"...There are guns in there."

"Yes, they're all locked up. I can go put my stuff away without you and then we can go out the other door to walk there, if you'd rather?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Five maybe ten minutes." He squeezes Julien's hand and goes into the garage.

Julien can wait that long.  And not even be that miserable about it.

Haru comes back. Calls something in Tagalog to Maya and shows Julien out the door, hand in hand.

Good.  "So, how bad is your arm, under there?"

"Guy chomped me hard enough to break the skin but I got it disinfected pretty promptly and it doesn't feel like it got worse overnight, they'll probably just change the dressing and tell me to take ibuprofen."

"It was a psychic dungeon?"

"Yeah. I assume the biter guy would never have done it if he'd been in his right mind, but they don't call me across international borders for dungeons where people get to be in their right minds."

"What was the theme?"

"It was like, an evil merry go round, or rather several different Venn-Diagram-ing merry go rounds, it was pretty big - they think it escaped in India a few years ago and wasn't new then, it might have originated somewhere we don't hear much from like central Africa or Indonesia. I actually wound up riding one of the carousel horses for a while, it was going my way and it was cheaper to make it not notice me than to fly over the traps all over the floor. And everybody was dizzy out of their minds, couldn't walk, and - berserk."

"Mm.  ...Anything exciting mats-wise?"  Look, he's so capable of looking on the bright side and caring about the things he would have a week ago.

"Some of the carousel horses are unicorns and most of their pieces are useless, just wood and paint, but the horns are decent batteries for a sensor in Florida, so she's getting a new batch. The music box mechanisms keep working perpetual motion machine style outside the dungeon but they move very slowly and aren't hard to stop, especially if you try to make it quit playing the annoying music, so it's mostly a novelty. There's mirrors, and they're apparently in high demand for laser-related industries."

"Do they move more slowly than a regular music box?"

"Yeah, the little note picking thingies are really densely packed and the music being any good was evidently not a design criterion."

"...Note picking thingies like on a player piano, you mean?"

"The bits of the barrel that stick out. I'm not sure if that's how player pianos work."

"Huh, okay.  ...Was the music being bad a design criterion, so you think?"

"I think it's not that far off from what you'd get if you placed the same number of teeth on the barrels at random, separately per instance and there's like thirty of them and they're pretty loud so they overlap. It sounds awful but not like an auditory Langford basilisk, and I didn't get more backlash standing near a music box than I did when relatively farther away."

"I wish we understood them better."  He leans on Haru a little, even though they're shirted.  "...I should really not become paranoid about dungeon welfare right now; that seems really unpleasant and also not helpful.  Uh.  - How did you sleep?"  What a stupid dumb question.

"I slept fine. I have learned to thrive on emotional whiplash. But yeah, I also wish we understood them better. I would've wanted to catch a carousel horse if only we were going to be able to kill the dungeon, but they hadn't found the core when I needed to bail, and it never works to catch a monster from a dungeon that's going to get away."

".......In the future when I say, 'I should really not become paranoid about something right now', it probably will mean that I want to switch topics immediately.  If that's helpful to say.  I'm sorry."

"Oh, sorry, my bad. Uh, I can't remember hardly anything I dreamed about but I think maybe there was something about palm trees in there, you?"

"I haven't really been able to remember any of my dreams for a few months.  I think it's college stress; it happened last year too.  But I slept really well.  Once I started."