"It's just baffling."

"Not especially. People are stupid all the time. It requires active maintenance to keep the stupidity out of critical institutions and today that maintenance is mine to perform."

"There ought to be better ways to catch this kind of thing than the sheer luck of you having been one of the people affected by it."

"Rhombus noticed something. The other esper in my dungeon and everybody on the squad with Axe Guy noticed something."

"Nevertheless. This was institutional failure and it feels like there should be institutional locks preventing that failure. I know it's gonna bottom out at people eventually but..."

"Yeah, I'm going to do some probing at the provincial level too for sure."

"Godspeed," he repeats. Because there's nothing he can do, even though this would've been in his wheelhouse, it would've been so far inside his wheelhouse it actually kind of hurts. But now he's nothing, and no one.

"Thanks! - do you have any warmer clothes in yet, I don't have backlash to sleep off overnight but we could go for a flight after dinner, get some more of your backlog chipped away."

"I do, but I maintain that the problem isn't the clothes it's that I am not made of whatever cold-resistant material Canadians are."

"Well, we don't have to, but acclimatization is in the long run the only way."

"Sure, we can do it." Time to be more entertainingly useless, whee.

But first: chili! Cornbread! Almost dying and then committing bureaucratic murder is hungry work.

Yeah, he bets. Not that he'd remember, it's been so long.

"Delicious," Haru pronounces.

Food and sex. A nice housewife.

"Horrors again?"

"Yeah, but at least this time they're making themselves known! I'm just thinking about how much I've completely ruined my life forever and I've got no one to blame but myself and I will never do anything good ever again."

"Is this the kind of thing where it helps if I argue with you or should I just be like 'wow those sure are some horrors'."

"You can go wherever the muse takes you, of course."

"'Cause, like, you contain a lot of capacity to do good things with the rest of your life, that's the project."

"I suppose saving people from Nightmare is indeed a good thing that I will be doing with the rest of my life," at the hands of someone else, the instrument of someone else's will.

"Plausibly also other dungeons, that's just the, like, flagship one."

"Mmhm, mmhm."

"You've probably got civilian applications too if that helps any, they'd just be a little harder to sell."

"I guess my power really is quite useful, you're not wrong."