"With you there."

"I'm out of topics for the moment so, uh, kissing?"

"The driver can hear us. Well, he can hear you, I'm prepared to prevent him from hearing me if that would improve the situation."

"Yes, I know, and I am mostly succeeding at not letting it bother me. It's- Ugh. I meant- Well, discussion of - sparkling consequences of kissing - can still wait. You can come up with topics."

"Do you want a robot bird? I already have a pet monster."

"I'm sort of uncomfortable discussing prospects of pet-ness when I haven't so much as spoken to it - him? - what did it even say, did it act like Cricket? -Anyway I do not think I would enjoy having a pet, let alone a sentient one that may or may not want a pet-shaped relationship, you may remember my thing about chickens..."

"It didn't act like Cricket. More, uh, robotic, and it didn't insult me at all. The legal status of orphan monsters is kind of weird - I don't think of myself as owning Cricket, he just behaves an awful lot like a cat so we fall into pet-shaped patterns, but in practice nobody knows what to do if he has some kind of legal-status-related situation and the way they'd be likely to default to handling it would be talking to me about it, I'm his point of interface."

"Well, I'll talk to it later. If they can hook it up to an EV charger or something. Which I hope they can."

"I hope so too, I think orphan monsters are a pretty high percentage of the possibility where we ever figure out what the fuck is going on with dungeons."

"Everything's mysterious until it isn't, aye? I'm imagining how John Snow felt, able to see the pattern himself, by tiny desperate degrees, but unable to prove it..."

"Yeah. Dots on a map, as many dungeons as will let their orphans live."

"Knowledge is power..." Sigh. "Metal tools. Agriculture. Sailing. Industry. Computing... Dungeons next?"

"The age of magic."

"Any sufficiently understood magic is functionally indistinguishable from technology."

"Eh, I'm not confident dungeons and esper powers and backlash reduce the same way as everything else. Maybe they do! But they're so fucking weird."

"Weirder than the sky and weather and animals and plants and fire and all the rest that many early peoples decided were all driven by divinity?"

"I'm not claiming that they were somehow experiencing a different form of confusion. I assume the internal experience is much the same. But we've picked up some things since then about what makes something exceptional, because we can compare more experiences and have more tools, and 'shows up without precedent out of nowhere, spooky action at a distance' is paradigm-demolishing, I think it really should call materialism into question. It could just be advanced aliens or something! But I wouldn't count on it."

"...It's kind of hard to stay materialist but... I think a materialist world is more comfortable to exist in, to me. Maybe I'm doing wishful thinking."

"Yeah, it would be among other things not very materialistic for the world to care if you wanted it that way or not."

Sigh.

"What is 'magic' by your definition?"

The car pulls up. "I don't have a rigorous definition, to be honest with you - I mean, extensionally, espers and dungeons, but obviously if next week we got people chanting to bring rain and it observably worked that'd be magic too."

"I don't like that. I think there's - blurrier lines - are you pointing to macroscopic changes in the world we don't understand? Changes in the world caused by a person doing stuff? You just said you don't have a rigorous definition but mmmrh."

"It could reduce to aliens doing stuff. We could figure it all out. Sometimes I think of it as, 'aliens landed in the seventies and started abducting people'. And I'd love to find out more about it but I don't want to labor confidently under the conviction that it absolutely must bottom out in normal physics." Out they scoot to their silo.

"I'd probably want to think about it more but I'd end up phrasing it something like 'effects directly dependent on a conscious mind'... No, maybe not... Ah, forget it!"

They are in the silo now! Weird that it's called a silo when it's pretty much just A House, but whatever. He maneuvers couchwards.

Couch. Shirtlessness. "We don't know if dungeons are conscious." Snuggle.