"At low levels always yes, and at middling ones sometimes, it helps if you're right there and I can tell myself the third party's the only reason not to talk out loud - it's less about the medium and more about the immediacy and the, social validation?"

"I see. That might work, but the way I predict it could fail would be related to, hmm, me being tempted to make people not realise that we're texting. Because it's—strange, noteworthy, unconventional."

"We could... ask what languages they speak and hope one of our three isn't among theirs?"

"That... could work," he says, thoughtfully. "I feel like there's something I ought to take some time thinking about..." Jaeha wants to call it "notebooking" but he feels embarrassed doing so in front of Haru, since Jaeha probably isn't doing it right. "If we—hadn't talked about anything—it would've been fine, I think. Or if I hadn't had to respond. Thinking about it. So it seems like I really care about the expressive use of my powers while backlashed."

"...so it might have been easier if I wasn't there at all being talky."

"Yeah..." Which is not a conclusion he loves. "...I don't think I was close to slipping up?" he offers. "The closest I got was this one time I thought I had done it to gauge our escort's emotions but it turned out I was just reading her body language. I felt tempted to use but not actually in danger of using my powers, I think."

"Okay. Is this something where you'd benefit from more practice with it or where one data point is clear and we just shouldn't do dungeons where we'd need an escort unless there's a particular reason to want both of us there?"

"I think this might benefit from practice outside dungeons? I—even without backlash, I seem to care a lot about how I come off... And I'm hacking this with you by thinking that you'd prefer me to be... raw... and also by thinking that if anyone gets access to my whole brain it's you. But—I haven't really been around people very much, over the past several weeks, and exposure to them could be good for me."

"Okay. We can go places. There are even probably more guild events than just specifically the queer bar night, apparently they're having go tournaments when I'm not paying attention - not that I'm any good at go -"

"I've never played."

"It's a well-designed game, it's just hard to get good at it without spending a lot of time on it and it's never struck me as important. Anyway, I'm sure there's stuff." O Quasar internal website what stuff is there.

There isn't much official. It seems like you can just create an event, if you want, and it'll show up on the official company calendar, and they're just relying on people being too Korean and/or too scared of having their name out there to prevent vandalism. You can tag your event and then filter events by tag: video games, in-person games, tournaments, bars, restaurants, karaoke, sports, so on so forth.

It's a company with over five thousand people so the calendar is... a lot. It's a lot.

"See anything good?"

Absolutely nothing.

"...I feel like just showing up to one of these without knowing anyone would be..." Horrible. "...hard mode. Maybe we should see if the people we've already met have things they might want to invite us to."

"Sure." He can text Yoo-min, he's the most read in on the situation.

"Let's see, what else... I didn't feel tempted to read our escort's emotions, which I think I would have, had I used my illusions on her, to see how they were landing, but—I don't remember how much I explained this, my receptive power isn't really passive? I need to look at something—for some values of "look"—and then point my power at it to see whether there's a mind in there—so in that dungeon I was doing that constantly in all directions at all things, and it would've been easy to target her accidentally. It was taking some attention not to."

"It's directional? - I guess you could just explain this to people, potentially, a lot of people would probably be fine with being - emotionally scanned -"

"Not exactly directional, it's—targeted. I can't passively know that a mind is there, not without explicitly pointing my power at a thing I roughly know must be somewhere specific. —it wouldn't be as much as a scan, either, maybe a very short snapshot but if I'm just pinging I don't get enough time to really form an impression. So that... is probably workable... but I'll have a bit of a time explaining why I'd never mentioned this to the people I've worked with regularly in the past. The world of psychic espers is kind of small, I know every other active psychic esper in Korea and they know me."

"There's probably some adequately deflecting phrasing. Like... uh... 'it's faster to distinguish whether things around me are monsters or people with my power first and my eyes second', like you might have only recently discovered this?"

"—this is not rising to the level of temptation, I don't think, but I ought to note that I just had the thought that it would be straightforward to do this if I could use my power for it. To speak for me, that is."

"...you could do that with a volunteer and have them tell you what 'you' said? It wouldn't be personalized but..."

"I could, but I think the personalisation is pulling some weight. Your phrasing is good, in any event, and it's making me more confident that such phrasings in general are possible. ...noting aloud, I seem to default to very pessimistic that it's possible to communicate difficult things with just words." Which is the dumbest possible hangup and the definition of a skill issue. He'll actually go ahead and write that one down because it feels like he ought to remember it in the future.

"Good to note. You seem fine at talking to me but that's probably a special case."

"Yes, though also telling you about all of this was really desperately unpleasant and even while I knew I shouldn't and wouldn't I spent a lot of the time I was confessing everything to you wishing I could get my power to figure out how to do it for me."

"—perhaps the cheerful self-deprecation is out of place here."