It's so very cozy.

So cozy.

"Should probably schedule my first dungeon sometime soon," Lucien says eventually.

"Mmyes. I will go bop all the people and you'll whisk them straight past the monsters. A few test dungeons and then they're going to start deploying us to the really dreadful ones where they don't want to leave anybody in a moment longer."

"Yeah that makes sense - I'm glad I'll be able to help."

"It can be pretty rough, in the bad ones. I usually get assigned bad psychic ones where people are clearly having the worst day of their lives but there's nothing visibly wrong, but with you we're probably going to be sent to big-name dungeons where people're being tortured."

"I didn't realize they got that bad."

"Most of them aren't. Most of them just grab people and hold them, especially the new ones. But the older ones that got away a few times get meaner and some of them start pretty mean to begin with. - they won't grab you, they don't take espers."

"... Possibly I am going to regret asking but if I'm going to learn anyways. Uh. How do they torture people?"

"Well, they're all different. Again I've mostly gotten psychic ones where there's nothing physically wrong, I get those because I throw off psychic effects, whereas I'm nothing special for dealing with, say, everything being on fire, like Volcanic Range."

"Do people survive that one, usually?"

"No. But somebody who could get close to its monsters could tap someone for you, and then you could deprive the monster of their victim and then the monster could be killed. - they explode. So usually Volcanic Range just kills people and takes a long time about it and there's no solving the problem. But if you pull them straight into a burn ward, maybe some of them."

"Yeah, I really hope I can help with that."

"I think you can. Easy ones first though."

Nod.

"I. Will be ready enough to help people in that state and my comfort shouldn't be the limiting factor but I might need to. I don't know. Be distracted afterwards."

"Of course. - you'd obviously have, like, a support team all around you, your job would be using your power and managing your backlash and your long-term stability, not personally comforting every dungeon victim. I talk to dungeon victims a lot but that's because of my backlash."

"Yeah that makes a lot of sense."

"... Oh, I might think all the burn victims are my fault."

"...maybe you should be blindfolded."

"Maybe, yeah."

"I'm not heatproof so I can just sit with you the whole time if it's specifically Volcanic Range. But a lot of the time if I'm going to be onsite for a dungeon that it'd be hard to carry victims through I'm going to be the one going in and tagging people. But we can take guiding breaks, getting person number twelve out a few minutes sooner isn't worth not getting person number fifteen out at all because we cracked up and had to abort."

"I think I will probably not crack in the middle of a dungeon. Though maybe if I had a bad enough time I won't be able to go and start another dungeon for a while or something."

"Even if you're very committed to not cracking and you can follow through on that under a lot of backlash, if you rack up too much too fast it'll process into chronic on the spot instead of over the next few hours, and then you wind up in the hospital over that."

"Ah. That does sound bad. How do I know when it's close?"

"Awakening level is about as bad as it can get without metabolizing into chronic, but there's some wiggle room past that because a little chronic won't kill you and it can be guided away like normal."

"How do you decide when you've have had enough and it's dangerous to continue?"

"Depends on your backlash and how you cope with it."