“I wonder if there’s some pre-existing factor, that I might be able to learn to pick up on. Has there ever been a group of the same thing where one survived and the others didn’t?”

"Not off the top of my head."

“I am guessing but not assuming that nobody dragged a megacroc out of that one dungeon.”

"Too big and unwieldy, but also they haven't found the core yet."

“Oh, still. Don’t love that.”

"It hasn't been that long, the median time is on like day two but it's not that unusual for a dungeon where it's dim and wet to hang on for a week while the search is underway."

“Yeah, you’re right. …After I got taken by the web dungeon I restricted myself to checking on it once a day because it felt bad to see that it wasn’t dead yet.”

"Lots of dungeons are a lot more navigable for normal SWAT teams than those two."

“Probably I’m not mostly going to be working in those dungeons though.”

"You might, your suitability probably depends mostly on the monster loadout? I'm not sure exactly what kind of monster loadout you're ideal for - might be similar to mine, I'm good with fewer monsters and bad at swarms of them."

“That’s true. It might take some experimenting.”

"Mm-hm." What if he kissed the side of her neck.

Eep! She is delightedly surprised by this! Less delighted than he is by kisses to the back of the neck, but that’s a high bar.

He ran out of things to say and also she is so kissable! Kiss kiss kiss.

Kiss kiss kiss! She is so onboard with this. He is pretty kissable himself.

"Upstairs before Cricket scolds us?" he murmurs.

“Oh, yes, excellent idea.”

Up they go and then he can kiss her properly.

Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.

The wait until the day after tomorrow is suddenly much more annoying than it was ten minutes ago but oh well, there are options.

There are options and they're pretty good!

“I really like you,” she murmurs afterwards.

"I really like you too." Nuzzle.