At least one dungeon will appear in almost every city of more than a 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.