"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.

And then he shuts the laptop and flomps more thoroughly. Then thinks better of it and sits up to pull his shirt off and then flomps more thoroughly.

Oh, yes, skin contact is good, he will also pull his shirt off for flomping.

"The most frustrating thing about my backlash - I assume this is true of a lot of people's backlash but I think maybe especially mine - is how it makes me do stuff that does not help at all, when I know it does not help at all, over and over and over till I want to scream and can't scream because that will impair me in doing the thing that doesn't help at all a few million more times, and." Faceplant. "This helps and it is very good."

He runs a hand through Haru's hair, gently.

"I think it—varies, to some extent. I get very acutely" depressed "anhedonic immediately after a dungeon, but after a few hours it tends to settle down into a more manageable background level of it, and an old partner of mine settled into almost no background acute backlash even without guiding, but you seem to be on the other end of that particular spectrum."

"I basically never let it get to chronic. One time the train I was on got stuck for some reason and I think everyone in the train car was thoroughly sick of me afterwards but by the time I got to Yamanaka's the acute was mostly chilled out. It was tolerable! But I can't summon it to replace a bout of acute backlash any earlier than it cares to appear."

These people have no appreciation for the gift they're given when Haru's around them being backlashed and painfully endearing.

"Well, I'm glad I can help, both with the powers part and with the—accompanying false need."

Nuzzle. "You are very helpful. I was getting by but I was very much underutilized."

Their snuggly evening eventually turns into Haru disappearing to be by himself and do some notebooking, but he tucks himself in next to Jaeha at bedtime and kisses him goodnight.

Jaeha's worries that he'd end up too bored turn out to have been unfounded. He has a lot to occupy his time with.

On one side, he needs to find some semblance of a personality and hobbies, some set of interests, and he's going hard on anything Haru so much as mentions a passing interest in. He finds more people who have looked into what's up with dungeons and espers, he looks up new and interesting recipes to at some point try cooking for Haru, he even downloads Civilization when he remembers that time he visited Haru's place with his mother and saw Haru's computer's wallpaper. He starts keeping up with news, too, and with developments in materials science involving bullshit dungeon materials, and he even starts digging into altruistic causes. Haru doesn't like it when he runs out of interesting things to talk about and his backlash compels him to keep talking, and while some of those moments can be replaced with sex he wants to also increase the amount of interesting conversation to be had.

On the other, he needs to figure out how to keep Sparkler's hands completely off Haru, and for that he needs to understand who Sparkler is as a person and what he gets out of fucking guiding Haru and how he can get it otherwise. Jaeha's getting to the point where even seeing that smarmy smile of Sparkler's makes his blood start to boil.

Sparkler has groupies! He goes to superhero conventions and sits on panels and signs merch, Jaeha can find grainy video of him at those winking (exaggeratedly, so it shows despite him being in his mask) at people (mostly girls, a few boys). He doesn't do very many dungeons - they don't do ranks, in the west, but his would be low - but he keeps up a steady pace of them.

(Haru thinks it's cute that he's playing Civ.)

...groupies. Johnny has groupies.

Johnny has groupies??????

Johnny has groupies and he's after Haru?????? His Haru?????