Why did he want to chat to this guy again?

Right, backlash compatibility. Also he's cute.

He sh—he cannot actually make this guy see him look like a presentable and normal human being. He is going to need to actually move his face to do that. How does he do that. Come on, Kang Jaeha, you know how to move your face.

"No, I've had lots of assignments here before, though I only visited outside work once. How about you?"

Wait. "—I mean to say, have you been to Korea before?" Amazing job, Kang Jaeha.

"Twice, vacation with my mother and for that maze dungeon with the minotaurs a while back! I picked up the language because my backlash is that I get lonely and 'language practice conversations' are a good sweet spot - speaking of, can I trouble you for more sanity-dispensing -" hand? Hold his hand please??

...Jaeha has no idea why that would be compatible with him but it sometimes be like that with these things. He holds Haru's hand.

Okay but this is in fact so much better than Do-in, he's actually not even a little bit sad that Do-in is probably going to break their partnership off within the week.

"I'll always be happy to be of service, of course."

"I'm so glad! See, on paper my current partner is perfect, because she has a diametrically opposite problem, but in practice this means that I have to be extremely strict with myself about never acknowledging that she exists where she can hear me, because otherwise she'll panic and kick me out of her silo, which rules out most of the classic options, so we actually recover much slower than you'd think."

This guy is just an open book, huh.

"Do you want to show me a nice café somewhere we can chat in so we'll get out of the hairs of the staff?"

"Absolutely. Let's see, where the fuck even are we - right, okay, thataway there's a nice spot if you like matcha?"

"Sounds lovely. Lead the way."

Handholding stroll to the place with matcha. "Let me text my cat real quick so he doesn't worry -" He can do that with the other hand though.

"...your... cat...?"

"He's a monster cat. He speaks Japanese, but I had to teach him to read, and he's still terrible with kanji. His name's Cricket." He sends a text that just says いいだよ and switches over to the photo album. "Wanna see?"

"Sure!" Wait was that the correct amount and type of enthusiasm. Fuck.

Seems to pass muster! Here is a portrait of Cricket. "If you ever meet him you should be warned that he's a dreadful misanthrope, he likes me and almost no one else. Though he did not manage to find anything to complain about the last time I kept Park Yoo-min on the phone for hours - do you know him, I forget what guild you're in, is it also Quasar? -"

"Ah, no, Juno, and I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with Park Yoo-min-shi." He should say something about the cat. "The cat has wings." Holy shit Kang Jaeha you're acing this. "They look surprisingly good, I wouldn't have thought." Nice save.

"He's a menace - I have to let him outdoors, you see, you can have the argument either way about regular cats but this one's a person and I can't keep him under house arrest, he kills pigeons and it simply does not work for them to try to fly away."

"So what's the secret to getting him to like me, too?"

"Park Yoo-min went with gratuitous flattery but I've seen the same general strategy backfire before. Or you can be me. He liked me immediately and I'm not really clear on why."

"Well he clearly has good taste, that's one thing he and I have in common." Yessssss he generated that one on his own that was good.

Haru giggles. "It was funny, Ren - my mother - got me in touch with the esper community and said that I had announced I had to get a cat and someone was like, do you want this one, please, take him, we can't just kick him out because we need him for the four dimensional dungeons, but he hates us all and we are barely keeping his loyalty with sashimi. So I went to be introduced and said like five words to him and he trotted right up to me and started purring and everyone was so relieved."

"He used to be a 4D dungeon monster? I wouldn't have thought." Kang Jaeha can you please make yourself interesting.

If he could his partners wouldn't leave so often.

"Yep, and he can still navigate them. Sometimes when he's cranky he complains about how flat everything on Earth is. The monsters from that dungeon were all animals that don't normally have wings, with wings, often inflated to giant size and with bonus spines or venom or whatever, Cricket himself was venomous." All of this information is available on his blog and literally does not need to be rehashed. It doesn't even help. But Haru is trying to cooperate with himself because he can be tempted to do some incredibly stupid things while he's badly backlashed and he needs backlashed-Haru to trust the-rest-of-Haru not to sabotage him, even now that the-rest-of-Haru is on the upswing. "Here we are. Can we get a booth, please?" So he can scoot right up next to the miracle sanity dispenser. And have sanity dispensed.

Sure, the wait staff can get them a booth and throw them only very slightly homophobic looks.

...how about they stop that shit.