"Shower sounds good, you look chilly."

"I am."  Is it wrong to be chilly???  "Wow my brain is very scattershot at the moment.  Bed soon sounds good.  Even if it's after a shower."

"Sure, swim trunks shower and bed. Have we exhausted the island mermaid dungeon, should I come up with another one?"

"I too would like to see the pictures but maybe tomorrow morning.  Or afternoon.  Um, if there's more to say about it I would hear it?  Did it have any tiny sea creatures that weren't mermaids."

"Tiny ones specifically? There was bioluminescent algae but I don't remember fish or anything, just toothy mermaids."

"I guess I was imagining a tiny ecosystem except for big mermaids which could jumpscare you.  But I guess I don't know whether the islands and grottos were enormous miniatures or just regular-scale and kinda little?"

"The islands had moss on them but it was normal for moss, and they were each like, five, six feet across." They will have to separate briefly to get into swim trunks in privacy but Haru can just talk a little louder. "The mermaids were full sized, on the big side where the anatomy compared straight across and with very long tails. The grottos were big enough to contain a person but not super comfortably and didn't have notably miniaturized stalactites or anything."

"That's really cool.  Were the mermaids like - this is a really weird question but were they more like colorful or like gray.  I feel like in art of mermaids people who're trying to make them scary sometimes make them gray and like, anglerfishy, do you know what I mean?"

"I don't know that I've looked at enough art of mermaids to come to a conclusion. They were colorful, spots and stripes all over them, kinda reminded me of lionfish."

Haru could just say he thinks Julien is a flaming homosexual.  "Wow, my brain is really putting out a last hurrah.  The mermaids sound cool.  Do you have any stories of - dungeons where things went wrong, but not like super duper wrong, and how you dealt with it and what protocols you used to make it turn out okay?"

Into the shower with them. "Sometimes I run a dungeon with June. Our powers don't synergize amazingly, but every now and then there's something that works for both of us - in this case there was a sessile boss monster and a zillion little wasp-monster assholes. The sessile one couldn't chase her, and the wasps were dense enough to be iffy going for me, so she drew the wasps off while I snuck into the boss - it was this hivey thing that shot lasers - to get the core. We had a third esper who was supposed to be laying an ambush for the wasps, thin them out as June led them through chokepoints, but a wasp got past him and nailed him in the face and his eyes swelled shut, so me and June had to get him and the core to the exit and there were a lot more wasps than I'd been hoping to deal with so I was racking up backlash quicker than I planned, and I'm lucky she was there because it's much harder to be delusional about whether there are any people in the universe besides me when I can detect June from a few feet off. We had advance contingencies for the general category of problem from the dungeon coordinator so fortunately for her we didn't have to discuss it on the spot."

"......That was pretty much a perfect story to say in this case but I don't really have any specific comments."  (Any appropriate comments; 'that's really cool' is not the vibe when it probably sucked a lot to experience.)  "Did - how much does your power work based on, like, do you need to see things coming?"

"I don't need to see things coming. So don't hide behind me if you are ever specifically worried about stray bullets, it wouldn't work. I just decide how I want to permit things to interact with me and then that happens till I decide otherwise. Doesn't work if I'm unconscious, I had Cricket check once, which is mostly good because it means if I pass out while doing something expensive it won't get worse from there except in all the ways you'd normally expect things to get worse if I passed out in a situation where I was doing something expensive."

Hug??  "Has that ever happened to you?"

Guiding hugs are awesome even though Haru is not lingeringly tramatized about any of his dungeon stories! "No, but I had a close call, there was a dungeon that was putting people to sleep and they thought it was psychic and it was chemical. The psychic part was masking the smell, I got out of there when I noticed it was whiffy and didn't go back in. At all, actually, I'd been going to wait for a gas mask but they found somebody better suited."

"And there are probably lots of protocols for figuring out when someone's fallen unconscious and for getting them out?"  Oh huh his eyes are open even though they're in the shower.  He closes them for two seconds and then decides he doesn't actually feel compelled to keep them that way.

"There's comms set up once there's a portal-environs basecamp established, though sometimes my realistic options are being way too prone to chatter or overcompensating for that by not checking in at all, and also sometimes I'm one of the first people in to case the joint and there's nothing set up at that point."

"But those have people coming in pretty soon after you?"

"When I'm doing that I'm getting a sense of monster behavior, how urgently the victims need rescuing, the layout of the place, and whether I'm picking up any suspicious backlash that might mean it's trying to poke me in the brain, and they'll put some equipment in while I'm working on that but usually want a preliminary report before there's a lot of people."

"By people I mostly mean - ways of catching it and getting you to safety if you pass out."  Soap soap.  "I have an impression that most espers who die in dungeons have like, had time to wrack up some backlash.  Instead of going in and dying really quickly.  But I don't know if that's true."

"It's not always true. If there's something about a dungeon you can't detect with a camera on a selfie stick through the portal, which will kill people, then somebody who goes in early can get killed that way. It's rare - most dungeons don't seem to want to kill people in an... unfair?... way like that. But it's happened."

"...Is there any dungeon that's immediately killed all its victims."

"It's happened twice on record, and one of them got away, but it never came back and it was thirty years ago, so we think that it's probably a pretty stupid thing for a dungeon to do and they were like, sick or insane, by dungeon standards, or something."

"....Huh.  I really wonder what it's like to be a dungeon."

"Me too, come straight here with the news if you get any clues."