"I guess not?" Here's the cheesecake, he can cut the both of them a couple of slices. "Sleeping next to someone feels more human, I suppose."

"Makes sense, I guess..." Omf. "This is great - do you ever do cheesecakes with stuff in them, like, peanut butter cheesecake or cherry cheesecake or anything?"

"This is only the second cheesecake I've ever made so I haven't experimented much."

"On my birthday Ren and I go to a steakhouse - we were not super well off when I was growing up, it's traditional even though I can now have steak whenever I want - and they have cheesecake there but I think yours is better."

"Oh, I doubt that, I'm not a professional chef or anything."

"I think a lot of restaurants buy their desserts frozen and just thaw them on site! So perhaps I am only asserting that you outperform a midrange restaurant supply grocery store."

"That I suppose I probably do."

"...dungeon pictures?"

Arghhhhhh that face againnnnnn!!!

"I'd love to see them."

Haru has dungeon pictures! Today's dungeon was a bright yellow spongy cave system that, Haru reports, also smelled kind of like a kitchen sponge, with tremor-sensing soapsud-elemental-things. He also has a few pictures from a dungeon where he caught a corncob-pig monster "but it died with the dungeon, alas".

Jaeha can make interested noises and try to ask questions and lead enough of the conversation that Haru won't make that face again argh.

It's not that hard to keep backlashed Haru happy, it's kind of a "keep talking and nobody explodes makes that face" situation.

After dinner they can do their evening ablutions and go to bed and Haru snuggles right up with a relieved sigh.

Gah.

But fine. He'll deal. He can deal. It's going fine. It's fine. He's fine.

...really.

The dungeon looks like a snowglobe.  The tallest buildings in the little model city are about seven feet tall, cute and glass and glowing with inner light.  The streets are just barely wide enough to admit a person on foot.  Big flakes of glitter drift slowly through the air.  Knee-high model trees covered in flocking sprout from the model park.  There's a tiny church, tiny stores with illegible signs.  There are no model people.  There are in fact no monsters at all, in this one.  Just the city, and the snowflakes -

- and the fact that whenever one of the victims, drifting to the ground from the high dome of the ceiling in the low gravity that mimics thick snowglobe fluid, gets within reach of the buildings, the entire dungeon shakes violently and gravity reorients a dozen times in quick succession, the glitter kicks up from where it's settled on the roofs and the roads, and the screaming victims fly vertiginously into the air again while the city clings innocently to the floor.

So they want Traceless more for the flight that doesn't care much about gravity, than for the tracelessness; there's nothing to be invisible from (he checks) but quite a lot of roofhopping so that when the time comes he can push off one inch from the top of the little school or the miniature library and ignore his vestibular system till the dungeon settles and he can push off to grab another victim.

When he's grabbed his first few victims to tromp through the streets with each of them in turn them clinging to his back, he sees that the other esper in the dungeon - a no-codename guy named Noah with spiderclimb powers, not one he's worked with before, Haru thinks he's from Winnipeg - has located the core; he broke open the big glass water fountain full of glass water in the town square to find it nestled inside.  Noah hands it off to the SWAT guys, who have an anchor dug into the glass floor that they're all firmly clipped onto.  They keep crunching the shards from where the anchor displaced bits of glass, under their boots.  In a monsterless dungeon having them there at all is perhaps redundant.  The dungeon could always surprise them, though.  Maybe the clocktower will wake up.  Maybe the trees will, or the glitter will coalesce into a boss monster.  Both espers return to work.

Haru brings his next victim to the portal.  Just within sight of it, the dungeon shakes again; he hovers, nattering to his passenger about how the timing seems irregular, how the photos are going to be great, how he apologizes for pausing to take photos when it cost a few minutes.  The dungeon settles, and Haru lands and starts forward again -

Then he shoves the victim off his back and shoots through the air straight at one of the SWAT guys, who's raising an axe over the dungeon core.

Haru tackles the still-intact core in both arms and goes with it through the guy and his axe both.  If he hadn't been flying, this would have been a dubious idea.  Given that he has been, it's nearly suicidal.

He curls up on the glassy floor in a fetal position around the core and can't figure out why he bothered.  He leaves it to the sergeant to scream at the SWAT team; it's background noise.  He leaves it to Noah to fetch the remaining victims, even though he's much slower at it because he can only reach the ones who come within life-preserver distance of the city or the ceiling.  He lets the SWAT sergeant take the core from him, and heave him out the portal, to drift to the ground, where somebody turns out to have called Tess, or what looks like Tess anyway.  He had his arms full of dungeon core, so he didn't grab any glass shards, and doesn't have anything he can do about how wretched it feels to exist.  He leans in when Tess hugs him automatically even though Tess is imaginary.  He lets Tess bundle him into the car to get to the transfer point about the Ablinger marble that can take him to Fox Island.

Tess makes sure the car is on the right trajectory, pats Haru down for anything sharp stuck in his clothes or tucked into his pockets, and then she calls Jaeha.

...what the. 

"Hello?"

"This is Tess, Traceless's PA, he's too backlashed to take care of himself, I'm going to send him over to you if you can be ready - I'm not allowed in June's silo so I can't drag him in there -"

"—too backlashed—yes, of course, what happened—?"

"The text I got just says he was unresponsive and I needed to collect him, they might have too much of an emergency in there to be more explanatory."

"...understood. I'll be ready."

They're no longer having Haru be the guardian of the key so he can just unlock his bracelet whenever he wants. Which is, like, never, but you know, he'll be able to do it as soon as Haru shows up. He's got the key ready.

"He's a suicide risk like this. We're almost at the transfer spot."

"Are there any specific suicide-prevention procedures I should be aware of or just guide him and keep him away from sharp objects?"

"Guiding him alone should do it, just, you need to be ready - NO no no no keep your seatbelt ON Haru -"

"I am." Right then he's not waiting, bracelet is off now. 

...it feels surprisingly not really that different.

There is the sound of Tess's phone falling to the floor of the car while she wrestles a suicidal esper for control of his seatbelt and repeatedly re-locks the car door and then the call cuts off completely.

Well that's not fucking terrifying or anything!!!! He is going to wait like thirty seconds before trying to call back. 

One. Two. Three. Four. Five...