"Sometimes they kind of dissolve especially if they were, like, water elemental things or something, but I am not aware of biological-esque corpses that shrink! If this interests you do you want to be on my list of people to call on the phone while I'm backlashy? I can't talk to my partner, she has the exact opposite problem from me and I have to pretend she doesn't exist the whole time."

Oh wow that's way more networking success than he expected out of this situation, and for way less effort than he thought it would take.  "- Sure!  I've really been wanting to learn more about this sort of stuff recently, but school and work have kind of been kicking my ass."

"Both of them at once, yikes! Are you in college, you look about college-age."

"Money's got to come from somewhere.  And yeah, Materials Science."

"Nice, you going into dungeon mats or is that a completely extracurricular curiosity?"

"It's curricular!  They seem like the fastest way to cooler stuff and safer everything."

"Some of the government dungeon-coordination people sneak the victims souvenirs. I don't know if this batch are like that but you can try making sad faces at them!"

"Oooooh.  Thanks for the tip."

"Anytime. Ah, we're crossing the purple circle path, almost there. Here's the headphones, though I'd take it as a personal favor if you didn't become incapable of talking till you gotta."

He puts them around his neck.  "Sure thing."

"Thanks. It's basically a tic but I try to cooperate with myself, see."

"Sure.  I might try and learn a sign language in your position, if there's usually loud equipment in dungeons, but maybe not enough people know any to make it worthwhile."

"I am planning to learn sign language, but not for that reason! This is an unusually loud dungeon situation. It just turns out that learning languages is a good sweet spot for my backlash because I can indulge it without thinking to myself how pointless it is the entire time. I polished my high school French till it was shiny and now I'm working on Tagalog."

Oh so he's definitely been thinking about how pointless this conversation is the entire time, that makes sense and is fine.  "Nice!  How long since you switched?"

"Almost six months. My mother found me a tutor from among her numerous friends, she's actually as social as I act."

"Is that how you decided what language to go for?"  It's getting kind of loud but an esper owing you just a little bit of a personal favor is worth a just a tiny bit of hearing damage.

"Yep. I would have gone for Japanese but my family's too assimilated for me to already know anyone who'd teach me - and my partner, who by sheer coincidence is also Japanese, doesn't talk to me. I talk to her brother but he's not interested in teaching me."

...Julien caught some of those words.  On go the over-ears.  "Makes sense!" he projects.

Haru thumbs-ups weakly and gives up. He escorts Julien out the exit; the sound doesn't carry at all and he holds out his hand for the headphones. "Do you want to give me your number right now or just like, find my email on the blog and follow up that way, or forget about it, which is also fine."

"Let's do numbers."  He'll recite his once Traceless is ready.

"Again slower? Sorry, this is my brain on backlash -" But then he's got it and he can turn his phone to display his own number to Julien. Then it's back into the dungeon with him and his can of spraypaint for more rescuing.

Once he's got the contact for 'Esper Traceless' saved (complete with website), he guesses it's time to go make sad faces at government employees?  And then back to Starbucks with or without new rocks.  At least he got yoinked in the middle of a shift; one of his coworkers has tried to excuse lateness with alleged dungeons twice and Julien wouldn't want to have to navigate a situation involving anything less obvious than 'yeah, he just fuckin' disappeared in front of everyone.'

A government employee will sneak him a little chip of dungeon mineral with a smile. Starbucks, like all serious businesses, has staffing procedures that are robust against the possibility that their staff people will fuckin' disappear in front of everyone.

He smiles fake-weakly at the chip giver.  Robust in a way where he should stick around or go home, in this case?

He is certainly welcome to pick up the rest of his shift if he needs the hours - after all, it has not actually become any less likely that his co-workers will themselves be abducted by a dungeon in twenty minutes and it'd bring their bus number back up - but they have enough people to survive one (1) dungeon abduction from among the staff for the rest of the day.