"Some water'd be great!"  Here he comes; hup.

"Here ya go." He's got a bunch of little pint water bottles. "We're gonna follow those green X's, green's my spraypaint color for this one and Xs are this route specifically."

Chug chug chug.  "Sounds good."

Tromp tromp. "You going to want the medics when we get out or are you all good?"

"I'm fine."  He has a couple scrapes, but he keeps a minimal first-aid kit in his backpack.  Not that the backpack got eaten into the dungeon with him; it's presumably still at his work.  But once he and it are reuinited he should be able to patch himself up well enough.

"Glad to hear it! So what's your name - you don't have to tell me, I'm just very chatty when I'm backlashed -"

"It's Julien."

"Lovely to meet you. Steep part here, do you want me to carry you over it?"

Does he seem like the sort to prefer an honest effort and probably less inconvenience for him or someone knowing their limits and causing him some small certain inconvenience - hm, he seems genuine enough, and it's not like Julien would hate to be carried around.

"If you don't mind!  And I expect it's a lot nicer for me to meet you than the reverse, at the moment."

Scoop! "Not necessarily! It is true that as yet you are little distinguished from other dungeon kidnappees you could have been but I am similarly little distinguished from other rescue espers I could have been to you, presumably, and I'm the one with a magical psychological problem making me particularly keen to meet people."

"....That would get you some more points on this metric, yes.  It still seems hard to beat the possibility of there being no rescue esper, which has been somewhat on my mind whether or not it was very likely."

"That sometimes happens but not in a dungeon like this, this is very bog standard. Or, well, sometimes there's no rescue esper because it's the military but they're less sexy so their share of dungeon rescues get talked about less."

"That makes sense."  He wants to come off as maximally noninconvenient for a rescuee and also as interesting (positive) as possible within that constraint.  So what does he say.  .......Nothing, if he can't think of anything interesting, positive, and noninconvenient at a given point in the interaction.

They are past the steep section and Julien gets set down. "Not yet but closer to the entrance you're gonna want headphones, I brought some for you, they've got jackhammers because they wanna harvest the walls."

"It's good they're on that.  Do you know whether this stuff is one of the ones with known applications?"

"No, but they're taking it to turn it into status symbol art and, I don't know, countertops or something, as a fallback. They've made off with a dead centipede or two also but my intuition is that the centipedes are nothing and the cave stuff is maybe something."

"It's really polite of the status symbol people to help fund dungeon mining."

"I know, right? The briefer the spells of nothing useful the more intently people can look for the windfalls."

"I'm always wondering how much stuff sitting around as sculptures or countertops would actually be really useful if only we knew what to do with it."

"Well, R&D gets first crack but there is certainly no guarantee that they catch everything. Maybe in fifty years they'll run a new test on a scrap of this stuff and then urgently buy all the old countertops to turn into spaceship parts."

"Which is still better than the same happening to a bit of centipede."

"I bet they occasionally have debates about it - if they find something really really useful, before they find the dungeon core, whether to let it live - I've never been assigned such a dungeon unless this is one, but I bet it gets brought up now and then, especially ones kinda like this that isn't physically injuring anybody and has a lot of the thing. Sure, statistically if you let it come back it'll be meaner next time, but how much meaner, really, and it'll have the same stuff."

"I wish it were easier - or, safer, really - to tell whether letting dungeons live affected base rates of them popping up.  Sometimes I think about a future where most dungeons are old tame ones we know are useful because we let them crowd out the new ones, but of course trying to get there might just mean we get a lot more dungeons in total."

"I have a post about that on my blog!"

"Really!  Can I get spoilers on any conclusions you came to?"

"Of course, but the conclusion was that we don't know! All the worst dungeons are the oldest ones, but is that because they were old, or because they were relatively hard to clear back when we didn't know what we were doing? I link like seven different people's takes on it and none of them are satisfying."

"Well, I'd love to read it anyway."

"Eventualities dot traceless dot com."

Julien goes for his pocket, but pauses.  "- Iiiiiii will take that down once we're somewhere less hostile.  And importantly not before then."

"If you google me it comes up."

"Excellent.  Do you have a favorite post you've written?"

"Hmm, writing-wise no, probably a tie between like six of them for the photography, but in terms of the most original research I've managed to personally pull off probably the long interview with my cat."

"...Your cat?"

"I have a monster cat! He does four dimensional dungeon navigation, since he's from a four dimensional dungeon. He can talk but I had to teach him to read."

"That's so cool!"  Julien doesn't ask whether the cat's in favor of the framing of belonging to Traceless; if he doesn't it won't help anything and if he does it's rude.  "What's his name?"

"I named him Cricket. He hates almost everybody in the entire world and the people at the agency were just calling him 'cat' because he wouldn't take a name from any of 'em."

"Hates them - in a monster way or a cat way?  ...Or in a human way."

"Cat-flavored human way, I guess. He's very judgmental. And impolite."

Someone should check in on this cat but it's not going to be him.  Probably it's fine.  "Much more charming on a cat, I imagine."

"Well, he likes me, I wouldn't blame anyone else for preferring not to deal with him."

"Makes sense.  Do you know of any other friendlyish monsters floating about?"

"There's a few, but it requires pretty specific conditions - a lot of dungeons never have monsters exit, a lot of escaped monsters die when the dungeon does, Cricket's unusual. And not all of them can talk."

"Could he talk before he left?"

"No - or, he was not recorded doing so and doesn't remember doing it and no other monsters from that dungeon were observed to speak."

"Huh.  Did you say any of the centipedes they took were alive?"

"They haven't taken any alive. It's not something they usually try to do unless they have a specific reason to want to. Most monsters don't live without their dungeons even outside it."

"I didn't know that any did.  It's... do you mean most die upon leaving in the first place, or just when the dungeon collapses?"

"Second thing. The ones that persist are usually the more - biologically grounded ones. So probably not the centipedes, they're too big for bug anatomy to work. Though they might shrink, Cricket shrank."

"Do the corpses ever shrink, do you know?"

"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.

.....Yeah, money is money; he'll finish up.  After he sits for a few minutes and bandages his little scrapes and has a snack from his bag.

Hey it's Traceless! Can I call you and tell you about the post I'm working on because I can't write anything down yet?

- Money is money but networking is networking!  Actually after sitting down everything is catching up to him and he's going home goodbye sorry see you Thursday.

Sure!

he sends once he's packed and out the door.

Ring ring.

"Hello!"

"Hi! So I'm trying to put something together on dungeon selectivity - uh, do you mind if I put you on speaker, I have speech to text on so I can go back and pull content out of the conversation later for the writeup when I am capable of writeups -"

"That's fine, sure."

"You're on speaker, my partner can't hear you but Cricket can. So there's some really obvious factors of dungeon selectivity, like that they do not go for kids as often as there are kids in the population - not never, but it's still notable - but there's subtle stuff too, like - are you particularly put off by centipedes, actually -"

"No, I actually like bugs.  Hello, Cricket."

"If I wanted to talk to you I would call you on the phone."

"Be nice, kitty. Anyway, it's really subtle in baby dungeons that haven't gotten away and come back, and yours was one. I'd expect a very slightly elevated rate of disliking centipedes among people it grabbed but easily loseable in statistical noise. But baby dungeons are also less traumatizing so it's easier to get people to complete surveys afterwards - you'll probably get like thirty of them, please fill them out, dungeon researchers love it when you fill out surveys. So we have more data on who the baby dungeons pick, but it's striking enough to notice in the non-baby dungeons. I don't think that one is going to want you back, it will have - I speak loosely and speculatively here - noticed that you like bugs, or at least that you were not alarmed by the centipedes it had on offer."

"I was pretty alarmed!  It just, y'know, wasn't about the fact that they were centipedes."  Or maybe it kind of was; there's something to... the way that everyone treats bugs, just because they're so much smaller than them and they can get away with it, and the idea of being the small one, even though he tries to treat bugs well...  "I will fill out any surveys sent to me."  If he has time.  He'll make time, this sort of thing is important.

"I mean, everyone's some baseline amount of alarmed about being kidnapped by a dungeon. Even the baby ones seem great at avoiding people who are like 'sweet, I really didn't want to go to my mother in law's birthday party' or something. That one did not obviously have other sources of alarm going on besides the centipedes, I don't think it was even trying with the pretty walls..."

"It seems like someone would have to have something pretty specific going on to be afraid of the walls.  I did get a little fragment of them; thanks for the advice."  He's going to make it into a necklace, once the professionals clear it for being probably safe enough to wear against your chest for long periods.

"I guess people could be freaked about by how mazey it is. We'll see when we get surveys back if we can tell what it was going for."

"Seems kind of hard to guess before then.  Is it usually, for baby ones, before the surveys?"

"It's not hard to guess, in this case my guess is solidly the centipedes, even with you as a counterexample. But it's impossible to be sure even with masses of data."

Does he in fact want to talk about himself here - sure, why not, seems relevant - "I like bugs in a way where it was... kind of notably about the reversal.  Very saliently being the squishable and wanting-to-hide party.  I don't know whether that makes me an exception or if it might have been about that."

"Huh, I'll have to see if I can get the surveys amended real quick to account for that, I'm not sure they will have thought of it - there are very dedicated people on the dungeon surveys but there are so many dungeons to design surveys about - so like, you have preexisting... bug sympathies? Because they're squishable and want to hide?"

"More the first thing than the second.... It's - people hate bugs just for being weird little guys, going about their business - some of them are dangerous but people act exactly the same way towards ones that aren't, or worse, because at least they in some sense respect dangerous ones.  And it's easy to kill or hurt them, so people just - do - and don't feel bad about it at all, just because they aren't cute.  And so it makes sense, if you're a bug, to want to hide and be in little crevices, because everything's out to get you.  ...And of course there are problems with normal predators, and bugs eating other bugs, and even if people weren't awful on purpose we're just so much bigger; it's hard to avoid hurting all of them.  But the normal human dynamic was, yeah, very salient, and the hidey-hole things were more stemming from that, secondary to it.  To me."

"Huh. I'm gonna call a survey guy about that real quick before they get it finalized, this has been great, thanks for picking up."

"You're welcome!"  'See you later' - no, he doesn't want to be presumptuous; 'Have a nice -' a nice what, recovery?  Day??  "Bye."

"Bye!" And dead air.

Well, that conversation only took him like two blocks from work, now, in theory he could go back; he's sure they'd have him gladly enough.  Or he could go home and read Traceless's blog, and chill out a bit after having been yoinked into a dungeon, in case it somehow had more effect on him than it seems to have, and not have to deal with jerking his coworkers around even more.

.....He does the math on how much money he'll make in his remaining hours for today.  He would not pay that much to buy these benefits, so the choice is really obvious, it turns out.  He'll get himself something out of the bakery to make up for it.  He can relax once he's out of school.

It takes a week and a half for him to muster the free time to check out the blog.  (That's mostly the fault of the surverys, which he fills out dutifully and detailedly; he's not that overscheduled.  Mostly.)  He's showed off his fragment in class when it seemed topical, and the reports about his dungeon's walls all seem fine, so late one night when he needs to wind down after homework and before trying to sleep he makes his best attempt at wrapping it artfully in wire, and puts Traceless's post on base rates of dungeon appearances on TTS to listen to during.

At least one dungeon will appear in almost every city of more than four hundred thousand residents almost every day. Sometimes they show up in smaller ones; they come thicker and faster in larger and denser cities. Here is some quibbling about what part of a broad metropolitan area counts as part of the city. If you make this range of reasonable assumptions it seems to follow this formula, if you make this other range of assumptions it's this more complicated formula, some people prefer the second thing but the first one is more popular because of how the formula is simpler. Almost every dungeon that appears in a given day is going to be a new dungeon, never seen before - records are imperfect but they do have databases going spottily back to the seventies and solidly back to the early eighties noting dungeon features to see if the same ones are reappearing across the globe and they're now very confident that if you destroy the core, it doesn't come back, and the majority of observed dungeons are de novo. Dungeons that get away, come back, refined and nastier. Here are some case studies of when various dungeons including the big names like Volcanic Range and Nightmare come back inside and outside of confluences. Dungeons that get away once usually get away twice because usually they got away in the first place due to being really hard to clear for some reason, but sometimes it was just that the right espers for the situation weren't available in the right area or someone made a tactical mistake. Dungeons that get away twice do not come back as much scarier, but for selection effect reasons you're likely to keep seeing them again till they land in range of a team that is really determined to take them out. Here are your approximate odds of getting eaten by a dungeon per decade depending on how many people live within a mile of your house.

Oh what a good post.  What a very good post.  He should read the rest of the blog... someday.  When he has any free time.

But he does make a point during a weekend lunch break to at least skim the interview with Cricket in an attempt to try and suss out whether Traceless was accurately representing him.  It's not that Traceless doesn't seem approximately cool, it's just that monsters don't have an established place in society and it seems really easy for people to accidentally abuse them.  A substantial number of completely regular cats owned by basically nice people are being kind of abused already, according to Julien; he wants a better view of the vibes.

Some of the interviews, including this one, have the original audio available in the post without any TTS shenanigans. It's illustrated with a Cricket photo in which he's posing vainly in a patch of sun, stretching out one wing.

It establishes the biographical facts of Cricket's life. He began in a dungeon which appeared in York, Toronto. Like most, it was new; this was its first and only appearance. It was four-dimensional and the monsters were assorted larger and meaner and winged versions of various animals. Traceless dug up after-action reports and apparently in addition to the giant winged cat, there were reports of a dog, a gecko, a squirrel, and some kind of frog, but since the dungeon was 4D, a lot of the suspected monsters were never seen in their entirety, they just reached kata or ana and killed people who were trying to hold the entrance from the dungeon end. An esper with a homing power that works across the fourth dimension was hauled in from Manitoba by teleport after the dungeon monsters started escaping and the dungeon's urgency level was escalated accordingly. That esper, Columba, located every identified victim of the dungeon and pulled them out, over the course of a few grueling hours with a lot of guiding breaks, and then homed in on the dungeon core and killed it. Meanwhile, more local teams were trying to deal with the escaped monsters. They killed most of them, but by the time the winged cat - the size of a black bear and venomous - was tracked down, the dungeon was dead, and the cat had shrunk to normal cat size and lost the venom and addressed the SWAT team in English. (He said "what the fuck is your problem".)

There's not a lot of robust policy on benign-ified monsters, but the SWAT team nonlethally arrested the cat and held onto him for a little while before the Maple Esper Agency's in-house research department received custody of him to investigate his properties. There's an X-ray, on the blog, showing how the wings attach, which was taken during this time. Cricket remembers vanishingly little of being a monster with a living dungeon and it's easily possible that every snatch of memory he is able to conjure up is a later confabulation or maybe localized to the few minutes in which the dungeon underwent its death throes. Analysis of his accent and vocabulary gets results like he grew up in York. Eventually MEA offered to get him food he liked more than normal cat food if he would help with a 4D dungeon; he did this, in Rochester NY, proving able to extend into and see across the fourth dimension just fine even in diminished form. However, he still had a very low opinion of everyone at Maple and refused to answer to any name they tried to give him (there's a list, which starts with Fluffy and ends with Cata).

During Traceless's awakening he decided he should get a cat - originally intending to get a completely normal cat - as a failover for backlash compulsive socializing during the inevitable moments when no human picks up the phone. Traceless's mother posted about this on an esper forum frequented by a Maple employee who offered - initially somewhat jokingly - to provide a cat. Traceless, once awakened, went to the office where Cricket lived and offered to teach him to read - he's native-fluent in English but began illiterate. Cricket reports taking an instant liking to this most worthwhile of humans, and went home with him that very day, and accepted the name Cricket, and insists on reporting to him and no one else, even though Traceless can't himself operate in 4D, when dungeon-navigating. Cricket now spends most of his time watching television (it's good for providing conversation topics when his human is backlashed and needs to be purred on and talked to) and gets sashimi four meals a day. He says being in 4D dungeons is nice because his fur can go in all the directions it's supposed to but he doesn't really mind being projected into three dimensions most of the time.

Lunches are better for eye-reading than ear-, but having the original audio is importantly good because it means that he can check that Cricket pretty definitely said the things Traceless claims he did.

That's so much.  Cricket's origin is so much.  Dungeons are a moral nightmare, and it's so concerning that entities that're out there killing people wantonly might be able to wake up into suitable companions.  It's - horrifying.  But the thing for him personally to do is the same:  he has to keep his head down and learn as much as he can and contribute to the great project of humans getting cooler stuff and safer everything, until the day when they're cool enough and safe enough to save the monsters too.

At least Cricket's current life seems to be genuinely fine.  Julien wasn't going to do anything about it either way but it's one less thing to worry about.

That curiosity satisfied, he doesn't successfully make time to read more posts for a while.  Though he is subscribed to future ones; he keeps an eye out for the one on dungeon selectivity to see whether he's in it at all.

Not by name; Traceless didn't ask for permission to identify him. He refers to "talking to dungeon victims, as is my habit". The post reiterates the basics - usually not kids, though there have been a handful of dungeons that wanted kids specifically for some reason. Basically never people who would rather sit in (that particular) dungeon than do whatever they were otherwise going to do with their next several hours. He posts example surveys - there's the one they pass out after Nightmare that people usually only return months later with the help of their therapists if at all, there's the standard one with fill-in-the-blanks to customize it about the nature of the monsters and the captivity, and it wants the date and time of your kidnapping and some Likert scales and free-answer sections. Here's a relatively well-answered one from a Baltimore dungeon last year; eighty percent response rate, no obvious trolls in the data, and it shows basically what you'd expect (lots of people who were scared of heights in a zero-gravity dungeon floating miserably). Here's one where people didn't answer much - it was a sex-themed dungeon; response rates for those suck and some people just use the survey to scream indignantly about being surveyed. This means they still don't know how those people were chosen and remain pretty confused about sex-themed dungeons compared to the standard kind. The centipede dungeon maybe doing something unexpected wrt fear of centipedes is a minor note in a post he's obviously been working on for a while.

That's as much as he expected!  Unless you factor in that he thought it might well not show up at all.  Do the ones that want kids tend to take only kids?

They don't seem perfect at it, but sometimes they're imperfect in a way that still results in all-kids kidnappings, like this one that seemed to want kids aged five to ten and got a twelve year old and a three year old in there.

Fascinating.  ...Unfortunately it's fascinating in a way that means he still needs to get to cooler stuff and safer everything, and school and work are still kicking his ass, and so it seems kind of unlikely that any time when Traceless is going to want to call him is a time when he's going to be free, at least until like spring break.  (He'll be working more hours then, but with more of them in the morning, so maybe not all of them will be during esper recovery times?).  If Traceless texts him before then he'll relay this, and also leave a comment about his centipede experience on the post, if that seems like the sort of thing other people are doing here.

Totally in line with the blog culture to comment on the centipede post.

He gets two more texts - one in the middle of the night ("guess who got called to a code R at two in the morning, obviously don't wake up for this if you aren't already up, I'm going through everybody in my contacts and crossing my fingers") and one at a saner but still inconvenient hour ("this a good time? I have dungeon mats on the brain").

The first one Julien doesn't respond to except with a reactji the next morning and his comment on the blog; the second gets Traceless the datespan of Julien's spring break.

Unfortunately, two days into that span, things start being - wrong.  Or right, sometimes.  Suspiciously so.  His bus is perfectly on time; that's nothing, his bus sometimes is.  People keep - not staring at him, nothing so overt, but - glancing at him.  Watching him, maybe.  It's hard to say, because if they do they obviously don't want him to catch them at it, and he doesn't want to let them catch him catching them.  At work, Aliya, noted constant grump, asks him how he's doing and whether he's doing anything fun for break, and then tells him - cheerfully, for her - about her own plans to take a trip down to Niagara Falls.  The customers are - they keep - he's not sure, but something seems implacably, dreadfully off about them.

Almost as if - they're actors.  Like all the real customers have been replaced, with the goal of...... what.  Something.  He doesn't know.  But he only gets more confident as the day goes on - as he sees someone walk in, look at the menu for several minutes, then at their phone, and then leave without ordering; as people are chipper to him in obviously fake ways and impatient with him so clearly just to double-mask whatever hatred or malice they feel towards him - that everything around him is a scenario constructed around him.  To get something out of him.

But he still has no idea of what.  He's got to play along.  Until he can find out.

So, yes, here he is, a completely normal barista doing completely normal barista actions.  Breathe normally, chat normally, smile normally.  If you can't smile normally err on the cheerful side instead of the terrified one.  His hands feel off somehow, his arms, his whole body feels - tingly or empty, or something, as if he's not quite real, either.  But that at least might just be the panic.  Or it could mean that he's in a hallucination.  Hard to say, but either way it doesn't actually stop him from punching in orders and making coffees.  Whatever they want out of him they're going to have to work for it.

And they do; it's not four hours before Kian mis-makes a chai latte and offers it to Julien, and he knows, he knows it's poisoned.  Or maybe drugged, it could just be drugged.  Something to drop him back into the complacency he's known his whole life?  Did he just wake up to the true nature of reality, or has he been dropped into a hostile facsimile of something that once was real?  It's impossible to say, but no matter what he must not drink this, and secondarily he must not tip his hand.  He puts on his most casual smile and tells Kian to keep it for himself.  The fucker.  He accepts without much protest and downs it, as if to show off how poisoned it isn't, as if Julien doesn't know that they - whoever's running this - are already controlling everything, that obviously that sort of trick is trivial to them.

There's the water in his water bottle.  That's probably safe.  He'll just have to make it last until he has a better idea of what's going on.

He restarts his phone, as casually as possible, during a lull.  So that his fingerprint won't unlock it until he puts in the pattern again.  It probably won't help anything, but it's as low risk as any of the protective actions available to him, and it might help.  Somehow.  In some of the more optimistic cases, where this is just government action about him instead of a fully constructed minireality.

And he keeps working.  As normally as he can manage.

"Hi can I get a venti iced caramel macchiato with almond milk and an extra shot of espresso and put the caramel in the actual coffee not on top of the foam and do you know how to do the designs, I want a design on it."

"Of course!"  It would be convenient if they would just give him easy fucking orders, but that wouldn't be very verisimilitudinous, would it, which is less annoying but more unsettling.  It's a very realistic simulation, he'll give it that, except for all the ways in which it clearly fucking isn't.  Coffee goes to the customer, just as asked for.  It slows down the line a little but the line isn't made of real people so what does it matter.

The macchiato person doesn't tip. The next person just wants a flat white.

He doesn't care if they don't tip!  It's not like he's going to get to keep the money anyway!!  Flat white!!!

...Hey Aliya, could you actually be the one to go get more milk from the walk-in instead of him.  Yeah he'll make this order for you, don't worry about it, he's got it.  (The walk-in is a sacred place where people are allowed to scream and cry and fall apart, or at least the real one is, and if he goes there he might do those things.)  Here's the order she was working on!  He's good at Starbucks it's his job!  His normal job which he's performing normally!!  Except that he's cold and doesn't want to go into the walk-in for the rest of the day!

This guy wants four blueberry muffins for his children who are waiting outside with his wife and the fact that there are only three of them left does not deter him from wanting this.

"I'm so sorry sir!  Can I interest you in one of our other flavors?  Perhaps chocolate chip or lemon poppy seed?"  What happens if he breaks character.  Probably he gets tortured somehow; he should really really avoid that.  He really needs to walk the line between telling this guy to fuck off and breezing out of here, and not revealing that he knows that nothing about this actually matters.  But erring on the cheerful side, always.

"No, if they don't all get the same kind they're going to flip, I need four blueberry. Can you check in the back," he says wearily.

"We have four chocolate chip!"

"One of them is allergic to chocolate. Look, I told you what I want, very clearly."

"We do have some batter in the back!  If you're willing to wait between twenty-five and forty minutes, I could bake you a fresh one!"

"God. Fine. You do that then."

Muffins!!  Also wow it's been almost six hours; once they're in the oven he's got to take his lunch, otherwise it'll be suspicious illegal!  ............His lunch is probably poisoned even if his water bottle isn't, so he will, walk?  Around?  Outside.  For half an hour.

"Spare change?"

"Sorry, I don't carry cash."  Great job Julien that's exactly what you normally say.  You can do this.

Billboard. Bus. Crying baby. Car horn.

Car horn near him is scary, he's scared, scared is the thing you're supposed to be when there are sudden loud noises next to you.

And now he just needs - he just needs to get himself back under control - he's - got to - it was a startle, not something that could start a panic attack -

Fuck.

"Mister? Are you okay?"

"Ahahahahaha yes.  Thank you.  It's - finals!"  It could not be less the time for finals. "Midterms.  College.  You know how it is!  I am very tired."

"Wow, looks rough, good luck on your tests."

"Thank you!"  Jesus Christ.  He routes towards someplace with less traffic.  That's very normal.  People don't like loud noises and he's people and he's even a specific person who normally likes to walk along quieter streets.  Sometimes.

Nobody bothers him on the quiet street, though he can spot a person adjusting the blinds in a second story window. And a squirrel.

Hhhhhhhh fuck.  Fuck.  The fucking squirrels are watching him.  He really wants to put on some music and try to chill out some but he can't do that without unlocking his phone, there's nothing it thinks he might want to resume, and he absolutely cannot do that.  So he doesn't do that, and he doesn't look forlornly at his phone wishing it were safe to unlock, because obviously he just had an update queued, or thought he did, and then hasn't gotten around to unlocking it since then.  He doesn't want to listen to music, actually, it's fine.  He whistles, some.  That helps; having something to do with his breath control is better than just trying to keep it even.  It is a lovely spring day and he's enjoying the weather and he forgot to bring his lunch out to enjoy the weather with.  Yes.

He's back at work with two minutes to spare; he does have to look at his phone in its capacity as a clock.  But that's not suspicious.  Is muffin guy still around or did the oven finish up or did he give up and leave on his own.

Muffin guy took the kids on a different errand but has returned for the four blueberry muffins.

Here they are.  He can even have four warm ones instead of the three from the case and one fresh one.

The kids probably appreciate that. The guy doesn't thank him but his wife leaves a dollar in the tip jar before they go hand out the muffins to the kids.

Except for how he isn't real, muffin guy probably has his own problems.  The character of muffin guy is raising multiple kids and is maybe taking them on vacation or something and that's hard.  The character of Julien sympathizes with him.  And once again the tip doesn't fucking matter so the character of Julien doesn't really need to form or express any opinions about the character of muffin guy's wife and whether he's insulted by or appreciative of the loonie.  There are other customers to serve!  For another two hours!  And then it's normal to go home so he has to go home.

Pigeons. Panhandlers. Traffic. Taco stand.

It's probably safer to eat at a taco stand than at his apartment or getting food from the grocery store but no way no how is it safe.  He'll have to figure out something later.

Hello his apartment hello one of his housemates who's hanging out in the kitchen; he greets you normally.  What can he do, what the fuck can he do to kill the evening, that's normal and that doesn't involve his phone or computer and also doesn't put him at incredibly high risk of slipping up in front of people.  ...Music.  He takes the guitar off its stand in the living room and - normally he would look at chords on his laptop but they have a songbook around somewhere.  He finds it after twenty minutes.  He wants to improve his technique it's normal the book is instructional it has lessons it's normal.  He doesn't lock himself in his room because it doesn't have a lock and that would be weird and he's, instead, normal.

After several hours his fingertips are very sore and he's really, really really incredibly thirsty, and also pretty hungry, but at least he can do the fingerpicking part and not just chords to 'Hey There, Delilah'.

Car alarm in the distance. Housemate fixing stirfry for dinner. Bird out the window.

Yes great his captors are successfully piping in 'Toronto Soundscape College Apartment Spring Evening | ASMR To Not Have A Panic Attack To (10 Hours) (Binaural)', good job, them.

Right, books exist also.  He replaces the guitar in the common area and - doesn't really feel like hunching over a textbook for the time being; what else has he got.  Traceless's blog, if he'd somehow known to print it out ahead of time; what's he actually got.  Holmes collection?  Holmes collection.  Holmes collection can keep him at least nominally occupied well into the night, until he wears himself out enough to fall asleep on it.  He doesn't need to unlock his phone for his alarms for tomorrow to still be set, thank fucking god.  Even if he was able to sleep straight through he'd be getting about four hours of sleep, but of course they have to give him nightmares on top of that; aren't they so funny.  They must be having a good laugh at him.

He's at work on time.  8:00 AM sharp, and looking a little more like people tend to for the 4:00 AM shift.  He stands outside for a minute, digging his smiles out of the junk drawer in his torso where they got shoved last night, and then steps inside.  Chipperly.  For another eight and a half hours of yesterday's deal.

Latte with a pump of cinnamon. Black coffee and make it fucking hot. Peppermint mocha. Tall regular. Guy asking for a "large" daring him to insist that he call it by its Starbucks name.

Julien will call it a large if that's what the guy wants!  It's not fucking Starbucks doing this to him, is it; he's sucking up to reality and not to company policy.  (....If it is Starbucks doing this to him he's going to get so much money from suing them, but also it's definitely not Starbucks doing this to him.  They're not that powerful and he's not that lucky.)

Vanilla bean custard danish. "A muffin", like it's obvious which kind. Sandwich. Tea. Seasonal beverage which is not in season.

Julien can handle all these customers with grace and tact despite his looming headache and dizziness and fixation on the idea of drinking some water, any water, even though it will poison him.  He was right about his water bottle being safe before, he's pretty sure.  Would it be safe now?  - No, that's ridiculous.  It was safe because he filled it up before this started happening.  Now it's solidly in the happening phase and all the water available to him is evil.  That's the only thing that makes sense.

People usually don't read his nametag and address him by name but this guy is going to before ordering a complicated thing in French.

"Eugh. Anglophones." He orders the thing again in accented English.

He's - he can't.  He ran out of him.  There's no more Julien.  He's going to get tortured - okay he is already being pretty tortured but now there are going to be like.  Broken bones, or knives, or the sensation of pain being beamed directly into his mind, like everything else already is.  Should he try and kill himself, first?  It doesn't really seem like it would help.  Getting back in character would help, almost certainly, very definitely, and he -
just -

can't -

"I have said," complicated order.

So the thing is that the sane thing to do is recover, even if it takes him an obvious, obvious amount of time; they have to already know he knows.  They're humoring him.  They're humoring him, but every minute they're humoring him is one they're not torturing him.  Actively.

But instead, since there is no more him to recover with, he staggers back away from the POS tablet, eyes darting around and clutching at the strap on his apron.

"Excuse me! May I get service!" calls the Quebecois guy to his nearest co-worker.

"I have - to go -" he hisses, and lurches for the door.

"Julien? It's not your break yet, you jerk!" calls the co-worker who has barely taken two steps toward his section of the counter.

The thing about the door is that it's really heavy, and Julien is not very - anything - right now.  But maybe he can open it if he kind of drapes himself onto it?  There's a crash bar; it can't be that hard to get out of here, can it?  - Or is he locked in; are they going to start disemboweling him right here on the floor of this Starbucks -

The door opens.

"Julien!" hollers his co-worker.

Okay, the street!  He's going to die out on the street and not on the floor of this fucking Starbucks.  He's going to be tortured for hours or days until they get bored with him and hook him up to different mind control, on the sidewalk outside this fucking Starbucks.  Here he is, on the sidewalk.  That's where he is.

People are definitely looking at him now, but of course this is independent of how he just burst madly out of a Starbucks and looks like he's about to collapse.

Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.  There is so little him, there isn't any, but - if anyone comes near him he has to try and make a run for it.  In the opposite direction of them.

People are mostly going around him, but, like, it's a sidewalk.

Everyone's coming at him!!  He sprints for about two paces, then kind of stagger-runs for half a block, and then strategically crashes into a garbage can.  It's one of the metal ones, stable enough for him to lean and pant on.

"Sir! Sir are you all right?"

"Stay back!"

"Do you need an ambulance?"

"No!"

"Joe, what's going on -"

"Guy's collapsed on a trash can, see -"

"Well, call 911."

"Says he doesn't need it."

Julien tries to get his feet properly underneath him.  If he has to fight anyone he needs the most stable foundation he can muster.

"Do you have a ride coming or something?"

"You tell me, why don't you!"

"Joe, I think you should just call 911 and have done with it."

Joe pulls out his phone.

...........If Julien tries to move the best he's going to manage is to get one trash can over, where he will also collapse.  Better to keep his reserves up right here until something happens.

(Ugh.  Headache.  And the little puddle over there by the curb is looking so good right now.)

"Hey - there's this guy, I don't know him, he's just acting like - no -" He gives the intersection.

"God. Fine. I can stay on the line. I'll ask. Guy, what's your name?"

"Fuck you."

"He swore at me, I don't really want to ask him any more questions. Yeah-huh. No."

Who the hell do they think they're fooling.  ...Whatever.

"Jesus Christ, fifteen minutes? What if he were having a heart attack? What if I were late for something? Come on!"

- Right, yes, okay, that's what's happening here, is that they're saying fifteen minutes (right in front of him, as if he needs it spoonfed) so he lets his guard down.  And then really they'll be here in like ten, or five, and he'll have sat down to try and get his strength up for the impending fight, and he won't be prepared.  That's what they want.  Well, they can't fool him.  He's going to stand right here, leaning on this trash can, and remain vigilant.

"No, it was a rhetorical question, I'm not late for anything, but that doesn't - thank you. Yes."

After about fifteen minutes an ambulance pulls up. Paramedics come out.

They can try and take him!!  And maybe even succeed, but he's not going down without a fight!

They just want to talk at first! They want to know how he's feeling! And who his emergency contacts are! And if he is oriented to time place and person!

"Probably not as bad as I'll feel in an hour!"

In an hour? What happens in an hour?

It's not that he wants them to give up on the masquerade and start torturing him, but the fact that that hasn't already happened is really confusing.  "I - because -"  Really annoying that the throat is one of the main water parts as well as talking parts.  "You're -"

He looks like he is having a bad time and should come to the hospital for real doctors to have a look at, okay?

"N - o -"  Stupid fucking voice stupid fucking poison water.

And he looks a little dehydrated, would he like some water.

He swallows.  "Fuck you!!"  (Yes, desperately.)

Does he maybe want to work with them enough to demonstrate that he has a solid understanding of what exactly is going on so that they can accept his apparent desire to refuse transport, because if he doesn't seem to understand that they can insist.

There it is, that's what he expected.  "My emergency contacts are all in the real world."  ...Or, well, he didn't expect them to give him this many chances to go back to playing along.  He - really doesn't want to be tortured, actually -

...so, psychotic break, looks like.

"It's -" he's terrified, he's so scared - "March 13th.  Monday.  Is what we're pretending it is.  Right?  I can - I can go back.  To pret -"  His voice breaks; he coughs.  Several times.  "To pretending?"

Sure but he's gonna pretend it in the hospital. In he gets.

- No, no nononononono -

He is not the first potentially violent psychotic guy they have put in an ambulance. (Actually he is the first one for the paramedic on the left but still.)

"Please - I'm sorry, imsorryimsorryimsorry - please don't - torture me - I can pretend -"

"We're not gonna hurt you, we just need to get you where the doctors can look you over, okay? You sure about the water, you really look like you could use it -"

"Sure, yes, okay -"  It's definitely, definitely drugs, but if he doesn't they are going to tor👏ture👏 him👏and anyway he wants it so, so badly.

Bottle of water.

Chug chug chug chug it's gone except for the portion of it which is all over his shirt and his stupid fucking fake Starbucks apron.  ....The case where it isn't drugs is the case where it's poison, which means he might have just sprinted down the path to torture instead of delaying it for a little longer.  Fuck.

They're taking vitals now. Wow his heart rate is yikes.

He could keep his heart rate kind of normal as a barista but he knew how to be a barista and he does not know how to be a person getting kidnapped by an ambulance under threat of torture and also possibly having already been poisoned.  "Could I please have another?"

Yes, he can have another water.

waterDrugs!!  Yaaaaay drugs.  Or poison!  Holy shit it's so good though.  Is there a third in reach.

...yes but they're getting sort of more concerned about him, when was the last time he had anything to drink?

They knoooooow thiiiiiiiis why are they bothering.  "This morning!"  That's when he fished the last dregs out of his water bottle with a finger.

Well, they'll put in his chart that he's weirdly thirsty for a barista who last drank something this morning, sometimes extreme thirst is a symptom of something. Will he also answer other questions like a remotely normal person while he is in this micromood.

...Actually he has acquired the Sʟᴏsʜʏ status effect and he would like to throw up most of the water he just drank do they have an obvious receptacle for that in the next 2.5 seconds or is it going to be the floor.

They have a barf bag, here it is.

Gwuhhhhhhh.

- Yes of course!  He loves answering questions.

Okay, name, emergency contact, insurance information -?

Julien Doucet.  (It - he - he really doesn't want to give the simulation an excuse to traumatize him on the faces of actual people he knows and cares about.  On the off chance he can ever get out of here.  It's maybe kind of too late on that already; he just gave them his full name, but his mom went back to her maiden name after the divorce and his dad is, y'know, dead, so maybe there's still hope.)  He... doesn't remember... his emergency contact information, and his phone is locked and the fingerprint doesn't work.  His insurance card is back in his wallet in his backpack in his locker at Starbucks but it's OHIP, same as everyone else, here's his - not here's his birthdate, that'll definitely let them find his mom.  He.... doesn't remember his birthday.  It's in December he thinks.  (He's lying they're going to torture him -)

He doesn't remember his birthday. Uh-huh. Okay. Here's the ER, they're handing him off to this here nurse.

Okay.  Hello, nurse, he's not lying about his phone, it won't unlock, see?  No matter how enthusiastically he shoves his finger on the reader.  It just won't work.

She squints at it. "Traceless? You get texts from Traceless, like, the esper?"

.................................The contact is listed as 'Esper Traceless', yep.  Right there on his lockscreen.  Well, whatever, he's barely met the guy, seems like a fine face to get traumatized on.  "Sometimes!"

"Okay, you know what, this is probably not an esper awakening but I've got eight other people who are also probably not esper awakenings who I'd really like to check if I can get anyone to come out here, I can never get Epione to come out of her wing to poke people when it would take five minutes - what's his number -"

"I don't know!"  This one's not a lie, why would he ever memorize anyone's phone number.

"Ugh. Mitzi!"

"What!"

"This guy knows Traceless the esper! Can you get his agent on the horn and see if he'll come do a round of poking?"

"Sara, one in fifty thousand people are espers."

"Most people aren't young adults in the emergency room! He's supposed to be really friendly, it's his backlash."

"His backlash is being friendly?"

"That's what I hear. Look, seriously, I know each one is probably not an esper but I really want someone to check Room Nine and you know how Epione is -"

"You owe me big time if this turns out badly."

"Absolutely positively."

Yayyy this is taking time away from them looking for his mom yippeee.  (Or, plausibly having had time to, rather.  Obviously they can do whatever they want, and there isn't really a his mom to be found per se.)

They get him into an ER room but the psychiatric consult is delayed for reasons no one elects to explain to him so he has a wait.

He will do whatever they want him to.  Mostly.  Definitely that thing in particular.  He loves waiting around and, importantly, not being tortured.

If it's for more than twenty minutes he's going to doze off, but if it's for more than forty he'll wake himself back up with a nightmare.

In an hour, the psychiatrist is still not there, but Traceless is; he arrives with Cricket on his shoulder, takes a selfie with the nurse, and is shown to Julien's room. "Julien?"

Ughhhhhhhhhhh plot.  "Hello!"

"They wanted me to poke you to see if you're gonna be an esper, but as you probably already know the odds are -" Poke on the hand.

Holy shit.

Well, that was longer than he expected for the drugs to kick in.

"- wow, okay, points to your nurse, I guess."

He is going to burst into tears about this.

Oh dear. Does he... want a hug?? That's not weird, right, he carried him for a bit in the dungeon.

That's fine.  Cling cling cling cling.  Traceless - the thing that looks like Traceless - is going to get a little wet, not just from him crying but also from where he spilled a ton of water on himself; it's not had time to dry all the way.  It's -

- he feels okay, or on his way there, and he had forgotten, already, what that was like - it's like the water, earlier, only the relief is in his soul and he's not going to throw this back up -

(.....at least not as long as things stay within the bounds of the established premise -)

- but the thing is that it's a lie.  Things aren't okay, he's not okay, he's probably never going to be okay again.  Nothing is ever going to be okay again.

But he was already playing along to avoid the people running the show being mean to him, and he's happy to continue doing so while they're being - nice.  Cruelly nice - to him.  So:  cling.

"Traceless, there were some other people we also wanted checked -"

"Don't you have a healer?" Traceless says.

"She doesn't come out of her wing. It won't take five minutes -"

"Okay, uh, I don't actually know how far down from awakening I can get Julien with only what backlash I have on me right now but let's give it more than thirty seconds before I drop him to go poke more people for you, shall we, I can assure you awakening sucks."

"No that's fine!"  It's harder to do chipper while actively crying but he's going to try.  "You should get it out of the way."  He doesn't let go more than already having breached his face back into air to talk.

"...I could carry you? Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from my own awakening, I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be let go of, what exactly is going on with yours."

"I don't really know."  It's not obvious what his is supposed to be for playing-along purposes.

"Do you... want to tell the nurse that she can tell me what their guess is?"

"Sure."  He clonks his head back against Traceless, turned to the side this time so he can continue to talk.

Traceless picks him up and goes to the nurse and receives the rundown (something in the neighborhood of confusion and/or paranoid delusions!) and he props Julien on his shoulder and goes and pokes the other questionable patients (none of them are espers) and goes back to Julien's room to sit down with him again.

"So this is going to be a week and it's going to suck, we call it hell week for a reason. When'd it start coming on?"

He also doesn't know what this answer is supposed to be.  "Earlier today, I guess?  I'm not really sure."

"Okay. Uh, I can't look it up right now and I didn't bring a device Cricket could operate for me, do you have your phone or if I give you mine can you look up what there is to know about finding a compatible esper during awakening -"

"Mine is locked."

"...and you... would like it to stay that way?"

"Oh, I mean, I can't unlock it.  I can't get the fingerprint to work and I don't know the other way."

"Ah-huh. Well, I have mine." He unlocks it and manages to poke the search bar. "I think my post about it was titled something like 'espers don't make housecalls'."

Julien is capable of googling!  When provided with a phone that is not his own!

The article says that it's really hard to get an esper to come poke someone suspected of awakening because they're false alarms more often than not - it's also a completely normal age range in which to have a bog standard mundane psychotic break or bad drug trip or psychosomatic stress symptom or whatever - and that even if someone is discovered to be awakening, they can almost never get anyone compatible found in time to ease Hell Week. However, there is an esper from Singapore who made a a habit of circulating through hospitals and checking every single suspected awakening personally, as a sort of public service. She found her present partner this way and Haru has excerpts from a machine-translated account of her experience. Apparently she brought the newer esper home with her and the symptoms didn't return to full awakening strength if they were apart for just a few minutes, but trying to sleep in separate beds gave it lots of room to pull up to full strength so they didn't do that.

(While he reads this Traceless is murmuring to Cricket about how Cricket could perhaps fly home and tell Ren what's up.)

It is nice of the showrunners to give him notes on how he can play along in ways that don't get him tortured.  (And also the drugs.)

"Okay, I've read it."

He takes his phone back. "So, yeah, do you want me to bring you to my house for the week, I wouldn't wish an unnecessary full-strength awakening on anyone and I promise not to be weird about it."

"Sure!"  (...What does promising not to be weird about it entail.  He is going to worry about that later.  Hell of a chekhov's gun, but Julien's not going to tear it off the wall before its time.)

"Alrighty. Do you need to call, uh. Starbucks. About being off work for the next week. Or your family or anything."

"...I should text my manager, but I don't actually know her number.  And I can't get into my phone."

"You could see if the franchise has a number listed online?" He offers his cell back.

"I guess, yeah."  Google google google okay.  Answering machine, sure.  "Hi, everyone, it's Julien, I seem to be having an esper awakening and will be back maybe never but definitely not for a week, sorry!  I'm doing pretty okay now but I wasn't earlier, really sorry about that.  Hope you guys are handling it okay.  Miss you," what is he saying "Bye!"  End call.  Phone back to Traceless.

"And hopefully they know who else to call, or will call me back, or something. Anyone else going to notice you've vanished?"

"My housemates?"

"Do you know any of their numbers or should I like, send Cricket to your address to insult all their hairstyles and also incidentally inform them."

Oh rad the simulation is not making him simulate boring detective work, that's really nice of it he would have hated that.  "That would be great!"

"Okay, where are they at -" He pulls up the map app; Cricket hops up beside them to look at it. "Kitty, please do hold it down to hairstyle-grade remarks, I don't mean to ask miracles but this might be a stressful eventuality."

"Maybe their hair is all fine. I won't know till I see them."

Address type!  It's a shame that interacting with this Cricket tells him nothing about the real one; he was curious.

Cricket peers at the map. "Them first or Ren first?" he asks. "They are opposite directions."

"Them first, Ren's probably not even home, I'll text when I can text."

"Keep him company," Cricket sternly instructs Julien, and he trots out of the hospital on this errand.

"I will!"  ...Hm.  - He's not going to worry about that in the middle of a hospital.  Even if it's not a real hospital.  Because he's going home with Traceless and that's going to be a much better place setting for - whatever's going to happen to him.  They're not going to make him do anything weird in a hospital, he doesn't think.  Not based on how things have gone so far.

"Let's see how much of a hassle it is to get you checked out, okay? Also like if anything freaks you out because of your backlash I get it, tell me and we'll troubleshoot, mine dips into delusional stuff sometimes too."

Hahahaha it's not like they don't already know how to hurt and scare him, so it's not like withholding that would do him any good, but:  he sees you, showrunners.  He sees the upcoming beat where he asks to avoid something scary and then that thing gets done to him extra bad, just for the rug-pull of it.  Well the joke's on them!  He will simply always expect this to go poorly.  "Of course!"  But also there's no way that he's going to get good-placed and go along with lots of really upsetting things just because it would be awkward to not.

Really the scary thing here is that even being this smart and savvy is not actually remotely going to prevent him from getting tortured in the long run.  But - it does seem like he can steer, some.  And if he ever gets out of here, maybe having exercised the agency that he could will be instrumental in being able to eventually recover.

"How do you feel about flying to my house, it might pull your backlash down a little quicker but I'll be more annoyingly chatty."

Wow that was fast.  "...With what....... safety equipment?"

"...well we definitely shouldn't do it if you're at risk of actively trying to fling yourself to the ground, but I don't fly very high or all that fast, and I'm more than strong enough to hold on to a person who isn't actively resisting, I do it all the time in dungeons. The alternative is calling an Uber, my car's at home, and I don't know how you currently feel about being across a backseat from me."

"I would... definitely be spending the whole time worried that you were going to drop me," (because Traceless would drop him) "so, yeah, Uber seems fine?"

"I guess that's of a piece, yeah, Uber it is." ....... he stares at his phone for a minute and then pokes it and says, "Call Paula." It calls Paula.

Sure?  Does he seem to need to participate in this in any way.

Doesn't look like it. There's two rings and then Paula picks up.

"Paula! Guy I took out of a dungeon the other week is awakening after all, thank you for relaying the call."

"No problem, do you want to make a regular thing of it?"

"Eh, maybe if they pay me, this was a real fluke. Anyway he's pretty compatible, not as much as June but, like, awakening is so much worse than what I left her with."

"Okay, so I should clear your schedule for the week?"

"And a vacation day after, thanks, I can sit with June some on the vacation day but I'll be hanging out at zero while I do it, please apologize to Casey for me so he can tell June in... whatever way they do things. And I need an Uber summoned to TGH to bring me and the guy to my house."

"Sure thing sure thing."

"Thanks, Paula."

"You want me to stay on the line?"

"Should be fine, I've got company and I'm ticking down."

"All right, Uber in two minutes, I'll text you the picture of the car."

"Thanks!"

"I know this call was for more than that, but in the future if you want me to do stuff like summon Ubers on your phone, I can do that.  And narrate it."  Mostly this is practical although it sure would be dramatic for a horrific reveal to happen via Traceless talking about him but not to him in front of him, and way less so for a scary piece of information to show up on a phone that he himself was controlling.  ....He thinks.  Anyway it's mostly practical.

"I don't expect it to come up but I appreciate it. Are you also going to be worried about me dropping you if I carry you to the exit, would you rather walk?"

"- Only if we take any stairs?"

"I'll take the elevator then, no worries." He carries Julien out to meet the Uber. They can hold hands in the back but it's not as good as snuggling.

Technically there's no reason Julien couldn't buckle himself into the middle spot, but also prrrrobably he should exercise at least a little willpower about the drugs, to the extent that he has the ability and excuse to do so.  "I'm - really hungry.  And also still thirsty."  And if he takes his hand off Traceless's to gesticulate about that, he will - flinch, wow, that's incredibly aversive.  Back his hand goes, thank you showrunners message received showrunners.  "I haven't eaten since yesterday morning."

Traceless releases his hand without resistance and takes it back instantly when it is replaced. "...why haven't you eaten since yesterday morning?"

"Just a busy person, I guess.  It's college, you know how it is."

"........okay, uh, do you need to call school, too?"

"It's spring break!"

"Well, that's convenient then. We have food at my house, what do you eat?"

"Y'know, stuff.  I will want to shove some snacks into my face as soon as possible, and then I can look around and see what you've got to cook?"

"Sure. I haven't practiced cooking in continuous physical contact with another person for a few years but I at least have proof of concept."

Noooo but he wants the excuse to not be touching him even though he also desperately desperately wants to keep touching him.  "We shall see!  - Do you have a real name?  That I should learn?"  It may or may not match whatever the real Traceless's is but it's just going to be awkward within this context to keep calling him that.

"I'm Haru. I don't go that hard on the secret identity thing but don't proclaim it from rooftops."

"I won't."  He is going to stay so far away from all the rooftops.  "Hi, Haru."

"Hi, Julien. So besides food and water anything you're gonna need?"

"I can't imagine so!"

"That's very low maintenance of you. Uh, a thing to know about psychological backlash, it's often a little flexible, not like you can think around it but you can think the same total amount of it into slightly different shapes, did you already know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"I have a post about it, it's one of the first ones I wrote after awakening, I've got three flavors and only one of them risks me wanting to kill myself so I have to really stay on top of that."

"I didn't get a chance to read a lot of your posts yet.  Barely any of them, really."

"Well, I guess it's both more relevant to your life now and not competing with anything else you'd otherwise been doing, but you can do whatever, obviously."

"I thought about reading some last night, actually, but I was having the phone-unlocking problem then already.  My laptop too.  So I had to go with a physical book."

"I have some of those if you like classic literature. I have the taste of a literature professor."

"Yeah!  Or if there's a spare device or if you have printed copies, I can read your blog."  Does he even really want to read alleged nonfiction?  It's kind of like dreams where he does homework; when he wakes up the homework isn't actually done and he hasn't actually learned anything.  Ehn, probably they're at least mostly copying things from the real world.  And it probably doesn't matter anyway because it's not like they're going to let him back into the real world anyway.

"Cool. I can't read a book when I'm backlashed, that's a bit of mercy."

"I guess I haven't tried it yet.  Extensively."

They reach his house. "Here's the place. I'm not sure how long Cricket'll take to get home. My mother Ren also lives here but she's out most of most days, she's actually as extroverted as I pretend to be on backlash."

....The real Traceless - Haru?  No, Julien doesn't know whether the name matches - the real Traceless said something very similar to that.  With a key difference, if Julien recalls correctly.

"'Pretend'?  How do you mean?"

"It makes me lonely. It doesn't make socializing - actually any more rewarding? Actually, uh, psychologically nourishing? It's like drinking diet soda when I'm hungry, there's nothing there but I can't stop and trying wouldn't actually help anything either so I don't. I can and do plan who I talk to about what so that anything I in fact value can come of it, but I still need the same amount of alone time to not have my brain full of bees that I would without the backlash. The reason I asked Paula for a vacation day after you're done awakening is so I can catch up on that after not being alone for much of this coming week."

.......Hm.

Hm.

He's not really sure what to make of that, with regards to himself.  Maybe it really is just verisimilitude; maybe Traceless would also say approximately this.

"- Sense!  Where are your cups and also snacks?"

"Cups over here! Snacks are in the pantry over there -" Is Julien going to react in any particular way if Haru pulls his hand away very slightly, ready to let him keep it instead -

Julien's body jerks a little, but he doesn't chase after Haru's hand.  And in fact.  He will go.  For the glasses cupboard.

Haru keeps an eye on him but takes the requisite steps to the pantry. "We can microwave some popcorn, there's those fruit cup things, there's... seaweed snacks, huh... saltines, mixed nuts, Oreos?"

Water water water water he loves youuuu water.  A reasonable and sane amount ooooof water.  "Nuts and Oreos are I think the densest of those?

"Yeah." He pulls them out and puts them on the counter and gets back in handholding range.

Nope, two hands to put Oreos and nuts and water in his face while he has the excuse - and the competing urge for relief - to do so.  It's obvious that the simulation really is doing something that varies based on touch, and not actual drugs, so he'll take the chance to get some of his mental sharpness back while it's here.

Huh, okay, his call. At least in the direction Haru can feel, they're not compatible at a distance, but he's hardly going to insist that guiding is more important than food and water.

Eventually Julien swallows and does not immediately fill the empty space in his mouth with more food.  "You don't have to stay with me all week if you don't want.  If you want to sneak in some alone time at a few points."

"I will probably do that since you seem robust to at least brief periods of being unguided, yeah."

Yessssss okay that established what if there was handholding again.  ...He's at the point where normally he would want to switch to meal-making, but like, this is all fake.  What does it matter, really, if he just eats two-thirds of a box of oreos by himself.  - No, no, then they'll know he knows it's fake.  But they already do!  They already do, and are being nice to him for mysterious reasons, and - he shouldn't push it.

"What do you have in the way of actual food?"

"I think the dinner plan tonight was... uh... I will be able to read short things soon but not yet..." He opens the fridge to look inside. "Oh, right, chicken Caesar, does that work?"

"If you're vegetarian or allergic to gluten or something the salad components can be served separately, or I can make something else?"

"Vegetarian, yeah.  I could - not be?  For now?"

"Nah, it's fine, Ren was vegetarian for three months once and we still have the recipes. Chicken on the side and I can open a can of beans to put on your salad or something."

"That sounds nice.  If you're sure."

"It's no problem. I didn't even buy extra chicken."

"Okay."  Yeah, he feels better about this.  Obviously the chicken isn't more real than anything else, and so he kind of wants to try it, but - no, he actually really doesn't.  Even if it weren't an egregious tell that Julien knows what's up, it's - he struggled against the paramedics, sure, but that was in self-defense.  He doesn't want to hurt anyone, or anything, even if they're just constructs.  He doesn't want to be that sort of person.  No chicken.

Haru's going to throw the chicken in the oven real quick, and retrieve his computer to put on the table beyond the Oreos in case Julien wants to look anything up, and then go back to hovering in range to be handheld. "Probably what makes sense for overnight is to share the guest room, there's a queen size in there and my room only has a full, we can try putting you in the guest room by yourself but you'd get back up to full volume awakening backlash well before you got a full night's sleep."

Hm.  Hm.  "Sounds good.  Why is that the bed layout?"

"One use case for the guest room is that we have people over who are a couple? Like Ren's co-worker and her husband get their place renovated and crash here for a few days, that happened once. When we moved into this house I replaced my bed because I'd previously had the same one since I was practically an infant but I didn't think I needed room for overnight company, my partner has can't-stand-to-interact-with-people backlash and is too female besides."

Hmmmm!  Scary.  Okay.  Well, he doesn't have to interact with that till after food, and he can spend the food time psyching himself up about it.  "Oh, that makes perfect sense, yeah."

Handholding. Eventually Haru's backlash ticks low enough that he links elbows so he can have both hands to type a blog post.

"Do you want me to put on a blindfold?"

"Not necessary for this, it'll be public when I publish it anyway, and if I need more privacy for something like if I'm redacting an interview we can sit back to back on the couch or something."

"Oh, I don't like it when people can see me type at all.  At least for anything substantial, not like google searches or whatever."

"Understandable but not a specific problem I have." The post is about "the" "standard" dungeon and what variations away from "it" are the most common.

Julien doesn't notice this because he keeps his eyes closed anyway.  He doesn't fall all the way asleep but he does melt more and more onto Haru as the minutes go by.

That's cute and fine. Haru texts Ren, finishes his blog post, picks up where he left off in Paradise Lost.

"How much longer on the salad?" he whispers, after a while.

"Ren'll be home in five minutes, chicken'll be done around the same time, she'll put stuff together - not the chicken for yours - and we'll be eating in fifteen."

"Ooooookay."  With an enormous application of will he peels himself off of Haru and blinks his eyes open.  "Where's your restroom?"

Point. "On the left."

Cool.  Bathroom, handwashing -

- eyes.

Wow, eyes.

Wow, eyes.  It - makes sense, doesn't it.  That if they're pretending he's an esper, they would do this to him; this - already isn't his body, probably.  He's pretty sure.  But it's still kind of disturbing.

He emerges.

"My eyes are the wrong color!"

"Huh, that's fast. I guess my eye change might have been as fast, they're navy blue now but you can't really see it in most light and nobody was checking for it on my first day of awakening. Do you like it?"

"Not really!  It could be worse..."

"If you don't like it it's probably not done, people pretty reliably like their color shifts."

"Huh.  Do you think they might be going for purple?  I guess they're already lighter than my favorite range of those, though.  I don't know, it's kind of freaky..."  Oh what if he were back right up next to Haru.  Doesn't do to let himself obviously panic about this, so yes thank you he'll happily take the complacency drugs this time.

Arm around the shoulders. "Could be purple. My hair didn't change but my partner's got indigo streaks."

Cricket enters the house with a pigeon feather sticking out of his teeth.

Ren's in a minute later. "Hi, Haru! And you must be Julien, I hear you're a vegetarian, I'll pick up some tofu tomorrow."

"Hi Mom."

"Hello!  Thank you!"

"No problem. Cricket, you've got something in your teeth."

"Well, why don't your thumbs make themselves useful, then."

Ren snorts, removes the feather, discards it, washes her hands, and sets about salad assembly.

Julien will continue to droop on Haru, then.  Did he really think it would be fine to have a blindfold on, just a few minutes ago?  The thought of giving up that much situational awareness is pretty scary, now.  Admittedly there wasn't anyone else in the house, then, but he knew they were coming....  And now he's still keeping his eyes closed.  But he could open them at any time, and that's important.

- Oh, right, it's probably the complacency drugs.  Duh.  He makes a mental note to check in a few minutes whether it still sounds scary, but then instead Haru's arm on him puts him - still not all the way to sleep, but definitely more than the 'just resting his eyes' level he was at before.  Someone's going to have to rouse him for dinner; he's not getting up on his own.

"Hey. Salad for espers time."