They'll laugh and share some of their own - though it's quickly getting late enough they seem almost dead on their feet.

Yeah, it's probably about time for her to pass out as well.

And to sleep!

Sleep happens.

And in the morning, to match the industrial quanitities of dinner, there is a pot with enough porridge to stock a mid-size middle school's breakfast. (Louie has maybe half a clue how much food two people need to eat.)

They gently tease her about the excess food.

"I'll make a note to be less over-the-top next time."

"It's good food! My poor stomach just can't take it all in."

"That's always the problem with food. Too much good food, not enough time."

They laugh. "Totally."

The next day, over breakfast, they ask Louie: "Do you have a notebook I can have? Or a ride to - I guess an office store?"

"I might have one lying around, but it's probably got some writing in the first few pages. But if you want a fresh one, I'd be happy to give you a ride."

"A ride would be nice, yeah - also wouldn't mind some computer time or being dropped off at a library? I've got some notes to reconstruct, is the main thing..."

"Feel free to use my computer, there's nothing sensitive on there. Unless you do want to get out of the house and to a library, of course."

"Might soon - I'll need references eventually, if nothing else..."

"That makes sense. So: office store, then library?"

"That sounds good, yeah!"

To the office store! It's a large, squat building, like a Walmart that realised halfway through construction that dealing with perishables is a pain, and you never have to deal with use by dates when you just sell stationary (and the occasional sad flat-pack desk at the back.) 

They get a mixture of notebooks, with a mild eye for ones with whimsical designs on the cover, and restock their pens - especially colored ones. Good for notes! They also get a pack of two more flash drives. 

After thanking Louie again: "To the library?"

To the library! It's pretty library-ish, with the notable exception of the retrofitted automatic book-return chutes that have a tendency to try and eat your fingers.

That's pretty poor design, yeah!

They mention they'll mostly be hanging out in the section of nonfiction on dunjes and weapons, if Louie wants to wander off?

Louie attempts to wander off-- and about 10 minutes later sheepishly sidles back into the dunj section, and reads a book that may as well be title "Everything You Wanted To Know About Dunjes, But Were Afraid To Ask."

Dunjes: honestly not much known but a lot speculated about why they happen or where they come from. They look made, though by people with possibly non-human design constraints and opinions - it's generally believed they're too aesthetically consistent to be entirely natural. The stones are always aesthetically out of place, and breaking them puts everything back where it belongs. The dunjes are theorized to still exist when cut off, just in another dimension.

Monsters are almost never particularly smart nor coordinated. They're variably aggressive; some are just more like curious cats that'll investigate their surroundings and be incidentally destructive, while some go on rampages. Some exhibit signs of a sort of 'hive mind' organization, but not an intelligent one. There's never been a dunj recorded that could be safely explored, though - all monsters are hostile to intrusion, and all dunjes can generate new ones, even if you killed off everything in it.

One very brave or very dumb dunjologist actually spent long enough in one to note that identical copies of killed monsters show back up but living ones don't repeat; she theorized they're being resurrected or restructured, or else the dunj has a limited number of templates and a reluctance to instantiate two identical living monsters. She put cameras to record a bunch of dead monsters and noticed them dissolving, prior to their copies returning.

That was definitely... brave(?) of that dunjologist! Hopefully that information helped someone enough to be worth the risk.

She's not sure if the monster being mostly stupid is comforting or annoying. Like, it's nice that they're unlikely to have to face off against any dunj monsters using complex tactics-- but you can't exactly double-bluff something that's about as smart as a fire ant nest. Though you don't really need to double-bluff ants' nests anyway.

This book doesn't go into tactics and strategies against monsters or dunjes, though it does have a 'further reading' section if she wants to keep going.

How's Lianne going? If they're still nose deep in a book, she may as well see if the library has any of those further reading books.