.....Yeah, money is money; he'll finish up.  After he sits for a few minutes and bandages his little scrapes and has a snack from his bag.

Hey it's Traceless! Can I call you and tell you about the post I'm working on because I can't write anything down yet?

- Money is money but networking is networking!  Actually after sitting down everything is catching up to him and he's going home goodbye sorry see you Thursday.

Sure!

he sends once he's packed and out the door.

Ring ring.

"Hello!"

"Hi! So I'm trying to put something together on dungeon selectivity - uh, do you mind if I put you on speaker, I have speech to text on so I can go back and pull content out of the conversation later for the writeup when I am capable of writeups -"

"That's fine, sure."

"You're on speaker, my partner can't hear you but Cricket can. So there's some really obvious factors of dungeon selectivity, like that they do not go for kids as often as there are kids in the population - not never, but it's still notable - but there's subtle stuff too, like - are you particularly put off by centipedes, actually -"

"No, I actually like bugs.  Hello, Cricket."

"If I wanted to talk to you I would call you on the phone."

"Be nice, kitty. Anyway, it's really subtle in baby dungeons that haven't gotten away and come back, and yours was one. I'd expect a very slightly elevated rate of disliking centipedes among people it grabbed but easily loseable in statistical noise. But baby dungeons are also less traumatizing so it's easier to get people to complete surveys afterwards - you'll probably get like thirty of them, please fill them out, dungeon researchers love it when you fill out surveys. So we have more data on who the baby dungeons pick, but it's striking enough to notice in the non-baby dungeons. I don't think that one is going to want you back, it will have - I speak loosely and speculatively here - noticed that you like bugs, or at least that you were not alarmed by the centipedes it had on offer."

"I was pretty alarmed!  It just, y'know, wasn't about the fact that they were centipedes."  Or maybe it kind of was; there's something to... the way that everyone treats bugs, just because they're so much smaller than them and they can get away with it, and the idea of being the small one, even though he tries to treat bugs well...  "I will fill out any surveys sent to me."  If he has time.  He'll make time, this sort of thing is important.

"I mean, everyone's some baseline amount of alarmed about being kidnapped by a dungeon. Even the baby ones seem great at avoiding people who are like 'sweet, I really didn't want to go to my mother in law's birthday party' or something. That one did not obviously have other sources of alarm going on besides the centipedes, I don't think it was even trying with the pretty walls..."

"It seems like someone would have to have something pretty specific going on to be afraid of the walls.  I did get a little fragment of them; thanks for the advice."  He's going to make it into a necklace, once the professionals clear it for being probably safe enough to wear against your chest for long periods.

"I guess people could be freaked about by how mazey it is. We'll see when we get surveys back if we can tell what it was going for."

"Seems kind of hard to guess before then.  Is it usually, for baby ones, before the surveys?"

"It's not hard to guess, in this case my guess is solidly the centipedes, even with you as a counterexample. But it's impossible to be sure even with masses of data."

Does he in fact want to talk about himself here - sure, why not, seems relevant - "I like bugs in a way where it was... kind of notably about the reversal.  Very saliently being the squishable and wanting-to-hide party.  I don't know whether that makes me an exception or if it might have been about that."

"Huh, I'll have to see if I can get the surveys amended real quick to account for that, I'm not sure they will have thought of it - there are very dedicated people on the dungeon surveys but there are so many dungeons to design surveys about - so like, you have preexisting... bug sympathies? Because they're squishable and want to hide?"

"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.