This one is to a beach! Well, to slightly above a beach, with a person who looks like a pre-awakening Lucien except his clothes are dirty and in a style that Lucien would definitely never wear. He is emptying a trap of fish. 

"What the fuck are you doing THERE," says Cricket, "and what did you do with your hair?"

Lucien looks up, is there fin-"WHAT?" 

Why is there a talking cat with its head poking out of nothingness in midair and wait did it recognize him what the heck.

"Don't you what at me!"

"I'm-you're-I'm sorry I am very confused. Are you from Earth."

"Well, I live there. Why are you asking me this now and what did you do with your hair, it's somehow worse."

"I'm-I don't... know you? I'm pretty sure I would remember if I knew you."

"...Wow. Don't do anything stupid, it would make Haru sad. I'll go tell him."

And he disappears back into the dungeon. He finds two more people on his way out and slays ten more bugs.

[Isabella I just had a conversation with a talking cat that appeared in midair and I am worried about this fact.]

[...what the fuck. Where are you, any other symptoms, did anything sting or bite or spore you or anything -]

[By the traps on the beach - nothing stung or bit or spored me that I noticed. It told me not to do anything stupid and that it would tell someone named Haru. And also insulted my hair which is sort of upsetting, I like my hair.]

[Uh, I otherwise feel fine.]

[Your hair is fine. Do you know anyone named Haru?]

[Nope.]

[I'm coming down to meet you, I'll be there in a few minutes.]

[Okay. It's gone now by the way.]

Meanwhile Cricket pops out of the dungeon.

"We're at eleven of nineteen -" begins a support team person.

"Yes, yes, I will go back for them, but also there is a THING there. Where is Haru."

"A thing? Like the dungeon core?"

"Do not waste my time by thinking it matters if you understand it. Haru!"

"Kitty, everything okay?"

"Your accessory has cloned himself and his clone is in the dungeon!"

"...Lucien, did you catch that?"

"Um-excuse me? Is that a thing that happens?"

"No! Kitty, c'mere and explain, we're decent." If he's right there the whole time Lucien's doing his thing they don't need to break for sex, they can just hug with Lucien in his lap and neither of them wearing shirts till the dungeon's over.

So Cricket goes over into the receiving area and relates what he saw. "- and he had done something dreadful with his hair," he concludes.

"I-um-what. I have questions but if he's taggable you should definitely get him out regardless of the answers to those questions."

"If you're sure," says Cricket dubiously, and he goes back into the dungeon and finds the last several victims and then returns to the portal.

"Isabella I can see the cat again."

"I see it too and have no explanation."

"...well are there any more of you or is it just the two?"

Well that's mostly reassuring.

"Just us two here?"

"The regular Lucien with the less stupid hair wants you to come meet him."

"...we're expecting to be rescued to our own winged-cat-free world in the next few months," when they get someone with the right profile for the portal to develop the needed powers.

"Well, you can be rescued to the one that is better because it has a winged cat instead, I just have to bap you with my paw and the regular Lucien will pull you over."

"Uh - if we do this I'd like a chance to gather my things first if there's time."

"How much time?"

"Ten minutes?"

"Fine. Do not keep me waiting." He turns to Isabella. "And you are?"

"My name is Isabella, and yours?"

"Cricket."

"That's a good cat name."

"Of course it is."

"Should I go and get our stuff?"

"Yes, do. And a couple bananishes - the one on the left and the one with the twisted stem are from different trees, bring those in case that matters."

"Yes ma'am."

He can throw things into their bags hastily and be back in time.

"He works for you?"

"...no, he's just my sub."

"Never mind."

"What? - oh, forget about it, I need to tell my brother anyway."

"You're his sister?"

"I'm not Lucien's sister, I have a twin brother back home who I need to update telepathically in case I lose the connection again when I go to your Earth."

"Fine."

And Lucien is back with the stuffed packs with time to spare.

"Sorry they aren't very organized but I got everything."

"Good boy. Cricket, this works by you just touching us?"

"Yes, twice each so regular Lucien knows I mean it." He holds out his paw.

Isabella considers making Lucien go first but there's not much point, if what it looks like is disappearing even when it works perfectly. She holds out her hand.

Bap bap.

Isabella translucents and then vanishes, off to speed through the dungeon on the way to another universe, Lucien holding out his hand and following a moment later.

"...wow, you really do look just like him."

"Are you two a very specific type of dungeon monster or is there some alternative possibility I'm missing."

Why is alternate him dressed like that, Lucien would never dress like that. 

"We're from a different Earth."

At least his clothes are comfortable! There's no way that shirt is at all soft.

"...I guess I am not terribly surprised that given that there is another Earth there would be another me?"

"Why isn't that surprising? I find it surprising."

"I think whether there should be more of people on alternate Earths sort of decomposes into what it means for a place to be 'an Earth'. Like, if you have American spelling you have to have had Noah Webster or something weird forcing the spelling change without him; if you have recognizable humans you need mitochondrial Eve even though none of us would know her socially; and so on for most features that would make a place recognizable short of visiting major geographical landmarks or getting satellite photos. I take it I don't look familiar, though."

"Sorry, no, though of course you can try Googling yourself or something."

"What year is it here?"

"2034."

"- that's a lot later than us and the Luciens don't look nearly that far apart in age!"

"Well, Lucien's actually a time traveler, but you don't look like you're from the 1920s either."

"2009."

[Well, that almost explains what he's wearing I guess.]

"Are dungeons and monsters new since 2009?"

"No, they date back to the seventies."

[Yeah, also explains the short hair, they didn't have the good news about boys being allowed to be subs propagated throughout the land back then.] "Can we get some food, our magic runs on calories and we've been living on alien fish and banana-esque fruits for a while."

"Yeah, what can I get for you?"

(Cricket, meanwhile, attends to his core-finding and loot-seizing duties in the dungeon.)

"Loaded burger and fries and a really big milkshake, thanks. Pet?"

[That'd maybe make more sense if he weren't also holding Haru's hand?]

"Veggie burger and chili fries and strawberry milkshake, also really big, please."

"Coming right up," says Haru, tapping into his phone with his free hand. "You guys have magic powers? But they're calorie-based? That's not how ours work, ours just have annoying consequences for use."

[Well, maybe he got caught up since the time travel but hasn't grown out his hair? I probably wouldn't grow out my hair even if I moved to China.] "Yep, we're eclipsed, both of us are psions but half of eclipsed are mages instead. What are you?"

"We're espers. We've all got our own more-or-less unique individual powersets and corresponding backlash symptoms that we have to clear out with contact with compatible espers." He nods his head at his and Lucien's joined hands. "What's the difference between psions and mages?"

"Psions can learn magic that has to do with non-physical effects - illusions, information handling, I'm a precognitive, my Lucien's a diviner, I've got an eidetic memory, he's got a thing to skip sleep but it doesn't work very well yet - it takes a long time to develop a new power and working eclipsed used to be a lot rarer so we're on the forefront of a big explosion in figuring out more about what there is to do. Mages do physical effects like teleporting or healing or flying or telekinesis."

[I guess the backlash removal might explain the hand-holding.]

"How do the dungeons fit into this?"

"They show up and kidnap people into small strange worlds populated with monsters. Often espers end up working to get people out."

"It's as far as I know totally unprecedented for there to be a portal to another - planet? Was it a whole planet?"

"We didn't circumnavigate it. It had weather and a horizon and stuff, I have no reason to suspect it of being a pocket dimension."

"I think the prior portals were to planets."

"Yeah, there's some as yet unexplained portals on our world, we were supposed to help investigate one but I tripped and dragged my Lucien with me through it." She waves the cane illustratively. "They weren't able to get anyone else through, portals are sometimes filtering on unclear criteria, but I was able to expand my existing communicative telepathy to reach my twin brother, so he's caught up on us accepting the rescue rather than die of weird nutritional deficiencies or lightning storms or wildlife."

"Does it still work from here?"

Also, does she really need to insist on disambiguating between him and the other Lucien in that way.

"Not yet, I'm going to be working on that." Yes she absolutely needs to do that.

"We'll need a place to stay in the meantime."

"I can rent you a place?"

Lucien looks to Isabella.

"Regarding rent, I at least don't have my wallet on me and even if I did I don't think Bank of America in this universe recognizes my account number. I normally make my living as a precog, but my range is only a few seconds right now, and I doubt you have the infrastructure to make particularly good use of that. Though I guess it might be legal for me to go into high frequency trading or something I'd still need somewhere to live and enough calories to predict the future on in the meantime. And my Lucien's divination is probably even harder to apply to the job market in an eclipseless world, because it will just kind of sound like him making confident statements for no reason if you don't know diviners are a thing."

"I'd like to hear a lot more about your powers and I'm guessing there's a way to make lots of money off them somehow but I can pay for your place regardless - I'm making a decent amount and this seems important."

"Well, I'm happy to tell you more about them after my food and a shower and maybe an entire night's sleep in an actual bed."

"I can schedule a car to come pick you up and put you somewhere - Lucien, where're you putting 'em -"

"Oh hrm, a hotel if it's now? Or an airbnb but I don't have that on my phone."

"I can have Paula do it." Text text.

It has been sort of a lot of a day and Lucien would like to be kneeling next to Isabella now that there's not an immediate reason for standing.

...Lucien is deeply confused. 

Scritch scritch. "...something wrong?"

"The area around the dungeon is, like, cordoned off, but it's not private private even if, uh, my Lucien, and I, are - familiar enough by way of the two-Luciens thing - I guess people'll probably just assume you're espers and it's backlash-related but still -"

"... do non-espers have to stand or something?"

"Not really but you're kneeling! Like you're her pet or something!"

"...this is a problem but me literally addressing him as 'pet' when I asked for his meal order wasn't? Is there a guide to foreigners about PDA here?"

"Not, uh, as such? The assumption people are going to make isn't PDA, it's that he used his powers a lot and now literally can't stand up and that you're guiding him, though actually it doesn't work through hair so that'd be a really inefficient way to do it."

"The pet thing was also very weird - are you a woman or a man, I'm confused." Isabella being a strangely named man who just looked like a woman would make this make at least a bit more sense.

"I'm a woman. Is... that actually hard to tell? There were short haired women in the 1920s even before it was commonly acknowledged that we can be doms."

"Can be what now."

"Dom short for dominant opposite of sub short for submissive?"

"This is first-meeting information on your planet?"

"It's on my government ID if the hair doesn't clue somebody in!"

"I know women can have short hair it's not just that it's that plus everything else. What do dominant and submissive mean in this context?"

Isabella will presumably tell him if she wants him to stop kneeling and until then he's not inclined to stop if all it is is a bit confusing to people in this universe.

"Well, outside of the context of a relationship it mostly means that I soften my imperatives less than he does, but in that context it means he's the one on his knees, as you can see, literally right now in front of you. Do you somehow not have this, are you all switches or something?"

"Occasionally people have it but not all people - it's a minority - and it mostly doesn't impinge on the parts of relationships that happen in public."

"Is he making you actively uncomfortable and if so will it actually help if I make him get up?"

"I'm - I don't want to insist he get up if he doesn't want to."

[I think it's making him uncomfortable even if he won't say it?]

[Well, I think the thing bothering him is us having a dynamic where he can see it so I'm not going to tell you to, but I didn't tell you to kneel in the first place so you're free to act on this suspicion as you see fit.]

"If bystanders guessed correctly rather than incorrectly about what is going on here they would probably be uncomfortable, which I'd consider a decent argument for cutting it out."

Lucien can stand.

"It was my idea in the first place - sorry for making you two uncomfortable."

"Hey, the last alien intelligences we met started kidnapping and murdering people by the dozen, you're doing amazing by that metric."

"Gee, thanks."

"I'm sorry if I came off angry I'm just very confused and a bit backlashed and possibly that is making me take things more personally than usual even when they're not about me."

"Being backlashed does that?"

"For me, yeah."

"Everybody's is different, mine makes me lonely, but I'm not carrying much now because I didn't have to actually go into the dungeon and I'm just here as my Lucien's guide."

"As long as we're talking about cultural differences, when you say 'my Lucien'..."

"We are in fact dating but I just mean it in the identificatory sense."

"I could just as easily say my Haru if there was a second Haru for some reason. What does it mean when you say it?"

"I mean, he can say 'my dom' and that's, as Haru says, just identificatory, but when I say 'my' it it's half that and half he's mine. If that makes sense."

The delivery guy arrives with McDonald's and Haru takes the bag and thanks him and distributes burgers and fries and shakes to the psions.

"Oh my god thank you" nomfnomf.

Isabella's Lucien had forgotten how amazing real food was: really really amazing.

That explanation wasn't at all reassuring but the food arriving sort of ended the conversation for now.

REAL FOOOOOOOOD

"Lotta Uber drivers won't let you eat in the car but it doesn't look like you'll have much trouble putting that away in a hurry. Paula's got you a hotel room."

"Did you tell her to charge me?"

"I can if you want."

"Yeah I'd prefer that - I offered to pay after all." And he is feeling like asserting his ability to do things right now.

Text text. "Paula's my agent," he clarifies to the psions.

"Mm." He should have asked for a second burger but he can start in on the shake instead.

"You must be really hungry."

"Fish and bananas." Fries in face. "For days and days and days."

"I never knew bread was this good."

"Potatoes!" Her fries are gone. Shake time. "And ice cream!" Slurp.

"I guess I was sort of the same way when I first came here. Though with less... energy."

"Right, so time travel is a thing here?"

"Not usually. My leading theory is that there's a time travel themed dungeon and one of its monsters went back and time-traveled Lucien but we haven't seen other signs of it besides him yet."

"It was an adjustment but the future turns out to be better than the past in a lot of ways."

"Oh, what sticks out on that front, I'm curious."

"More variety in food, fewer people dying, the Internet and Wikipedia are amazing, and lots of things that only sometimes worked badly now work consistently very well."

"All hail Wikipedia."

"You have it too?"

"Yeah, it's great. I was an active editor for a while."

"Oh I'm jealous I can't figure out the culture quite well enough to feel like I'm allowed to do anything more than quick corrections."

"If it's similar enough I can give you pointers."

"Anything else seem weird about us besides having a dynamic and being from a different year?"

"Nothing I wouldn't chalk up to you being American," shrugs Haru. "This is Toronto."

"I haven't noticed anything else and I'm from New York."

"Oh - I'm from Jersey City."

"Huh, that's where my parents are."

"Me too, why'd you end up in New York instead of sticking around?"

"Job at the New York Times, which my grandfather owned."

"Ah, no grandfather in New York for me."

"Do you have the same last name?"

"Oak?"

"No - Sulzberger. Ochs on my mother's side."

"Oh huh, my dad is Schulman so they at least resemble each other."

"Parents' first names? Grandparents?"

Iphigene and Arthur for their parents, but the grandparents don't match.

"That's so interesting, I wonder how that works. Once I can talk to Alex again I can make him look things up for me."

"Make him in the sense that -"

"Ew. It's a context-sensitive phrase. He's my twin brother and does stuff for me and performatively complains about it."

"I'm confused about what it means in other contexts."

"Well, earlier I asked if it'd make you less uncomfortable for me to 'make' my Lucien get up, and if I had told him to do so performative complaining wouldn't've featured, he'd've said 'yes ma'am' pretty as you please. Do you actually want the answers when you ask questions like that?"

"-I-probably? I'll get used to it if I have to. Does that not go.... badly? For people?"

"Not really? I wouldn't be Isabella's if it didn't make me happy."

"When I can make - get - ask - my brother to look up statistics for me we can compare domestic violence rates or something if that's what you're worried about."

"I'm not sure I've heard that phrase before?"

"Domestic violence? It means people abusing their domestic partners and family members. It sounded at least to me like that was what you were worried about with them being... dynamical."

"Dynamical."

"I said what I said."

"Ah, I was thinking more like slavery or exceptionally poor employers but that also matches what I'd be worried about."

"I'm not going to say there's never any overlap with poor treatment but most relationships are healthy these days."

"Slavery's been illegal in the United States since 1863. I don't know about Canada, but they beat us to it."

"That matches what I remember... and by this you mean, like, economic slavery."

"Yes, I prefer 'pet' but it would not be too irregular to hear recreational non-economic slavery-related terminology tossed around," she shrugs.

"... I guess its been longer for you. My dad took me out to dinner with a former slave when I was 12."

"...yeah, it's been a really long time for us."

"That's good, I guess."

"Mm-hm."

Their Uber pulls up. "It'll wait a few minutes if you need them to finish your shakes. I'm having Paula send burner phones to your hotel room, I'll text those, okay?"

"I mean, as long as we're getting plenty to eat I can -"

"- hey!"

"...sorry?"

"Stick to phones till I know you better, it backlashes me every time I have to prevent people from using psychic powers on me."

"It's purely verbal, just more convenient, but okay."

"Assuming it's just verbal telepathy you tried you can use it with me."

[Testing.]

[Works fine.]

"Neat sensation."

"It's not supposed to be particularly sensational but thanks. Okay, pet, let's go."

Off he follows.

The Uber drops them off at a hotel. They're expected by the front desk and get a room. It's got two queen beds in it, which is unnecessary but better than making the opposite mistake, she supposes.

"Come have a shower with me. I usually need a shower chair, your job is to keep me from falling over and hitting my head more than it is to do anything particularly erotic."

"Yes ma'am." It does not have to be particularly erotic because it is one something Isabella told him to do for her and two a shower after way too long without one.

Showers are amazing, wow. Hot water. Soap. Hotel rosemary-scented shampoo.

Lucien can help, enjoying the water and the faces Isabella makes when she's enjoying something this much.

And eventually they are clean and in hotel bathrobes and she is figuring out how to order a change of clothes for each of them on the gift card Haru's agent sent along with the phones.

And Lucien can have his head in her lap while she does this, perhaps.

Oh yes, of course he can. Pet pet.

In that case he is fully content with life for the time being.

Their clothes show up eventually, delivered by the hotel staff, and they can be clean and fed and dressed all at the same time and should go to the hotel restaurant for dinner.

Yes, he really could use another meal right about now.

It's a decent restaurant, though there are no kneeling cushions and it would apparently be scandalous for her to feed him so they have to just sit there like it's a business meeting. Still, they have hot rolls and burrata and pork medallions and cheesecake.

[This place reads like everyone is a dom. Or a switch. It's weird.]

[There's people I'd read as subs, like the waitress in the next section over, but... not confidently, yeah.]

[Feels like performance art commenting on sub erasure or something.]

[Like it's here to underpin the screenwriting advice - 'exterior, day, a crowd of whom half are subs', because otherwise they'll hire ninety percent dom actors who can't even pretend and not notice they're doing it. The subs are presumably all home baking or something.]

[Bit preachy if you ask me.]

[Too much politics in your dimension-hopping adventure?]

[Politics is fine but the pacing is off.]

[Oh, how would you pace it?]

[I'd start with just little hints of all the subs being missing - not have too many people in the first scenes and make one of them that waitress. And then you'd start meeting more people and none of them would be subs and then I'd do a wide shot. ... Sorry I was the only sub in my film class and appear to have developed opinions from this.]

[Oh, don't apologize for having opinions. Do you have a read on, uh, what to call him. Your alt? I mostly got 'disconcerted'.]

[I think he might be a dom or something and he's trying to imagine himself in my shoes and it's disconcerting for him, yeah.]

[I can't imagine myself as a sub at all, but maybe this is my latent chauvinism.]

[Huh. Yeah, you being a sub doesn't seem very consistent with you being you.]

[But you think you make sense as a dom no problem?]

[It's a bit of a stretch but yeah, I can imagine a dom version of myself. I took a fair bit to figure out I was a sub and in retrospect it makes a lot of sense it doesn't feel like I'd have to be a whole different sort of person to be otherwise.]

[Ah, I was obvious very young. My mom took me to a protest and had me hold a sign that said 'my mom deserves rights because I said so'.]

[Oh that's very good - what was the protest about exactly?]

[Switch rights, she's a switch.]

[Good cause to be brought to a protest for.]

[I have slightly mixed feelings about kids as props in politics but it didn't do me any harm.]

Nod. It would definitely have been a bad idea for Lucien to show up at a protest for his parent's rights, though that's a more extreme case.

Once they've put away their dessert they can go back up to the hotel room. And sleep! In a real bed! She's got some accumulated sleep debt from the lean-to being such a poor approximation of a bed.

Lucien lets the nouns lull him to sleep, as usual.

"So that's interesting," Haru remarks when the psions are in their Uber and heading for the hotel.

"That's one word... I found it disconcerting. Though possibly this is because of my backlash making me focus on the bit where there's a strange version of me instead of the bit where there's a whole other world with different powers."

"I also found it disconcerting but I'm really very excited about the other world with different powers, which apparently we'll be able to talk to soon! If only through Isabella. I'm so tempted to leave this dungeon alive - it's not my call but I can make a recommendation -"

"I'm definitely in favor."

"Both of us together might swing it but I'm at all worried that if we make this recommendation and Cricket doesn't find the core it'll look like I told him to sandbag."

"I guess that's not great but it seems worth that risk? Transit with another world could be really important."

"We won't be able to control it. There was only the one portal, it didn't open to a population center - I guess it may have opened to a population center on that specific planet - and the dungeon will probably fuck off for years even if we let it live and appear somewhere random. We will be getting like forty randos from, like, Helsinki, kidnapped and bitten by four-dimensional insects for a chance at another portal which might not happen at all or might not be useful at all."

"Still seems worth it but it's not great, yeah. I'm happy I don't have to make the final call."

"How about you make the recommendation and I abstain until and unless Cricket finds the core."

Lucien can do that, texting his agent about it.

"So uh. You have a better understanding than me of what was up with the submission thing I-my alt was doing?"

"Only in the sense of having been on the internet longer than you have. Some people get turned on by bossing other people around in bed or being bossed around and they've turned it into an entire - gender, or something."

"I'd normally guess that that would be gender dependent already."

"...well, it's not, or at least not very."

"Huh."

"It's one of the more common kinks? Kink here being a term for anything odd that turns somebody on."

"Is there a reason for that?

"For the bossing people around one being common or for the word being 'kink'?"

"The being bossed around one being common is what surprises me."

"Yeah, I don't know. There's plausible neuroscience behind a lot of people kinking on feet but I'm not sure if anybody's got a good idea for the BDSM cluster - that's a cute overlapping several initialisms, but I'm not sure I remember what-all they are -" He looks it up and turns his phone for Lucien to see.

"Bondage and discipline? Also, what was that about feet?"

"In the part of the brain that maps to how people think about their bodies feet are right next to genitals and so people are likelier to kink on feet than on most other random body parts. I don't know enough neuroscience to know how good an explanation that is."

"Does that mean that people have always kinked on feet? I hadn't heard of that being a thing in the past."

"Would anyone have told you about it back then if they did?"

"I suppose no."

"The internet is revelatory. Let's go to our silo, how about."

"Sure."

The silo: it is good and contains silo activities.

The next day the Luciens are going to want to meet up with each other and discuss their respective worlds, magic systems, and what powers they personally have. This is really rather a lot to discuss so they are going to be doing meta level scheduling first, which they both enjoy immensely.

"Is this just a Luciens meeting, shall I find something else to do with myself?"

"It's definitely not just a Lucien meeting."

"Good, because I also have cool magic powers to brag about and stuff." Kiss.

"You do!"

Hopefully she is not bored by the animated discussion of how to organize their conversation and diagramming of said schedule.

It's very cute, though she's not sure it will survive contact with the actual conversation.

Well, after they make the agenda they are going to take a short break and then start doing quick presentations on topics, with questions after each. If the question sections go off on a tangent then they get marked down and added to a queue for additional presentations. It seems to work pretty well for the Luciens.

Cuuuuuuute.

"So there's three broad categories of loot - the terms I like to use on my blog are irreproducible, reproducible, and treasure. Treasure is stuff like gold or neodymium or something, valuable but we already have it here on Earth. Reproducible loot is stuff like weird alloys that we can reverse-engineer, biological goop we can get bacteria to make, that kinda thing. And irreproducible stuff is things that we don't have and can't learn to make, at least yet, by looking at it - orphan monsters, power batteries, the weird mineral that goes into those comms devices popular in Korea. In terms of sheer monetary impact reproducible stuff is the heavy hitter, irreproducible stuff makes a solid showing, and treasure is worth very little. But most stuff, even if it's not just treasure, isn't useful - you sell some of it because it's pretty, sometimes, but not all of it has an industrial application. I think that the top, hm, five percent of dungeon loot makes eighty percent of the money, but I push for more live capture because if you math out Cricket's contributions to 4D dungeons in the Great Lakes region he's easily worth hundreds of live captures that yield nothing, and I think if we did that the distribution would spread out, nothing else in Cricket's dungeon was useful at all."

"Why don't people do more live captures already?"

"They usually don't work. Almost every time, when the dungeon dies, the monster goes inert or physically destabilizes entirely. And not every surviving orphan monster talks, or has powers, or is inclined to be helpful - they're generally pretty chill but that doesn't mean they all want to go out and do good deeds. You need equipment sufficient to contain the monster when it's still trying to attack you, which can be very difficult depending on the monster. And doing the capture is dangerous, I have an advantage at it so I do a lot of it when time allows but most people want to be killing monsters at range and not approaching them."

"But you think they should try more anyways because the benefits outweigh those risks?"

"I don't think people should risk their lives to do it on monsters that are obviously not going to be able to survive because they're made of smoke or something, but I think it's a good use of resources on the margin and I have gear for it since I'm personally well equipped to do it."

"Would you be interested in doing a lightning talk on orphan monsters later?"

"What exactly is a lightning talk?"

"Five minute presentation with time for questions afterwards."

"I don't have anything prepared but I can probably just... talk generally about orphan monsters for that long if you like."

"That should work," says the other Lucien, adding Haru to the queue.

"Happy to help."

Next up is Lucien explaining how his divining power works.

The other Lucien doesn't interrupt but is really quick any the questions.

"So can you get like, number of espers that work on the average dungeon in Toronto? Or uh, something more complicated like the average number of hostages in the dungeons with seven or more espers?

"Between 2 and 3 and uh, more than a hundred less than a thousand - I shouldn't get more specific unless we have a lunch break real soon."

"People are terrible at record keeping about dungeons and it's terrible and I want to spend the next week fixing that with your power."

"Sounds like a great use of time and calories to me."

"You will be an incredible boon to the field, I should go over my old blog posts and see if there's any particularly high value mysteries."

"I'm regretting not taking notes every time I looked for a statistic on Wikipedia or Google and couldn't find it."

Lucien is very pleased with his power decisions.

"If there's a way his power doesn't work now that would make it more useful, tell him, he can grow it any which way even while I'm still stuck trying to get ahold of my brother."

Lucien is excited enough about the power that he won't quibble with the way that's framed.

Next up is a primer on how dungeons work! 

And then mages.

And then.... Lucien has already done esper powers and so it's time for whatever explanation of guiding Lucien can give without feeling awkwardly like he's talking about his sex life and wow it turns out that's really difficult when Haru is right there.

"Do you want me to explain this for you?"

"...Yes perhaps that would go better."

"Guiding - etymology is disputed - is how we cure backlash. It works by skin contact and fluid exchange between compatible espers; it's possible skin contact works by fluid exchange, sweat and skin oil, but that's a live scientific debate. I lean against because some pairs are so compatible as to notice without having to physically touch, I can feel Lucien and also my previous partner June from a few paces. Unidirectional fluid transfer like a blood donation guides the recipient, not the donor. Guiding per se is universally reported as a pleasant sensory experience in and of itself, though some backlashes can interfere with the presence of other people or contact therewith being tolerable. Compatibility appears to work by way of the two espers' backlashes being opposite - for example, my backlash makes me lonely, and June's makes her socially reclusive, which is one of those inconvenient ones that interferes with guiding being tolerable, while Lucien's makes him self-centered, both of which are conceptually opposed to loneliness. I'm also tolerably compatible with a guy in Vancouver whose backlash makes him averse to sound and light. Backlashes themselves are in their own ways opposed to an esper's powers, which lets you guess better than chance about two espers whose powers you know even if their backlash is secret; you can also often get decent results by trying a partner's partner, or a partner's partner's partner - they haven't tried it but I bet Lucien and June are more than zero compatible.

"Sometimes compatibility is asymmetrical, where one person reports much more intense guiding than the other, and we don't know what causes that - 'oppositeness' per se shouldn't have that trait. The better the compatibility and the more contact and/or exchange, the faster backlash drops. Compatibility remains discernible when there's no backlash to guide away. In theory even espers who feel completely incompatible to one another will make non-zero improvements on each other's backlashes but in practice this is so unpleasant and inefficient that it doesn't come up in the modern day and our data about it is from the seventies when nobody knew any better."

"How treatable are backlashes without guiding?"

"Not. After some hours - variable esper to esper - acute symptoms settle into 'chronic' backlash. Pain, impaired organ function, fatigue, sometimes nausea, usually some attenuated form of the individual acute symptoms. You can also get conversion to chronic backlash by accumulating a ton of backlash too fast. But the amount of backlash will not go down at all ever without guiding, it'll just settle into the more generic form and hang out increasing all-cause mortality risk."

"I wonder if our magic can do backlash..."

"It seems like it'd be on that awkward border of things that are neither purely mental nor purely physical."

"I'd guess depending on which backlash we could at least help with symptoms?"

"You might not be able to. Drugs don't work on backlash even when it's a straightforward physical backlash with very effective drugs that work on mundane forms of the same thing."

"And we might be able to but it might be it'd be a separate power with years of dev time for every individual backlash."

"Hm, do people typically get guiding when they awaken?"

"Finding compatible espers is hard, I got really lucky with Haru."

"I'd have to start from scratch but I'd bet it'd be doable."

"What would you be going for specifically?"

"Maybe just whether two espers who I had pictures of or something were compatible, and if so how much?"

"Would you need pictures? Some people go the secret identity route. I don't wear a mask personally but I do the codename thing."

"Oh, I could do something else? More identifying than a name for what I have in mind."

"Date and location of awakening?"

"Yeah, I think I could make that work."

"Most people have things other than their future secret identities on their minds when they awaken but seems polite to respect it anyway."

"Espers have secret identities?"

"Not all of us but I go by Traceless professionally and you have to do a moderate amount of detective work to connect it to my civilian legal identity."

"Huh, why?"

"I think it's cool to have a superhero alias and also dislike my legal first name."

Lucien nods.

"Should I not ask for your legal first name?"

"You would at least need a good reason."

"I still don't know it."

"I'll live without it, I suppose."

Next up is an explanation of how learning new powers works!

"So you can't really guess in advance how long picking up a new power will take?"

"Not without prior art on it, no."

"Makes it a lot harder to figure out what to schedule once you're beyond the usual."

"Not everybody aims at an unconventional power, I could suck up years on expanding my precognitive range and adding various hypercog stuff that's all been done before, but yeah."

"Are you planning on doing that?"

"First of all I'm going to be getting my telepathy to the point where I can talk to people back home starting with my twin, and I'll consider suggestions on what to do after that, but I really would like a precog range of more than a few seconds, even if I decide to rest on my laurels when I've got twenty minutes. But practice works as well as directed effort toward improving an existing power in a straightforward way, so I can do that by just using it a lot."

"What sort of things is precog range of a few seconds useful for?"

"Expensive science experiments, trying out a line in a conversation a couple different ways, getting an all-clear-so-far message during an eclipse - I guess we haven't actually covered eclipses yet -"

"You want to cover that one?"

"Sure, pencil me in for wherever you've got space."

And she can join the queue.

"Oh, Haru can you do something on recent scientific advances and new technologies? We're a bit ahead of then but I'm not actually clear on what's recent here.'

"I mean, it'll also be a little confounded where we're just ahead and where we're working with different stuff, dungeon materials and whatever they've got eclipsed doing, but sure -" He can pull up a Wikipedia page to jog his memory and comment on notable recent items from the last thirty years.

Lucien has questions about advancements in cheaply building infrastructure that might not itself be novel, assuming Haru knows about that sort of thing.

It's not his area of focus but he can see if there's anything obvious on Wikipedia?

"Oh, it's okay if you don't. I can figure out searching Wikipedia myself."

"I figured."

The presentations and discussions continue, with a break for lunch, until eventually they wrap up for the day and go their separate ways.

"It turns out I'm very good at communicating with myself."

"It was adorable. Finally someone who appreciates color-coded charts in the same way you do."

"He understands me! Except for the bits of me he's really confused by. But that's fine, there are other people who understand those bits of me."

"Is it more parts than just being a sub?"

"I don't think so?"

"Bad news, I find subs very confusing. I accept that you exist but it is on an instinctive level weird."

"Well, I suppose I'll have to remain confusing to everyone then. I hope that doesn't stop you from taking advantage of my situation. "

"Oh, no, not at all. Much like I don't have to know how a microwave works to turn one on."

"Oh good."

"And I am very glad to have you with me in this strange nondynamic universe."

"We don't know how long bananishes keep, we should probably bring the ones we packed to the next time we hang out with them, let them try 'em and get the seeds out to see if they'll grow here." She opens up their bag.

Well, the bananish peels are still there, but all the actual fruit appears to have disappeared with no explanation save for this very satisfied furry friend, sleeping nestled under the peels with flecks of bananish all over its mouth.

"Oh for fuck's sake." Did it eat the seeds?

There are some in its fur and some near the top of the peel where it couldn't quite get its mouth.