At least Haru knows who he is under all the this thing he's doing.

"There are worse flaws and less well-deserving targets," Jaeha says with a shrug. Baseless flattery, of course, they've known each other's names for an hour, and absolutely not the kind of thing that he'd usually try without the possibility for a redo, but, well, he's gotta say something. "I'm not sure what to say on an open prompt like that, though," he temporises, because he, fuck, he has no idea what personality to present. It seems that being mild-mannered and somewhat flirty is working but that's, like, two adjectives, not a whole personality.

It was frankly delusional of him to expect that he'd be able to conjure enough of one to seduce this boy at the end of a work day like this, he really should've taken a raincheck on this and come back when he has more ability to want things.

Their drinks and desserts arrive. "Thank you!" Haru says to the waitress. "Well, you can't be doing psychic dungeon victim rehab all day every day, and especially if you're usually a lot more efficient about getting your guiding in than I am that also can't eat your whole life, what else do you do with your time?"

He thanks her, too.

(It is so much better to be able to do this the right way. Haru is only seeing a pale shadow of Jaeha's appreciation of this waitress's job.)

Anyway. What else does he do with his time. Nothing. He's going to need to conjure up some hobbies. He has a standard list of those that he brings up in casual conversation when he wants to seem normal but most of it doesn't survive the scrutiny of partnership, and something about this boy tells him that he would not appreciate being grossly misled.

Let's temporise a bit more. "I do a lot more active dungeon clearing than victim rehab." Haru seems bookish, Jaeha can figure out book opinions while he talks. "Today was more exception than norm, I actually wasn't scheduled for this at all and this was a third assignment squeezed into my day." Does Jaeha like fiction? He could like fiction but maybe fiction isn't the best thing to like, here.

"...maybe my perspective is skewed by how gently I'm currently scheduled but sending you into dungeons seems... questionable as a resource deployment choice? You are irreplaceable at a life-saving task which can be performed outside of dungeons, like what you did today! I remember reading that for Nightmare you have to go inside for it to work but that's a special Nightmare thing, not standard issue. If you keep taking little risks they add up and then those dungeons that only you can heal people from get to - win, with every single one of those people, until another one of you awakens somewhere, which might happen tomorrow or in twenty years or never."

"I'm not that irreplaceable," he says, lifting his cup to his lips. "There aren't any dungeons that I'm the only one who can heal people from, at least not that I've run into. There... are dungeons where I'm the quickest or most able esper around to do that... But there aren't enough psychic espers manifesting in the world that we can afford to be that picky." He supposes despite Haru's mental shielding he is not primarily a psychic esper.

(Frustration at the mental shielding again.)

"I don't go into dungeons for no reason, anyway; if all I can usefully do is shield espers going in then I do that. Mostly when I go in it's because rescuing people without clearing them of psychic influences is hard or infeasible, or when my other powers are useful."

"Maybe 'irreplaceable' is putting it a little strongly but - if you've ever read memoirs from people who've gotten out of Nightmare, the ones who know, because you in particular and only you in particular un-marked them, that it can't ever take them again, they seem to find that a pretty important feature of the rescue, and people who do get yoinked twice even if they also get rescued twice are kind of more fucked up."

"I can't say I have. Read their memoirs, that is." That sounds horribly depressing what the fuck. Points for bookishness, though. He takes a sip from his coffee and ponders how to proceed from here. This seems to be something Haru cares about, but Jaeha can't just change everything he does after one conversation with a boy he met less than a day ago. Not that he particularly cares, mind you; it would just read as insincere. He's not sure whether he should be pushing back and arguing, and to what extent. He'll try to... play it by ear, and argue like someone who cares.

"For most dungeons, if an esper doesn't go in to clear it, someone else will. Often, someone will be able to go that very same day, if it's not one of the most powerful dungeons." He lowers his coffee again and stabs into the ice cream with his little spoon thoughtfully. "That's not true for the ones I usually go to. Out of the approximately one thousand espers in Korea, twenty-one of us are psychics. If I don't go, there isn't somebody else lined up to go instead. And sometimes that means that they'll go without me, and they'll be able to clear it even then. And maybe they'll be able to rescue everyone, too. But that increases the risk to them, too, and to the kidnap victims.

"You mentioned that the little risks add up. They add up here, too. Nightmare only shows up once every two or three years, but these are dungeons that I'm going to twice a day five to six days a week; there are a lot more of them."

"Maybe it does math out all right, I couldn't say for sure without a closer look at some things. Dungeons are weird and very little effort is put toward making the information we do have available systematically enough to do any research on at all, there's all these private interests refusing to compare notes and of course the understandable focus on each emergency as it presents itself such that it's hard to push for spending energy on data collection, let alone anything outright experimental." Sigh.

Okay he thinks that worked. Cool. Alright.

(aaaah.)

"I don't know if it does," he admits. "You're... right that I don't have numbers. So maybe I'm completely wrong about how the numbers shake out. But Juno hasn't told me to do anything different, so it's at least not so obvious that the higher-ups there would know..."

Now it's time for him to finally try some of the ice cream and make a delighted face. "Oh, this is delicious."

"Oh good!" Nom, strawberry cake. "I bring my dad mochi whenever I go visit him, you can't get it at a normal store where he lives without driving all the way to, you probably don't literally have to hit Vancouver for it but something nearly as inconvenient."

"Your dad lives in Canada and... your mum lives here?" he guesses.

"Yeah, though even before she brought me to Japan she'd already picked me up and moved me just about all the way across Canada from him and Canada is very big. It's slightly more inconvenient to visit him now than it was when I was six, but not by a lot."

Oh, dear. Alright, not digging into personal family history right now, then. "I lived in Korea all my life. I travelled a bit before I became an esper but it doesn't really hold a candle to the opportunities available to espers with teleportation. Though, ah, am I showing my age if I say that it wasn't anywhere near as widely available when I manifested as it is now?"

"I don't know, are you? How old are you? I'm coming up on 22."

"Twenty-five," so not that much older. He wonders if he can get Haru to call him hyung... Probably not today. "I've been an esper since I was seventeen, though."

"Early manifestation buddies. In my case I think I'm glad it hit me young, if I'd moved out of Ren's house first before I got smacked with all of the backlash that would have been... lets go with 'worse'."

"Ah. Yeah." Relatable, not that he's going to say that. "Living with my family did make my manifestation go substantially less badly than it could otherwise have." For one, it means that it wasn't public at all.

"Poor Ren had to phone Charlie - that's my dad - and make him fly here on no notice so that she could have a minute of peace, I was a mess and it was really freaking her out because I was not acting at all like myself. Would you believe that actually I am an introvert?"

"I would, actually." Ice cream. "Mmmm, do you want some of this? It's really good," he says, offering Haru a spoonful.

Nomf! Does it count as useful fluid exchange if it's just sharing a spoon, maybe!

He is so cute. Jaeha wants to kiss him.

All in due time.

"You do give off a vibe," he continues. "Someone who would much rather be doing something else than spending recovery time with someone else, exhaustingly."

"Oh god, I do, don't I, it's awful, I'm trying to cooperate with myself by being pleasant so that I don't wreck all my laboriously cultivated social connections and leave myself up a creek without any placebos to hand but I'm not good at it and I get incredibly in my own head about how many layers of meta up I should be at any given time."