Lucien will toast to that.

"I think a tiny bit of me wants there to exist at least a few samples left of each species afterwards, but not having any in the wild seems important."

"There's smallpox in research labs. I kind of don't like this but I can see the argument."

"I would rather not have any risk of smallpox getting out than keep it around - I'm not sure if other people are making reasonable tradeoffs about this."

"Yeah. So far, no smallpox leaks."

"That's good, I really hope it stays that way."

The entrées arrive. Haru has finished his artichoke but he's still hungry.

"You are welcome to have some of mine if you'd like."

"Same to you." Theft!

Lucien will steal a bit for himself, increasingly confused about how gender is supposed to work here but not unhappy about the situation.

"Do you think you'd like to try doing dungeons? My agent can set up some easy ones for a first run or two."

"Yeah that seems like it would be a good idea?"

"When I was starting I went with a much more experienced escort but I've been at it a few years and can probably just do that part myself."

"Yes I'd definitely like that."

"Anything you want to know before we schedule that? - is this an undatelike amount of shop talk -"

"I don't know what a datelike amount of shop talk is but I am always happy to discuss scheduling things. I think it might be good to verify I can my taps last for a decent amount of time to be at all useful?"

"Do I still have mine or did it go away when you pulled me through the table?"

"It went away when I pulled you."

"I guess that makes sense. I wanna write things down - test how long a tag lasts, check your range, bring you to a simple dungeon for field testing within and across the boundary..."

"Yeah I am also definitely interested in doing this."

"How much do you know about what an entry-level dungeon'll be like?"

"The half of your blog I read didn't discuss any entry level ones, I don't think."

"They're less interesting because they're more common knowledge, but not, of course, to you. Standard issue newborn dungeon parameters are: there's a pocket dimension. It makes a portal to itself somewhere in a city, often high off the ground. It either directly teleports people into itself from within a radius of a few blocks or it sends monsters out through the portal to go physically grab people and drag them in - first kind is more common, second kind it's easier to physically locate the portal if it's at all tucked away. It hangs onto them and they have a bad time. They're very reliable about that - even if all they're doing is putting people in cells or holes in the ground that aren't that overtly unpleasant, they somehow never grab somebody who really wanted to have a great excuse to skip their math final. Sometimes they're doing worse than that but the entry-level one you'd start on won't be. There's monsters, in the dungeon; there's environmental hazards, sometimes though not always, like thornbushes or traps or something; there's the victims; and somewhere, occasionally guarded by or even inside of an especially big monster but sometimes just hidden in some location, is the core. It's yea big," he gestures basketball-sized, "and when you destroy it the dungeon dies, collapses, the portal's gone - so everybody has to be out by then or ready to go as soon as it's destroyed. I'm sometimes the first person to get a look at a dungeon but that's when the sensors have trouble with it, so that wouldn't be your first one, we'd go to one where we already knew what the monsters looked like and what they were doing to people and what to watch out for."

"Huh! Most of that I think I knew but the bit where they don't grab people who want to be grabbed is new and very confusing information. If someone keeps it a secret to everyone outside of them that they want an excuse to leave, do they still not get grabbed? Do people who think they have a good reason to want to skip their math test but in fact the test was cancelled get grabbed? What about people who don't know that they were heading into a test because they forgot?" 

"Our source on this is post-dungeon surveys and the responses aren't great, or especially high-granularity, and we can't run controlled experiments because we don't decide where dungeons appear or who to offer them."

"Hrm, how many people get kidnaped each year again?"