"I'm not really sure where else might be safe for drops.  You might be more used to thinking about this than me.  ....Empty open-air sports stadium?  Except it's probably still trespassing even if you don't go closer than seven meters to anything in it."

"If there is nothing specific you have always fantasized about flying over I will just pick stuff and try to be scary in the process."

"Yeah, no.  Maybe later."  He's allowed to think about there being a maybe later without caveat now, since he's trying to switch.  (Or, with a caveat that he has to deliberately negate after he's thought it.)

"Ready?"

"Ummmm..."  Check check check that he can fit two fingers but not much more than that underneath all his straps.  This one needs adjusting.  "Did you still want to pick out conversation topics in advance?  And, what are you planning to do when Julien's back, fly home?  Or land and get back some other way."

"I'm planning to stay close enough to the house to fly home, backlashed me is competent to do Goodnight Carbon Monoxide Detector and snuggle and I don't have other plans. But I'll bring my phone in case he hates it and wants me to call an Uber. And yes, advance topics good."

"Good Night Carbon Monoxide Detector is very good for him and therefore me and I appreciate it, but yeah, I mostly meant in getting back here.  He might not need the Uber but he might also really want it, so, that sounds good."  The strap is adjusted; check check check check.  "Um, do you think you have enough dungeon stories to pull from to sustain conversation?  If talking about the fact that we're flying isn't enough, which it really might be."

"Yeah, I can do dungeon stories if they're interesting enough to get questions and comments."

"I am super interested in dungeons and so is Julien."  That is definitely all the straps checked, some of them more than once.  Ughhhhhhhh.

"Keen. Alrighty. You all good to get scooped there?"

Heeeeere is the extra-super-duty carabiner and here's the blanket.  "...I should have shoes on.  And socks."  But after that last bit of delaying and the regathering of the relevant items, yep, he'll get in position sideways next to Haru.

Scoop! And out the door and up up and awayyyyy!

Ren lives in a dense part of town and with some navigational tricks Haru can "climb" the various buildings until he's up a lot higher than twenty feet. "So I learned to fly before I ever set foot in a dungeon, and I didn't have to in the entry-level ones Rhombus brought me to. The first dungeon I did significant flying in was a water one, lots of little islands separated by a miniature ocean - like the wave patterns were miniature, it was really cool looking but I was a worse photographer then. So I was hopping from island to island a lot, each island had a victim in a grotto under the waterline."

WOW FLYING.  Ahahahaha wow.

"Grotto as in like, a cave with an enclosed pocket of air?"

"Yeah, they could breathe, though the tide kept going gradually up. I had to leave my guns on each island to swim down for people. In principle they could have swum up themselves, if they could swim at all, but it was hard to tell from inside the grottos how hard it'd be, and also I had to kill the mermaids first."

"Mer-der..." he says, somewhat uselessly, some of his brain taken up with trying to focus on how scary this is and most of the rest going holy shit holy shit this is really high and there's nothing but air touching me that's touching the ground.  - Right, but Haru will be sad if he's not getting talked to.  Ughhh he should have asked for Cricket Radio again, why did he think he could do this.  "Um - uh - did you -"  What does he saaaay. "You'll show us pictures of the water later even if they aren't very good?"

"Sure! It's not like they're blurry or anything, it just doesn't really convey how strange it was at the reduced scale, entire cresting whitewater tidal waves two inches high. The best shot has my foot in it and that was an accident. I had to do the whole dungeon barefoot because you don't want to swim in shoes. Geronimo!" Out over the edge of a skyscraper and they're dropping.

"aaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

(He doesn't actually think he's going to die, but it's very easy and probably good for the character transition to think about how he's going to die he's gonna die he's gonna die -)

"Careful, somebody might think I was flinging us off of buildings against your will."

"There are water shoes but maybe you didn't already have them."  Holy shit.  "Uh, sorry - I - yeah.  Are you going to do that again?"

"Are you sure you don't want it to be a surprise?" They've pulled out of the dive now and are now skating toward the water smoothly.

"I - I need a minute, can you - hold -"

Haru coasts to a stop. A midair stop above a pier. "Do you want me to land?"

"Noo.  Thanks."  There's some chance he can get his head in the right shape with a minute of thinking, and if he can't he'll have to do that again, which is frankly great for the paranoia - he has to be talking otherwise it's cruel.  "I guess I should narrate this - I'm, not sure who I am right now.  And I think maybe I can be Julien in a minute because I really didn't like that and - we got so close to the ground, it felt like - it looked like, and -"

"And, at first I was faking it, in my head, being like 'I'm gonna die I'm gonna die," but then we just kept falling, I don't think I have a good sense of scale, and I thought we were really going to splat for like a second, three quarters of a second, and," sniff, "it was really scary, and that was the point of it, I know it was the point of this, but - it was really scary -"

Haru squeezes him. "Did I overdo it?"