"You probably can't, they dissolve if you try to do it by force, but it might backlash you untenably to try. We'd need psychic help to clear people of the Nightmare brand anyway - it leaves a mark on people, some psychic espers can clear it, I am not one of them, they can't leave the dungeon with it still there. So I'm probably being too optimistic on Nightmare, the logistics actually remain a little awkward on that one in particular."

Nod nod.

"Are the worst fears people... people?"

"Can't get one separated from Nightmare to - meet it. They... look and behave like people, but they don't display creative behavior, they're acting out someone's fears and don't do other things. My gut feeling is that the dungeon is just puppeting them all but I don't know if dungeons themselves are conscious."

"Yeah if they can talk I'm really not sure where else to draw a line for whether something is a person."

"If they are people they are clearly remarkably evil people, at least while Nightmare is alive, but yeah. It does bother me."

"Seems hard not to be evil if you're someone's worst nightmare."

"I mean, it's slightly more complicated than that because some people's worst nightmare is about them doing horrible things. So Nightmare provides victims, who just sort of perform victimhood, in terms of their concrete actions, but still obviously only exist to torture people."

"I.... would have to be really careful about interacting with that. I think."

"Right. We should try a basic dungeon with you wearing headphones and a blindfold and see if you can work like that."

"Seems like a good idea, yeah."

Onto the to-do list with it.

The headphones and blindfold mostly work, though as it turns out two dungeons later if he gets enough backlash he'll start suspecting he's annihilated all of reality which isn't exactly better. But so long as he doesn't push it, or use them too often, he can keep the backlash from getting too bad. 

"How could you possibly have annihilated all of reality," Haru wonders while they're guiding after, "when you can still, like, feel things, you can be sitting in a chair and you wind up touching every person you grab out of a dungeon..."

"Depends - I tried to have support move around some but it didn't really work." And then Lucien is distracted by the guiding.

Important to have nice guiding to make up for all the miserable backlash. Haru will take very good care of him.