"More the first thing than the second.... It's - people hate bugs just for being weird little guys, going about their business - some of them are dangerous but people act exactly the same way towards ones that aren't, or worse, because at least they in some sense respect dangerous ones.  And it's easy to kill or hurt them, so people just - do - and don't feel bad about it at all, just because they aren't cute.  And so it makes sense, if you're a bug, to want to hide and be in little crevices, because everything's out to get you.  ...And of course there are problems with normal predators, and bugs eating other bugs, and even if people weren't awful on purpose we're just so much bigger; it's hard to avoid hurting all of them.  But the normal human dynamic was, yeah, very salient, and the hidey-hole things were more stemming from that, secondary to it.  To me."

"Huh. I'm gonna call a survey guy about that real quick before they get it finalized, this has been great, thanks for picking up."

"You're welcome!"  'See you later' - no, he doesn't want to be presumptuous; 'Have a nice -' a nice what, recovery?  Day??  "Bye."

"Bye!" And dead air.

Well, that conversation only took him like two blocks from work, now, in theory he could go back; he's sure they'd have him gladly enough.  Or he could go home and read Traceless's blog, and chill out a bit after having been yoinked into a dungeon, in case it somehow had more effect on him than it seems to have, and not have to deal with jerking his coworkers around even more.

.....He does the math on how much money he'll make in his remaining hours for today.  He would not pay that much to buy these benefits, so the choice is really obvious, it turns out.  He'll get himself something out of the bakery to make up for it.  He can relax once he's out of school.

It takes a week and a half for him to muster the free time to check out the blog.  (That's mostly the fault of the surverys, which he fills out dutifully and detailedly; he's not that overscheduled.  Mostly.)  He's showed off his fragment in class when it seemed topical, and the reports about his dungeon's walls all seem fine, so late one night when he needs to wind down after homework and before trying to sleep he makes his best attempt at wrapping it artfully in wire, and puts Traceless's post on base rates of dungeon appearances on TTS to listen to during.

At least one dungeon will appear in almost every city of more than four hundred thousand residents almost every day. Sometimes they show up in smaller ones; they come thicker and faster in larger and denser cities. Here is some quibbling about what part of a broad metropolitan area counts as part of the city. If you make this range of reasonable assumptions it seems to follow this formula, if you make this other range of assumptions it's this more complicated formula, some people prefer the second thing but the first one is more popular because of how the formula is simpler. Almost every dungeon that appears in a given day is going to be a new dungeon, never seen before - records are imperfect but they do have databases going spottily back to the seventies and solidly back to the early eighties noting dungeon features to see if the same ones are reappearing across the globe and they're now very confident that if you destroy the core, it doesn't come back, and the majority of observed dungeons are de novo. Dungeons that get away, come back, refined and nastier. Here are some case studies of when various dungeons including the big names like Volcanic Range and Nightmare come back inside and outside of confluences. Dungeons that get away once usually get away twice because usually they got away in the first place due to being really hard to clear for some reason, but sometimes it was just that the right espers for the situation weren't available in the right area or someone made a tactical mistake. Dungeons that get away twice do not come back as much scarier, but for selection effect reasons you're likely to keep seeing them again till they land in range of a team that is really determined to take them out. Here are your approximate odds of getting eaten by a dungeon per decade depending on how many people live within a mile of your house.

Oh what a good post.  What a very good post.  He should read the rest of the blog... someday.  When he has any free time.

But he does make a point during a weekend lunch break to at least skim the interview with Cricket in an attempt to try and suss out whether Traceless was accurately representing him.  It's not that Traceless doesn't seem approximately cool, it's just that monsters don't have an established place in society and it seems really easy for people to accidentally abuse them.  A substantial number of completely regular cats owned by basically nice people are being kind of abused already, according to Julien; he wants a better view of the vibes.

Some of the interviews, including this one, have the original audio available in the post without any TTS shenanigans. It's illustrated with a Cricket photo in which he's posing vainly in a patch of sun, stretching out one wing.

It establishes the biographical facts of Cricket's life. He began in a dungeon which appeared in York, Toronto. Like most, it was new; this was its first and only appearance. It was four-dimensional and the monsters were assorted larger and meaner and winged versions of various animals. Traceless dug up after-action reports and apparently in addition to the giant winged cat, there were reports of a dog, a gecko, a squirrel, and some kind of frog, but since the dungeon was 4D, a lot of the suspected monsters were never seen in their entirety, they just reached kata or ana and killed people who were trying to hold the entrance from the dungeon end. An esper with a homing power that works across the fourth dimension was hauled in from Manitoba by teleport after the dungeon monsters started escaping and the dungeon's urgency level was escalated accordingly. That esper, Columba, located every identified victim of the dungeon and pulled them out, over the course of a few grueling hours with a lot of guiding breaks, and then homed in on the dungeon core and killed it. Meanwhile, more local teams were trying to deal with the escaped monsters. They killed most of them, but by the time the winged cat - the size of a black bear and venomous - was tracked down, the dungeon was dead, and the cat had shrunk to normal cat size and lost the venom and addressed the SWAT team in English. (He said "what the fuck is your problem".)

There's not a lot of robust policy on benign-ified monsters, but the SWAT team nonlethally arrested the cat and held onto him for a little while before the Maple Esper Agency's in-house research department received custody of him to investigate his properties. There's an X-ray, on the blog, showing how the wings attach, which was taken during this time. Cricket remembers vanishingly little of being a monster with a living dungeon and it's easily possible that every snatch of memory he is able to conjure up is a later confabulation or maybe localized to the few minutes in which the dungeon underwent its death throes. Analysis of his accent and vocabulary gets results like he grew up in York. Eventually MEA offered to get him food he liked more than normal cat food if he would help with a 4D dungeon; he did this, in Rochester NY, proving able to extend into and see across the fourth dimension just fine even in diminished form. However, he still had a very low opinion of everyone at Maple and refused to answer to any name they tried to give him (there's a list, which starts with Fluffy and ends with Cata).

During Traceless's awakening he decided he should get a cat - originally intending to get a completely normal cat - as a failover for backlash compulsive socializing during the inevitable moments when no human picks up the phone. Traceless's mother posted about this on an esper forum frequented by a Maple employee who offered - initially somewhat jokingly - to provide a cat. Traceless, once awakened, went to the office where Cricket lived and offered to teach him to read - he's native-fluent in English but began illiterate. Cricket reports taking an instant liking to this most worthwhile of humans, and went home with him that very day, and accepted the name Cricket, and insists on reporting to him and no one else, even though Traceless can't himself operate in 4D, when dungeon-navigating. Cricket now spends most of his time watching television (it's good for providing conversation topics when his human is backlashed and needs to be purred on and talked to) and gets sashimi four meals a day. He says being in 4D dungeons is nice because his fur can go in all the directions it's supposed to but he doesn't really mind being projected into three dimensions most of the time.

Lunches are better for eye-reading than ear-, but having the original audio is importantly good because it means that he can check that Cricket pretty definitely said the things Traceless claims he did.

That's so much.  Cricket's origin is so much.  Dungeons are a moral nightmare, and it's so concerning that entities that're out there killing people wantonly might be able to wake up into suitable companions.  It's - horrifying.  But the thing for him personally to do is the same:  he has to keep his head down and learn as much as he can and contribute to the great project of humans getting cooler stuff and safer everything, until the day when they're cool enough and safe enough to save the monsters too.

At least Cricket's current life seems to be genuinely fine.  Julien wasn't going to do anything about it either way but it's one less thing to worry about.

That curiosity satisfied, he doesn't successfully make time to read more posts for a while.  Though he is subscribed to future ones; he keeps an eye out for the one on dungeon selectivity to see whether he's in it at all.

Not by name; Traceless didn't ask for permission to identify him. He refers to "talking to dungeon victims, as is my habit". The post reiterates the basics - usually not kids, though there have been a handful of dungeons that wanted kids specifically for some reason. Basically never people who would rather sit in (that particular) dungeon than do whatever they were otherwise going to do with their next several hours. He posts example surveys - there's the one they pass out after Nightmare that people usually only return months later with the help of their therapists if at all, there's the standard one with fill-in-the-blanks to customize it about the nature of the monsters and the captivity, and it wants the date and time of your kidnapping and some Likert scales and free-answer sections. Here's a relatively well-answered one from a Baltimore dungeon last year; eighty percent response rate, no obvious trolls in the data, and it shows basically what you'd expect (lots of people who were scared of heights in a zero-gravity dungeon floating miserably). Here's one where people didn't answer much - it was a sex-themed dungeon; response rates for those suck and some people just use the survey to scream indignantly about being surveyed. This means they still don't know how those people were chosen and remain pretty confused about sex-themed dungeons compared to the standard kind. The centipede dungeon maybe doing something unexpected wrt fear of centipedes is a minor note in a post he's obviously been working on for a while.

That's as much as he expected!  Unless you factor in that he thought it might well not show up at all.  Do the ones that want kids tend to take only kids?

They don't seem perfect at it, but sometimes they're imperfect in a way that still results in all-kids kidnappings, like this one that seemed to want kids aged five to ten and got a twelve year old and a three year old in there.

Fascinating.  ...Unfortunately it's fascinating in a way that means he still needs to get to cooler stuff and safer everything, and school and work are still kicking his ass, and so it seems kind of unlikely that any time when Traceless is going to want to call him is a time when he's going to be free, at least until like spring break.  (He'll be working more hours then, but with more of them in the morning, so maybe not all of them will be during esper recovery times?).  If Traceless texts him before then he'll relay this, and also leave a comment about his centipede experience on the post, if that seems like the sort of thing other people are doing here.

Totally in line with the blog culture to comment on the centipede post.

He gets two more texts - one in the middle of the night ("guess who got called to a code R at two in the morning, obviously don't wake up for this if you aren't already up, I'm going through everybody in my contacts and crossing my fingers") and one at a saner but still inconvenient hour ("this a good time? I have dungeon mats on the brain").

The first one Julien doesn't respond to except with a reactji the next morning and his comment on the blog; the second gets Traceless the datespan of Julien's spring break.

Unfortunately, two days into that span, things start being - wrong.  Or right, sometimes.  Suspiciously so.  His bus is perfectly on time; that's nothing, his bus sometimes is.  People keep - not staring at him, nothing so overt, but - glancing at him.  Watching him, maybe.  It's hard to say, because if they do they obviously don't want him to catch them at it, and he doesn't want to let them catch him catching them.  At work, Aliya, noted constant grump, asks him how he's doing and whether he's doing anything fun for break, and then tells him - cheerfully, for her - about her own plans to take a trip down to Niagara Falls.  The customers are - they keep - he's not sure, but something seems implacably, dreadfully off about them.

Almost as if - they're actors.  Like all the real customers have been replaced, with the goal of...... what.  Something.  He doesn't know.  But he only gets more confident as the day goes on - as he sees someone walk in, look at the menu for several minutes, then at their phone, and then leave without ordering; as people are chipper to him in obviously fake ways and impatient with him so clearly just to double-mask whatever hatred or malice they feel towards him - that everything around him is a scenario constructed around him.  To get something out of him.

But he still has no idea of what.  He's got to play along.  Until he can find out.

So, yes, here he is, a completely normal barista doing completely normal barista actions.  Breathe normally, chat normally, smile normally.  If you can't smile normally err on the cheerful side instead of the terrified one.  His hands feel off somehow, his arms, his whole body feels - tingly or empty, or something, as if he's not quite real, either.  But that at least might just be the panic.  Or it could mean that he's in a hallucination.  Hard to say, but either way it doesn't actually stop him from punching in orders and making coffees.  Whatever they want out of him they're going to have to work for it.

And they do; it's not four hours before Kian mis-makes a chai latte and offers it to Julien, and he knows, he knows it's poisoned.  Or maybe drugged, it could just be drugged.  Something to drop him back into the complacency he's known his whole life?  Did he just wake up to the true nature of reality, or has he been dropped into a hostile facsimile of something that once was real?  It's impossible to say, but no matter what he must not drink this, and secondarily he must not tip his hand.  He puts on his most casual smile and tells Kian to keep it for himself.  The fucker.  He accepts without much protest and downs it, as if to show off how poisoned it isn't, as if Julien doesn't know that they - whoever's running this - are already controlling everything, that obviously that sort of trick is trivial to them.

There's the water in his water bottle.  That's probably safe.  He'll just have to make it last until he has a better idea of what's going on.

He restarts his phone, as casually as possible, during a lull.  So that his fingerprint won't unlock it until he puts in the pattern again.  It probably won't help anything, but it's as low risk as any of the protective actions available to him, and it might help.  Somehow.  In some of the more optimistic cases, where this is just government action about him instead of a fully constructed minireality.

And he keeps working.  As normally as he can manage.

"Hi can I get a venti iced caramel macchiato with almond milk and an extra shot of espresso and put the caramel in the actual coffee not on top of the foam and do you know how to do the designs, I want a design on it."

"Of course!"  It would be convenient if they would just give him easy fucking orders, but that wouldn't be very verisimilitudinous, would it, which is less annoying but more unsettling.  It's a very realistic simulation, he'll give it that, except for all the ways in which it clearly fucking isn't.  Coffee goes to the customer, just as asked for.  It slows down the line a little but the line isn't made of real people so what does it matter.

The macchiato person doesn't tip. The next person just wants a flat white.

He doesn't care if they don't tip!  It's not like he's going to get to keep the money anyway!!  Flat white!!!

...Hey Aliya, could you actually be the one to go get more milk from the walk-in instead of him.  Yeah he'll make this order for you, don't worry about it, he's got it.  (The walk-in is a sacred place where people are allowed to scream and cry and fall apart, or at least the real one is, and if he goes there he might do those things.)  Here's the order she was working on!  He's good at Starbucks it's his job!  His normal job which he's performing normally!!  Except that he's cold and doesn't want to go into the walk-in for the rest of the day!

This guy wants four blueberry muffins for his children who are waiting outside with his wife and the fact that there are only three of them left does not deter him from wanting this.

"I'm so sorry sir!  Can I interest you in one of our other flavors?  Perhaps chocolate chip or lemon poppy seed?"  What happens if he breaks character.  Probably he gets tortured somehow; he should really really avoid that.  He really needs to walk the line between telling this guy to fuck off and breezing out of here, and not revealing that he knows that nothing about this actually matters.  But erring on the cheerful side, always.

"No, if they don't all get the same kind they're going to flip, I need four blueberry. Can you check in the back," he says wearily.

"We have four chocolate chip!"

"One of them is allergic to chocolate. Look, I told you what I want, very clearly."