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It is a few hours into a projected 168 of them. Haru is trying to get back to sleep while his mother holds him, because 168 hours is going to feel a lot longer if he can't figure out how to sleep while lonelier than ought to be humanly possible.
Suddenly not having his mother holding him is certainly a way to ruin the attempt.
"It doesn't help if you do, I am having a magical problem and not a mood one, so I guess that means you needn't, you are a complete stranger and owe me nothing besides an ambulance or your choice of arguable improvement over an ambulance."
"Yeah, I get to be an esper, just like I always fucking wanted. Some people just fall into a nice simple coma or something, but not me, oh no."
"Mhm." Typetypetype. She finishes up, pockets her phone.
"Are you violent at all?"
"I don't feel so inclined and have not been historically but I am racking up symptoms at a really dismaying rate! I have dyspraxia and can be escaped by anyone capable of a brisk jog."
"Sure, if it's not too far, because, again, dyspraxia, I will trip and fall into traffic if I have to speed up above a sedate old-person pace to keep up with you."
"It's not." She leads him at a sedate old-person pace to a building half a block down from the one that looks weirdly like and yet weirdly unlike his own.
"It bears a strong resemblance to the exact block I live on except for all the ways it isn't! I live in Toronto, or at least so I remember myself to have believed in saner times."
"That's good, unless it isn't. At least it appears to me that we are both speaking English, so there's that."
"Well, it's better than being in Bangalore, especially since I'm in my pajamas," a T-shirt and buffalo check pants, "and it's worse than being in a Toronto that I recognize."
Door, keycode. The lock display instructs her to 'RETRY FINGERPRINT SCAN' and she jams her thumb on a side panel at a few angles until it chimes and lets them in. "So there's, uh, magic, in 'the Toronto that you recognize'?"
"It's everywhere in the world since the seventies. Espers, dungeons, monsters, whole nine yards. If I'm having a delusional episode about that it's really thorough and I cannot rely on my information that my episode should last only one week."
Elevator waiting. "I don't really follow the news but it does seem like a thing I would have... ever... heard of. If it were real." She pat-pats his shoulder.
"...Okay. - Oh." Her watch buzzes; she checks it. "He'll send someone within the hour." The elevator arrives and she hesitates, just for a beat, before leading him in.
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