Oh. Okay.

Thank you.

"It's probably not literally the same but if I imagine suddenly being stuck in two dimensions it does sound stifling."

"Yeah, I'd -" Huh, he'd been trying to read the waitress's nametag and she turned away suddenly, he likes making obviously silly guesses about how to read the kanji if there's any ambiguity, if he comes up with something nobody's said before he can often get a laugh - "- I'd be surprised that he isn't physically uncomfortable in 3D space, but I guess he was deployed outside his dungeon here in our 3D world in the first place."

"It can't have been all bad, if he found you and seems to like you very much."

"Yeah, but if you had to run me over with a steamroller before I could meet my future best friend I'd object more than Cricket seems to! Though of course the alternative to being outside his dungeon would have been being inside it and I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that monsters go on in any way after a dungeon collapses with them inside, same way as we have to declare any humans trapped in such a dungeon dead. So really it was this or nothing and I guess I'd take the steamroller if I had to, I like existing unless I am being heinously irresponsible with my magical powers."

"—you get that bad on backlash? And your partner doesn't like interacting?" This means that Jaeha himself would be a better idea, doesn't it? Yeeees it doooooes even if he can't get Haru to think this the way he usually would.

"I try very hard not to get that bad on backlash! I do like three dungeons a week in a normal week and if there's an emergency for which only I am suitable she can donate me blood. But I awakened like everybody else and it turns out I can be so lonely I want to die, it sucks real bad."

"...ah. I'm sorry. How long have you been with her? Have you considered, ah..." See this is a time when he'd just get his power to do the work. And now he can't. "I suppose getting a third person involved would exacerbate her problems..."

"Since I awakened. On a magical level I'm more compatible with her than you, though only by, I wanna say ten percent?, and it's quite important to the guild to have her partnered, she's a speedster who draws monster attention and she can cover a big team by making all the monsters chase her while the other espers do rescues or wreck the core. And I do not, strictly speaking, have to socialize to recover from backlash, I'm really just gobbling up placebos by the fistful over here. She wears heavy-duty headphones and hides under a blanket, and I bother people on the phone and pet Cricket. I think I'm just about an ideal case for her - well, I guess ideal would be someone who could give her blood transfusions and had nurse training so they didn't need to do it in a hospital with medics swarming around, but I'm at least close - but on my end it, uh, could be more comfortable, in the sense that scratching chicken pox is more comfortable. And... could be faster."

"There are absolutely more efficient ways to guide someone," he agrees. Now he should say something that has any content. "But for a restaurant I suppose this will have to do."

"Wouldn't want to make the waitstaff uncomfortable!"

"Would you go into more dungeons more often if you could?"

"Hm, sort of depends how you unpack 'if you could'. It's very ego-syntonic to be a dungeon-slaying superhero saving lives, of course, and however disquieting it may be that I'm participating in the systematic genocide of however many thousands of proto-Crickets I have at least for the time being come down on the side of pro-dungeonslaying, since, in a nutshell, they started it. But it is very important to me to spend some quality time carrying no backlash at all, to check in with my fully sane and regulated self about how I'm going about all my cool superhero shit, and if I could get there quicker only to immediately go pile it back on again I'm not sure I'd like how that'd work out in a time management sense."

Yeah Jaeha wonders what that's like. 

"I think it's normal to do about two dungeons a day and depending on the guiding method that wouldn't be different from a day job in terms of how much free time you have?" Arghhhh now he's coming off as uncertain and insecure. Can he get the wait staff to come here fetch their orders?

Yes, he sure can!

"Matcha and a strawberry cake for me! - and you're right, if it went faster by enough, and, uh, I could keep up the pace otherwise, two dungeons a day would be sustainable."

Jaeha should not pick the same thing as Haru; he should instead let Haru pick because then he's probably going to pick something he also likes and then when they share he'll have had two things he likes. "Pick something for me? You're the resident, here, I'm sure you know what tastes best better than I do."

"Sure, you're getting a mochi ice cream assortment." Smile up at the waiter. "But I should warn you that my sweet tooth was entrained in Canada, so if I have selected something unbearably sugary you'll have to pick your own desserts going forward."

His taste buds are as deadened as everything else about him so he's sure it'll be fine. "No better way to learn than trying it!"

"And I'll have a double espresso, please."

(He's still saying this out loud, but the waitress isn't immune to him so she can see a more charming, nicer version of him doing it.)

Gosh, what charming young men! And one of them did just mention being from Canada so she shouldn't judge their cultural differences.

"Coming right up!"

And back to Haru:

"I suppose it'd have to be determined experimentally but I'm pretty sure at least one a day ought to be doable, and if you'd find it ego-syntonic to do that then I feel like you ought to try."

"I do so love doing things that are ego-syntonic. Are we talking about me too much, the combination of my actual underlying personality and my backlash sometimes does that and that's not ego-syntonic, tell me about you. Is there anybody you by rights should be texting that all is well - probably not a cat but partner, family, whoever you report to at Juno? Are you private enough about your backlash that you can't tell me in a restaurant even speaking Korean on the off-chance a waiter learned the language?"

"I messaged my partner that I'd be getting back late already," he says, nodding. "As for the backlash, it... is in fact that private, I'm afraid."

"That sucks. - I'm really not casual about every personal thing I know, my partner's name and the fact that she's an esper suffices to find her backlash on Google so I figure it's impossible for it to be a secret and she might have some more complicated preference I could try to compromise with in my need to explain my own situation but in order for me to do that she'd have to tell me about it at all ever, so. ...and that was me stuff again. Sorry. Under all the this thing I'm doing I'm actually really self-centered, it's not my loveliest trait."