It is of course pretty hard for the victim to reply under present conditions.

Now is his turn to be useful. Or his power's, anyway. He shields the victim and makes them not feel like they're burning all over.

This assists the victim in grabbing onto the rescue stick and letting Haru pull them up from his vantage point standing astride the nearby conveyor belt! Here they are, all covered in wax, and now it is urgent to get wax off their face so they can breathe and also to stop them from diving back in.

Well they won't dive back in because the dungeon can't see them anymore. But he can help them with the wax, too, silently.

Not-yet-hardened wax is a little slippery so they might fall in! Presently they are breathing-capable and have broken some wax off their shoulders and knees so they can move their arms and walk a bit and then they can be led back to the portal. No dumping, Traceless leans out to help them step over onto the ground and then they can go look in more vats.

"This is a weird one. I know they're all weird but like, eventually you get used to Clowns Again, I'm not used to Crayons Again."

"Have you had Crayons Ever?"

"I had Children's Arts And Craft Supplies In General, once. I caught a rubber stamp shaped like a duck but it was inanimate afterwards, no surprise. The crayons in there were big log-sized environmental hazards that rolled around."

"This would've been the kind of deployment that I would've refused—before. When I wasn't admitting that I couldn't..."

"Did you have some kind of backup excuse?" No vic in the cornflower blue. No vic in the glitter silver.

"I was sufficiently—wanted—that I usually had my pick. And push comes to shove I could say I was too backlashed."

"Did you never get surprised with a dungeon that had some unreported property?" There is somebody in the dandelion yellow, out she gets.

And he will not say things while helping the victim because he does not want his voice to be recognised.

Yeah that's totally fair, Traceless will say reassuring things to the victim and help her get enough flexibility de-crayoned that they can haul her out. He winds up asking her yes-or-no questions about whether she's comfortable enough and warning her that once she's through the portal she'll be feeling a little like she's got a sunburn since she'll be cut off from the anesthesia etcetera etcetera.

Once she's out: "Yes, and then I'd edit the memories of everyone around me and find an excuse to leave. You're—I don't know if you realised this, but you're literally the only esper that has ever been able to shield from me."

"I'm still surprised you got away with that for so long, even if you could cover your tracks you could have wound up in a dungeon that - got worse during a confluence and made you stab yourself or something."

"During confluences I don't do anything until Nightmare shows up. It's not worth it, it always shows up early anyway."

"But you can't predict the onset down to the minute, have you never been in one that suddenly un-sandbagged...?"

"I haven't. There have only been four confluences while I was active as an esper and I wasn't in a dungeon when any of them started."

"Lucky you, I guess. I was in one last confluence, I got out obviously but we lost all the victims who were still in there."

"It got that bad?"

"Yeah. It was, not Clowns Again, it was actually acrobats, flinging people between trapezes and stuff, and I'd catch them midair, kind of backlash-intensive but not complicated, and then suddenly the acrobats got much faster and I couldn't keep up and another flier tried to grab somebody and interrupting the acrobats broke the vic's neck, and the guylines and rigging for the tent and trapezes and all that stuff got really aggressive."