"The improvements in the plastic industry and stuff probably helped too though." He ketchups his own KD and sits down to eat. Cricket's got halibut.

"That's the same thing the bags were made out of, right?"

"Yep, plastic's all over the place, it's cheap and can be any shape and color and it's lightweight and usually waterproof."

"And it can hold it's form after being squeezed into a different shape! That's the really impressive part about the bottle. Well, that and being transparent."

"Depends on the plastic, some of it will stay deformed, but yeah."

"I suppose the plastic bags did that....How is it made?"

"I think it is mostly derived from petroleum but this is again the sort of question you can ask Wikipedia. Sorry, I'm more talkative when I'm backlashed but I haven't run a dungeon today."

"How do I ask Wikipedia things?"

"Like this." He selects the relevant part of the URL and types "Plastic" to replace it.

A page to read! 

Eventually: "Guest room is up the stairs, first door on your right, whenever you want to crash for the night."

"Thank you," He should probably do that soon.

(He doesn't actually manage to for several hours, because so long as he stays on the laptop he can think about Wikipedia things and not about his-life things.)

When he wakes up there's a note that says Laptop is where you left it, please don't do anything besides click around Wikipedia without supervision. Help yourself to the muffins on the counter. I have a dungeon appointment and will be at that and then my partner's most of the day but you can call me with the phone next to the coffee machine at and there's a number.

Lucien gets up, has a muffin, mentally plans out a letter to his parents about the recent events, goes to his room to quietly cry for a bit, and then returns and looks up dungeon on Wikipedia. 

Dungeons are hostile pocket dimensions! They started appearing at the same time as espers. They abduct people - sometimes with monsters but often just magically causing people to be in them instead of wherever they were before. They almost never kill people right away, so there's plenty of time for espers or the military to go in and retrieve victims and find the dungeon core and kill it, unless it's a very difficult dungeon for whatever reason. A dungeon which is not killed will eventually vanish, complete with anyone or anything inside it, and come back bigger and scarier in months or years.

Espers?

Espers have lots of exciting powers! Here are some famous individual ones! In addition to their dungeon work many have civilian applications in various industries! Cultural handling of espers around the world! Etymology of "esper"!

Ooh! What industries??

There are espers in construction, medicine including psych care, electrical generation, law enforcement, and various rarer options for rarer powers.

Lucien wants to look at all of those, and this time is going to manage to go at least somewhat breadth first so he gets to each.

Around lunchtime the phone rings.

.... Lucien does not know the etiquette for this, but in his time he would answer and take down a message if asked, so possibly he should do that?

"Hello?"

"Hi Lucien, it's Haru. Wanted to see how you're doing and if you want lunch delivered or anything. I'm backlashing so I'm very chatty right now if you have any questions Wikipedia couldn't answer."

"I'm doing well and lunch would be nice eventually though it is not at all urgent. I read up about espers but didn't actually get to the section on backlash before I got distracted by industrial applications of powers - what is it?"

"Using our powers gives us symptoms. Acute varies esper to esper, but if we get a lot very fast, or leave some sitting for a long time, it turns into generic chronic pain and chance of organ failure and stuff. My backlash makes me lonely."