"It's... not like I knew a person I was picking the major to benefit selflessly, who was also doing that.  It's a lot less... defined.  As a situation."

"Right, but you can assume that some reasonable distribution of people exists, maybe look stuff up if the numbers matter, and pick a strategy that synergizes with that."

"Yeah.  ...Did you have any life plans before this?"

"You mean before I awakened? I wanted to be an epidemiologist."

"Oh.

"Why?"

"I'm into disease eradication. I drop a lot of money on antimalarial charity."

"Oh.  ...I might have done that if I was somehow born in a world where dungeons and espers had never happened."

"The cool thing about eradicating a disease is that once you kill it, it stays gone. That's true of individual dungeons, but not dungeons as a class, as far as we know. I did also consider some kind of magic-related support career, since I was preexistingly a dungeon nerd, but I was not preexistingly a people person nor especially risk-tolerant. Being an esper has made me work on that for more reasons than one but it didn't seem my highest leverage option before."

"Disease eradication is really good," Julien agrees.  "I guess, just, non-esper non-simulation me was hoping to find something that would give non-esper non-simulation you a big leg up on that.  Or something equivalently good."

"There are lots of useful things to do."

"Yeah."  In the real world...

Yeah, awakening sucks.

"I could maybe try and sleep now, but I don't know whether it would work and I'm afraid of you falling asleep before me."

"I could grab my laptop and work on translating a blog post or something that’ll keep me up till you’re asleep."

He smiles weakly.  "Sure."

...he'd second guess that but isn’t sure how. Laptop. Monster case studies now in French.

Julien... well, it's kind of awkward to position himself for sleeping and guiding with Haru sitting up and not wanting things to be too - intimate.  But he can kind of press his face into the side of Haru's torso above the waistband of his pants, and throw a leg over Haru's, and it's not the worst thing in the (simulated) world.

Translation benefits less from stream-of-consciousness rapidity; he doesn't need both hands.

That's nice too.

Julien holds still but it's not externally clear whether he's conscious or not.  He does start sniffling, after a while.

Probably better to err on the side of assuming he's awake, though Haru does slide his hand to where he can get a halfway decent pulse.

That's a heartbeat!  Kind of a fast one.

It's sort of surprising he can sleep at all without being sedated, like that. He'll wait to see if it goes down.

After a while Julien takes Haru's hand and moves it off of his neck and onto his shoulder.  Then goes right back to lying still.

Yup, not asleep. ...does elbow work for him?

"What are you doing?"