"I'm going to spend the day in Toronto, do an evening dungeon and maybe some monster snagging if any good ones turn up, and be here circa bedtime," Haru remarks when he's about halfway through his breakfast.

"Understood."

Kind of a two steps forward one step back situation, Haru supposes. He puts his plate in the dishwasher when it's empty, collects his bag, and orders a teleport.

Okay.

He supposes he's doing this, then.

He orders more ingredients for food and he'll start cooking enough to have leftovers, and he'll see about getting a room fitted for exercising properly, and he'll go read the damn blog to figure out what his jailer is interested in since it seems like it'll be relevant. That series on basic research is probably useful context, he guesses.

How big across is a dungeon portal?

We don't know.

We know approximately. They're about two meters in diameter in a new dungeon. You can tell that by looking. Older dungeons have bigger ones with Nightmare ballpark ten meters. They're never six inches and they're never half a mile.

But it turns out that nobody has actually gotten ahold of both of a tape measure and access to a portal enough times to see if they're all the same size, if they're all perfectly circular, if they stay the same size over the duration of a dungeon's presence within a given appearance, if their width varies with location on Earth or whether they send monsters out or how far off the ground the portal is. This phenomenon happens within easy shopping distance of a hardware store hundreds of times every single day and we simply do not have this information.

Does it matter? Probably not. But if there were a pattern there - if there were something important there - if we really needed to know how big the portals are and really needed to chase down the thread of a clue we could get ahold of by measuring them - we still would not have this information. We will only have this information when it's important by gathering it when we don't know it's important. That's basic research, and it is flabbergastingly underfunded, undersupported, and disrespected...

Jaeha was trying to be mad, goddamnit. Why did Traceless have to go and, and be interesting and smart and well-read and passionate and attractive. Jailer! His jailer! There is literally zero to be gained from having any sort of fondness for Traceless. He needs to quash these feelings immediately.

...but he'll keep reading, might as well get all of it out of the way so that he can quash it all at once.

...started this series because I was getting inquiries as to why, given my known penchant for antimalarial charity on the grounds that it has clearly delineated estimates for how many lives are saved per dollar, I would throw my weight behind the Ontario Monster Park. Well, for one thing, I need a place to put all these monsters. I have started to wear out the patience of the normal zoos, which tend to see their mission as an educational one grounded in normal biological and ecological facts to which monsters do not adhere. Furthermore, from a purely financial standpoint, the park is expected to be self-sustaining by 2035 if not sooner, whereupon I can recoup my investment. But even if that weren't the case -

- folks, how the fuck do you imagine we figured out mosquitoes carry malaria? The disease isn't called "mosquitoborneitis". For a longass time, people thought that malaria was caused by "bad air", and truly effective prevention and treatment efforts could not proceed while we labored under this misapprehension...

14. Blood transfusion work by Antonio Barbieri, whose research was upstream of practically all modern advances in emergency-situation clinical-setting guiding,

See also Why Dungeon Photography, but tl;dr; I think it's worthwhile to take high quality photographs of the insides of dungeons, and all those pictures (except the ones with other people in them who were photographed accidentally) are available for download from this very site, and the ones which do contain people who were photographed accidentally, Library and Archives Canada has copies and will dispense them to people with demonstrated research interests thus advanced. (I also have copies, and you should probably come to me first instead of LAC unless I have introduced myself to a monster and died; they're a backup.) They are all marked with the date and time they were taken, which dungeon I was in (or which dungeon the monster was from, where they were taken outside), what camera setup I was using. They're all available raw even when my phone did automatic color correction. Is the extra resolution on the accidental thirtieth shot I took of the ceiling in #6099541 important? Probably not. But storage is cheap and the dungeons die like flies: the information cannot be replaced, not even in the world where we can learn desperately important things about optics from the way the lighting worked, or signals that a dungeon's about to close on us from correlating the pixels with the timestamps, or facts about monster habits based on where they weren't when I snapped the shot. And if you just want to use one of the good ones as your phone wallpaper, that's fine too; but it's not why I do it...

For the thousandth time - no, I tell a lie, it's actually only the seventh time - fill out your dungeon surveys when you are dungeon-napped.

Do this even if it was nothing more than incredibly boring and dark and silent the whole time and you can't think of a single interesting piece of information about your experience. This is how we found out #2098551 was a repeat, and not a new dungeon. We've probably missed dozens like it with first appearances in less responsible cities. If you live in a city without good followup procedures and you aren't contacted, you can submit a generic dungeon survey.

Fill out your surveys even if you have had the absolute worst time of your life and need to have your spouse/therapist/dog hold your hand through the whole form; this is how we can begin to know anything about the worst, meanest dungeons out there, many of which have escaped several times and want to do the exact same thing they did to you to an unlimited number of other people.

Fill out your surveys even if your life is on fire and the idea of taking an hour to reiterate your date of birth and which dungeon ate you is overwhelming. Dungeon Data Science International will compensate qualifying dungeon victims for survey completions. If you're illiterate and listening to the audio version of this post, you can also call DDSI on the phone and they will take you through the questions out loud.

Fill out the surveys for your loved ones as best they can if they die in a dungeon. Do this before the funeral, before you forget the details, before another day goes by in which nobody knows exactly what happened. Someone doing this back in the nineties, where instead they put it off forever, could possibly have helped your friend or your relative - and now you can help someone else.

Skipping a dungeon survey is like not finishing a course of antibiotics. Does your dungeon survey read like it was composed by monkeys who've never seen a dungeon in their lives? Fill it out anyway, but complain about it to Dungeon Data Science International, and fill out the generic (it's got lots of freeform text boxes). DDSI accepts volunteer labor (translators, survey designers, response interpreters, followup phone banking and email handling). It'll look good on your college applications, probably...

Here is how to lose at hide and seek: stay right where you were while you were counting, and guess one hiding place that your opponent might have snuck into, if you happen to be right about their knowledge of the architecture, their footspeed, their contortionist skills, their ability to climb, their tolerance for dust and stuffy air, their creativity, their willingness to relocate to a different place behind your back, and all the other factors both you and I may have forgotten. Then, look only there. Declare victory if you find them in so doing, and defeat if you do not.

Here is how to win: look everywhere. Start in the best possible places modulo which ones are near your starting position, of course, but keep going. Look places they couldn't possibly be, because you may be mistaken in your impossibility proofs. Look under the couch they couldn't fit under, in case you're wrong. Look on the roof they're too scared of heights to have reached, in case you're wrong. Look in the refrigerator, just in case. Is it a waste of time to look in the refrigerator? Only if you were right about enough things.

If we're looking for dungeons - bewildering uncommunicative hostile magical multifarious dungeons - we're not going to be right about enough things.

A frankly embarrassing amount of science happens by accident. Penicillin. Saccharin. Insulin. Superglue. But these accidents can only occur if the ingredients for them are present - if someone's bothering to grow bacteria in petri dishes, if someone's messing with assorted coal tar derivatives, if someone's taking the pancreas out of a dog to see what happens, if someone is trying to create a new form of plastic. Dungeons are absolutely chock full of ingredients, but in many cases they aren't harvested unless there's something obvious about them; after all, once you can kill the dungeon, leaving it alive to take everything that isn't nailed down (materials, monsters, videos) gives it opportunities to kidnap more people, send more monsters out through the portal (or tie up resources securing the portal), and disrupt traffic around its aperture. I understand that. Having a bigger warehouse full of more dungeon loot that might accidentally interact with something and reveal a new industrial or medical or magical secret is valuable, but it's not infinitely valuable.

However, there is a tendency to look at this tradeoff and see instead an ironclad rule of slaying dungeons at the moment their vulnerability is assured and their captives released, when there are often substantial improvements to be made in dungeon utilization with just half an hour - even just five minutes - of further dungeon survival. A lot of materials can be reverse-engineered based on what you can fit in a shopping bag, or less; it isn't necessary to excavate wall-to-wall to take advantage of that. One specimen of a monster species is a tremendous benefit over zero of them, even if you can't justify the time necessary to collect them all like they're Pokémon. Even a material that cannot be reverse-engineered has the delightful economic property that it will, typically, be used in whatever the most suitable application for it might be - wherever it makes the most difference between doing without and doing with. Having a fist-sized amount of it is better than nothing by more than having two fist-sized amounts of it is better than one.

...antimalarial charity... Wasn't it eradicated in 2034? Google to the rescue, yeah, seems like it was. Huh, this post is old. Traceless has been into this for a while now. And he sure seems to have some opinions. Opinions that make sense, even. Opinions that, if more widespread, might've led to them finding something like the material his bracelet is made of earlier. Probably not, that's wishful thinking, but material effects do repeat sometimes.

And...

...he's annoyed. He's really, really annoyed. He is going to pretend he didn't just spend an embarrassing amount of time reading his jailer's blog and he will make some food and then while he is waiting for it to be done he will exercise until he can't feel his limbs anymore, which happens too quickly because he is horribly out of shape but at least at the end of it he can't feel his limbs anymore which is always a win.

The blog has a great big excited happy post about the eradication of malaria, linked to in a footnote under that post in a 2034 edit!

Okay why is he big excited happy about the eradication of malaria.

The thing about eradication - not treatment, but eradication - is that you can start to release all the held tension in the economy, in the public awareness, in the medical system, in the human genome, that was defending against it. It's gone. It's no longer a holding action, it's a victory. Those brilliant talented people at those triumphant organizations that achieved this can now find the next most important thing to do; this is not just a strike against malaria but against whatever they take on next. Now we can get more emphatically underway on polio, measles, and a dozen others...

The food is DONE and he will take a SHOWER and then he will EAT the food and then he does not know what to do with himself. What did he use to do with himself. Stalk T- Lee Tae-gun. What did he use to do with himself prior to that. Dungeons and sex and a whole lotta nothing.

God, why is he so boring. It's so fucking hard to not be bored when he's boring. He doesn't have hobbies he doesn't have anything to do and he doesn't want to keep reading his jailer's blog because it's making him mad. And in fucking prison he could at least contextualise the boredom as appropriate punishment for his sins and also he just slept a lot which he knows is a symptom of depression which no duh but now he is meant to be doing something PRODUCTIVE about his sins instead and so he doesn't feel like punishing himself anymore but he doesn't have anything ELSE.

Fuck this. Fuck his life. Maybe he should find one of those incredibly addictive phone games and sink his life into it. Like one of those gay gacha RPGs. Didn't Traceless complain about how he wasn't even spending crazy amounts of money to lash out? Maybe he SHOULD do that. How would Traceless feel if he spent a thousand dollars trying to pull hot men from a Korean gay gacha game when he could have literally just Googled the pictures of what they looked like and the stats aren't even that much better than the normal skins. He's not GONNA because that would be PATHETIC AND CHILDISH but he is mad.

ARGH.

Haru teleports in that evening after dinnertime. He is for the moment not on the phone. "Hi there, how was your day?"

Right. Of course Traceless would be backlashed and wanting to chat. Of course. And now Jaeha has to—he doesn't have to do jack shit. He doesn't owe his jailer shit. He could be spending a thousand dollars on gacha games.

"Well, I discovered that I have no hobbies and nothing good to do with my time, but on the bright side I made food."

"Cooking's a hobby but it does have the drawback that one normally does it threeish times a day tops! What'd'ja make?"

"Salmon Caesar salad! I should actually ask if you have any dietary restrictions, it occurred to me earlier that I didn't know..."

"Relative to my culture I'm not very adventurous but I'm not a vegetarian or anything. Is some of it in fact for me, I didn't want to presume."

"Yes, I did in fact make enough for both of us with leftovers unless you eat a lot more than I've seen you do. I also made a strawberry tart, it's in the fridge."

"Ooooooh dessert, I will save room for that! Thank you!" He dishes himself a serving of salad.

"I wanted to be feeling productive while I was exercising hard enough to be feeling it for a week in search for anything to occupy my time so something that went in the oven was good." He will serve himself salad, too.

"Do you want, like, hobby suggestions, or have you already thought of a hundred things and they all sound awful?"

What does this guy think depression is like.

"Sure, let's hear them, so long as you don't get heartbroken if I shoot them all down because I'm a Debbie Downer."

"Musical instrument? Volunteer work, there's stuff you can do remotely. Learn to paint or something. Pick up a new language, me doing introductory French or Tagalog or ASL with you will work just as well for my backlash as doing intro Korean would if that's a factor. I assume you don't have a reading list or you bounce off the books on it or you'd have tried that already but that's what I'd do with a lot of downtime is read books. Cricket likes to watch TV, I can get recommendations from him if you've got anything you'd narrow it down by. I used to play Civilization, but I hear there are as many as several video games that aren't Civilization and that some of them are good."