"Okay. Do you need ins to any more of my senses than you have right now for that to work?"

("Probably not? But I'll let you know if I do.")

"Okay. ...do people ever bring Nightmare visions in as legal evidence, like, if this guy wanted to prosecute his dad..."

("I'm not sure. Possibly if a rescue esper is recording video it could be admissible.")

And there's the portal, floating solid in the air, the only thing visible in a sea of darkness now.

"Do we just toss him out the portal to float down and get seen to or do we have some more elaborate handoff procedure?"

("Protocol is for us to come out with the victim to hand them off personally to the support team and also so that the team can make sure we're okay, don't need shields to be renewed, don't need a break, etc.")

"Okay. Breath of fresh air sounds nice anyway. Starlight. That kind of thing." Haru jumps out with Ji Dong-sun and Jaeha still aboard and floats down. Who's he handing this guy to.

The support team is very on the ball for this particular dungeon. They've got a camera filming victims floating out of the dungeon portal running them through a face recognition algorithm so they can match them to the database of known or suspected kidnapped people, in case there are known triggers or preferred ways to deal with them and in case there are loved ones looking for them.

"This gentleman introduced himself as Ji Dong-sun, Jaeha's erased his mark and shielded him," Haru informs them for their checklists, handing the guy over, and he'll take point on any remaining chatter that needs to occur, considering.

And then they can go right back in.

Yeah. Right back into the depths of hell.

It's dark, and their tracker lights up the way. The distances to victims vary wildly, and it definitely looks like they should've run into some of these while rescuing others. The distances to the victims are not always the same as those from them and back towards the portal.

And it's always bleak. Always horrible. This person was kidnapped and left in a dark room with barely any food or water for three days. This person was stalked for two years by someone who kept texting them pictures of them in private situations they had no way of being observed in. This person was beat up to an inch of their life by their ex. This person was gaslit by their parents for years. This person had cancer that went into remission three times, the latest one supposedly for good but who knows. This person was bullied so much they had a breakdown and now have psychotic paranoid delusions. This person was in a hiking accident in which their spouse died and they lost a leg after spending days thinking they were also about to die in the wilderness. This person is a recovering drug addict who was abandoned by everyone they ever loved because of their addiction.

Nightmare torments all of them, individually, personally, and very, very thoroughly.

Haru scoops them all up one at a time and flies them out, once Nightmare can't see through their eyes any more, and does his best to find something light to distract them chattering about. What's their favorite color? Who should know that they're out, do they want to workshop what they'll say to whoever their emergency contact is? Have they got pets, he's got a cat himself -

Halfway into that their tracker needs a short guiding break, which is as good an excuse for them to also take one themselves, but it's not long enough to zero anyone and then they go back in, newly caffeinated and ready to witness more trauma. 

The bright side of Jaeha's backlash, he supposes, is that he grows inured to horrible shit very rapidly.

This next victim isn't a very long distance from the portal—or rather, their area of influence isn't. Before Jaeha and Haru can actually see the epicenter of their nightmare, they can feel the heat and see the floating embers in the air.

"Well, at least it's not going to be dark?"

"Small mercies, I suppose."

The situation is straightforward. As they approach, the air gets hotter and they start being able to smell smoke. The sounds of fire lead them towards something that looks like an apartment complex's hallway, formed without its outer walls as buildings here sometimes do; the darkness just slowly melts into it.

There's a snag, though: from where they're standing, there isn't any obvious way further in that doesn't seem either blocked by the fire or far too precarious.

"We might have to leave this to somebody else, I'm no good with temperature."

"Nightmare doesn't typically kill its victims, so there must be somewhere safe inside..."

"There doesn't necessarily have to be a safe path to whoever's in there, but maybe there is, if we go around?"

"Yeah. Nightmare also likes to give its victims the illusion that they can escape, often, so there could be, though it might still be too dangerous for us. You could maybe fly around it very quickly?"

"Okay - you coming along or just doing psychic comms?"

"It..." Fuck, it kind of terrifies him to be split from Haru in here but... "It might be safer if you go on your own so you can have your full range of motion and reaction times? Maybe?"

Jaeha's range is insane and he doesn't need to keep eyesight once his power's got hold of someone, which it has been so that Haru can subvocalise to him when needed, so he'll be able to keep in contact throughout. However: argh.

"Okay. Love you." And he's off into the darkness, flashlight bobbing like a rock skipping across a lake, in that more-efficient flight gait he's picked up. "So far so flaming, and the geometry of this place is really fucked..."