Drive drive.  "Have you ever been?"

"No. Kids usually don't get taken, I've only been in the usual age range for getting taken by a dungeon for a couple years. What's weirder is that my mom also hasn't been, this even though we live in a dense part of Toronto - dungeons like dense cities."

"Do you think your psychiatric issue makes it easier to get secrets out of you?"

"Oh yeah absolutely. I don't know anything that would be sensitive in my universe besides irrelevant personal stuff and I'm assuming you're kidnapping me because you already knew me to be from another universe."

"How distressed by being kidnapped are you?"

"I'm, uh, not thrilled? Are people you kidnap usually happy about being kidnapped? Do I get a selfie and an autograph?"

"Do you want one?"

"Honestly I would not turn you down, it'd make for a conversation piece, but I would still be pretty unhappy about being kidnapped. Admittedly less unhappy than I would be if it made the difference between being at home or not, but I was already separately transported to another universe so you have not made my mother any more worried than she was already."

"Hm.  ...I would not bring you to a place which I thought would treat you very poorly."

"If whoever you're bringing me to just wants me to tell them about dungeons and espers and our tech tree they could have asked nicely! I'm very talkative right now!"

"Other parties would have prevented this even if you didn't."

"You could've asked me and Ari nicely instead of breaking into the house, even if it was necessary to circumvent some sort of government or whatever. You could've snuck me a note asking me to make a phone call. Which I couldn't have read, because I can't read right now, but I could have gotten Ari to read it to me and dial the phone for me."

"Do you want me to talk about dungeons more or something. Please."

"- I apologize, I didn't mean to distress you more with that.  I was... thinking."

"What about?"

"It's my job to securely deliver you to by employers, and not my job to attempt to entice you to work with them.  Above a certain baseline of treatment."

"Oh, you don't need to, on account of I'm very talkative right now, I would tell anybody anything if they prevented me from going and finding people who weren't assholes to talk to instead."

"I don't know that information is the only thing they want out of you," she notes, offhand.

"Being an esper runs in families but only by like a factor of ten compared to genpop, even cloning me a thousand times probably won't get them another if people can start awakening in this universe at all."

"- Tell me more about dungeons."

"They've all got a core, it's a thingy about the size of a basketball, and if you destroy the core the rest of the dungeon collapses in a few minutes, killing anyone inside. If you don't do that, then eventually after like a couple weeks of kidnapping people and producing monsters and stuff, the dungeon will go away on its own, again killing anyone inside, and then it'll come back bigger and meaner in months or years. The first upgrade is usually the most substantial but it continues indefinitely; the worst dungeons are all ones that got away in the early days and have kept doing so since then. If the dungeon dies while its monsters are outside of it, sometimes they vanish or disintegrate or something, but sometimes they stick around, there's a few of those around. Some of them talk. Usually the monsters of an active dungeon do not talk. Some dungeons are four dimensional inside. Dungeons can contain substances that we have not invented or that retain magical properties after removal from the dungeon, too, some of which can even be reverse engineered, and those are big in the materials science sector."

"You look - sad - "  She sounds somehow baffled.

"I have been kidnapped and I don't really want to be cloned a thousand times, or tortured, even by accident which is currently really easy to do, or - I don't know what they're going to do to me and it's scary."

"Are - is...  I'm sorry."  She takes off her right glove and puts a hand on his shoulder.