"Really!  Can I get spoilers on any conclusions you came to?"

"Of course, but the conclusion was that we don't know! All the worst dungeons are the oldest ones, but is that because they were old, or because they were relatively hard to clear back when we didn't know what we were doing? I link like seven different people's takes on it and none of them are satisfying."

"Well, I'd love to read it anyway."

"Eventualities dot traceless dot com."

Julien goes for his pocket, but pauses.  "- Iiiiiii will take that down once we're somewhere less hostile.  And importantly not before then."

"If you google me it comes up."

"Excellent.  Do you have a favorite post you've written?"

"Hmm, writing-wise no, probably a tie between like six of them for the photography, but in terms of the most original research I've managed to personally pull off probably the long interview with my cat."

"...Your cat?"

"I have a monster cat! He does four dimensional dungeon navigation, since he's from a four dimensional dungeon. He can talk but I had to teach him to read."

"That's so cool!"  Julien doesn't ask whether the cat's in favor of the framing of belonging to Traceless; if he doesn't it won't help anything and if he does it's rude.  "What's his name?"

"I named him Cricket. He hates almost everybody in the entire world and the people at the agency were just calling him 'cat' because he wouldn't take a name from any of 'em."

"Hates them - in a monster way or a cat way?  ...Or in a human way."

"Cat-flavored human way, I guess. He's very judgmental. And impolite."

Someone should check in on this cat but it's not going to be him.  Probably it's fine.  "Much more charming on a cat, I imagine."

"Well, he likes me, I wouldn't blame anyone else for preferring not to deal with him."

"Makes sense.  Do you know of any other friendlyish monsters floating about?"

"There's a few, but it requires pretty specific conditions - a lot of dungeons never have monsters exit, a lot of escaped monsters die when the dungeon does, Cricket's unusual. And not all of them can talk."

"Could he talk before he left?"

"No - or, he was not recorded doing so and doesn't remember doing it and no other monsters from that dungeon were observed to speak."

"Huh.  Did you say any of the centipedes they took were alive?"

"They haven't taken any alive. It's not something they usually try to do unless they have a specific reason to want to. Most monsters don't live without their dungeons even outside it."

"I didn't know that any did.  It's... do you mean most die upon leaving in the first place, or just when the dungeon collapses?"

"Second thing. The ones that persist are usually the more - biologically grounded ones. So probably not the centipedes, they're too big for bug anatomy to work. Though they might shrink, Cricket shrank."

"Do the corpses ever shrink, do you know?"