Anytime!

Next is - hm.  He feels pretty tired and like he doesn't want to do more things, especially not really emotionally taxing ones.  But... he has to have the emotions about the dungeon sometime, otherwise he won't be trustworthy to himself about switching away from being sad.  Haru's idea only works if you proceed to have all of the right emotions later.

Still.  That doesn't mean he has to do it right now.  He... goes to check out his new esper body?  He has abs, now; that's pretty cool.  He thought he looked pretty fine before but there's a definite improvement.  One of his roommates has a pull-up bar in the kitchen doorframe; he tries doing a few and just can, even though he's not feeling very energetic.  ...Okay, he should try and do more of this at a time when he's capable of feeling good about it, instead of when he has unresolved bad feelings looming over him.

Hm.  He'll - this is probably interesting in its own right, and he couldn't read it last week, and if it ends up being just an interesting read that will be fine and if it leads to him having dungeon feelings that will also be fine.  What's Haru's "Sex Themed Dungeons: What The Fuck" post got to say?

Arguably, it's surprising that there aren't more dungeons that rape people. They seem to aim at people having a bad time but otherwise exhibit really fantastic variety in the details of that time: trapped in a pit, walking on a treadmill for hours, burning alive, chased by zombies, living through their bespoke worst nightmare, but also more bizarrely specific experiences. Buried up to the neck in a giant peach? Forced into a role as a plant and menaced by pruning shears? Sent into an artistic frenzy? Having a series of vivid dreams about being a princess while unconscious in a dragon-guarded tower? Those are all real and the pruning shears one happened twice, once with topiaries and once with bonsais.

Dungeons get ideas from people. Dungeons didn't invent topiary or bonsai, are not credited with zombies or treadmills, and certainly had no part in fairy tales. And dungeons do get ideas from that pervasive and powerful human concept, sex. But... not that often. You are (slightly) more likely to be kidnapped by a dungeon that bases itself on some form of children's media franchise than one that would be really tricky to sanitize for such a franchise's audience. This even though dungeons seldom kidnap children. But sex dungeons do exist. Dungeons, as a group, are not invariable prudes; it's just an uncommon means of victimization. But not so uncommon that we don't have some to look at, sparse though their surveys are. (Fill out your dungeon surveys.)

So let's look at the data.

Yeah.  Ugh.  Maybe the reason is that new dungeons are all babies and nope, that's doing way too much anthropomorphization and really obviously not how it works.  Presumably the data are definitely not going to show that new dungeons never do sex but that repeat ones eventually do; that wouldn't make any sense.  ...But what do they show?

Sex dungeons often have monsters rape victims in various ways, and sometimes mind-control the victims; the latter option involves monsters less in the process, sending victims after each other or supplying them with non-monster items or letting the monsters be fairly passive about the affair. Sex dungeons are more likely than randomly selected dungeons to be psychic (with sex pollen effects, or effects that confuse identity, or dreamlike or drunklike states, or weirder stuff), but still less likely to be psychic than not. They are not any less insistent on victims who don't want to be there than other dungeons but might be slightly more likely to pick up people who think they want to be there and can be disabused of this notion by contact with two-dicked werewolves or insatiable packs of wood nymphs, or the trauma of believing that you're about to lay an egg and realizing that you will do no such thing, or the discovery that the one with all the sex toys does not actually have any means of privacy separating the victims from each other. (There could be reasons for this to be an artifact of response rates, though.)

So far the two rare characteristics "sex dungeon" and "kidnaps children" have not overlapped but there is a sex dungeon that has childlike monsters which feature in the action and half a dozen people have been murdered for being kidnapped by it (by vigilantes unclear on the concept). Nightmare is not "a sex dungeon" but some known anonymized sex-related nightmares it has enacted are included for completeness. Sex dungeons have victims in physically torturous conditions at elevated rates for dungeons in general, but psychic sex dungeons are not more torturous than psychic non-sex dungeons according to these three different measures Haru dug up, though the error bars are real wide here. It is not usually significantly easier or harder to clear and kill a sex dungeon than a normal one modulo psychicness being trickier and requiring more specialized espers. Some psychic dungeons do not attempt to whammy SWAT/esper visitors, only their own victims, and this seems very slightly more common in sex ones, maybe. Sex dungeons are marginally less likely to have a breach but psychic dungeons also have this property and they're looking at such independently rare things that it could be noise plus there being more psychic dungeons among the sex ones. All dungeons like cities; sex dungeons might like slightly larger cities slightly more. Only a couple sex dungeons have a gender preference in their victims; this is also true of a couple non-sex dungeons, but since sex dungeons are rare it's a lot more proportionally.

Yeah.  Yeah, it's really good for him, in the course of not looking to everyone else like he has really bad priorities, to have lots of solid reminders that dungeons in fact do tons of fucked-up things that really hurt people.  Which, of course, is a large part of why communicating with them would be so incredibly important, if there's a way to get them what they want that doesn't involve.... all this.  Really, Julien just wants a future where humans and the coolscary aliens don't have to do any hurting of each other, and can coexist, and learn about each other, and....

He was studying dungeon mats.  They're the fastest way to cooler stuff and safer everything, he'd said.

He's pretty sure the material extraction hurt the dungeon, today.  He could feel the way it responded to the logging.  It wasn't positively.

It seems... bad, if the path to victory and peace lies in torturing the torture-creatures until one of them happens to have something useful enough that humans can get powerful enough to enforce a peace built on retributive suffering.  Julien would really, really prefer a story where humanity learns to put their weapons down and all the dungeons, moved, follow suit.  He doesn't think he's in that story, but he's worried that there will be a chance to put down his weapon, sometime, and will fail to take it because he's too concerned with the practical, legitimate harm that dungeons do.

He spends a while shifting between the sets of frames available to him, staring a little blankly at the blog post.  Optimism against practicality.  Hope opposite desire for justice.  ...Dungeons versus humans, fundamentally.

He browses through little display boxes online and orders one with dividers that can be slotted in or taken out, so that he should be able to fit plenty of dungeon souvenirs even if some of them wind up having to be bigger than his wall chip and the splinter.  And puts on his wall chip necklace.  (Any case of 'putting his weapon down' is probably going to involve putting human victims at risk; there will probably be a real cost there...)  And then takes it off because his hair is in kind of a state and he should really shower in his shower with his products.  (Maybe dungeons are just fundamentally un-cooperateable-with, even if they're thinking, feeling beings, maybe there's just no way to live in a world without at least one species suffering horribly by the work of the other.)  ...Okay this was kind of a bad idea and now he's going to have a cry in the shower for like thirty minutes.

And then he'll give up on stopping crying while in the shower and instead get out and... go apartment hunting?  Sure, that's distracting.  He's done this before, for this set of housemates, and admittedly the constraints here are very different but that just makes it more of an interesting challenge, now that he has so many more options to pick from besides the cheapest ones.  (...At least if he concludes that dungeon harvesting is really unethical then he won't have to worry about how wanting to repay Levity for his contributions to science in sexual favors will impact his relationship with Haru, because he will no longer want to do that.  Ughhhhhhhh.)

He sends emails about four apartment listings and writes up a list of things he wants to test with his powers - Can he read normal animals?  What about babies?  What about fetuses?  What about comatose people?  He should meet dungeons having a wider range of experiences and see if he can get a better idea of how bad it is to be harvested from; clearly it's not good but maybe it's annoying instead of tortuous, or something - and then it's kind of almost the sort of time when a reasonable person could go to sleep, so he pulls up an ASMR video and does that.

In the morning the news says his neighborhood is a recommended detour zone and one of his roommates is missing.

Ah fuck.  Ah, shit - he grabs screenshots conveying this information and crops them and sends them to Haru and tries to find what public information there is on this.

I'm not assigned on that one, do you want me to ask for it? We're not exactly doctors but usually if you can avoid it you don't want personal involvement

you were gonna have today off, right?

Yes, I don't think it's a great idea, but if you really wanted this I'd look into it

no, I don't think I do

....Okay, before he sends that, he should - he thinks the amount of bad he feels is very explicable by having just woken up to this and also everything that has been happening to him, but -

He opens his power to Things Coming Towards Him, just for a split second, and yep there's a cluster of probably-ants and yes that was a noticeable but small tick of backlash, which means that he didn't already get crazy backlashed without noticing in his sleep somehow.

Send.

OK. Your roommate will almost definitely be fine.

yeah it was just bad to wake up to and I panicked.  thank you for existing

I am on that 24/7

Purple h - no.  Sparkle react.

Whaaat does the news have to say about this dungeonnnn.

The news is generally pretty sparse on exact dungeon details, but it is actually slightly unusual to suggest a detour - the more they do that, the less people pay attention, you can't go about your business in a city completely out of range of all its dungeons reliably, so they reserve it for especially unpleasant dungeons where people sue them if they get kidnapped and there wasn't a recommendation up, or ones with breaches in progress or anticipated.

Guhhhh.  But it's just a detour rec, not an evacuation one?

Yeah, though they're another order of magnitude more conservative with evacuation recommendations (even Nightmare doesn't get one, though people usually take it as read in spite of the official recommendation being to act maximally chill about it).

Ughhhh. Ughhhhhhhhhh.

Have any of the apartment people emailed him back yet?

Yup, he's welcome to come tour this place or that one.

Parc Safari wants the bird, thought you'd want to know.