...

"Cricket, is there a way I could redeem myself in your eyes?"

"Oh, I don't know, that seems like your problem."

"Kitty..."

Sigh. "I'll think about it."

"I look forward to it."

Cricket accepts a nibble of pancake out of Haru's hand and resumes plating himself fish.

He's not going to bother Cricket any more than this, and instead turns back to Haru to say, "That teleporter, Min Woo-young, was able to teleport in 4D, right? And his power can be stored. So it ought to in theory be possible to have ways to move along the fourth dimension in some automated way so people wouldn't have to be constantly asking Cricket for rides and bugging him all the time."

"I don't think Cricket works enough like an esper, but maybe there are monster batteries, that would be cool."

"I don't see in principle why there wouldn't be. ...I mean, it's not like I understand anything about any of this so for all I know there might be some reason, but it is not ruled out by anything I do know."

"A battery might be the wrong concept, Cricket just is advantaged at 4D when it's there and it doesn't take anything out of him to navigate it. Hmm."

"Ah, yeah, good point. ...hmm, I wonder if there'd be a way to just build something in 4D? Like a conveyor belt... Except, hmm, that might risk rotating people along the fourth dimension and I'm not sure that's... survivable..."

"Isn't it? I have no substantial 4D advantages so I don't usually go in them and certainly haven't got much background in the math."

"I guess I don't know for sure but if I think about, rather than someone's whole body being in a single 3D space, they're rotated around the fourth dimension so that a part of their body is here and another part is in another 3D space, that could be a problem? Their internal organs would no longer all be in one place... But then again, they would be, within their individual spaces... I don't know. I don't know any of the maths either and every time I've tried to think about them over the years I ended up getting myself more rather than less confused."

"You have all kinds of tendons and things holding you together. But you might leak."

He shudders. "That sounds like it would be pretty unpleasant."

"Oh, certainly." Doesn't seem to put him off his food to imagine though.

Jaeha is perhaps blessed by his inability to properly imagine 4D space and his unwillingness to force it to render something in 3D anyway. And now that his coffee's done he can go back to the table to eat the pancakes Haru made him and make sappy faces at him because HARU who is HIS BOYFRIEND made him PANCAKES and if anything's ever deserved sappy faces this has.

"Is that a yes on maple syrup?"

"Yes. It's nice." But the NICEST THING is that HIS HARU made them FOR HIM.

"You're cute."

"It's probably a side effect of you telling me you like me. Those might last a while, I fear."

"A while, huh?"

"Mmhmm. I don't see them getting better in the foreseeable future."

"Well, I hope you are prepared to live with this chronic condition. It sounds like such a burden."

"I haven't found it so! Maybe in ten years I'll change my mind." Jaeha's known Haru for less than two months. He is being ridiculous. But it's fine to be ridiculous because Haru is his BOYFRIEND.