He's not completely sure his Korean is up to emergency dungeon shit but there's not really a way to find out besides live fire situations, because for some reason nobody does drills. Haru doesn't know why they don't do drills. They'd be great, they could play paintball pretending it was a dungeon and then go eat karaage about it afterwards. ...that's the backlash talking but he's still good to go, he can't insist on sitting with poor Yamanaka long enough to turn into not only a sane person but a sane person who specifically doesn't want to play paintball and go to a restaurant with his pals. Lots of sane people like those things.

Anyway, here he is! Is he on scouting duty or is there psychic shit or both?

Both, though the pre-briefing document he got was somewhat sparse on the details due to the dungeon having upgraded to emergency status pretty quickly and also due to it being apparently really hard to safely scout due to very violent monsters.

The dungeon is in Gangwon-do, which is a popular touristic spot in January with numerous famous ski resorts, which means it's managed to kidnap quite a few people, not all of whom are locals, and that kind of thing always has the potential to turn really ugly really fast. When Haru gets there, the dungeon portal—a pitch-black circle floating above the ground, its edges glowing red and swaying and crackling ominously—is already surrounded by yellow tape, the support staff's tents are already up, and the rest of his team's on site: aforementioned teleporter, an A-rank battlefield control and combat esper, and a B-rank melee combat esper who is also the team lead for this expedition.

"Welcome, Swan Haru-shi, it's great to meet you!" says a very tall fit man with silver-green hair and pink irises, extending his hand for a handshake. "I'm Park Yoo-min, and I'll be your team lead today."

Can he nonverbally talk this guy into a fist-bump instead. Espers should introduce themselves with fistbumps. It's lower commitment than a handshake and gets across what needs to get across (the seating arrangements for passive guiding via elbow-bumping when they all go get karaage debrief after). "That's me, nice to meet you," he's specifically not amazing at honorifics, he's gotten the hang of the Japanese ones well enough since he's lived there for most of his life at this point but the entire concept is weird and unintuitive to him, he doesn't even call his parents Mom and Dad when they're not actively listening to him do it. Is shi one of the reciprocal ones. "What do you need to know, what do I need to know?"

...fist bump? Fist bump! He digs that.

(They're not compatible, but not horribly incompatible either. Kind of meh.)

Okay, the fist bump is, in Yoo-min's opinion, a perfect excuse to drop some of the formal tone. "I read your file and I'm gonna ask you to tell me everything about your powers in your own words but you seem like exactly what we need here. Lemme get you up to speed on all of us, though.

"My powers are touch-range lightning generation, as well as lightning absorption and redirection. My partner Choi Seungjoo—"

("Nice to meet you, Swan Haru-shi," says a boy who looks younger than Haru, blond and with salmon-coloured irises, bowing as he does.)

"—has momentum redirection powers, which are also aces for this dungeon, and Min Woo-young is the best teleporter on the planet."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Swan Haru-shi," says a boy about the same age as Haru, with very long light-green hair tied in a ponytail and brown eyes behind large round thin-rimmed glasses. "Please forgive my sunbae his tone, he's a bit too used to only talking to people he knows."

"Not true! He fist bumped me! He started it!"

"I'm secretly Canadian. I thrive on informality." Do these additional people also want fistbumps? Haru has two hands. "Being the best teleporter on the planet is very cool, unless you only got that way because the better ones are hanging out on Mars without you, but somehow I suspect otherwise."

Alright, fist bump. (Same as Park Yoo-min.)

...sure, why not fist bump. (A teensy bit more compatible than the other two? Not much.)

"Sunbae's exaggerating, I'm just B-rank."

"Am not! I'll let Haru—is it okay if I call you Haru? I don't know how Canadians do it—anyway I'll let him form his own opinions."

"Haru's fine, Swan's fine too if you prefer."

"Well I'm Korean and you won't see me calling anyone by their last name if they don't make me," he says. "Anyway! Give me a rundown of your schtick?"

"If I don't want something to perceive me or touch me I get my way. I will not usually go around being invisible to you but I could if I wanted; my usual dungeon function is to go poke around their insides without them knowing I'm at it. This is cheapest in terms of sensory and psychic contact I want to avoid but I can at greater expense fly, if I really don't wanna have to touch the dungeon even on the floor. So for very reactive or psychic dungeons that will mess with people when it spots them I'm a good scout-slash-infiltrator. Also my extremely public backlash is that I get lonesome as fuck so if I heroically swoop in to save anybody they have to like pitch me on their favorite anime or something till I can go home to my partner and monstercat."

"...monstercat?"

"Sunbae, mission," says Choi Seungjoo, poking Park Yoo-min lightly on the arm.

"—right! Distracted, Haru can tell me all about monstercat afterwards.

"Anyway, this dungeon is a leeeeeettle bit of a headache for approximately everyone because the sensors have been having one hell of a time with it. It's mazelike, and it has monsters, and the monsters seem chill, but they're actually really bashful and shy: if you look at them, or sense them, or whatever, they go from chill to unchill faster than you can say 'minotaur'. We've had a buncha sensors go in to try to look and as soon as they perceived a monster using whatever senses they're using the monster would immediately rush them. We've also tried other stealth espers and the monsters noticed them too! Which is why you're perfect, you can stealth and they won't see you looking!

"The dungeon's just as lonely as you, though, if substantially less ethical about it than you are, and it's kidnapped a bunch of people. Whom we can't find. Because of the monsters."

"Ha ha ha, yes, I try to keep my backlash levels well below the point at which I would start even fantasizing about kidnappings, I like my sanity. It doesn't break the tech with weird physics, just with monsters? So if I go in with a map doodad it'll behave?"

"Yep! Great minds think alike, it seems! My main idea for what you could do would be scout and map as much as you can, leaving relays behind that we can use to create a proper map of the place using the arcane sorceries we call 'maths'. Once you've got a good overview of the dungeon and have found the kidnapped civilians the three of us are going in. Woo-young, overview of your powers, please?"

"It's reference-based," he says. "I can do 'the person next to that other person' or 'the green box in that room' or things like that, and likewise for the destination. I don't do distances and directions directly."

"Huh, but it doesn't work in such a way that we can just get a list of everyone the dungeon took based on who's missing and have you grab them?"

"Not if I don't know where the reference is, myself. —or, yes, in theory, but the backlash cost grows really fast the less I know about where the target is. I'm—kind of new, I've only been at this a couple of months, so we haven't tested my power that extensively yet, but some preliminary testing's gotten me bedridden with a single teleport because of that. Uh, because my backlash is losing motor ability."

"Gotcha. Ballpark how big is the place, do we have a guess?"

"No clue! Dungeon's new, though, so it won't be city-sized probably? And it's spent a lot of energy on making those monsters real bad and tough and it kidnaps people so best guess would be, hmm, handful of city blocks max? ...I guess that's a clue."

"Sounds like a clue to me. Doodads ready to go? Shall I head in nowish or is there more to cover?"

"Doodads ready! Should be in your inventory. Also there's a second kind of doodad if you happen to find a kidnap victim that'll make it easier for Woo-young to TP them. ...or so we hope. Field testing! Worst-case the map itself will still be good enough.

"So, if you've got no more questions, then godspeed and please don't die on us, we'll be poking our heads in every couple of minutes to check if you left us any messages or are in dire danger but the portal surroundings are very dangerous so we can't leave anyone inside too long."

"Here goes nothing." Inventory check. Are his shoes tied, he doesn't have dyspraxia anymore but old habits and anyone can trip on a shoelace. Comms are up and behaving.

In he goes.

It's sunny in the dungeon. The sky is blue, there is birdsong just out of sight, and ground is grassy and there are flowers and shrubs. He is in the center of a large circular room with stone walls about twice as tall as he is split by irregular gaps leading out into proper mazelike corridors going around in spirals.

And the monsters are, indeed, right there. They're made of the same stone the walls are, large minotaur-shaped golems patrolling the corridors, visible through the gaps in the walls at regular intervals. They move surprisingly quietly for animated statues that large, but as soon as Haru looks at any one of them he can feel the mounting pressure of his backlash.

He is going to have to show that guy so many fucking cat pictures. Maybe get Cricket on a video call. That's a terrible idea because Cricket hates everyone but maybe this time he'd get along with a new person??

He wants to get through here quickly and not become lost; he'll fly for a second to get on top of a wall so he can run and not have to try to left-hand-rule his way through the optional physics zone. Unfortunately, because of the optional physics zone, the wall Alice-in-Wonderlands out of his reach. He gives up and touches down again. Through the maze it will have to be.

The pressure of the minotaurs on him diminishes if he doesn't look at them, and is gone altogether if he renders himself completely incapable of perceiving them, such as by covering his eyes and ears well enough. Of course, that'd defeat the purpose, so he'll have to deal with minotaurs that really want to pick his brains re. whether he's looking at them. 

It is, otherwise, a pretty unremarkable dungeon run for Haru, who is by now probably used to going into situations where he's walking through and past huge supernatural threats that completely ignore him like he doesn't exist or matter. The stone maze theme continues, with occasional environmental hazards like spiked pits and swinging pendulum blades and so on. 

The first victim he finds is a young woman in ski clothes trapped behind iron bars at the end of a corridor, in a cell about four square metres in area, with nothing but grass in it. She's been here long enough that the fear got mostly replaced by boredom, and she's sitting on the grass playing on her phone when Haru sees her. There isn't a minotaur directly guarding it, but occasionally one does come into view; it seems to not care that she's seeing it, though.

The lady's allowed to see him. "Hey. Teleporter's gonna get you out of here in a minute," he says, in Korean if she looks local and in English if she's a white tourist.

She looks local, and she shrieks when he appears out of nowhere. 

"O-oh," she says, heart hammering nearly through her ribcage. "Th-thank you, esper-nim," she says, standing up to bow to him. "A-are you Korean?" She doesn't think she recognises him, maybe he's an esper that doesn't usually make the news?

"Nah, just visiting." Experimental doodad, behold this lady. "This is supposed to tell the teleporter where you are so he can grab you. Do you want me to message ahead for anything?"

She accepts the doodad. "...could you tell my husband that I'm okay, if he hasn't also been kidnapped? I'm Kim Jeongtae and he's Nam Dal-pyeong."

"I'll let the support folks know. Kim Jeongtae, Nam Dal-pyeong," typety typety. .........tactically speaking he should not stand around talking to this person till she's teleported out. That's minutes he could be spending mapping instead of indulging his backlash. Any messages or pings or anything on the system indicating how long they're going to take about it?

Next check-in is in two and a half minutes.

"It's gonna be a couple minutes before they get that. I... should... cover the rest of the dungeon, but you won't have long to wait, okay?"

"Oh. That's—faster than I expected. Thank you, esper-nim." She bows again, more deeply this time.

"You're welcome!" he says, and he dodges a passing minotaur and jogs off.

There are more kidnapping victims, all of them in similar cages, some of them more scared than others, all of them being completely ignored by the monsters. It'll take a while to get to all of them, but once he's about 70% through the best estimates for the number of people this dungeon is thought to have kidnapped he finds the exit to the maze, opening out into a beautiful flowery meadow.

The centaur resting peacefully on the grass, not at all made of stone, looking like it'd be a good three stories tall if it were standing on its hooves, is probably guarding the dungeon core.

Haru doesn't have basically any combat applicable powers. He could have gone in with a rocket launcher, but a) he didn't and b) there's still people in there. He puts down one of the mapper doodads, snaps a picture for his blog, and starts circling back, trying to cover different ground while still heading exitward, because he was very worryingly tempted to introduce himself to the centaur.

When he's out of the dungeon Min Woo-young's in a wheelchair. "Verdict is that the doodads are useful but not by enough that I can eat the backlash cost so we're going to need people to actually be inside near the rescuees," he says immediately.

"And to help with that, let me introduce my best friend Lee Tae-gun!"

Lee Tae-gun, Korea's only S-rank esper, is indeed now with the group, looking irritated by being referred to as "best friend" by Park Yoo-min but not willing to pick a fight about it. "Nice to meet you, Swan Haru-nim," he says, bowing.

"Good morning!" Fistbump? Ha ha the barbarian Canadian actually wants to know which of the people around him can make him less insane, he finds that important information, let's discover it together? "I found most of the folks, not the whole list because it's a literal maze that wouldn't let me overfly it, but they're not really hidden beyond being in a maze."

Lee Tae-gun is looking at Haru's fist like he might've looked at a strange dungeon monster that looked like it was dangerous at first but then turned out surprisingly docile: with extreme distrust and mild bafflement.

"That's a fistbump, Tae-gun. You bump your fist against it."

Okay it would be extremely embarrassing for him to argue with Park Yoo-min about this in front of the stranger (as well as the support staff and the news cameras outside the yellow tape) so he will bump fists, sure. 

(They are actually a pretty reasonable amount of compatible.)

(Lee Tae-gun has suddenly understood exactly the purpose of this arcane gesture and might in fact like it.)

"You said the boss monster is a huge centaur? Sounds like that'll be fun!"

Yaaaay new top candidate for sitting next to later! "Yeah, do you want to see a picture?"

"Oh yes absolutely."

That... might be tactically relevant? Sure.

Picture of the centaur! "He'd be taller than a house if he stood up so maybe don't let him do that. I post this kind of thing to my blog, is that okay? After the dungeon's clear, not while the centaur is menacing anybody."

"Yeah! Link me the blog later, I'll subscribe."

"Shall we?"

"We shall! It's time for the less cerebral of us to do the part of the job that involves hitting things very hard until they stop moving," he informs Haru solemnly.

"Oh, did someone publish stats about which powers people get having literally anything to do with their cognition, that'd be exciting news."

"I wouldn't know, I'm not smart enough for stats."

Aaaaare they going to go do their jobs or are they just going to stand around chatting all day...?

Fiiiiine fine. "We'll go in before Tae-gun decides to go on his own but you owe me cat pictures."

"Absolutely!"

And in they go to rescue some people and kill some minotaurs and a centaur!

So now Haru has nothing to do until they come back, except for maybe making friends with all of the support staff and/or the news reporters and/or the onlooking civilians.

He'll talk to reporters! Parasocial's better than nothing and it's often easier to schedule Reading The Comments than it is to schedule real live human beings. He will make sure the folks he tagged with doodads are holding up okay! He will message Yamanaka Junko one (1) emoji which she will be able to decode according to their lookup table to indicate that he is going to show up to the silo to put his feet on her feet within thus and such an expected time frame! He will tell Cricket and his parents that he is unscathed by the dungeon! He will see if the support staff need any stuff they don't have!

Korean reporters are not as used to him as Japanese ones so they're super curious and would love to get some sound bites. Most of them don't even know who he is, really, but they'll take what they can get and espers are usually so reserved, especially Quasar ones, so this is novel.

Is this his first time in Korea? Is he new to Quasar? His Korean is very good for a Japanese person! Oh, he's Canadian? His Korean is even more impressive for a Canadian person! Had he worked with Quasar before? Had he worked with Lee Tae-gun before? What is Lee Tae-gun like? Had he met Quasar's hot new teleporter before? Does Quasar have plans for his teleportation power? Etc etc etc etc.

He's been to Korea once before on vacation with his mom! He's just met all of the lovely folks of Quasar today, but they seem great! Lee Tae-gun didn't talk much but he seems dedicated and goal-oriented, which is what you want in a dungeoneer! The new teleporter is very cool, but Haru doesn't know much about Quasar's plans what with how he mostly operates in Japan and on specialty deployments suited for his powers!

The people being rescued by the other espers start to trickle out, usually escorted by one or another of the four who went in (or, well, not Min Woo-young, who remains inside throughout) and then handed off to support staff—though that might perhaps be a job Haru would want to take?

Sure, especially if they've got tourists who need an English or Japanese speaker!

They absolutely do! Tourists are various levels of bedraggled but most of them seem to be altogether untraumatised by the experience. Some want to take pictures with him, too.

Sure! Selfies for the selfie god!

The rescues eventually stop coming out, and a while after that the portal makes a loud vvvvwommmm noise and its edges turn green.

The other espers step out immediately after that, all looking pretty backlashed. Park Yoo-min looks like he's having a lot of trouble controlling muscle spasms, but the kind of trouble where he's mostly succeeding, and grinning while he's at it.

Choi Seungjoo is leaning heavily on him though it's not otherwise obvious what's wrong with him.

Min Woo-young is brought out on a floating stretcher made of ice, looking like he can't move anything at all other than his head and hands.

(He doesn't look cold at all, though.)

And Lee Tae-gun, the person who conjured the ice stretcher, looks...

...perfectly fine. His hair's a little bit messier than it was when he walked in, his clothes a bit disheveled, but otherwise he looks completely unbothered.

As soon as he does every newsperson surrounding the yellow tape immediately starts calling his name and shouting questions indistinctly at him.

Wow how does he do that. Haru wants whatever he's smoking. And then he wants to inhale a kilo of it and go PLAY CIVILIZATION ALONE IN HIS ROOM FOR EIGHT HOURS.

He adopts a magazine smile and waves for the cameras recording and/or taking pictures of him and, once he's successfully transferred Min Woo-young to a proper stretcher from the med team and unconjured the ice, opens the blue holographic screen accessing his computer system and uses it to teleport away.

"Forgive Tae-gun, he's a very busy man," says a person who knows for a fact being busy is not at all the reason Tae-gun teleported away.

"How does he do that? Or should I not ask, I suppose that just took a bunch of selfies with complete strangers and probably looked fine in them and it's not because I'm fine and dandy."

"I d-don't kno-o-o-ow," he replies, losing control of his tongue for a moment there. "I'm surp-p-prised to see you he-e-ere still." He grits his teeth then continues. "I thought you'd have gone into isolation."

"My partner's in a dungeon right now, there's no point till she's back, but if there's not a debrief step or anything I can go bother my cat instead of you guys."

"I'll bug you about cat pictures l-l-later but f-for now th-this was straightforward and w-we'll just silo."

"Good work today!"

Seungjoo is trying to smile and only half-succeeding.

Okay. Time to go home to Cricket till Yamanaka's done.

He gets an email in his work inbox a few hours later.

Hello! This is Park Yoo-min. I realised I never got your number so this was the best way I had to contact you to demand that which you owe me.

"Hey kitty, pose for the camera."

"They're not worthy to gaze upon my visage." But he poses.

Here you go! And the blog is only available in English and Japanese so far, translating takes time, but here it is: Eventualities

Oh wow you really meant it when you said "monstercat". And that's a very cool blog!

Anyway, should you wish to continue correspondence in closer-to-real time with yours truly, you may find me at <phone number>.

Does he want a call right now because he's getting a call right now. Yamanaka's here but feet-to-feet is not an attested rapid debacklashing method.

...well, sure!

"I meant texting but hey I'm down for this, too! Don't suppose there's a chance that means I get a cat live rather than just a pic?"

"Sure, absolutely, he only speaks Japanese but if you know the language just be aware that he is extremely impolite to most everyone." He can turn on video and point it at Cricket. "This is Cricket! I got him right after I awakened, another esper was hosting him before that so he wouldn't walk the streets and make people think there was an ongoingly active dungeon spitting out more like him but they did not get along and when I made it known that I thought I needed a cat we were introduced."

He switches to Japanese. "Oh, gosh! Hi, Cricket! Your wings are gorgeous!"

"Yes. That's why I'm prettier than you, because you don't have any wings. And aren't a cat." Preen.

"You are absolutely right. Unfortunately not all of us are blessed with being born as cats, but we at least can perform our duties of obeisance and admiration."

Cricket looks incredulously at Haru. "Did you find another worthwhile person? I thought you were the only one."

"Wow, that's high praise." Cricket hops into his lap for scritches and the camera turns accordingly.

"I feel humbled and honoured that I was accepted as worthwhile. I hope I can live up to it."

"There's probably something wrong with you, but I don't know what it is yet."

This monster cat encapsulates the distilled essence of the catpersonality, it's amazing, Yoo-min is delighted. "Hopefully it'll be something fixable."

Paw-lick. "Sometimes it is. For example Haru did not have a cat but then he solved that problem."

"Well, seeking out a cat would have done me much less good before you were available." Pet pet.

"You've been together since Haru manifested?"

"Not week-of, but shortly after. My mother fortunately finds it merely exasperating when he insults her."

"This is the first time I've met an ex-dungeon monster, I'm super curious but I'm not sure if there's anything that would be a faux pas to ask."

"He's from a 4D dungeon that opened near Osaka five years back! They killed it while he was on somebody's roof. He was sort of loitering with the guild, bribed with sashimi for help navigating other 4D dungeons since he can still do that, but he was not the world's most popular co-worker and now when something 4D opens he reports direct to me, even if I don't go inside."

"Oh, oof, I hear those are always such a pain to deal with. I'm thankfully not specced for them at all so it's not my headache but my guildmates whose headache it is always spend a month afterwards complaining about them."

"Yeah, I think that's why they kept him rather than turning him out on the street to catch pigeons for a living, they'd rather be told that they're morons while being pulled kata than simply not be pulled kata when they've gotta go that way."

"Did you look different before your dungeon died?" he asks Cricket.

"I was much bigger and venomous."

"I bet you must've been so fearsome. Are there pictures of that version of you?"

Since Haru is interested in the topic of Dungeons: What The Fuck he has actually already interviewed Cricket a lot about what he remembers from being part of a dungeon (unfortunately, it's not much). There is some security camera footage of Big Cricket, but not a really good picture, since he was, uh, a monster, plausibly trying to eat people, though they don't think he in particular got anybody before the dungeon was slain. No other monsters escaped the same dungeon to compare notes with.

And blah blah blah blah it doesn't even help but he can't concentrate on anything else till he's had longer with his feet on Yamanaka's feet. It would be a lot faster if she wanted to platonically make out. She's O-positive and he's A-positive, so she can give him blood albeit not vice versa, but they save that for when they're in a hurry to get him up and running again.

Eventually he manages to let Yoo-min off the phone.

This was fun! They should do it again sometime!

Jaeha hadn't originally been scheduled for this dungeon but he got specifically and personally requested for the most peculiar of reasons: apparently the psychic effect it's causing on its victims is really hard to clear. There are a couple of espers who managed to go in and not get affected, including this guy with a stealth power that also happens to be able to resist psychic effects fully, but Jaeha is to shield as many people as he can and then save the victims from the persistent feeling that the air is poisonous and they need to hold their breaths until they fall unconscious, or the certainty that they're drowning, or any number of other creative ways the dungeon has found to fuck with them. There are monsters, too, which are being held back some, but they really really need to send in some big guns soon.

It's in Japan, so he'll need a teleport, but he wasn't doing anything else in particular so he might as well.

Public face on. "Hi! I'm Kang Jaeha, I hear you need me to shield some people and clear some other people?"

The support staff he's talking to jumps when they hear his voice but then relaxes at his words. "Oh, yes, Kang Jaeha-san, thank you we're so swamped—here, let me get the espers who need to go in and then you can get started with the victims—"

He really doesn't feel like going into that dungeon at all so it's a good thing there's work for him to do outside. In the worst case he can just say that he's too backlashed and shouldn't go into the dungeon right now, but they probably won't press.

Victims are piling up. Stealth guy keeps going in and putting a person over his shoulder and hauling them out. He has his serious face on because these people are suffering, but,

, oh, a new face! "Hi! Are you the miracle sanity dispenser, I've got another patient for you." Gently placing the person in a lawn chair time; holding your breath till you pass out isn't great but it's not stretcher-and-ambulance dangerous because you start breathing again once you pass out. Fistbump once his hands are free?

"I am, indeed!" What is this man doing. He wants a fist bump? Is—

(Jaeha can't feel him. At all.

That must be the esper he read about in the briefing document.

But an esper being immune to him? That's—not actually possible. What the fuck.)

Fist bump it is, then, and Jaeha will hope the hiccup is interpreted as him just being awkward over the fist bump and—

"- and once you're unburied from the patients are you headed straight back to Korea or do you have time to hang out?"

He ought to go back to Korea because he'll be even more backlashed and even less personable.

Wo Do-in has been acting unsatisfied and Jaeha expects he'll want to break up as soon as Jaeha gives him an excuse to and not going into isolation after this dungeon would be an excuse. 

Jaeha might have just found himself a new partner. 

"For someone like you? I have all the time in the world," he says, falling back into the flirting almost subconsciously before he remembers that actually that can backfire horribly and he has no idea what this man is feeling and he can't even change anything—it's fine. He's fine. Flirting is fine. It might make things awkward but it'll be fine.

"Delightful - I hate to tear myself away but there's at least twenty more people in there and if we're not lucky somebody's going to have a plastic bag and cleverly put it over their head -" He shrugs apologetically, takes one step backwards before tearing back off into the dungeon.

...that went better than expected! He was totally responding, right? That was the body language of someone who's responding?

Fuck.

Anyway, yes, there are victims to clear, he'll keep doing that.

Here's another one! "Wow, you're fast!"

"Right back at you." That was a lot of compatibility, right? A lot more than he has with Do-in. And this man is in fact drop-dead gorgeous, and seemed to be responding positively to that tiny bits of flirting... On the other hand, maybe he interpreted it as just being friendly? Homophobes are often extremely clueless. On the other hand, he's an esper, so... "I never caught your name."

"Call me Haru! Unless you're too formal for that in which case Swan or Suwan is fine." That lady looks a little more fucked up than she should; he takes her pulse and waves over a medtech when this is inconclusive. "And you're our miracle sanity dispenser Kang Jaeha, right?"

"I see my fame precedes me. You can call me Jaeha, Haru-san."

Here's the medtech! They carry the woman to the med tents for more observation once Kang Jaeha's done with her.

(Should these espers really be doing this right now? He supposes Kang Jahea has been making short work of all of the rescues, but still...)

"You're very famous! The Anti-Nightmare! And also the anti-whatever-the-hell-this-thing-is, and one thing it is is suffocating people so I will be right back with more of those!" He does a little ironic salute and runs off.

He's really cute. Jaeha will try to remember that he thought this later and hold onto it, it'll be easier to act normal if he does.

There are a lot of people in this dungeon, it must have been incredibly hungry. Haru is trying the strategy of talking to the people he's rescuing in spite of them slipping in and out of consciousness for refusing to breathe, by the time he brings in the next one. "You're gonna be okay, sir! This guy here can fix you right up lickety-split, okay, and you will go home and be totally fine!"

This guy here? What guy? Oh God oh God he inhaled—

Boop.

—bwuh? The man blinks confusedly at being... somewhere... he did not expect to be.

"Sir, you were kidnapped by a dungeon," Jaeha explains. "If you'll follow my colleague?" The support staff are here for a—well, for a very large number of reasons, actually, and one of them is handling victims and figuring them out so Jaeha doesn't have to. Hard enough to figure out what to say to the esper guy when he can't use his powers, having to figure out how to sound human to victims sounds awful.

"All better, you'll have a great story to tell at parties," says Haru, clapping his hands and contributing to gesturing the guy support-staff-ward. And then turning to Jaeha - "You're - oh my god, stop me if I try to stay and chat, it's my backlash running the show and it doesn't even help, we will chat after, I'm holding you to that -" Off he runs.

Alright, sure, it'll be easier to seem human within a single interaction rather than over several broken ones.

...not that he can resist. That boy is really very cute.

With the espers Kang Jaeha shielded being able to help bring victims out, they can deal with rescuing all of the kidnap victims in short order, and soon after that they can close the dungeon, bringing its core to the portal and destroying it just before stepping out to make sure no one will stay behind. The portal's edges turn green, and one by one the espers that went in leave, looking various levels of bedraggled and tired and backlashed.

Haru is tired and backlashed but absolutely not in a way where he wants to run to Yamanaka's silo. She might actually be there and could certainly get there if he summoned her with the right emoji but Kang Jaeha the Anti-Nightmare is right there and like ninety percent as compatible as Yamanaka is and will have a conversation with him instead of requiring that Haru pretend he not exist the entire time. He bounces right up to Jaeha. "Everybody's safe and it's no longer embarrassingly irresponsible of me to chat you up! Welcome to Japan, is it your first time here?"

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.

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."

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. I 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."

He is so cute. Jaeha literally just thought that.

"You know, I wouldn't actually mind if you wanted to drop it."

"That's kind of a layers of meta problem, though, like, what does it mean to 'drop it' - I know what it means when I'm unbacklashed but it gets increasingly muddy as a concept when I'm carrying any meaningful amount."

"Just do whatever you wanna do and say whatever you wanna say without worrying about the damage you're doing to our relationship, how about? That way all—versions of you—get the same benefits. If I understand what you meant correctly."

This interaction is much easier than what's been happening so far, surprisingly. He's really not sure why.

"I will see what I can do but I'm out of practice at doing that under field conditions. World champion at figuring out what I wanna do when I'm fully clear and just introspecting alone in my room, but then I go save a few dozen people from a dungeon and it's like giving an Olympic archer a set of juggling clubs."

"'World champion', are you?"

"Yes! I would offer to prove it but even if I take you home and you fuck some sense into me it is not a spectator sport."

Well that was forward. He feels like maybe he'd been playing it too safe.

He wants to say something flirty and charming and provocative back but he's on a time crunch and he's backlashed so he'll need to just figure something to say on the fly. "I'm sure we can find other reasons for me to fuck some sense into you." Good? He thinks it was good, maybe.

Sounds like it's time for Haru to go through the rest of his cake and matcha kind of fast. "The phrase itself contains at least two reasons!"

His partner is gonna get mad if Jaeha fucks someone else rather than go back to their silo to guide him.

Does Jaeha care? He does not. Fucking this boy is going to be so much better guiding than whatever he could get with Wo Do-in.

He can finish his coffee reasonably fast, too—it's just an espresso—and then use the tried-and-true excuse of his partner eating too fast and oh no he got some cake on his chin, Jaeha supposes he'll have to thumb it clean and then lick it off his thumb. Can he turn that into a kiss? Inquiring minds want to know.

Not in the restaurant he can't. "I haaaaave test results from since the last time I went to Canada - if there's a dungeon emergency there there's this guy but there is not the guy in a way that would be an obstacle and that's the only guy - you?"

"—test results?" Like STD test results? "I only have my partner but we're not monogamous." Because Jaeha says so.

"Test results so that neither of us winds up having an embarrassing conversation with our doctors later? Can't exactly go the barriers route considering."

So yes STD test results. Fuck. He could have made those up with literally anyone else. "That is a good point that I have completely failed to consider," he admits.

"Well damn. I have the occasional irrationality but this is not actually one of them."

"Condoms and kissing cover most of it from the guiding perspective," he says, "and I can grab tests for next time." He would've loved to be more graceful about this, gah.

"Okay, I guess we can stop at the konbini on the way to my house, I don't have any."

"I do! I suppose I don't know your size—nor, for that matter, what you like to do, although I'm flexible."

"Well, one of those I will indicate in the konbini and the other I will indicate in my bedroom and neither of those are restaurant material despite the nonlocal language."

"Yes, sir." If they're both done he can get the attention of the waitress and pay for both of their orders.

"Oh, is it like that - hey, I was going to pick up the check -"

"Consider it my payment for being shown around."

"If you insist!" Off they go to the konbini, holding hands.

It takes him by surprise again before he remembers that Haru is Canadian. And maybe it's less of a big deal nowadays, anyway; he's importing his instincts from the last time he ever held hands with anyone which was, actually, kind of a while ago.

Off to the konbini.

If someone gives them a hard time that cannot be managed by simply not giving a fuck about stupid people's opinions, Haru will pick up Jaeha and fly away! He doesn't fly frivolously because nobody's usually available to fuck sense into him afterwards but it's an emergency option!

Condoms are got with a minimum of interest from the proprietor and then it will be a six-stop subway ride, not everyone has as much teleportation ability sloshing around as Korea, Home Of The Best Teleporter On The Planet And Not Because The Better Ones Are On Mars.

...no it won't, what.

He points his index and middle fingers forward and slides them down in the air to make the holographic commscreen appear. "Give me your address?"

"I already let you pay for snacks!" Haru says, but it's a mock protest, he produces the address.

This is substantially more expensive than the snacks.

He could do this several times a day every day for weeks before he started to feel it. Throwing money around is one of many good ways to get boys to like you.

They teleport.

"Tadaima!" Haru calls, letting himself in.

The cat glides down the stairs, alights, and assesses Jaeha.

Ah, right. The judgmental cat. He will do his best to be liked and bow to the cat.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Cricket-san. I am Kang Jaeha."

"You reek," pronounces the cat.

Blink blink. "I'm sorry?"

"You should be, it's all your own fault. You will deserve all the cancer." Off he trots into the kitchen.

"I'm sorry about him."

...ah. Because he's a smoker. Right.

"I should have seen this one coming."

"You won't deserve the cancer but you do have the power to reduce the risk!" chirps Haru, tugging Jaeha by their joined hands up the stairs. Haru values his sanity too much to be highly paid for an esper but he did manage to buy his mom a nice non-shoebox sufficiently central to Tokyo for her tastes.

His room might offer more clues about what he's into for Jaeha's perusal! There is a bookshelf; it's got classics from the complete works of Shakespeare to the tale of Genji, and some science fiction. It's got a computer, with a screenshot of Civilization-but-modded-so-it's-fantasy up as the desktop wallpaper. The closet, left halfway open, showcases clothes that are all just about as boring and Western as the ones he's already wearing, but also a yukata in indigo shibori. The bed will be snug but it's a full, not a twin, so they won't be pushing each other onto the floor by accident, and it's got a quilt on it that looks like a souvenir from India or someplace. There is a rug covering most of the floor and it feels squashy, like it's got an unusually thick rug pad under it, and the corners of his desk have foam things glued on them like people get to prevent their toddlers bonking their heads. The curtains are closed and too thick to see much through. The walls are painted dark blue, like the way his eyes look in certain lighting conditions, but the ceiling is white and there's plenty of light to compensate for how the color is trying to eat it up.

...those are definitely some clues. He ought to examine them at some point. He might even muster up the interest to do that.

You know what will definitely stir that interest, though? Kissing Haru is what.

Oh god yes, Canadian fuckbuddy is way less compatible than this and also is not big into kissing, this is amazing.

Jaeha is way into kissing. He's way into kissing and into getting his hands all over Haru and trying to get Haru's clothes off without taking breaks from the kiss which is approximately impossible but always a ton of fun to try, and more skin available means more places he can kiss, which he also does even though it's less good guiding because, look, he just likes doing it okay.

(Not that the guiding doesn't feel amazing. Fuck Wo Do-in, he hasn't actually ever been with someone was compatible at this and God this feels good.)

Oh, about the more skin meaning more places he can kiss, Haru has a suggestion, it's the back of his neck. Why did he suggest this? We may never know and certainly aren't getting any clues from the moaning noises.

His wish is Jaeha's command, of course. Jaeha is a quick study, at least when it comes to this, and anything that makes this gorgeous boy make noises like that is something he'll be doing a lot of.

Oh good, Haru loves it when he gets to be selfish in bed, it is a profound charity of the world that even though it seems like being on his preferred end of all possible intimate acts should be the universal consensus position of every human being there's actually a lot of variety and he has landed one who wants to nom his neck. (They're not literally in bed yet, they're kind of leaning on the door. Shirts go flying across the room. Maybe now they should be on the bed.)

Yes they should. He really likes this thing where he doesn't have to figure out a normal way to be because he can just be horny instead. All decisions are easy, just do whatever makes pretty boys moan, touch them and kiss them and bite them, grind against them and play with their bodies. Shirts are off but surely they won't stop there, right? Surely Haru will let him get his hands more places?

Oh yeah. After the briefest detour to get the condoms out of his pocket and onto the nightstand.

Hmmm yeah those are for later he's back to kissing now because fluid exchange ahoy, he knows for a fact making out with people you're not this compatible with just feels a lot less nice in itself and, and he thinks he can feel it, too. He might be making it up in his head but he thinks he can feel the guiding, can feel the fog start to move hopefully in his brain. 

That only makes him want to do more.

Mmmmmmmm enthusiasm is so gratifying. And sex is one place where backlash thinks he's having a social interaction, sanity is excited about coming back online, and introversion acknowledges that unlike paintball this activity is part of a balanced diet. And the compatibility is so good? He's never smooched Yamanaka and in theory that would also be great but he's too gay to find it appealing and right now he is very very gloriously gay.

And here's the thing Jaeha likes the most about guided sex: it cures backlash. That's not winning any awards for surprisingness but it means that he gets progressively more into it as he does it, his interest going from mostly performative to something much more genuine. He usually fakes the genuine version using his power but he has no practice with doing it for real and he's sure there are a myriad tells he doesn't know about or can't correct for, so he probably won't be able to fool Haru at all, if Haru is paying attention. Although, well, depending on how much time they spend on this the change might be too subtle to notice; if it's up to Jaeha they'll do it for at least an hour but other people tend to get less high on sex than he does.

Still, hopefully Haru will like this? He seemed pretty enthusiastic about how into him Jaeha is, so this will probably be a good thing.

God it's good to get to feel positive things again.

Progressively increasing sincerity of enthusiasm mostly comes across as being... impressed or something? Which is slightly odd, Haru's not pulling out any particularly exotic tricks to be impressed by and is not showcasing any kinks that weren't presented with an engraved invitation by that one "sir", but that doesn't make it less flattering.

Bearing in mind that Haru's refractory situation is not as superhuman as some other espers the narration could mention, he is still completely on board with spending an hour in bed as long as the pacing varies accommodatingly between nice sustainable handsy naked makeouts and other stuff that can't comfortably go on for as long at a stretch.

Yeah Jaeha also cannot sustain the most strenuous of these activities for a whole hour but he's such a junkie for the feeling of touching someone who guides him as well as the guiding itself.

Eventually they do wind down—if nothing else, it is the end of the work day, and Jaeha himself's done three dungeons today so he's kinda beat—but Jaeha can snuggle afterwards before he's gotta teleport back to Korea to be yelled at by Wo Do-in.

Snuggles. Snuggles during which Haru doesn't feel an overwhelming itch to carry on a conversation! He's almost totally clear! Even if Jaeha leaves suddenly he can probably finish up getting down to baseline with an hour of putting his feet on Yamanaka's feet and reading a goddamn book. Snug snug snug.

He's adorable.

"I should get your number," he observes to the air after a bit of companionable silence.

"Mm-hm," Haru agrees, and he makes no immediate move to remove his face from Jaeha enough to recite such a thing.

He. Should go home. 

He kind of doesn't want to. 

It's kind of late.

He kind of doesn't care. 

Woo Do-in is yelling at him through text messages he should probably deal with that actually.

Can he justify staying longer? ...realistically, yes, but...

"I should actually get going, probably." He wishes he could've said that with his brain instead of his mouth.

"Mm, okay." Smooch. Number recitation. And email.

Alright, he can write the numbers down, and...

...is Haru going to mind if he just... gets up and starts putting his clothes on...?

That's fine with Haru. "Do you want me to escort you past Cricket or - I suppose you're probably teleporting so never mind."

"Is Cricket likely to attack me or just insult me? I've got a pretty thick skin."

"I'm mostly confident in his ability not to be the first to initiate physical... contact, he'd probably take petting him in the wrong direction amiss even if that's not strictly speaking violence."

"I'm probably safe, then. But you are correct that I'll just teleport, so it's moot anyway."

"Thanks for fucking some sense into me!"

"I feel like I should say 'Anytime!' but that'd be pleasantry, we'll probably need to align schedules. A disadvantage of not being official partners."

"Yeah, one of us would have to move."

"Oh my father would hate it if I moved. Which makes me want to do it more rather than less, but that subject is perhaps one for the future."

"Yeah, we can logistics about it later."

One final kiss, one "It's been lovely to meet you, Haru-san," and he teleports.

Haru catches up on his email, because "almost, but not entirely, free of backlash" is a good state in which to do that, and then he pets Cricket and walks to Yamanaka's. (Ren's house was chosen to be in easy walking distance.)

With a book. And a notebook.

And Jaeha, as expected, is yelled at. Wo Do-in calls him a selfish and self-centered prick, which he can't argue with because it's true, and then they have some angry sex in which Do-in gets to be kinda rough and mean in a way he feels isn't a problem, and then they go to their respective homes to sleep away from each other. 

Jaeha kinda misses Haru, which is insane, they just saw each other. 

Anyway, it's just a matter of time, now.

Haru actually forgot to get Jaeha's number but will see if he has an email deriveable from name and guild, if Jaeha takes too long to send a text.

kang.jaeha@junoguild.co.kr does seem to be a valid email address.

I totally forgot to get your number.

- Haru

He gets a text shortly after.

Hey, handsome

Is this Jaeha or a secret admirer?

I'm kind of curious now what you'd do if I said it was the latter

Good question, I haven't figured that out in advance.

Well, I'm not very secret about my admiration at all

There are some very nice benefits to making it known to you that I admire you

Such as, for instance, learning the sounds you make when I kiss your neck

Now you have this information! Whatever shall you do with it?

What a silly question, Haru-san

I'm going to extract those noises from you more often

I'm looking forward to it ;)

logistics though......

Do-in hasn't, in fact, broken their partnership off, but even if he had Jaeha would not bring it up right now. It would not do for Haru to think he had been the one to cause this breakup; being with Haru might have sped it up but not by more than a couple of weeks, it was a foregone conclusion.

Does Yamanaka-san sync assignments up with you?

We sometimes even run dungeons together, for certain values of "together", but usually it's our boss who does the syncing on our behalf, for her sake.

...forgive me if this is inappropriate to say but I don't love the vibe I'm picking up on of you being used mostly for her benefit

It's not inappropriate to say but I mostly think of it as being for the benefit of whoever she saves in the dungeons! She's got a great power and she's sucking up a crippling backlash that she can't even clear quickly to use it instead of quitting espering to go back to being a performer. I wouldn't impugn her right to do that but as long as she feels moved to do dungeons and I can help, that's all to the good. It could stand to be more serendipitous but that's not her or the guild's fault.

Jaeha supposes he is selfish, huh. There's something that feels just... wrong about all of this. If nothing else it does feel like it's a little bit the guild's fault.

She used to be a performer?

, he asks rather than trying to get into it.

Yep. Awakened in the middle of being some idol's backup singer, on stage, that's why her backlash is not secret.

Oh

That sounds terrible

Especially to the kind of person who wants to perform, damn.

Right?? I think very highly of her for being active as an esper at all. I mean maybe I wouldn't be able to stand her if we ever had a conversation but based on what I know I think she's cool.

Do you guys not interact when she's not backlashed?

No. This is me guessing and not something she has said, she hasn't said anything, but I think a) it is more practical for her to not know me, so that if she does accidentally think about who's touching her feet she will run out of things to think about that faster, and b) probably just like when I'm not backlashed I have to cram in all the alone time I don't otherwise let myself have, she probably has socialization she wants to do with, like, her family and friends who she already knows. I could make a fuss about it and insist on hanging out with her sometime, but it seems like the upside potential is not amazing and the downside potential pretty bad.

I suppose that makes sense

Quick, time to acquire a new topic to talk about.

Ahh.

My guild would probably be happy to poach you if you want to ?piss off your father? But pitch me on Juno ofc if they're cool.

I've been with Juno since I manifested and don't really know what other guilds are like, honestly

They're all the same, I think

Well, I've heard people say that Quasar is special, but it's where Lee Tae-gun is, so of course they'd say it

I talked Park Yoo-min's ear off on the phone one time, he's nice and he's Quasar. Cricket even liked him!

Right, you mentioned

He must really be something special for Cricket to like him, I think I'm jealous

Technically Cricket hasn't expressed any problems with you besides the smoking one and you could quit!

Do you think you're self-medicating? Nicotine's available in a lot of forms and in itself is not the dangerous part.

I suppose you could call it self-medicating

I don't smoke regularly

Only to calm my nerves

Wait shit is he coming off as nervous or anxious. He is not nervous or anxious! But if he tries to clarify that he will definitely come off that way so he'll just leave it as it is.

Aah.

Try gum or something then. Or live with Cricket thinking you smell, it doesn't bother me particularly.

Perhaps Cricket will be the push I need to quit

It would be flattering to be one of a very small number of people your cat likes

I certainly find it so

So should I ask my guild to make you an offer?

My current partner's with Juno

But I have to say I am sorely tempted

This gives him such a good opening for when Do-in breaks it off, actually, that's great.

You can tell Juno to make me an offer too, we can make 'em fight

You know, I just might

The Against Malaria Foundation will rejoice when my compensation like quadruples or something

The what now. Quick Google to the rescue.

Huh!

They seem interesting

I hadn't heard of them before

I was not blessed with the power to eradicate malaria but I was blessed with the ability to throw a lot of money at the folks working on it

fuck malaria

Man it sucks to run into things Haru cares about like that that he knows nothing about because he can't sound cool and likeable if he doesn't know anything about it.

You'll have to tell me more about this org

Though I'm unfortunately going to need to go prep for my next dungeon now

Which has the advantage of being true. It's not, like, urgent, his assignment is in half an hour, but still, he should look those guys up, too.

good luck take care!

Wo Do-in texts Jaeha to let him know he'll only get back to their silo kinda late today.

...figures. He supposes he'll spend a while feeling sorry for himself on his own in his silo after the dungeon. 

He's used to it. 

(Part of him wants to go find Haru instead but he doesn't want to come off as too clingy. He needs to be at least a little bit hard to get.)

AMF

that's the against malaria foundation, anglophones love abbreviations

emailed the guild president, I'd expect turnaround in idk 1-3 days depending on how many emergencies fall on her head

You're very efficient

, he replies a couple of hours later.