"Especially since they just - showed up without warning! Thousands of years of things getting more explicable and then bam."

"I occasionally wonder if dungeons or dungeonlike things happened in - very early history, prompting all the myths, and then stopped like some supernatural sunspot cycle-"

"Hmmmm, the way dungeons work doesn't seem like it'd prompt most myths we have - I guess if there were also espers that would close some of the gap, going around being gods and heroes and stuff, with dungeons to be the underworld and such. And the dungeons might have... died back because the population wasn't urban enough, maybe, if we take the hypothesis that they're feeding off people as read..."

"There's a lot of reasons it wouldn't fit together. I'm not a dungeonologist. They'd be either operating entirely differently back then, or quiescent for at least a couple hundred years to go back to being myths after industrialization, or something..."

"Definitely more than couple hundred years. Recordkeeping wasn't amazing before the printing press but the printing press was 1430 and people would have written recognizably-enough about dungeons before that too. I'm not even sure you can have dungeons coexisting with the Roman Empire or, like, Classical Greece, and I'm not sure what Chinese dynasties would have let it go unwritten either."

"Yeah, so pretty unlikely all told."

"The theory I come back to most often is that it's aliens somehow."

"And how would we have any idea at all what they might want or how they might think, right? Maybe they're harvesting backlash and suffering. Maybe it's a game show." Sigh. Lean- No, no leaning into Haru.

Not even a little? "The fact that espers and dungeons appeared at the same time has to mean something, and even if it were somehow a coincidence, the fact that dungeons never kidnap espers can't be. The way dungeons lean on - human concepts - in their theming is also suggestive of something, but I don't know if it's a communication attempt or our collective unconscious doing this to ourselves somehow or what."

Well, it's a couch. It's squishy. He won't be responsible for the natural consequences of elastic deformation in furniture so there may end up being some leaning anyway.

"Correlation is not causation, it's just correlation. If there's some new field of energy, maybe it both results in espers and in dungeons, completely separately. It's not like dungeons can guide espers or have the backlash-guiding dynamic. They fuck with people in a different pattern and don't obviously have to - go back to neutral or find balances."

"Right, like Cricket can navigate in 4D as long as he can stay awake, it's not a power, it's just how he is."

"Should I actually read your blog first, do I sound unacceptably oblivious and uneducated on this...?"

"If you like. I'm not backlashed right now so I'm not going to insist on personally educating you in conversational format."

"Well, I'll read it later either way so it's really more 'more of this topic, or something else'."

"Powers testing?"

"Sure! Uh, say when and I will attempt to detect you and talk to you. Er, with my powers and not my arm and mouth."

"And I will try not to let you and then I will try letting you. When."

Where are the people around him, o brain?

And does it change if he focuses fairly hard on thinking that there ought to be someone right here to talk to if he just - mentally spams ping requests, looking really hard?

There's nobody there! Nobody at all!

"Whoa I definitely notice that."

He stops immediately, by the end of 'whoa'.

"Nothing on a passive 'who's out there'. I was trying to get through to you by knowing you were there and pushing harder. Sorry."

"It's fine, but if a dungeon were doing that to me I'd definitely want to clear it double-time. Letting you through now."

Hi. Can you hear me?

It's not exactly words. Or feelings. It's some secret third thing.

Trippy. Yes, I can hear you.

I wonder how complicated I can get it. I didn't do much testing before. Mental images? Sense-of-place? Complicated, non-wordy concepts? May I try these things?

Sure!