"God knows how long I would've sat around trying to think of that," he says.  "It's even something I practiced doing with my partner Toby at the beginning of my career, breaking through drywall.  Only takes me a few minutes, you kinda perforate it with a combat knife and then just kick it right down.  And it works out perfect - hole in the wall leads exactly where it should, we're practically just around the corner from the antechamber.  After I make my report to the DRT squad they wind up requisitioning a buzzsaw to cut open some of the other disappeared doorways with, gets there in thirty minutes."

"Well, all's well that ends well. Did they find the core? Is that what set it off like that?"

"No, we're not sure what happened," Bryce says.  "I wondered if it just panicked because it figured out it had espers inside, but..."  He shakes his head.  "I think we still just know too little about dungeon behavior."

"Traceless has a lot of stuff on his blog about research. It's why he funded the monster zoo, at least in part."

"I really like Traceless's blog," he says.  "I've been trying to get into documentation and monster capture myself the past few years, like get really serious about it, and he was a big part of that.  His writing, I mean."

"I've been sending a lot of spare shots I didn't want to keep to Library and Archives Canada, since Traceless suggested that. I kind of end up taking a lot of selfies with things. I've caught a few small things too, but I'm currently pretty limited to things I can safely store in my parents' basement until they kill the dungeon and I find out if it's actually going to survive. Also it turns out that saltwater aquariums are pretty hard to set up. Luckily the bioluminescent nudibranches were actually fresh water tolerant."

"I send as much as I can to public dungeon info archives, but LAC is a good idea too.  I try to set up my capture work so I can do it right at the end, just before we blow the core, so there's the least time possible spent securing an active dungeon monster, but that's not always practical.  Benedikt - Benedikt Chun, my agent at Paradigm - he's really helpful with prepping my DRT squads to help with capture work, sometimes they pull in local animal control."

"Pulling in animal control is a really good idea if it's something relatively tame."

"They can handle more than you might think, especially once it deactivates, but yeah, there are limits.  I bet DRT squads could handle almost anything that survived if they, like, sank budget into speccing for it, but it's not any more on their radar than on most espers'..."

"Most espers have a harder time speccing into live capture than we do, but yeah..."

"I don't know who decides what to spend that budget on but they might not want to, what with all the other things DRT budget is for. I do think it's a little sad, though, when a dungeon dies and everything that was part of it is just gone forever. It's pretty cool of people like you and Bryce and Traceless to be trying to save the monsters when you can."

"Aww thanks, I admit the first couple were more on impulse than anything else, I was kind of showing off a little. Backlash. But I've been more intentional about it recently. It is nice to save something unique that would have otherwise ceased to exist."

"For me a big part of it is - some of these things could be people, and a lot more of them could be animals which is maybe still a thing worth being if you can't be a person - and I don't know what that means for what they are before their dungeons die, but.  If there's something that got to experience becoming Cricket, I'm glad it got to do that, rather than disappear."

"Yeah. Yeah, exactly."

"It's like that story about the starfish. We can't save all of them, or even most of them, but we can save some, and it still matters to those ones."

"Something like that," he says.  "I - sometimes think of it more like - I don't want it to be a war of total extermination."

"But maybe that's because I'm a dour and unpleasant person," he adds playfully.

Dour and unpleasant people must be booped on the nose to undercut their mystique.

(He shuts his eyes and giggles.)

Hee hee hee.

Giggle.

Then she gets serious again.

"Wars of extermination are not a good thing. And - they don't seem to need to kill, or even hurt people, necessarily. So if we could communicate with them, or...breed the more benign ones or something like that...well...That'd be a lot better. The problem is you need to make sure they stay benign."

"Yeah. It's so hard to even know if they're the kind of thing that can communicate at all, but..."

"Maybe we'll figure it out someday..."

"I kind of don't expect it to happen in my lifetime.  We're right at the beginning.  But - I hope, someday."