Here is the new Quasar member! They checked her exothermic abilities for 4D capabilities early, on account of her fluency in Japanese and having Cricket on their payroll. While she's incapable of moving either kata or ana without assistance, her ineffable esper sense is not so constrained. Her omnidirectional defense isn't as complete as someone actually specialized in defense, but she's comparatively much more capable offensively, and, well. It's a paper origami dungeon. Her major problem will not be destroying things in here, it will be avoiding the entire place being consumed by a raging inferno, consuming everything and everyone inside. No pressure.

She's already in her leash and harness (and it's admittedly very funny that she's going to be taken for walkies by a cat), and gives a very Japanese bow to Cricket. "A pleasure to meet and be working with you, Cricket-san. Ready," for walkies, "when you are. You've been briefed on my capabilities?"

"Yes, you are going to make it hot but not ignite anything in a sphere around us until a crane tries to attack and then it will die."

Nod! "Yes. My destructive capabilities are also otherwise at your disposal, if there's environmental barriers you'd like out of your way. Please put me on the same axis as it, so my pitiful human senses can properly perceive it; with larger contiguous things I'm worried about keeping the destruction controlled."

Because: fire esper in what's essentially a tinder box. She wants to be extra careful.

"What about things that are not politely all on the same level?"

"I'll slice through the level I'm on, and otherwise leave things kata or ana alone unless told otherwise. I'll be acting more like a paper cutter than proper fire, in here. Or maybe a better comparison would be claws." Her mouth twitches, a little. "If admittedly very clumsy in comparison to yours."

"Well, the range matters in this situation." He collects the leash end and spreads his wings. In they go.

Hye-jin gets a close-up look at his 4D transformation, his slit puils going four-pointed and his fluff wilder and looser and intermittent and his feathers or paw-tips sometimes appearing to cease to exist when he flaps or adjusts position.

He is so pretty in here. He was pretty before, of course, but - four-pointed pupils and the metaphysically wild fur are both very striking.

This side of the portal is cleared of staff (4D defenses being more trouble than they're worth in this case; the portal perimeter on the other side is more extensive than normal to compensate), so she turns on her shield as soon as they're through. The air wobbles a bit from the heat, but the visibility is still quite good.

A paper not-crane attempts to ambush them from kata; Hye-jin smiles slightly and incinerates it as soon as it intersects with her perimeter without any kind of prompting. It's as neat as it is fast, which is very. Extended burn times are dangerous, in here; best to pay the backlash cost to destroy things quickly.

"That was a big one. I would like to catch one of the cranes for Haru if we find the core." It ate eighty people, which means it's been around the block. But most places that might have been visited by Paper Crane didn't have Cricket.

They did not! Cricket is a incredibly valuable asset, and Hye-jin is fully aware that she is here at his disposal, not the other way around.

"... Hm. I'm not sure I can capture one alive. My partner might be able to manage it, though. I'll send him a heads up, one moment." She types a message on her phone, sticks the phone through the portal, and hits send.

"The ice guy?" Cricket asks, trotting off down a hill of steel-blue paper with her in tow and then jumping up a touch kata to get to a wider part of the canyon between two stacks. Tug tug goes the leash.

Hye-jin follows after the winged cat, and is accordingly tugged.

"Yeah. He doesn't work in 4D, but ice is better for trapping things than fire. If they were smart monsters that were afraid of fire I might be able to manage it with your help, but I don't want to bet on them not stupidly struggling even though that would result in their death."

"If you could get one to stick its beak in something it couldn't get out of, the rest of it would not be too dangerous, I think. But they do not seem very smart. Here comes one." Hye-jin can't see it at all but a moment later, yep, there it is.

The paper of the origami not-crane incinerates in a quick flash of light and heat. They really are very flammable, these monsters.

"They really don't. I would have thought it could see what I did to the other one. Something to catch and trap their beaks, then, I think my partner can manage that."

"Something that it will want to peck. If it does not want to peck it, it will not work." Trot trot and tug tug on the leash and now they're going through a paper tunnel full of stars. "I smell blood this way."

"Yeah, hm. Their beaks are their primary method of attack, so baiting it into an attack might work," she muses as she follows, at a jog to match his trot.

At the mention of blood she starts a little, but doesn't slow down. "- Oh, damn, no one's thought about blood contamination between victims, have they, they'll all be bleeding and I might need to carry them out."

"I guess you could wrap them in paper."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. Though they might have bad associations with the paper, but that's better than getting a new blood-borne disease. I can also clean the blood off of my skin without too much trouble, just... not really my clothes, so that's a potential disease vector."

"Pity Min-san isn't here to just teleport them."

"It really is! But I think it's one of his battery days, and we'd have trouble protecting him on this side of the portal and also going to find all the victims. Maybe one day we'll have a portable teleportation battery we drag into dungeons in place of him, that'd be nice."

"Yes, it would. A battery cannot have a terrible accent."

"Oh no," giggles Hye-jin. "I haven't heard his Japanese, how bad are we talking here?"

Cricket does his best Min Woo-young impression.

This earns a cackle. "Oh, that does sound bad. I suppose I can be the designated Japanese practice esper?? Try and help him polish his accent? ... There's got to be a normal person who has that as their job, though, that doesn't seem like efficient esper time allocation..."

"It does not. ...this is a flock of airplanes, you can kill them if you want but you do not have to." Airplanes nose into the sphere.

"Hm. Better to save the backlash, I expect that right before I'm at my limit we'll do a sweep so I can kill as many of the dangerous monsters as possible before you're escorting someone else with less offensive power."

The airplanes can live, and only have the hot air divert them upwards. Actually, she might be able to catch one, with her paper airplane steering practice, but now is not the time for that. Even though a little living airplane would be adorable, it's unfortunately unlikely to outlive its dungeon, and there are eighty people to save.

"I think the person is in here." Tug tug, here is the hyperbox and the muffled screaming. Cricket starts clawing open the box.

Yep! Hye-jin will assist pulling open the box with her opposable thumbs and taller-than-feline height, and switches languages.

"Hey, we're here to get you out, everything's going to be okay," she calls, in Korean.

The person does not reply in words, perhaps because (once they've got the box open they can observe that) their lips are pretty cut up along with the rest of them. It's all shallow papercuts but there are so, so many.

Yeah. It's not pretty. She keeps the wince off her face, because if she's learned anything from Tae-gun (... aside from all of the sex tricks, of which there are admittedly many) it's that a calm and authoritative demeanor helps with rescues. She is a professional, she is here to save them, they will be okay. That's what really matters, here, not that this is the worst of the victims she's personally rescued and it's actually kind of upsetting to see this much blood. Anyway, she expects she'll see worse when the confluence hits.

"It'll be okay, we're getting you out," she soothes, carefully working to extract them.

Their clothes are hanging off them in tatters but probably used to be a dress, so it's probably a woman. They cooperate insofar as they can with being picked up.

"Crane," says Cricket, staring.

The crane is neatly incinerated, Hye-jin not even looking up or otherwise acknowledging its existence. Instead, she's careful to get a sheet of origami paper from a wall, to wrap her rescue in before gently picking her up.

"Okay, ready," she says to Cricket, when her human charge is as ready as she'll ever be for being carried off. (Technically speaking what she says is 'ご準備ができました。', which is a bit more formal than this casual English translation, and implies that Cricket is her superior. A closer translation is 'The preparations are complete.')

Cricket nods approvingly at the burned crane and leads Hye-jin out to the portal, alerting her to planes and cranes as it comes up and clawing the forthcoming face off of a sheet of paper that is trying to become a new crane before it can do that.

Hye-jin leaves the planes be, but incinerates cranes as they come. She smiles a little at the clawed crane, and assists with disposing of it once Cricket has ripped its face off.

When they reach the portal, she says, "Okay, I'm going to put you through the portal now. People are waiting on the other side to take care of you." This warning and reassurance given, she extends her arms through the portal, and gently drops the woman through. This still feels a little wrong, but apparently paramedics find the brief floating period after a portal departure much easier to work with getting a patient into position on a gurney than an esper carrying them through. They can converge on the patient from all sides without her in the way, as she understands it.

"I'm okay on backlash for now, I estimate I can probably get through about ten more victims before I need a break." This is back in Japanese, and directed at Cricket.

"Is your ice guy coming for your break?" Cricket asks, leading her back into the paper maze.

Hye-jin is a good, obedient esper to take for walkies, and follows her feline leader accordingly.

"I'm probably heading to him, he's more picky about isolation while backlashed than I am. But he might so he can help us catch a crane, we'll see."

"It's too early to catch one. I think you can slide down this part."

Sliiide!

"It is, but he can be a bit... High strung? Eager to please? I probably shouldn't have given him the heads up so early, actually, he might take it as an order instead of a request, and show up ten minutes before my projected shift ends, with a painstakingly drawn out plan for crane capture already drafted."

"Don't they keep him busy?"

"They absolutely do, but he's a compulsive workaholic."

"Oh dear. Here's another box." Tug tug.

She is tugged, and gets on to box disassembly and inhabitant rescue! The paper is razor sharp at its natural edges, but she and Cricket can both take out those edges pretty straightforwardly, Cricket with his claws and her with application of fire and ability to grab paper by not-the-edge with her thumbs.

This being her second origami box to disassemble, she does a much more efficient job of it this time, and soon enough has the victim wrapped in paper and ready to be carried off.

And retracing their steps. (Cricket has taken to making little claw marks on their routes to make it easy to follow them back.) He hums the opening theme to Frieren.

!!!!! She will wait until her charge is safely through the portal before commenting, but this does earn a tiny smile from her.

"Have you been watching the anime, or reading the manga?" she asks, after this latest rescue is safely dropped (gently! and with weird magic to break the fall!) through the portal.

"The anime. I am much better than most five year olds at kanji but anime is easier."

"I started on the anime, and then wanted more heartbreak of seeing how incredibly stupid Frieren was for missing that Himmel was in love with her, so swapped to the manga," says Hye-jin, cheerfully. "But I watch the anime when it comes out, the fight choreography is just so gorgeous..."

"I liked the part where they spent several episodes catching a complicated bird."

"You know, I had some trouble with that arc until I got used to the changed pacing? Catching the bird itself was fine, it was just the babysitting of the blue and red lesbians that I was a little like, why? They still haven't endeared themselves to me, mind, I just respect the overall story structure."

"Oh, the lesbians were annoying, but I appreciate it when a story pays attention to and respects things like catching birds. Crane."

Incineration! Oh no, Cricket is such a cat, it's so cute.

"You are an expert in bird catching," she agrees. "I now want to ask you about what hunting different types of bird is like, is that insensitive of me?"

"I mostly get pigeons because nobody will miss them. I try to hunt the ugliest ones so the next generation of pigeons will be prettier. Squab is pretty tasty even though it makes Haru nervous that I eat raw feral birds."

"That makes sense. Probably you're okay? I haven't heard of any monster catching any kind of ordinary Earth disease, but I guess even if I'm wrong, Quasar's got a healer on staff. They'd heal an esper if they caught something. Can I recommend seagulls to you? They're little assholes and people will actively celebrate their loss."

"Seagulls are bigger and meaner. I could lose an eye."

"Ah, damn. One more thing to hate them for. They probably have a redeeming quality, somewhere, but it's sure hard to think of one."

"If I were still big I could eat them for sure."

"I am sorry for your loss. You must have been magnificent when you were big. You still are, of course, just. Seagulls should also fear you."

"I was venomous too."

"Ooo! What kind of venom?"

"I don't know. Nobody got a sample before the dungeon died."

"Aw. I bet it would have had really neat properties. A lot of dungeon venoms and poisons can get extremely weird. With your ability to fly it might've given things vertigo, or something even stranger."

"Maybe! Not very useful though."

"It could be for catching flying prey! One tiny bite or venomous claw swipe, and it falls to the ground with a crunch. But not as good for things on the ground, yeah. Could have been an anti-gravity effect, maybe? Things floating helplessly where you can pick them off at your leisure? I've heard of those before, and it would explain why you didn't get to keep it. Those sorts of effects don't tend to make it past the dungeon's death."

"My claws weren't poisonous, just my bite. Planes." Cricket pounces on one and wrestles it to the ground.

Adorable. Hye-jin otherwise leaves the planes be, the bubble of hot air diverting them neatly.

"Oh, hm. But the claws would be so efficient, they're clearly your primary weapons? I think I now take some issue with your dungeon's design sensibilities, that's very inefficient. ... Do you want me to carry that for you?"

"My plane? No, it's not in very good condition any more." He bats it wunder a nearby paper stack and moves on. "I smell another one."

Nod! Onwards. Dungeoning with a winged cat is kind of great, actually, and she missed speaking in Japanese. She does it with Tae-gun sometimes, sure, but usually they swap back to Korean because they're in Korea. Now she has a responsibility to speak Japanese! It's nice.

The third person can be saved and wrapped up and escorted out, and the fourth, and so on, till his escort needs a break or her ice guy shows up to throw off the routine.