Kissing is pretty efficient but they're still gonna be here for a while if they try to zero out. Haru does pull back after a few minutes - "All systems nominal?"

"Mhmm."

Kissing resumes.

She gets somewhat more assertive about it as they progress though she's still mostly letting him set the pace.

He is qualified to do that.

Eventually his phone buzzes; Columba's arrived.

Back in then.

Yup. Vantage gets a shield refresh, Columba gets one, Columba's partner gets one - she might not wind up needing to stay in for very long but Compos Mentis prefers to batch them and then go back to his silo with his partner rather than be called out as-needed. Traceless loads up on layers, gloves and a scarf and all, so that he can carry Columba on his back and if necessary also her partner on his front without touching either one, and then he, Columba closing her eyes because she's kind of scared of heights and doesn't need her vision to use her power, jumps off the precipice and starts binary-searching the mineshaft.

Columba can move toward things. "Things" includes dungeon cores. She can go in pretty small increments. Her precision isn't so good that you can usually draw a straight line from her starting position to her placement a centimeter along and find anything - but this dungeon's a great big long straight line. She will probably budge up or down, or at least more one of those than the other, and then Haru can keep going up or down, and repeat. Hopefully she won't have to go more than a few centimeters herself. Which is good because if she goes much farther than that she's going to throw up on him, but needs must.

"Going down," he reports to Vantage, and he jumps again; Columba eeps.

"Going down." she repeats, to have something to say and for the benefit of the watching SWAT team.

And then: "Going up, so it's not at the very bottom."

"Okay then. In one of the alcoves maybe?"

"Probably, but can't rule out embedded in a wall."

"In which case they might want you to hang around and kill bats while they dig it out?"

"Yeah, pretty likely."

"Either way we'll be home in time for dinner I hope."

"Probably will be. Lunch seems unlikely, though."

"There's still pizza leftovers in the hotel fridge..."

"Yeah, that'll do the trick. I think this is about halfway, Columba - okay I think that's more down than up but we're at small enough increments I'm going to climb back down instead of flying -"

"I'll give you another shoulder rub later if you want."

"I will appreciate that enormously. Espers build muscle fast enough that I'm probably going to have noticeably more definition in my shoulders," he snorts.

"You've earned it!"

"I have come by all of it completely honestly, yep. Columba, from here? - ah hell, that's across the mineshaft from the ladder. If the ladder's twelve o'clock we're gonna want one anchored at around five-thirty, do they think they can do that?"

She relays this request to the SWAT team.

They think they can do that but will need to have Traceless spotting them in case somebody falls, there's not a lot of space to work over there.

"They need you to spot them while they work on that in case somebody falls off. Is it embedded in the wall?"

"It could be in one of these alcoves, but it's not visible any more than it was yesterday so I want to know what our options are depending. Trying now from the middle of the plausible alcove cluster."