bad about it but they've only known each other a couple of weeks so he is going to make himself not feel bad about it instead.

Sure, what's the contract say and can he get a copy in English so his agency lawyer back in Canada can read it? Not that the guy's licensed in Korea but it's good to have a second pair of eyes on anything weird.

It boils down to, if Kang Jaeha's backlash is shared by Haru with someone who didn't already know about it prior without explicit consent from Kang Jaeha, Haru will need to pay a fine, which is the standard form the majority of espers who have such contracts at all use. The agency lawyer in Canada will almost certainly have run into identical ones before.

Wow, that's a hugeass fine. He is kind of making a skepticalface at Jaeha that this is necessary. But okay, he can keep a secret.

(Kang Jaeha is feeling particularly irritated that he has zero access to Haru's emotional state, right now.)

Yeah, sorry about that, he has his reasons, though.

Anyway, one other thing, they heard from Park Yoo-min-shi that Masaharu-shi's old guild was maybe threatening Cricket? Would Cricket and/or Haru want legal representation? Quasar has been trying to push through a law recognising reformed monsters as legal persons and this could help it go, or they could instead argue for Haru having full ownership of Cricket if both he and Cricket prefer this, or something else that worked better...?

"It wasn't an outright threat? Someone just - mentioned, at the wrong time, that the last time the government of Japan heard anything about Cricket, Hasegawa was responsible for him. Reformed monsters should absolutely have legal personhood, but if you have a test case who maybe speaks any Korean and can get through a conversation with the average person without telling them that they could costlessly be replaced with an equivalent volume of Styrofoam, Cricket is probably not the ideal show trial candidate."

That's... true... but Quasar will go to bat for either of them if they want. Option's on the table.

Anyway! If that's all squared away then they are both officially members of Quasar, now! Their comm systems should have access to the internal Quasar apps, including the one where they will be receiving their dungeon assignments according to their declared specialties and preferences, there's procedure for changing that if they want to, they've got a lot of leeway to figure out what works best for them during their first month, etc etc, welcome!