"Yeah. But also, what kinds of things could she tell me that would change what I ought to do? I suppose if she says she's pregnant that means my father is imminently not going to care about me," though, fuck, could he actually condemn a dongsaeng to the shit he's been through? He might need to raise the kid himself.

"Yeah, I don't know; if I knew what she could say I'd just say it, save the trouble."

"Mm, but I mean more—what kinds of things could I learn that would affect whether I should get rid of all of my stocks or not? Whether I should sell the house and get a new one with esper money? Would anything change if my father did versus did not have another heir planned?"

"I'm getting the impression that having a sibling you've never met doesn't weigh particularly heavily on you, so maybe another sibling wouldn't either? I think... unless he won't take 'I'm cutting you off going forward' for an answer without a really big financial exclamation point, I think you don't need to return the money, so whether you want to liquidate anything is kind of a separate question from how you terminate what little exists of the relationship, and it's not time-sensitive, I don't think the house or the stocks are depreciating particularly fast. I think if I were talking to her I'd mostly want to know how she arranged never to speak to him that thoroughly, whether there's anything she'd be interested in contributing to a project to flip him off..."

Ah, fuck. He hangs his head. "It's—starting to weigh on me, actually, never having met my sibling, and it's—I would not want to condemn someone else to the fate of being raised by my father."

"...well, then you might need to coordinate with your mother about her custody plans."

He runs a hand through his hair. "Seems like I ought to talk to her regardless of anything, if those are the feelings I'm starting to have now that I care again."

"Sounds like it, yeah. Uh, if you're going to start doing dungeons again soon I want to flag that you have to schedule emotional processing accordingly, that's probably obvious but you won't have any habits about it."

"Mm. Yeah, probably. 

"...I should get back to dungeoning, right...?" He's not really sure what to do with himself otherwise.

"...well, I thought that was the plan but if you find yourself reluctant by all means spend more time with your entire brain reporting for duty thinking about it first?"

"No, I—the opposite. I want to. I'm just—nervous, I suppose."

"You could like, walk me through your usual dungeon procedure and we can see if there's looming pain points - do you even ever do normal dungeons that have normal toothy things and pit traps and stuff or are you forever being sent abroad to the spooky ones?"

"Only the spooky ones, there are enough of those in need of psychic espers at all times that it's pretty much never worth it to send me to toothy ones. As for dungeon procedure... I'm not sure what you mean?"

"Like, you show up, you get your briefing, probably you shield some people, in how many of cases do you need to go in yourself, are you ever doing the mobility-oriented rescue stuff or do you hang out near the entrance, who are you going to encounter, what might occur to you to do during those events that you should not, will I be able to be right there at your elbow the entire time to keep the backlash on the ebb or will that sometimes be infeasible. - ooh, they have cheese curds."

...Jaeha really, really likes Haru. Quite an unreasonable amount.

"It varies a lot. For some dungeons I shield people outside and go on my merry way, but those are rare since most things don't need my caliber of shielding and those that do tend to require more field operations. Those will often have continuous effects on civilians that we need to wipe before rescuing them, sometimes literally physically like with Nightmare but sometimes just because the alternative would be knocking them unconscious or physically restraining them to move them despite their resistance. So my usual M.O. is going in with an esper with a mobility power and an esper with a defensive or offensive power, as the case may be, and getting people out of the effects they might be under.

"Some dungeons have more complicated effects, like being fully illusory such that if you don't perceive the illusions at all you fall into an endless void, or having monsters that can enter your brain if you see them and leave with you without being detected, or with more conceptual effects. Those are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

"I can also often use my powers for stealth and for confusing monsters, which I tend to do as needed, and to reflect monsters' psychic attacks back on them, which is useful on occasion. And sometimes, the dungeon core itself is not physical, and I occasionally have needed to psychically destroy it. It's rare that that's something my particular powers can do, though.

"What I'd be tempted to do is just... keep my passive powers up, forget to stop using them once I'm out of a dungeon, forget to not target other humans with them..."

"Would you forget enough to - do you want to be having this conversation in the grocery store, actually -"

"—no, probably not." Argh probably no one heard him but he has no way of checking and he got so used to just him and Haru at home he forgot other people existed ugh.

"I don't think there's anybody in earshot, just, abundance of caution." Cheese curds go in basket, and cherry tomatoes. For pasta salad.

Okay, he is once again reminded of how much he likes Haru and how great it is that they're BOYFRIENDS. Possibly it's because this feeling is literally a day old. Possibly it's that. It might be.

Anyway yes groceries like normal people who weren't just discussing whether one of them might accidentally become a psychopath!

And then they can go back home. "So - what was I going to say, something about - oh, right. You'd gotten out of the habit of targeting me, do you think you'd retain the - presence of mind for that, or that you'd bump into my shields so I could catch you?"

"I think that—if you were around, it would feel... very embarrassing to fail at this. So there's nonzero effect from just your presence. The amount of backlashed I'd need to be to actually slip up and try to ping you would be—I'm not sure. The flip side of not being in the habit of targeting you is that that was just because I was seeing no one other than you on the regular and so I was just not using my powers at all. If I am, it's—not like I can't target, I can, but I tend to use them in almost a radar fashion, indiscriminately in all directions, so it's possible that I'd bump into you, too." Wow that was a lot of words and not very organised ones at that, huh.

"Hm. You'd suggested a check-in app for me, after my close call, would something like that work or would you ignore it?"

"—I think it'd plausibly straightforwardly work, yeah. At least unless I were so backlashed not to care at all but that would take some doing, I think."

"Cool, is that a native functionality the implanty things have or do we need someone to code it up?"

"Should be built in," he says, summoning his screen and looking into setting up alarms and notifications.