Eeeeeeee. His Haru. His. Just his. Forever. His and only his. Forever. For... ever...

...zzzzzz

"You wanted girls, right?"

"For draft dodging purposes, yes."

"Did you have names in mind?"

"I should look through a baby name website or something. We live in Korea so they should be Korean names but ideally they'll be pronounceable for all their grandparents and also Cricket." Baby name website powers activate. "Aeri is cute."

"Aeri is cute," he agrees. "I'm vetoing anything with either a 'jae' or a 'seo', I don't want to make my father think we're trying to please either him or Nam Hee-seo."

"Valid. Min-ji or Ji-a but not both of them, honestly I think the shared syllable thing is kinda tacky even if we pick our own syllable. Mi-hi."

"Yeah I don't really like the shared syllable thing either. I like Min-ji best out of the two, but I'm not sure about Mi-hi."

"No? Any legible reason?"

"I think the repeated vowel without a harder consonant in the middle, maybe?"

"Noted. ...Eui?"

"Oh that one's unusual, I don't think I know anyone called Eui? I like it, too."

"I don't know anyone called it either but it's here on this website and I like the hanja."

"Yeah it's very pretty."

"That's probably enough names to get started, we might not even want three."

"Which, onto the next point: I still don't super have a good candidate for a surrogate."

"I can ask a bunch of people a very weird question, I guess."

"The down side of our particular social network is that I don't... really, uh... I mean, all of the women I'm close to are espers. Other than my sister, but."

"Yeah, and this is not a job for an esper. I guess it's not inconceivable that it's a job for your sister, though I'm not picturing her as being interested."

"It would feel kind of rude to ask before she got her own kid, anyway. And even if everything goes great with her fiancé that's probably still at least a couple of years down the line."

Nod nod. "So am I asking some of my acquaintances for a weird favor? Well, 'favor', we can pay 'em."

"Might be the way to go, yeah. I can probably find people through my network but 'will you carry my and my partner's child' is kind of a weird favour for this particular kind of network. I guess maybe what I could find instead is someone who would find it—good, in itself? Rather than doing it just as a thing they're being paid to do?"

"I think the first people I'm going to hit up are the ones who, like, might wish it made sense to take a sabbatical from their job so they could write a book."

"Yeah, that seems like a good target group. I'll see if I can't send some texts, too."

Haru sends texts around.