He calls 112. There's a long beep that kind of fades into the background, and someone says How can I help?

"Hi, was just dungeon kidnapped. The dungeon was not very dangerous I don't think. I am at..."

He squints at a street sign. It's not very legibly lettered.

"I am at one... four, two, East, Haven, street. I – no, one nine two. East Haven street. One nine two."

I will send you help. Thank you.

"Thank you! I am happy... happy to help, I am a DRT in my country."

An esper shows up and asks him some questions and sends him home. He lies down on the pavebed and.

Pavement. He's not home yet. He gets back up and wobbles through the cramped streets, looking more at the ground than at the buildings. Eventually he stumbles through the door to his house and calls goodnight to his mum and lies down in bed.

His mum comes in and she says goodnight.

Her teeth...

His mum.

He hasn't seen his mum in ten years.

She's dead. His mum is dead.

"Who are you?"

"I'm your mother, bärchen."

"You're not."

She shrugs. Her shoulders are too long. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Why is there a dungeon portal in his bedroom?

He scrambles towards it. He must still be in the dungeon – this is the real portal. This will take him to safety.

His mum twists her neck around to watch him go. "Don't be late."

What?

He goes through the portal and he's in Seattle. He looks up at the sky, wrenching his eyes upward with terrific effort. It's grey. There's sunlight through the clouds. The buildings around him are pressing in.

He's... he should...

He's not out.

He should stay where he is.

Someone will come.

This dungeon doesn't have an official name but everyone unofficially calls it Fake Out. It's been around the block a couple of times, and it's not the most dangerous, but it's a pain in the ass to find and rescue people because it's made out of a bunch of disconnected spaces linked through portals.

(It's more complicated than that, but the more complicated version didn't make his briefing because it's irrelevant for his job.)

It's also pretty annoying to be kidnapped by, despite the lack of danger, due to the mental effect it applies on everyone that makes them feel like they're in a dream. And that's not to mention the Nightmare-lite visions it shows its victims, not selected for being awful but still unpleasant to experience in the same way multiple false awakenings from dreams are unpleasant to experience. 

Speaking of Nightmare, the anti-Nightmare is outside the portal shielding anyone who goes in. He doesn't need to go in, himself, since the effect doesn't need to be cleared for victims to be rescued, so he's just sitting there, applying shields to anyone who needs them.

James and the rest of his squad need them!

Done.

In they go.

The pockets of space mostly look like dripstone caves, but open above to a bright, cloud-smothered sky. Their walls shift in color and texture, never quite moving but never quite still; near a victim there's usually an impression of a scene: a city street, or a forest, or a kitchen. Portals hover all around, usually not within view of each other, but often one "room" will have half a dozen lurking in its various corners. Each one has to be mapped, and some of the rooms are entirely identical to each other, just to make it more confusing. The monsters change shape (slowly and badly) to look like whoever the nearest victim is dreaming about, or stagger around looking just enough like sleepwalking victims to distract rescuers.

When you're shielded against the visions and the dream-walking, the dungeon itself is kind of boring, and the rescue work is a pain in the ass. But a boring, annoying dungeon is better than a deadly one any day of the week.

Yeah. 

Well, James is DRT but he's also an esper. He's over the bitterness of not having awakened to a badass power and by now it's another tool in his arsenal. So he activates it, a short pulse to give him a low-res 3D map of his surroundings and also backlash him a tiny bit, just to see if there's anything else he might want to know about the place.

His low-res 3D map says that the current room is shaped thus, that there are portals here here and here, and that there are five dungeon cores in various corners of it.

Ughhhhhhhh. Well, it's protocol to collect all of the (fake) cores anyway, so, he'll do that and then keep going in the direction the sensors said the next victim was.

She's a woman, maybe 40, staggering around and crying, and when she sees him she flinches away and slurs "Are you my husband?"

"I'm afraid not, ma'am, but I'll lead you to him. If you'll accompany me?"

She shakes her head rapidly. "No no no nonono I don't want a husband! I don't want to see him, I don't want him! No!"

"Ah, sorry, I misspoke, no husbands are in attendance."

"Don't trust you."

That being said, she doesn't actually resist being led out. She does keep muttering "don't trust you" over and over.

Yeah. Whoops. Anyway hopefully she'll feel better once she's outside.

Probably she does! It's amazing what not being in a dungeon can do.

Another victim?

Another victim!

This one is a blonde man, mid-twenties, quite tall and softly muscled. He's sitting slumped against a wall, with a large aluminum water bottle at his side.

He's also got his still-buttoned trousers around his knees, and is listlessly fondling his half-mast erection.

He looks up as James approaches. "You're pretty," he says, confused.

...what on Earth. 

Victim. Be professional. "Good morning, sir. I'm a DRT officer, and we're in a dungeon. Would you come with me while I escort you out?"

"Oh! I'm DRT too! But not here. Here I'm tourist, and victim I guess."

He gets to his feet, wobbling a bit. His pants slip down a little further.

"DRT buddies! —ah, you might want to pull your pants up." Although that's kind of huge— be professional.

He looks down and pulls them up... wards. They encounter two significant obstacles on the way to his hips: someone has placed a mostly erect penis in their way, and also a sizable ass.

"A bit further perhaps."

Tug.

Tug.

"I need to unlock them."

He tries to do this, with mixed success.

This is mesmerising, but being mesmerised would be unprofessional. Instead he will wait patiently and professionally and look away and hope the man won't need his help because if anyone shows up that's gonna be such a nightmare to explain.

...bad news?

What bad news?

He has fallen over. The pants are not opened.

Right then. He turns his power on to watch his back in case someone is about to walk in on them and goes to help him pull his pants back on as efficiently as he can.

"Danke schön."

Hup! He is back on his feet, now: with pants!

"I will have such stories of how I was the idiot of the stupid dungeon. And all of my friends will say, Ari, that sounds so like you, are you sure there was a dungeon."

"Finding yourself half naked—the wrong half, even—in a totally inappropriate location is very like you?" Should James be making this kind of conversation? It might be a bad idea. On the other hand, if this "Ari" is also DRT as he said he was, it's probably fine? And regardless he has in fact acted with utmost propriety despite the way he's fully hard right now.

Anyway, he starts leading the way out.

"Oh, very. I was once playing... truth or dare? With friends in Hauptschule. Was arrested for streaking, with a carrot in my arse. They say I cannot be ashamed."

"I know several EMTs who would be looking at you very sternly about this carrot."

"Still had all the greens! I was very safe!"

"If you say so. I wouldn't be able to tell."

"Also I was sixteen. We are all stupid when we are sixteen."

"We are!"

"I like you," Ari decides. "You are nice and we are the same job and you are very pretty. If we met in a bar..."

Ari somehow manages to shut up before the end of that sentence. "But it is a dungeon instead. My bad luck."

"...well, if you for a completely random reason wanted to find the contact information of one James Lim once you were out of the dungeon and in your right mind, I wouldn't have any reason to advise you against that. Sir."

"Oh... you like me!"

"The Lim is Lima-India-Mike, by the way. And here's the portal out, let's get you back to the land of the waking."

"Thank you!"

Ari steps through the portal, leaving James to his work.

Hopefully he won't find anyone else in such a compromising position? He's not sure his heart or pants can handle the shock.

Ari floats down to the ground!

He feels... bleary. Like he just woke up. Actually woke up, though, which is better than the fake kind. His brain comes back online gradually, as he sips some cocoa provided him by a nice young lady who looks like she's volunteering to fill an educational credit.

Who's the nearest person. That guy. He will walk up to him and ask "excuse me, do you know the man who saved me? James, he said James Lim? I want to send him flowers. Do you know his contact details?"

"Uhh hold on let me see if it's on file..." He checks. "I have an email, not enough for flowers but?"

"Hmm... can I go buy some and leave them for him, maybe?"

"Sure! But do you want the email?"

"Sure!"

He recites the email.

And Ari will go buy some flowers! And a little card inside with his name, phone number, and hotel room. And leave these articles with the nice support person. And go back to his hotel to recover from a mostly pretty awful experience, the last bit of it aside.

A couple of hours later, he gets a text.

Hello! Those flowers were lovely, thank you so much!

you are quite welcome! thank you for saving my life!

if you would like to be thanked more personally you know where to find me, or we could get coffee or beer or something!

I wanted to make sure you were definitely awake before taking you up on any of that

I'm also not totally sure about the professionalism of the situation 

though perhaps that is a subject best thought through in person

coffee, then? i think not beer, you've seen enough of me stupid

and I don't really drink if I can help it, though I pretend to sometimes 

there's a nice and cozy little hole in the wall a couple of blocks from your hotel

He sends a link to the address.

meet you there!

Ari dresses up a bit, with the cowboy shirt he got in Austin and the tighter of his current set of available trousers. Also, a flower behind his ear, he picked up a couple of loose blossoms at the shop. Then he heads down to the cozy hole in the wall.

James is already there and waves him over to a little booth by the wall when he spots Ari.

Wall booth! Ari takes a back-to-the-wall seat happily. (It isn't that he's hypervigilant per se, but there's something about being in a position from which you can see your entire environment.)

"Hello! I hope the dungeon has not been too much trouble since I left it?"

"That dungeon is really only a problem to the victims. There is barely any action when you're not being forced to feel like you're in a dream. It has so many fake cores, though."

"Oh, I hate fake cores. Really I hate the... the bureaucracy? Of having to bring them all back, even though of course none of them are the core... but what if, what if!"

"And if we didn't bring them all back the dungeons would just take that as an excuse to be lazy and in fact leave their real core among them."

"Exactly. Scheißkerle. Not like the kind too new to have clever tricks; those can even be fun."

"I don't have any German so you'll have to forgive me for not understanding your cursing, but I agree with the spirit."

Here is a waitress offering them cute little menus for them to pick their orders from.

"Thank you very much."

Ari accepts his menu and goes looking for sugary treats. "Thank you! -yeah, it means not much of anything anyway, it's just 'shit guy'. We have lots of words for guy who sucks, it's like the forty words for snow. Many Scheißkerle to go around, plus Arschlöcher and Hurensöhne and Kackbratzen and Sackratten too."

"German might be competitive with English in breadth of cursing."

"We do have that. Think I'll have the cinnamon roll and mocha, what about you?"

"Think I'll have the mochaccino with dulce de leche and some shortbread."

"Sounds tasty!"

He relays his order to the waitress, then as she's leaving: "Speaking of tasty, will we be sucking dicks after this? I'm not so good at the first-date stuff."

He sporfles. "Well, I'm certainly interested, although I'm not sure I can handle that," he says, lowering his eyes in a direction that is currently obscured by a table.

"It is not that big. Porn-sized maybe, but I'm not Rafael Alencar. I've seen smaller guys than you take it well. But if you don't like the challenge I'm happy to bottom, too."

"Oh I'm just being modest, I can definitely take you."

"Modesty! How silly of you. But I guess the polite thing is often silly."

"Indeed.

"So, what brings you to this side of the Atlantic?"