"Tens of millions."

"Ah, yeah I see how that's not quite enough to make substantial experiments practical without a lot of coordination. Part of me still feels like it would be worth the cost to do so - we know so little - but I suppose everyone else doesn't agree with me on this and I'm no longer likely to become extremely wealthy."

"Dungeoneer espers make a lot of money! But I'm not sure this is the low hanging fruit on dungeon research."

"What do you think is?"

"I'd like to see more live capture of monsters and more aggressive stat-keeping across the globe."

"I am very interested in what the current stat keeping infrastructure is but also I want to know what the limitations on live capture are and whether my power could help if it works on monsters."

"It maybe could depending on how you aim exactly - I'm imagining you standing right up against the outside of a cage and summoning a monster to the place right in front of you with that being inside the cage - they're hard to hold, and many of them dissolve when their dungeons die so it takes quite a few captures to get a specimen after."

"I think I'd need to be touching them but it seems plausible it would work if I had my hand through the bars of a cage for a moment. How often are they similar to Cricket?"

"Cricket's special but not unique. There's a talking carnivorous unicorn in Johannesburg and a talking twelve-legged lizard in... I forget where, somewhere in South America... and I don't know if everybody who's got a talking monster publicizes."

"A twelve-legged lizard... Those sound like stories I would be sent to chase down when my editor was annoyed with me."

"What did you do to annoy your editor?"

"Uh, I was bad at picking a name for my byline and my dad is Jewish."

"Are those things related?"

"Sort of, I guess? I didn't go with my dad's name in my byline because it's too Jewish, and my mom's was out because that's the name of the publisher and I don't want favoritism from that, so I was supposed to find another and it turns out I'm not very good at that."

"What'd you wind up with?"

"I didn't find one in time and so I was assigned 'Lucien Tunnard' by my editor."

"Could be worse."

"Well, he was pressed for time."

"And didn't have time to make it worse?"

"Exactly."

"I feel like it shouldn't be that hard to pick a pen name but I guess I spent a while on my code name - the thing is they have to be unique, a lot of the good stuff has already been taken."

"Oh I'm going to have to figure something out again, that's unfortunate."

"Esper codenames aren't obligatory, June doesn't use one."

"Why do you?"

"Oh, I'm just really into being a superhero and enjoy some of the trappings. Also I hate my first name and I can leave it a little more thoroughly behind if I am known professionally as something other than my legal name."