"I suppose you're right. I'm almost done, do you want to—never mind, actually." He shouldn't ask his backlashed partner to go set the table on his own.

"What might I have wanted to do in the universe where you finished your question?"

"Just set the table."

"Well, I could, but I'd have to let go of you, which as you apparently surmised is not very appealing."

"Mmhmmm." He kisses Haru's temple. "It's okay, I'll do it in a bit."

"You are so accommodating."

"It's because I like you," which is still not something he's ready to say in either Korean or Japanese but this is fine. It's fine.

"It's really convenient! I'm so glad I met you."

Jaeha kisses him for that, but then he can get on the setting up the table and serving the food.

With a limpet.

Haru will sit in his own chair to actually eat, but scooted up right beside Jaeha. Mmmmmmm bibimbap.

Good, good, if Haru likes his cooking that's one more thing keeping him around.

He certainly seems to!

Then he runs to fetch his laptop and pulls up his interview template. "So obviously I have since learned more things about you but the reason you were on my list is the whole Nightmare thing, is there anything in that vein I should steer clear of either because you don't want to talk about it or because you don't want it on the blog?"

"Not particularly? I don't think so at any rate."

"That makes it simpler! I can redact stuff during the cleanup step if necessary, of course. Recording now..."

And then he wants to know stuff about psychic dungeons generally and Nightmare specifically that Jaeha's worked with - patterns in their victims and what they do to them, and how it was originally discovered that he could shield people from the influence (did he have a strong intuition in advance about that or was it experimental?), and if there are little-known creative uses of his powerset in or out of the field, and whether he has any light to shed on his own data point toward the "powers have something to do with people's personalities maybe possibly" popular fan theory, and what the backlash expense ratio is between various power applications, and anecdotes about the hardest/easiest dungeons he's done.

So he's not totally sure about victim patterns but as far as he can tell everyone a dungeon's kidnapped has been affected by the dungeon. For some dungeons that doesn't mean anything—for instance, there's a non-psychic named S-rank he knows of that just burns people alive and you can't not be affected by that. But everyone he's talked to who has been kidnapped by Nightmare had some great fear, some trauma, something that's really really awful that Nightmare pulls on; he's never met any victims who were just having one of those weird nightmares that you're not even really scared of in the morning. And this pattern holds true in other psychic dungeons he's run into: whenever he can identify some thing that the dungeon seems to be "trying to accomplish", the victims were almost invariably unusually likely to be good targets for that. 

As for how he discovered his power use cases... well, this particular aspect of it should not go on the record since it's not public, but the receptive empathy part of his power was very clear very early, and once he had a bead on someone's mind the levers he had access to became reasonably intuitive. ...he was not the most ethical at early testing of his powers—not in that he was trying to actively cause harm, but he was a little bit blasé about the concept of consent. He doesn't go into detail, though; just says that while looking embarrassed and moves on.

Something that is less well-known but still public about his powers is that they work on monsters, too, which can be used for stealth or to confuse them. Not always, though, as some monsters seem to either be directly controlled by the dungeon, which he can't affect—can't detect a mind to affect—or to be doing something else with their senses that he doesn't know. Also he can shield from and remove influences by other espers, not just monsters and dungeons.

He has... no idea... about the power-to-personality theory. When he was a teenager he was kind of a fuckboy? Which doesn't seem to match any of this very well. He supposes the fact that he at one point in his life had an interest in journalism might suggest he's interested in understanding other people which could be loosely related to the receptive empathy but it seems like a bit of a stretch. 

Backlash expense ratio: wiping mental influences is really really cheap, detecting that a mind is somewhere is a bit less but still cheap, actual full receptive empathy is about... he doesn't know how to think about this in number terms... maybe three times as expensive as as the influence wiping, power second? Shielding has a lump cost that depends on how long he's keeping it up for and how much oomph he's giving it—a Nightmare-worthy shield is easily thirty times as expensive as receptive empathy per second. Illusions vary a lot lot lot depending on what they are.

He has some anecdotes! Probably not all of them should be shared due to being fucking terrifying but, well, he has them.

Remarks about being blasé about consent get raised eyebrows and frowning, but Haru agrees not to put it on his blog. Can he tell differences between monster minds besides "affectable" and "not affectable"? What other espers has he had reason to shield people from in the past? Haru is interested in all the anecdotes but, yes, will cut some for being too yikes for the audience before publication.

Oh he can't tell that the monster minds are different at all; he can feel himself affecting them just fine, it just doesn't have the effect of confusing the monsters the way he'd expect it to.

He's had to help deal with rogue psychic espers a handful of times but he's not sure how much detail he should go into... For one, he expects Haru himself might get kind of spooked, but for two, some of these stories were kept under wraps because knowing very much about rogue psychic espers is the kind of thing that can get the public to cause a lot of damage by mistrusting people who are trying to help them. Psychic espers are already the ones that poll least popular and scariest.

Haru tends to think that "the niggling sense that the authorities are hiding things about psychic espers" is more long term damaging than true reports of how those psychic espers have conducted themselves both positively and negatively - and like, if there are rogue psychic espers around, they and not the mistrustful reactions to them are the main problem - but if Jaeha doesn't want it on the blog it doesn't have to go on the blog.

"Some of those I'm actually prohibited from sharing, and the rest I've just been strongly encouraged to forget about. I suppose I could mention a couple of those."

"I don't want to get you in trouble, it's a blog, not an intelligence agency report."

...right. Yeah. He just—seemingly has some trouble with saying "no" to Haru. In lieu of saying anything about this he will kiss Haru's cheek.

Ee. He has been snuggling long enough now that he can start editing down and translating the interview if he talks about it while he's doing it the entire time. Hopefully Jaeha is curious about the blog post editorial process.

He is! Or, if not curious, at least interested, which is pretty much the same thing.

Eventually the post is streamlined and translated (with footnotes about what nuances were present in the original Korean) and queued for later appearance on the blog. This takes long enough that Haru gets less chatty, though he's still snuggled up.

He has now left an indelible mark on Haru's soul Kang Jaeha that's a bit dramatic even for you, don't you think.

He's happy to snuggle and watch the process, in any case.