"Depends on the kind of sexual relations."

"Do you have something in mind?"

"Well, if we're maximizing suit-being-on-me-ness we don't want to involve any lube but you could go down on me without the pants necessarily having to come all the way off."

"That does sound enjoyable."

Looky here, the pants open.

Lucien eagerly takes advantage of this while doing his best to look up at the rest of Haru as he does so. He is pretty sure at this point that he has the most attractive partner that could possibly exist.

What a good Lucien~

Toronto is a large city. Dungeons appear in it on a daily basis. Most of them are entry-level basic baby dungeons that will ruin your day but not your week. Some of them are baby dungeons that promise to, if allowed to grow, become dreadful indeed, and some have been around the block a few times. Some of them send monsters charging into traffic and some of them just assume people into themselves teleportation style.

This dungeon has been around the block a few times and wasn't very nice when it was new. It's a desert, with eye-tricking mirages at the edges to make it look like it goes on forever, nothing but sand dunes and six-armed cactus monsters periscoping up from the sand with whatever their locomotion apparatus might be hidden under the scorching shifting ground.

Persons abducted into this desert are placed far apart from one another, but sometimes catch a glimpse of a fellow victim, who might be crawling across the sand while it blows into their eyes and abrades away their skin, or might be lying in one place screaming while stroked bloody by a cactus monster. The cactus monsters don't hang out with any specific victim for very long, and they don't need to. The place impedes memory formation, because while the dungeon is certainly no enemy of pain, it particularly treasures the moment of realizing things are about to get a lot worse than they were a second ago. The moment of realizing that you're in a really hot and miserable dungeon, not one of the merely inconvenient ones. The moment of realizing that the monsters in that dungeon torture people. The moment of noticing that a cactus is moving in your direction.

So every moment in the dungeon is the first moment, or very nearly, over and over.

When they've pulled people out of this one before, when it's appeared in Cairo, in Jinan, in Khartoum, in Surat, the victims were incredulous that they could have waited minutes, let alone hours, for rescue. The last thing they remember is being pulled through the exit. But they're just as sunburned and sandblasted and slashed as you'd expect, for however long they waited.

It doesn't have a canonical name yet, but it's getting there. It's come to Toronto to feed.

Lucien, meanwhile, is following the set-up notes given to him by his alternate self in order to properly configure all the settings on his new laptop. 

No he's not.

"Lucien??"

[Lucien!]

What the heck!!

[I am in a desert all of a sudden and I am very confused about this!]

[...must be a dungeon. I'll tell Haru and Lifeline.]

The former by text, the latter -

[My Lucien's in a dungeon, he says it's a desert.]

[I didn't know they would just pick people out of nowhere!]

[Telling people now, let me know when you have more details.] 

"Uh, Haru, my alternate self was picked up by a desert dungeon. Can you message people and also are you up for a third dungeon today?" He'd text people himself but he has not quite gotten the hang of typing on a cellular keyboard nearly as fast as Haru can.

"- fuck. New or known dungeon? Has it been called in yet? Do we know where the portal is?" He grabs his phone to check.

He can relay for Isabella to respond to these questions.

[Pet, any more details on the desert?]

[Really hot! I would take off my shirt except there's also a bunch of sand blowing around - also I thought the distance had mountains or something but I now think it has some sort of sandstorm... which is getting closer.]

She relays this to Lifeline. [No other features besides the sand blowing around?]

[It is getting sort of difficult to see far off but there might be other people or something in the distance?]

[Okay. I'll leave the channel open, sit tight.]

Their report is in first. Haru loads Lifeline into his truck with a standard dungeon gear loadout and turns on the siren to head to the area where the portal has to be, and then they can get out and start looking; they're there a minute before the first response squad.

[I can make out someone else, a few dunes over. I think they're bleeding.]