"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."

Pat pat. "It will probably suck less with more acclimation."

"I have also noted to myself that I had some unearned confidence in my ability to understand people and communicate without my powers. This is something I can work on, as a skill."

"Today you even read someone's body language, apparently."

"I have some ability to do it! Just not... nearly to the extent I thought I did."

"Am I hard to read?"

"Yes. Very." Half the crises he had over the past weeks were due to being unable to tell whether Haru liked him.

"Would it be... skillbuilding... if I let you read me via power while you were also, like, looking at me conventionally."

That makes his heart do something funny. 

"M-maybe?"

"Okay. Wait till I say when or you'll just backlash us both to no effect, but - when."

Oh, God... Jaeha braces himself and looks.