"Don't check anything yet. There's no hurry. If you find one that is near another victim, then you can wait for the divers to go down before you take it and protect the divers with it."

“Yeah.” She keeps someone else’s eye on the relative positions of monsters and hostages and wiggles to attempt to maximize skin contact. Are there any other garments she could remove to improve that situation.

In theory yes but if she tries to take her pants off Haru's going to grab her wrist. "There's tents, if you need more of a guiding break than we can get standing in the dungeon."

…Can she hike the leg of her pants up a little bit even if she can’t take them off.

She can do that but "standing on an inflatable pontoon" is not the ideal state in which to make use of this. They can get a little shin-to-calf contact this way if he rolls up his pant legs though.

Fair. Fair. The tent is maybe a good idea if she can’t just take her pants off here but she doesn’t want to stop watching the monsters.

"Lucy, you should stop using your powers for now, nobody's down there and these monsters don't care about surface behavior."

Oh. Well then.

“Tent.”

He picks her up and flies out of the portal; this dungeon is not power-intensive for him and it'll help her. They alight on the ground. He picks out a guiding break tent.

Pants off. HUG.

He can take his shirt off in here, though he is going to leave the pants on because, look, he's only human. Hug hug pet pet.

He can do that but it will have Lucy attempting to put her legs on his torso.

Lucy is allowed to do that and they can just pretend that no lap situation is occurring!

Lucy literally does not notice any lap situations that may be happening!

…She does eventually uncontort herself after she is somewhat less backlashed.

A short flight and a noncommunicative partner had him checking his texts but when she seems better he glances up from his phone.

“Sorry about that.” Pants putting on.

"It's okay but you should - be aware of when you're cutting it close, I was starting to consider when I needed to pull you out of there if you wouldn't quit monitoring monsters of your own accord."

"Yeah, I--will try to be more on top of that."

"At least you don't actively object to guiding at any point in the process like June does."

"That is an advantage. Even when I am totally uncommunicative I am cuddly. ...Which I knew, but previously 'uncommunicative' meant 'asleep.'"

"I did notice you were a sleepcuddler but chalked it up to the guiding, it's not all that?"

"Nope. It hasn't come up much outside my immediate family but I haven't yet found a way to fall asleep in the same bed as someone and wake up still on my side. Briefly awkward on a class trip in highschool."

"Oh no! I wouldn't have expected class trips to involve bedsharing!"

"Hotels have pretty big beds! Nobody else had problems besides me!"

"We went to France once and we got our own beds!"