"Yeah! Is that something you recall or is it something you've absorbed through pop culture osmosis, I need to know if I need to read you the series."

"I read Hitchhiker's, though it was a while ago. I gravitate most strongly toward older stuff but I'll take a run at anything that's obviously influencing the literary conversation and Hitchhiker's did that for sure."

"Does it not count as older?"

"It's younger than dungeons!"

"Well, that's fair. I read a lot of stuff in that general time period. So when you say you read Hitchhiker, do you mean the whole series, or just the first book?"

"I think I read the... first four? I'm not sure if I got around to the fifth one."

“Fair enough, I wouldn’t call the fifth one mandatory.”

"I might've read it and just forgot."

“Hm…oh, I think the first Pern book was written before dungeons.”

"I tried Pern and bounced off it, I think I just don't care for McCaffrey."

“That’s fair. I like her fine but everyone has different tastes. It was deeply impactful on the genre, though.”

"I believe it. I lean a bit sci-fi over fantasy? I like fantasy but I'm less plugged in to what it's doing."

“Well, Pern is actually sci-fi in a silly hat. But most of the dragon-riding stuff it influenced isn’t.”

Haru hand-wobbles. "It reads like fantasy."

“That’s the silly hat! But no, you’re right.”

"I wish somebody'd snagged a London dragon, those were cool apart from the mayhem and carnage."

“I know, right?”

"Gotta figure out how to establish a monster zoo so I have a great excuse to put bounties on anything I can't go catch myself."

“Hm…what do you need to found a zoo…besides money.”

"Well, I already have a job, so I need someone who isn't a dungeon-capable esper to manage things like establishing a site for it to be built on, developing the staff and the slack and the institutional responsiveness necessary to take in new creatures on short notice when they don't know what size they're going to be or what they'll eat or if they'll still breathe fire should they survive their dungeons at all, and ideally a return on investment plan that probably involves charging admission."

“I don’t know if my trying to see if I know someone who knows someone whose life’s ambition is to run a zoo is the best way to do that but I can certainly try.”

"Can't hurt! I might put out feelers on my blog, anyone whose life ambition is a monster zoo in particular probably stands a decent chance of being a reader."

“Yeah, that seems sensible. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to reach out to people who run existing zoos, asking for advice…”

"You're right, I should absolutely call all the people I currently call when I want to place a monster."

“Yeah! Ooh, and the monster zoo would need an aquarium element, a lot of places keep those separate…”