"...Well I'm going to start by asking questions, and if that doesn't get me anywhere I will start trying to figure out how to do magic to track them down, even though that's not really in my wheelhouse. I'm not going to have a panic attack or assault anyone about it, the situation isn't urgent, just important." And she's not going to admit that she'll absolutely steal them back if she has to unless someone asks her point blank.

boss monster walked out of dungeon. saw cricket. TALKING TO CRICKET POLITELY IN ENGLISH

I CANNOT decide whether or not to talk to her backlashed I NEED go/no-go from somebody whose brain is working NOW

NOW, PAULA

"Is your dungeon alive still?"

"My...pocket dimension...isn't exactly an organism, but it's fine, I just closed the portal to it."

Holy shit??

The place isn't evac'd, if it gets mad it'll just eat a bunch of civilians, if you want to talk to it go for it

"--Whoah! Hi! Are you okay, you seem kind of not okay."

"Taking your presentation at face value for the moment: here on this planet sometimes a pocket dimension opens up, kidnaps people sooner or later, takes its time about killing them, sometimes lets monsters out to roam around the normal world. This phenomenon is called a 'dungeon'. Your portal was funny looking and the place was weird in other ways but that's the paradigm in which it was first assessed."

"Oh no! I'm sorry, I did not know that--I have not kidnapped anybody and I am not going to kidnap anybody and I am definitely not going to kill anybody, killing people results in them being dead and that's bad. I'm a magical girl. The pocket dimension comes with."

"There... are dead people. In your basement. There are only four of them, but there are those."

"--I didn't kill them! Those are my family. They--they came about in the same way I did but not--not all the way."

"--Wait, if you know that, were you in my pocket dimension, did you take--a couple of colorful things--I really do need those back."

May hands over the bag. "I also took a couple books and a walnut. A lot of the funding for people to go in and rescue people from dungeons and kill the dungeons comes from the exploitation of exotic materials found in some dungeons, I wasn't just swiping stuff for kicks."

"I don't care about the books and the walnut--I mean, I might care a little about the books, but not a lot." She extracts the two colorful things reverently, kisses each of them, and hands the bag back. "I sort of just came to exist a little while ago, and the people in the basement are--people who didn't finish getting made, sort of--and then there's people who got made even less, and," she carefully displays the two not-glass objects in the palm of her hand, making sure she can snatch her hand back if some additional person appears out of thin air and tries to take them, "that's these. And the other ones like them. They're--little pieces of soul, sort of."

"So, again, the paradigm I have to understand - entities coming to exist through processes that aren't mundane biological ones - is dungeons spawning monsters. Which isn't necessarily - I mean, Cricket here was a monster, he just changed a lot when his dungeon died, but - perhaps you could clarify more about what you mean."

"...So, I'm still sorting through my own memories, but I think what happened was that a glob of magic hit a whole bunch of universes and--picked up--bits of me--and also people I was close to--and then landed here. And if one of the mes was from here then it's from before the pocket dimension dungeon monster thing. ...Several of the mes I can sort of remember being are from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but I think there's at least one of me who's from a world that's...nowish...because your clothes don't look weird but the part of me that's from the eighteen nineties is going 'but why would a woman wear pants.' Um. I'm sorry, this is, actually, weird for me too. If it helps."

"Wow that does sound incredibly weird.

"Do you mind if I record this conversation."

"No, that's fine!"

May pokes her phone and props it up against Cricket. In the process she pulls down the time and date display to show the ?boss monster?. "The pocket dimension monster thing is in fact a historically recent thing, it started in the seventies. Do you... have a name. I'm May."

"...I have a magic name in a magic language but you can call me Lucy, a bunch of me were named that and a bunch more were named things like it."

"It is honestly incredibly cool to meet you apart from how this is objectively a terrifying thing to be doing, you would not be the first dungeon monster to talk." Gesture at Cricket.

"Well, I'm sorry to be terrifying you! That's so not what I'm about, my magic is for helping people. It's good to meet you too, though, and I'm really glad to have been informed of the scary context before I scared more people."

"Quite. Speaking of, I should update various people I scared when you came out."

"I'm sorry to have done that but, like, not really actionably so, because I wasn't just going to hang out by myself in my pocket dimension forever. ...Even for definitions of 'by myself' that take into account managing to finish the people in the basement."

Text text text. "Dungeons usually spawn in population centers. The wings are certainly something but if you'd opened the portal in the middle of some anonymous patch of tundra and walked into town I think people'd guess 'weird esper' before 'polite monster'."

"Good to know but unfortunately I did not actually consciously place that portal."