"That makes sense. I'm just assuming here they'll agree that I should be matched to you, if they don't think of it themselves is it straightforward to tell them?"

"Yeah. Most of my previous partners were also psychics so we'd often go in together anyway, and you double as having very good mobility, so it's not a bad idea. Tactically speaking."

"Yeah, I can fly you around. Shoot nightmare bears."

"The bears are fine. The bears are never the problem."

"Yeah. Just, metonymy."

"Yeah." Hug. "We'll figure out what our schedules will be after the all-hands, probably, but having to wait until then is giving me anxiety."

"Y'wanna fuck the anxiety away?"

"God, I love you so much. Yes, I do."

"I have great ideas," chirps Haru, and he kisses his boyfriend.

He does, he does have great ideas, and his boyfriend thinks he deserves his favourite sex act as a reward for them.

Not everyone is attending the all-hands in-person, and even the people who are are spread between a handful of auditoriums with the address being made virtually. Amongst the people who are in the main auditorium and visible to all cameras is Lee Tae-gun, being reassuringly S-ranked in front of everyone, and his new partner Kim Hye-jin, who is not yet S-rank but from the splashes she's been making with him it seems like it might only be a matter of time.

Yep, she's here, looking attentive and standing next to her objectively amazing partner, hi everyone, she is just going to look like she definitely knows what she's doing, hahaha definitely hasn't only been doing dungeons for like a month and a half at best, nooooo...

Jaeha and Haru are also in the main auditorium, but they don't get seats of honour like the big shooting stars of Quasar. Which if it's all the same to Haru, Jaeha really does not mind.

As long as he can, like, see what they're supposed to see. They're both taller than the average Korean, should be fine.

There isn't much to see; just the guild president plus a holographic screen accompanying his speech.

"Good evening, everyone. I don't want to take up too much of your time, especially given the time of night, but confluences aren't known for starting at reasonable hours. I'm going to go over the basics of how confluences work, for those of you who are newer or more out of the loop, and then cover some operational and logistical concerns.

"Confluences happen about two to three times a decade, and just like no one really understands where dungeons come from or why they happen, no one understands why confluences happen either. The short version is that they are a period lasting between one and six months during which the frequency and power of the dungeons that crop up all over the world reaches critical levels. A few of the big, named S-rank dungeons that no one's been able to seal yet only appear during confluences, while others always appear during confluences even if they also appear at other times. Additionally, several new dungeons appear to, and please don't read too much into this phrasing, opportunistically make use of the time when we're all busy dealing with their bigger siblings to become bigger, themselves.

"I don't want to overstate the danger, but I don't want to understate it either. We've managed to create some very good systems to deal with confluences when they happen, but they are taxing our system and they are very difficult to deal with. Both espers and non-espers will be spread thin, and everyone's workload will be necessarily increased. During confluences, you should consider every other esper your ally, and forget about guilds or what-have-you. We're all working together, here, for the good of Korea and the world, and cross-organisational teams will be the rule rather than the exception. You'll be seeing many new faces and we'll be expecting you all to be showing your best faces. Misunderstandings are always risky, but when working with people you've never worked with before they can be deadly. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you emit, to copy a certain saying. Everyone will be extremely stressed out, backlash levels will be much higher on average, and exhaustion and frayed tempers are to be expected.

"Your comms system has numerous functionalities that will be invaluable. It's usually not worth the bandwidth cost, but for the duration of confluences, you will all have access to live maps of dungeons all over the world. It's usually best for people to stay local, of course, for familiarity and specialisation reasons, but any espers that have more niche or specific powers may find themselves being called much farther afield than they are used to.

"You all have access to information packets elaborating on all of this, and to anyone doing their very first confluence, I urge you to read it all in detail. I'm going to go over some of the most important points, here, though, to make sure we're all on the same page..."

Haru follows along in his packet.

It's very neatly organised and summarised. There's a section with a list of all dungeons known to always or often appear during confluences, in decreasing order of power and urgency by default, but with filters like dungeon type, how long it's been active, whether it tends to send monsters out, and so on. There's a section on statistics, which tracks the overall trends in the appearances of dungeons, including a couple of predictive models that try to map how likely certain areas are to be hit given what other areas have been hit and known dungeon predilections and so on. There's a section with a non-exhaustive list of guilds and agencies they're likely to be running into, with various filters. And so on, so forth.

The guild president himself is going over some highlights of the dungeons they're most likely to encounter, the resources available to other guilds that will be shared with them (as well as the resources of theirs that they'll share with other guilds, such as Woo-young's teleportation powers), the live map of dungeons, and various little tools and functionalities in their commscreens like emergency buttons and quick-summary requests for support.

Cricket, sitting on Haru's shoulder, listens attentively (to Jaeha's live illusion-translation of all this incomprehensible Korean).

(Haru's holding hands to cover for that.)

(Thankfully the illusion-translation is really cheap, backlash-wise. All he has to do is pay attention, himself, and let Cricket's own brain generate the content.)

It's not that long of an all-hands, only about half an hour all told, and then people are dismissed after being told that they'll receive updated tentative schedules soon.

Jaeha and Haru are in the first batch, and the recommended schedule they're given does place them together for lots of dungeons, though not all of them. They also receive a different schedule each that doesn't try to optimise for placing them in the same dungeons, and sends them to ones more tailored to their specific powers (so more similar to what they usually get). They can accept or reject either, suggest modifications and make tweaks, or do something more à la carte, though they're encouraged to go with the first suggestion as that's the one that's easiest on the support teams as well.

Haru looks over the reports on what's in the recommended schedule in case he needs to replace anything, but he's inclined to stick with Jaeha. Both their powers will go farther partnered, and the unpowered SWAT types can do a lot of the sort of non-psychic dungeon Haru normally handles if they, like, bring ladders and take longer about it.

"And, hey, we have a solution to the comms chatter problem in dungeons together now, if you've got the hang of picking up what I subvocalize. Like in Speaker for the Dead."

"Yeah, I think I've gotten pretty good at it now." Especially because practising it meant being able to listen to Haru's feelings and he will never ever get tired of that. It makes him feel like he's constantly hugging his Haru, it's great.

"So I can talk your... not ear... off and vice versa and nobody will be the wiser. It'll be lovely." What's first on the docket and when are they doing it?