Though I have hopes that with more research and dungeon materials and so on we can make the tradeoff better over time.

100%. It can be the Black Plague of magic. (The Black Plague improved labor conditions because labor became more valuable, sorry if you knew that already but if you didn't hte reference would have been pretty incomprehensible.)

I was aware and managed not to get the reference anyway! ^_^;

I did not anticipate that but fortunately covered adequately anyway!

It’s one of those things that’s true but conversations about the Black Death are usually not about it, they’re about the horrors.

Well, dungeons too are often discussed in terms of the horrors.

Yeah, the Black Death doesn’t have an equivalent of espers.

It has... people who have genetic resistance to the plague...? but it's a reach.

Yeah that would only work if the only thing espers did was not get kidnapped. Although maybe I should suggest “people with genetic resistance to a disease can magically eradicate it” as a writing prompt to a friend.

I wish your writer friend luck with this concept!

I’ll tell her you said so!

Lucy tracks the follow-up on what she can’t help but think of as her dungeon. Did they kill it? Did Traceless get any spiders out? Probably they aren’t going to post a list of rescuees who haven’t filled out their surveys so people can nag them about it.

They still haven't found the core, apparently, so most likely Traceless has yet to catch spiders (they'd be a huge liability if the dungeon got away and they'd just have to kill them then). There is no list of victims of the dungeon.

Hasn’t been killed yet but also hasn’t escaped. Okay.

She messages Writer Friend with the prompt and does some homework and starts looking up possible analyses to do to Traceless’s compatibility dataset and then goes to bed.

In the morning she annoys her roommate with how chipper she is about being dungeon-napped and replies to an email from student health about post-dungeon counseling and goes to all her classes and then lets herself look into the dungeon again.

Core still missing. A spider made a break for it and was killed but the population of them has been thinned out enough that they're starting to harvest the webs.

Good for them.

She really wants this thing to die.

Man, it’s a good thing she said yes to counseling, wanting things to die isn’t a healthy Lucy opinion! Like, obviously dungeons need to die, it’s not the worst possible trauma response, but she would really prefer to feel mildly sad about it.

She checks again the next day.

Core is found, a spider specimen has been caught, and they're keeping it alive to harvest the silk, it's good silk once you acetone off the glue.

Whew.

She hopes the spider turns out to be a person. That would be so cool. Even a non-person animal would be good, but a person would be better.

She keeps an eye on the situation over the next several days.

The dungeon tries to escape and everybody has to bolt for the exit while it's coming apart around them and kill the core before it can get away. The spider doesn't survive the loss of its dungeon, sadly.

Aw! No!

That was HER spider it was not even slightly her spider, what the fuck, she’s going to weird out her counselor so much.

She goes to counseling. She continues periodically emailing Traceless with the results after she does math to magic-related datasets.

He doesn't always reply right away but sometimes she'll get a batch of responses to accumulated emails all at once.

And a couple of months later he gets an email from Lucy’s email address saying that it’s Lucy’s roommate and she’s in the hospital with some kind of psychotic breakdown and the hospital has like a roomful of people who are probably not espers but like it sure would be convenient if somebody could check.

...okay, he doesn't usually do this but usually it's not somebody he knows, since he knows far fewer than fifty thousand people. He calls the hospital to see if they'll confirm that they've got a Lucy who is a suspected awakening, he's Traceless and knows her from the internet and would be willing to come check if they've got her.

Yeah, they’ve got her! And a handful of other people.

Honestly now that he thinks about it they probably shouldn't just tell anybody who calls them on the phone and claims to be an esper that they've got a specific patient! But it is not a problem he is going to solve right now while backlashed. He sends June an emoji, and he and Cricket drive to the hospital and ask to see Lucy, he doesn't actually have her name but there can't be that many albino Lucies.

Lucy is sort of half-sitting, half-lounging on an examination table, her wrists in soft restraints, fiddling with a three-dimensional wooden puzzle thing.