"Small mercies."

"Quite."

"Is that also how Lady Brynd can, like, walk? The wounds heal?"

"Quite possibly - the details vary, but when kept under control demons rarely do permanent harm to their empowered."

"Kind of like dungeons - I mean, dungeons can and will do permanent harm but they keep people alive through improbable amounts of rigmarole first."

"How do they choose their victims?"

"There usually seems to be something specific they're going for - for instance, almost all dungeons prey exclusively on adults. They do not want people to be having a good time. There are plenty of dungeons that wouldn't be inherently awful to be stuck in for an hour or two, and there's a few which would sound heinous to most people but have some niche appeal, but they are uncannily good at choosing people who will find it at least moderately annoying anyway, never somebody who'd rather be in a dungeon than doing whatever they had scheduled instead. There's a lot of post-rescue survey work trying to find out more but it's a slog."

"That sounds somewhat like they are tuned to achieve a specific degree of suffering."

"Not exactly. Dungeons vary in how bad they are when they start out but they all get worse if they're allowed to disappear and reappear more times. The very worst dungeons are the ones that got away back when dungeons as a class were new."

"How bad do they get?"

"Probably the worst dungeon is named Nightmare - we name them after they've been around long enough - and what it does is it takes people in their sleep, and it physically instantiates their worst fear, and it picks people who have very, very miserable worst fears, not people who are just generally scared of heights or something. It likes to grab the same people repeatedly when it can; usually a dungeon will appear in a new city each time it shows up, and Nightmare usually also does that, but it's often gone to new cities where former victims happened to be and taken them from there, and sometimes if people are trying particularly desperately to kill it, it'll close up and re-emerge somewhere else in the world immediately, which is otherwise almost unheard of. I think Omen was also able to do it but somebody killed Omen in 2011." If there were others, he can't look them up, which is a way his life is worse, so he won't mention it. "There's like one psychic esper who can clear Nightmare out of somebody's system thoroughly enough that even if it appears in range of them again they aren't taken."

"How many people does it take each year?"

"Nightmare doesn't appear every year, more like every - year and a half, on average? - and it's big enough now that it'll chew through hundreds of people, each time."

"That's horrible..."

"There's an empowered, Mr. Dean Highton I believe, who has the ability to returns someone's mind to a recent prior state. I wonder if he would be able to aid victims if he was present soon after such an attack." 

"- it's not so much an 'after' as, uh, 'over the course of a couple weeks'. Nobody's been able to find the core to kill it for good. But he sounds like he'd be a huge asset during Nightmare appearances."

Lucette nods.

"I've heard somewhat contradictory things about what he's like, but it seems plausible he'd be persuadable to help should we find a way to your world."

"I think there could be really good opportunities on both sides if transit were to be established, yeah."

"I believe you have more dance lessons today, and we should be receiving our signalling system so you are welcome to join me on this evenings patrol if you are comfortable doing so."

"Can do."

His lessons run up until dinner time as there's no social event he's obligated to go to this evening, though Lucette does attend a small gathering on her own.

Dancing is pretty fun, when you have esper grace and endurance.

He can outlast his instructor that way. 

Lucette's head maid fetches him after dinner, so he can "have opinions on the decorations for their upcoming party". This turns out to involve stairs to an underground tunnel hidden behind a tapestry in Lucette's private study.

"Should I be wearing something a bit less - fancy? I don't need to dress for stealth but I can still get scuffed and catch my sleeve on a twig."

"I believe Lady Lucette has acquired appropriate costuming for you, my lord."

Alrighty, what's he got.