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It is a few hours into a projected 168 of them. Haru is trying to get back to sleep while his mother holds him, because 168 hours is going to feel a lot longer if he can't figure out how to sleep while lonelier than ought to be humanly possible.
Suddenly not having his mother holding him is certainly a way to ruin the attempt.
"I don't think my world is particularly close to eradicating any kinds of natural disaster. It sounds like you have some kind of fuck-uppedness in your, like, equilibrium of incentives, which is yielding all the sabotage? I don't know what it would be though."
"Well, maybe dungeons will be contagious and we'll be united by a common enemy or something and cut it out."
"Yeahhhhhh. Do you have any reason to think they might or might not be contagious?"
"No, this is my first nonfictional exposure to other universes. They didn't, like, start in one place and expand from there like an epidemic, they started happening all over the world."
"Maybe not. But I doubt there've been any there. They like population centers, they don't even show up on farms more than once in a blue moon. Cities mostly, once a cruise ship."
"I was about to be like, 'That's so weird,' but maybe it's not actually that weird based on the other things you said about them."
"I mean, they eat people, or like not literally eat them usually but certainly want them for something. There's no people on the moon and not usually much of a selection on a farm or in the desert or in the middle of the ocean."
"...people landed there, but it was before dungeons were a thing, and even if a dungeon had spawned right at the time of their landing it was like three guys, even a very small dungeon is going to want at least, like, eight, and will appear someplace that has more than a total of eight options to sort through them in some way."
"It would not have been weirder to me that you guys hadn't gone to your moon than it is you don't have cultured meat! - But you didn't like keep going back? Maybe dungeons take up all your money for that sort of explorationy stuff?"
"I guess that could be it but also there's not a lot of stuff to do, on the moon? In the long term a flourishing human civilization has people living there but it's not hospitable or cost-effective or particularly useful at our current tech level, I guess maybe it is at yours..."
"2029, I guess dungeons are somehow slowing us down more than rampant industrial sabotage is slowing you guys down. Or maybe even minor head injuries are like lead poisoning and you guys are more resilient to them or something."
"How do you feel about the idea of going through some medical scans and tests? After a week has passed, of course."
"It is currently sort of hard to project how I will feel about things in a week unless I already know my preexisting opinion on whatever it is."
"Very reasonable." Xavier ruffles his hair and sets a plate with two folded half-sandwiches in front of him. There's not the best view of the chicken, with it surrounded by bread and at least three kinds of cheese, but it looks approximately like a pretty regular steak of chicken breast. Xavier circles back to fetch a bowl of soup garnished with additional grated cheese but no herbs.
It is. The meat is quite good but not in any identifiably non-chicken way; it just tastes like an unusually delicious example of the kind.
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