Haru types this all up furiously. "I mean, I don't think I actually agree with that assessment, a human capable of being meaningfully friends with Nightmare while being, uh, generally on the side of humanity, would be big news on the negotiating with dungeons front, but clearly it - struck a suicidal nerve and was probably intended to?"

"Yes, it occurred to me once I turned out to have failed to kill myself that that might've been its intended result. But it knew me better than anyone and it certainly knew what I'd believe, if it said that."

"Do you have a good sense of what things it must have known about you - I don't know if you're familiar with existing basic research about how dungeons seem to choose targets but it seems like all of them have some sort of psychic or precognitive ability to sift through people, Nightmare's just unusually focused on that -"

"Everything. I can't imagine there was a single thing it didn't know about me. It certainly could see all of my thoughts and feelings and memories, it reacted to that I was thinking even if I never said anything, it probably knows more about me than I do."

"Have you been to every Nightmare appearance since you started running dungeons or have you skipped any, or not made it to any..?"

"Every one of them. And I only took breaks about one out of every eight to ten days."

"Do you know if it ever, like, mentioned you to other people, when you weren't there to. Prevent them from remembering it? I'm trying to distinguish between you being one of many targets who happened to be reachable with a strategy that made it sound like you were special, versus you being more definitively special to it with evidence that wasn't obviously tailored for you."

"I've never been told of any—well, actually there was someone once whose nightmare was being captured by Nightmare and then seeing me specifically refuse or fail to rescue them, but I wasn't the one who did rescue them and I only heard about them later. Not otherwise, though."

"...do you know who that was by any chance?"

"A man called Jean-Pierre Fontaine, from Switzerland."

"Probably speaks French, cool..." Typety type. "And it never addressed you, at all, or seemed to target you in any way, before you had your partner as an emotional handle for it?"

"Yeah. It acted like I wasn't there."

"I've... been in Nightmare one time when it hit NYC three years ago, but it wasn't there long - I'm not sure we even laid eyes on each other though presumably you were there - and I wasn't letting it see me, so I don't know firsthand, is that a normal way for it to behave with rescue espers or does it usually interact with them?"

"That's how it normally goes, yes. The dungeon interacting with rescuers signals that they need to renew their shields."

"...they don't usually have a timer on that?"

"No, they do, but other espers' shields can sometimes run out prior to the expected time."

"...is that known to have any particular factors involved, like, does it possibly vary with how hard Nightmare's pushing or is it mostly down to how hard the esper tries in the first place or...?"

"I... do need to mention here that Nightmare is evil, and that its whole entire fucking thing is messing with us in the worst possible ways and you can never trust you know what you're getting into. So, it's inconsistent, it'll occasionally happen when no one expected it to for no reason anyone can discern, and we have confirmed cases where shields had expired and Nightmare did not—as far as anyone noticed—press the advantage at all.

"But that said, it seems related to esper strength, time spent inside the dungeon, and how much the rescuer was being perceived by people who were not shielded. Nightmare can't see you if I shield you, at all, but it can see everything its victims see.

"And—not just that. That last day, I snuck into a queue to get myself shielded, posing as someone else, and—the shield hadn't entirely run out, I think it wasn't very strong but it was still there, and it still talked to me. So it probably has other senses than just that—which stands to reason, most dungeons do, just, I don't know that it had ever demonstrated it before—and if it knows you well enough it can give you nightmares even without being able to see what you're thinking right then and there."

"Oh, I know it's evil. If it's a person it's plausibly the worst person in the world. But it's - information - I have a whole blog post series called Yelling About Basic Research, I'll not rehash it all right now - hm. Any reason to believe it doesn't just straightforwardly see out of its constructs' eyes and so on?"

"Just the same reason we had before, it hadn't done anything to indicate it could do that prior to using Kim Hye-jin's face to talk to me."

"Had it, uh, met her, or did it have to pull her solely out of other people's minds?"

"The latter. Though... I don't think it was really trying to pull her. Just the boogeyman I had created in my mind that wore her face. ...boogeywoman?"

"Bugbear," suggests Haru. "Right. Did it get anything wrong - I mean, besides presumably the personality -"

"...what else would there be? It got her appearance and voice right..."

"Well, I mean, did it? Did it have her dialect, did it misplace a freckle, I assume you couldn't draw her perfectly from memory."