The thing he's after... None of the things he's after are things he can have.

"At least a little bit of processing my notebook-catalyzed revelations but not with just any other person."

"I am the metaphorical buffet you're at, here, I can't pull an alternative person out of my back pocket."

"Thankfully you're exactly the person I'd like to do it with, then!"

"...I lost the plot, though, where was I."

"Your suicide attempt."

"Oh, right. Well, the actual attempt was prior to my getting hit with Regret Ray and was because I had lost all will to live when Lee Tae-gun irrevocably decided he'd never be with me and was triggered proximally by Nightmare calling me its only friend, which I now believe was meant to manipulate me into killing myself actually, it's always been exceptionally good at manipulating me specifically."

Snuggle. "Has it manipulated you into a lot of other stuff?"

"...I'm pretty sure it—no that's less strong than I mean it. It was what pushed me down the road towards—everything. Not that that excuses anything I did but it was definitely providing a lot of the impetus and wheel grease."

"What do you think would've happened without it?"

Slight shrug. "Who knows. It's not like I had zero issues. But I'd—fessed up already. I was on the up and up. I had gone clean, had stopped using my powers on people altogether, and then there was that—confluence."

"Nobody was - monitoring the situation."

"What situation, me?"

"You being, like, on the wagon."

"No, no one was. Lee Tae-gun, in theory, I suppose, but... he wasn't immune to my powers, and I..."

"It's a fundamentally - tricky problem without an immunity on the board, yeah."

Well now he's feeling defensive of Lee Tae-gun. That's objectively insane so he should squash that—hmm. "I'm gonna write something down that I want to do that notebooking thing about later," he says, as an explanation for why he's grabbing his phone and turning its screen away from Haru.

That done: "I don't want to blame him. It's not his fault. He was a twenty-one year old kid who'd never been in a relationship and who—is also Korean."

"What's the - being Korean doing, here, I didn't spend much time there."

"The—focus on saving face, on image, on hierarchy. Prior to the time he and Kim Hye-jin destroyed Volcanic Range, no one had ever seen him express backlash symptoms in public, ever. As far as the public and media were concerned, he could have been some weird alien esper who didn't experience backlash."

"He didn't claim to not have a backlash, right, it was just undisclosed?"

"Right. But looking like he didn't have it, or just wasn't affected by it, being the perfect shining hero who had no flaws—I don't know if you've ever consumed any Korean esper media, or K-pop, or whatever. We must not have flaws in public. To the extent we do, they are shameful and to be downplayed and ignored by others. He—understood the temptation. Why I'd want to use my powers to make sure people only thought the best of me."

"Cricket likes Korean horror movies but I don't usually watch them, just hear summaries. I mean, Western celebrity culture isn't a paragon of health either, I do worry about how I look in photos and try harder to watch my mouth on camera, but..."

"I've seen a description once of how the K-pop industry creates its idols which went, they grab young teenagers or even pre-pubescent kids and they polish all of the personality off those kids until they're perfect, and every single charming quirk or flaw they present on camera and all of their relationships are only there because the producers put them there. They're not allowed to date or have any personal relationships that aren't approved by their managers."

"Espers can't be that managed, though..."

"No, we can't, and we mostly aren't, but it's—the whole culture that spawned that. The obsession with always looking perfect. Not everyone is like that but it's in the water."