"Some water'd be great!"  Here he comes; hup.

"Here ya go." He's got a bunch of little pint water bottles. "We're gonna follow those green X's, green's my spraypaint color for this one and Xs are this route specifically."

Chug chug chug.  "Sounds good."

Tromp tromp. "You going to want the medics when we get out or are you all good?"

"I'm fine."  He has a couple scrapes, but he keeps a minimal first-aid kit in his backpack.  Not that the backpack got eaten into the dungeon with him; it's presumably still at his work.  But once he and it are reuinited he should be able to patch himself up well enough.

"Glad to hear it! So what's your name - you don't have to tell me, I'm just very chatty when I'm backlashed -"

"It's Julien."

"Lovely to meet you. Steep part here, do you want me to carry you over it?"

Does he seem like the sort to prefer an honest effort and probably less inconvenience for him or someone knowing their limits and causing him some small certain inconvenience - hm, he seems genuine enough, and it's not like Julien would hate to be carried around.

"If you don't mind!  And I expect it's a lot nicer for me to meet you than the reverse, at the moment."

Scoop! "Not necessarily! It is true that as yet you are little distinguished from other dungeon kidnappees you could have been but I am similarly little distinguished from other rescue espers I could have been to you, presumably, and I'm the one with a magical psychological problem making me particularly keen to meet people."

"....That would get you some more points on this metric, yes.  It still seems hard to beat the possibility of there being no rescue esper, which has been somewhat on my mind whether or not it was very likely."

"That sometimes happens but not in a dungeon like this, this is very bog standard. Or, well, sometimes there's no rescue esper because it's the military but they're less sexy so their share of dungeon rescues get talked about less."

"That makes sense."  He wants to come off as maximally noninconvenient for a rescuee and also as interesting (positive) as possible within that constraint.  So what does he say.  .......Nothing, if he can't think of anything interesting, positive, and noninconvenient at a given point in the interaction.

They are past the steep section and Julien gets set down. "Not yet but closer to the entrance you're gonna want headphones, I brought some for you, they've got jackhammers because they wanna harvest the walls."

"It's good they're on that.  Do you know whether this stuff is one of the ones with known applications?"

"No, but they're taking it to turn it into status symbol art and, I don't know, countertops or something, as a fallback. They've made off with a dead centipede or two also but my intuition is that the centipedes are nothing and the cave stuff is maybe something."

"It's really polite of the status symbol people to help fund dungeon mining."

"I know, right? The briefer the spells of nothing useful the more intently people can look for the windfalls."

"I'm always wondering how much stuff sitting around as sculptures or countertops would actually be really useful if only we knew what to do with it."

"Well, R&D gets first crack but there is certainly no guarantee that they catch everything. Maybe in fifty years they'll run a new test on a scrap of this stuff and then urgently buy all the old countertops to turn into spaceship parts."

"Which is still better than the same happening to a bit of centipede."

"I bet they occasionally have debates about it - if they find something really really useful, before they find the dungeon core, whether to let it live - I've never been assigned such a dungeon unless this is one, but I bet it gets brought up now and then, especially ones kinda like this that isn't physically injuring anybody and has a lot of the thing. Sure, statistically if you let it come back it'll be meaner next time, but how much meaner, really, and it'll have the same stuff."

"I wish it were easier - or, safer, really - to tell whether letting dungeons live affected base rates of them popping up.  Sometimes I think about a future where most dungeons are old tame ones we know are useful because we let them crowd out the new ones, but of course trying to get there might just mean we get a lot more dungeons in total."

"I have a post about that on my blog!"