"I can actually see myself all the time so if you put your face on me I can't see your face, but sure." Visible.

Yeah well it still feels weird to hide his face in air even if the air is solid and shaped like Haru so he'd just rather hide his face in Haru's neck.

"It's just—difficult to—feel like a burden, I suppose."

Pet pet pet. "I'm still embarrassed about how I conducted myself at my own parents during my awakening, so, like, that's understandable, but - you'll be better able to take care of yourself if you're better taken care of, long run."

"Hmm, yeah." But parents have—should have—a duty of care towards their children that Haru does not have towards him.

Pet pet. "If it helps I have been underindulging my 'go be a kickass superhero' impulses due to slow guiding issues for years and you are improving the situation from that angle."

Oh.

Right. That's right. He is providing value. There is a thing that Haru is getting out of this. For a moment he'd just—forgot, somehow. Even if he's not doing dungeons, Haru isn't just doing a lot of stuff for him.

"That does help," he admits.

"Oh good." Haru kisses the top of his head.

Jaeha shouldn't feel safe, though. That isn't enough. If it's just the compatibility, Haru might find someone else more compatible. If it's just the money, he'll be making stupid esper money soon, too. Jaeha needs to figure out some other way to keep this man. Jaeha needs Haru to like him. He needs to be someone Haru will like. Which isn't news, it's not like that's not what he'd been doing, but—Haru's seen right through him, and Jaeha hasn't even told Haru everything about his backlash or powers—

(he needs to not think about that right now)

—so he needs to make sure Haru needs him. He needs to be perfect for Haru.

...he's not starting off on the best possible foot but he can figure it out. He has to.

Haru's up bright and early the next morning to fling himself into hostile pocket dimensions which can't detect his presence and evacuate their victims and then attack them with artillery. Nobody can hear him if he says "yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" once or twice.

After his first one he pops back home - the teleport ration is a very good feature of the Quasar membership - and flings himself into Jaeha's arms instead. "I'm home, didja miss me?"

As expected, Jaeha did not really do... much... this morning. Cricket isn't even awake yet to come insult him. It was just him and his thoughts, waiting for Haru.

Well, him, his thoughts, and his plan to figure out how to become someone Haru will never want to leave.

"I did," however pathetic that may be, "quite a bit."

"I missed you too." Smooch. "Dungeon was one of the weirdly pretty ones, do you wanna see the pictures? It had gravity-defying waterfalls!"

Backlashed Haru is really cute.

...he keeps thinking this exact same thought about all Harus. Haru is just really cute.

"I'd love to."

Haru wiggles out of his shirt for skin contact reasons and snuggles up and produces pictures! Waterfalls and fairy-dragon looking monsters and all. "It was dangling eighteen people upside down by their ankles, so it was obviously a jerk, but I feel bad about killing them sometimes, you know?"

No, he really doesn't.

"Yeah, I know what you mean. That's gorgeous."

"Not just gorgeous, but - they've got to be taking cues from humans, somehow. There are dungeons with dinosaurs and three-headed-dogs and centaurs and flaming bird monsters, stuff from reality and mythology, specifically the parts of reality that humans care about! Dinosaurs yes, Cambrian explosion shit not so much. Centaurs yes, something with... the head of a dolphin and the body of a tortoise, which I just made up, no, nothing like that. Aliens made contact in the seventies and we don't know how to talk to them and we keep killing each other and it bugs me."

"Well, perhaps I'm just making everything about my specialty, but given how Nightmare explicitly pulls its inspiration from the humans inside it it does not seem surprising that other dungeons are doing similarly, in a more... diffuse fashion, I suppose." They very much started it, though.

"It could be something like that, yeah, but they're all - on theme. Nightmare's on theme, its theme is just 'nightmares' and that gives it an unusual amount of range. They're somehow picking something, sticking with it thereafter no matter who they kidnap and no matter who goes in to take them down... it could boil down to something relatively uninteresting but they clearly - contain people in potentia, like Cricket - so I'm uneasy about deciding that there's definitely nothing like that going on with the cores. Obviously I still kill them, because I certainly have no reason to think that even if they're all people they're somehow important enough to get away with anthropophagy, fuck that, but."

Come on, Kang Jaeha, trial by fire, can you produce literally anything interesting about this topic which Haru clearly cares about?

"I assume someone must've looked into attempting to communicate with dungeons but I've never thought to look into it." He just cannot be interesting to save his goddamn life.

"They mostly haven't. A few people have, uh, died trying, and some people have made kind of... weak gestures in that direction by like. Verbally addressing portals or monsters. So it isn't anything that obvious and it's risky territory to try stuff in. But....". Sigh.

Hey you know how to seem interesting? Show interest.

"Do you have any ideas for things to try?"

"When I go with Cricket in 4D dungeons I ask him to address the monsters. No answers yet. I would kinda like to talk to some myself except for how every time I have the opportunity to do that I can't be sure how much that's a rational thing to do and how much it's just a really appealing stupid idea. I've never actually been sent into a long-standing recurrent dungeon but sometimes I work on, like, a first contact message in all my languages, which I could print out and drop off in such a dungeon for it to chew on between appearances."

"And I think you mentioned Cricket not remembering much from before his dungeon died, right? I'm not sure if—well, I wonder if rather than the dungeons being individually possible to communicate with they're—created by something else and puppeteered."

"That seems possible! Like how octopus tentacles are individually capable of problem solving to do things like for example catch prey. Cricket knows a lot of things a regular person or animal would normally have to learn like how to talk and move around. He remembers being surprised by how small he was and by how biting a pigeon didn't make it start dissolving but he doesn't remember a part before that where he wasn't surprised about how he worked. You could definitely get a result like Cricket if monsters were the subdivisions of subdivisions that, when cut off, start having personal continuity, but have it with some - onboard procedural memory storage. Which I guess prompts the question of how to cut a dungeon off and leave it alive and what would happen if you did that! But - hm, I think the strongest evidence for the dungeons being connected to each other is the timing - which also coincides with espers, so I don't want to make too many assumptions about how it ties in with the dungeons' allegiances and motivations - and also the confluences, which, I don't know. There's this researcher whose blog I read who thinks we should model dungeons as an infection and espers as an immune response, which I think is interesting as a model but the immune system had to evolve, even if past dungeon infections of the Earth didn't get as far because there weren't urban population centers there isn't an obvious previous evolutionary stepping stone from which you get to 'espers exist now'..."

"...I'm not sure what that idea would explain, though. I mean, there's definitely some kind of intelligent thing there, the dungeons themselves or something else, and that intelligent thing must've evolved and—decided to come to Earth and do whatever this is. Pocket dimensions with things out of human mythology don't just spread like viruses."

"They do get bigger, if they come back more than once. But not in a viral way. More parasitic, I guess? Or autoimmune, maybe humans collectively are doing this to ourselves somehow, that would be weird but I'm not sure it would actually be a more profligate explanation all things considered, everything that could be going on is weird."