"Okay, hi.  Hi.  I'm going to kiss you?"

"Cool, I like it when that happens." Kiss.

There could be some sort of inane affirmation about how he also likes it, but the convenient thing about kissing is that it both occupies the mouth and allows one to affirm things in other ways.

There's a moment several seconds in where - it feels nice, and the feeling comes back that he shouldn't be feeling nice, and he has to wrestle his emotions back into shape - he already decided to do this - and then he's approximately fine.  He can pretend.  He thinks it probably isn't the sort of only-pretending that Haru would be upset about having kissed him through.  He ideally would be pretty confident about that but it wouldn't do to try and figure it out and then make things bad by overthinking them.

Guiding kisses are SO nice and they HAVE decided to do them and now they are doing them. They should probably not get too carried away in this tent on this air mattress, though, it's not like it locks.

Getting carried away is not actually all that tempting, currently, because that's not a thing that they already decided to do, but yeah.  The kisses are about as good as anything can be right now.

........And get much better as, presumably the thing that's happening here is that his backlash is going down.  Yeah, wow.

It's really very nice to be not so backlashed, ten out of ten espers agree.

Mmmmmmmsnuggle.

"Coretapping time?"

"Sure." Hup. Shirts. Communication with the logging team so they don't get a magnetic tree (apparently that's what's so exciting about the wood, it's both wood and magnetic) dropped on their heads. Up to the portal.

Yup!  He's so fine about this.  (For the moment.)

"I'll just pat it once and you can tell if it can detect that at all, and then we can try prime numbers?"

"Sounds good."  Hey dungeon, what're you thinking?  (And also hey bird, can he hear you from in here?)

He cannot hear the caged bird which is outside the dungeon from within the dungeon.

Pat.

(Phone is recording again.)

f̶̫̟͖̜̲̉̌̈̂͐̈́̑͗͝͝e̷͉̦̟̼͙̙̻͉̭̩̮͕̪̓̄̓̔̓́̈̂̀͛͝͝ͅͅa̸̮̻͚̹̻̹͖͒r̸̢̛̻̼̬̗̻͉̩̐̄̀̓͜

"I don't think it liked that."

"Any guess why? Like does it feel physically bad or is it just uncomfortable with the fact that we've got the core or...?"

"I think - closer to the latter?  ...But I don't want to rule out the former."

"Replicate one pat or move on to prime numbers, do you think?"

"Let's move on?  I don't want to confuse it by changing patterns if it's capable of not being confused."

"Okay."

Pat pat.

f̶̫̟͖̜̲̉̌̈̂͐̈́̑͗͝͝e̷͉̦̟̼͙̙̻͉̭̩̮͕̪̓̄̓̔̓́̈̂̀͛͝͝ͅͅa̸̮̻͚̹̻̹͖͒r̸̢̛̻̼̬̗̻͉̩̐̄̀̓͜!

"Yeah, I - think it predicts something bad will happen to it."

"It's... not wrong in general but it is at least wrong about specifically me patting it."

Pat, pat, pat.