She's been doing this for a few months now so it's almost routine. Get dressed in her eye-catching yet practical outfit ,check her phone battery and other equipment. Show up at the cordon in front of the portal, flash her ID at the DRT guys controlling access. Head inside.

Somebody she might recognize is already there, unloading and strapping on gear from the flatbed of his pickup truck!

She's  been paying a lot more attention to local esper news over the last few months and does recognize him.

"Hi. Traceless right? I've seen you on the news. I'm going by Kuroko."

"That's me! I heard you were coming - this," he extends a hand to her, "is almost certainly going to be awful but I want to know by how much, do you -"

She giggles a bit ruefully "Sure."

Maybe they can just touch fingertips.

Boop. "Yowch! I love being right. Okay, I'm gonna go with gloves for this one just to belt-and-suspenders not deliberately poking you any more than that." He locates and dons his gloves.

She winces and shakes her hand out vigorously. "Yeah, thanks for that. Yikes."

"On the bright side, I would have one hell of a time doing this one alone on two fronts, no comms to chatter at on the way in and on the way out even if the vics talk I'd have to be really sure I'd gotten every monster before I could safely move anyone. I think with you along the sensible division of labor is for me on gunnery and you on vic transport, and I can do a little sensor-ing into side rooms, and we can chat."

"Yeah that makes sense. I'd love to hear about the monster zoo. I think it's pretty neat. Which will make it easier for me to avoid monopolizing the entire conversation."

"My thing actually plays fine with you monopolizing the conversation as long as you tolerate me asking you questions about whatever you're saying, so don't worry about that too much, but I also love talking about the monster zoo!" Ammo ammo ammo the terrycloth guys are not exactly durable but they also don't have organs so you have to fuck them up pretty good before they stop moving. "Anything you need to check on or load up before we go in?"

"I appreciate questions actually. Also, I'm trying to train myself to be polite when I'm backlashed and most people don't really appreciate it if you won't let them talk about themselves at least a little."

She double checks that everything is secure and where it's supposed to be. "Everything looks good."

"Alrighty. I'm about all checked off too." He sends an emoji to somewhere on his phone, and then up to the portal where it's parked in the backroom of a mattress shop. "I often have my cat summarize television shows and I ask him about those. People reading to me and tolerating interruptions also works but he's not much of a reader."

"I do dramatic readings sometimes. I can't sit and read quietly at any level but at lower levels I can do dramatic readings if it's the sort of thing that lends itself to those."

"My ability to read anything that wasn't directed at me goes really fast. Who d'you usually have listening to your dramatic readings? - also you've got ear protection, right," he adds, when he spots the first monster gently arranging glass bottles on a teak shelf.

"Yeah I got ear protection. I do shoot things myself occasionally. Usually it's my partner - they're a professional, listening to me ramble and making appreciative noises is part of what I'm paying them for. I get online friends on voice chat too, when I can."

"Is it rude to suggest that I could try poking your partner - I have really high compat with mine but we have to spend the entire time each pretending the other doesn't exist so it's still really time consuming."

"Not rude I don't think. Though the compatibility isn't like fantastic, soo....Man I would hate that so much. I get incredibly...twitchy about people ignoring on purpose, or seeming to ignore me on purpose, even if I have other people to talk to Sometimes I have to take a break just to cool down because a victim couldn't or didn't want to chat at all. Maybe I should try picking up Chinese, that's come up. But it would take a while for me to get it much better than gestures."

"I can ignore her and it's not unbearable as long as I've got somebody on the phone or my cat on me or ideally both. Languages are a good sweet spot for me," he unloads his gun into another monster and when it's still twitching on the ground follows up with a knife, "I polished my French and picked up Tagalog and it turns out sign language is very different from spoken languages but it's linguistically interesting. I don't think I'm likely to delve into Chinese because it's logographic."

"Well, I'm not looking to do a lot of reading in Chinese, just make small talk.  I brushed up on my French too. Turns out a lot of people in Quebec are way more talkative in French even if they speak English fluently. Also turns out that having your verbal filter kind of shot is helpful for actually practicing speaking a language, instead of being too awkward to speak it. Your cat was the reason you organized the zoo right?"

"Oh, legit to be willing to settle for spoken Chinese only, it'd just weird me out to speak anything I'm not literate in where there's such a thing as literacy, and if I pick up anything phonetic I can use some of my unbacklashed spare time to learn the alphabet and coast from there. Cricket was part of the inspiration but I think I might have come up with it even if I hadn't happened to wind up with him. Monsters are neat! It's neat that they can survive orphaning! And there's so much stuff we don't know." This room has a victim in it on the table. Traceless slays six towel-monsters and checks adjacent rooms to shoot a few more while the victim holds very very still, eyes scrunched shut. "Hello sir!"

She gets close enough to cover the man with her power. "Hey. It's safe to move now. The monsters aren't allowed to notice you. We're going to get you out of here."

The man tries twitching a finger, tentatively. Traceless kills another monster that wanders into the adjacent steam room. The man stretches out and gasps and starts crying. If Meghan reaches to pick him up she'll get very clung to. Hopefully she's too professional to care that the monsters feel massages are best delivered to the nude.

"Let's make sure our maps are synced so you can rejoin me, after you get him out while I'm clearing more rooms?" Traceless says.

Well she's not going to say anything about the nudity. And he can definitely cling to her, though she'll want to adjust the position of his arms to allow secure carrying..

"Got it." she'll sit down on the massage table long enough to free up one hand to manipulate her phone.

The mapping software is working as normal! Traceless indicates his planned bearing and then they can split up for a minute.

She'll prod the guy for his name and other standard identification details. And offer him a bit of water.

The guy is named George Mendoza and he's not sure how long he's been in there and yes he's thirsty and those zaps HURT and he read on the internet someplace that if you do what a dungeon wants it might eventually let you do things like move toward the water sources but NOPE.

"Sometimes that works. Here we're almost back,  I'll get somebody to hand me up a blanket for you, then just drop you through. It's safe, you'll just float down. And they can give you a phone to call someone to come get you once you're cleared with the medical people."

"Is there something wrong with all these towels?" he wonders. (There are really a lot of towels in what is unofficially called Still Spa.)

"It's chilly out there, you'll want a proper blanket. But I can also grab you a towel."

He has by now worked out enough kinks from his various limbs by changing position in her arms that he can help get a towel (the room the portal opens into has them in mint green) wrapped around himself, and once she's stuck her head or her phone out of the portal to call for a blanket someone can ferry it up the ladder for him. A whole bag of them to hang off a hook at the top of the ladder, even. Out George wafts.

Traceless is acting as a silencer on top of his real silencer for the benefit of the monsters, but not for Meghan; the mapping software with his position relayed to her phone agrees with the direction from which the bullet noises are coming.

She'll jog in that direction then.

"Hey there! This lady kindly agreed to be monster bait!" Haru says between shots, gesturing at an old woman who is desperately scratching her pruney skin beside one of the hot tubs.

"Very brave of her. Hey lady, I'll make sure the monsters don't notice you on the way out. And get you a towel."

The monsters stop charging in toward the hot tub as soon as the lady's covered and Traceless can grab one of the honeysuckle-yellow towels for the old lady. She came in with a cane and clothes which the monsters took from her while putting her in the tub and wants those.

"It's not standard to bring out possessions like that and I think Kuroko carrying you will be faster than you walking even with the cane, ma'am."

"Yeah, I'm going to carry you.. I need you to be close to me to protect you and it'd be too easy for you to fall behind."

"Well at least let me get dressed," huffs the woman. (Traceless notices a twitching bit of terrycloth and goes and slices it.)

"Sorry for the inconvenience ma'am. Let me help you wrap this towel. There's blankets by the door."

"I want to wear my own normal clothes!" insists the old lady. "The last time I was in a dungeon it didn't even take them off!"

"Ma'am, this dungeon will probably be here for weeks. Someone may have a chance to make a trip to grab your clothes. Right now you need to get to medical."

"Clothes are replaceable. Your life is not. Now please hold on." Scoop.

The lady's protests ("why, if you'd let me grab my cane you'd deserve a good smack with it!") are presumably gratifyingly attentive?

Yep. She's more or less unbothered by the threat itself ('You could try.") She will attempt to extract the lady's name and other details on the way out as that's on the checklist.

Her name is Deborah and Kuroko will be hearing from her LAWYER.

"I think you'll find you won't win that case, and if your lawyer is any good they'll tell you the same."

"My clothes were RIGHT THERE and you could have let me get dressed."

"It's against procedure and this costs me backlash for every second I have to protect you and there's other people to rescue today. We're almost out of here, you can call your family and have them bring spare clothes once medical clears you."

"My family don't live around here. I'm perfectly capable of getting around by myself as long as I have my cane."

"Ma'am I can do a lot of cool things but I can't change the rules for you. Talk to the support workers, sorting out this sort of thing is their job."

Deborah grouses all the way back to the portal and wraps herself up very grouchily in the blanket and would prefer to be carried down the ladder rather than try to land on her feet at the bottom.

She's just going to test to see if she can leave her phone on the ground so it won't lose contact with Traceless' (she can grab it again if a monster tries to break it.)

A monster hustles into the room!

(she grabs the phone)

"Hmm, inconvenient. Look, I need to keep my phone paired with Traceless. I'll get one of the support people to catch you." She sticks her head out and waves a support worker over.

"That is NOT what I asked you to do, young lady," says Deborah, but this will not stop Meghan from tossing her to a support worker.

She goes back to find Traceless.

He's cleared a ways into the dungeon now and has found a yoga room. The terrycloth yoga instructor has been slain, and the erstwhile yoga student has been stashed, sobbing, in a corner so he can shoot incoming monsters.

"Hi again. So I'm informed the lady's lawyer will be calling me, I told her good luck with that."

"My agent hates it when people's lawyers try to call me. I had her let a couple through once," bang bang, "but they turned out to be terrible conversationalists for my purposes. This is Christina! Christina, this is Kuroko, she's gonna escort you out." Yoga victims get to keep their clothes on as long as they're not too restrictive; Christina has been relieved of her jeans but has underwear and a shirt on still.

"Yeah, my agent can explain to them why they don't have a legal leg to stand on."  She can cover Christina with her power (and with a towel.). "I'll just pick you up, okay?"

"Just please don't touch my knees, my knees are killing me," breathes Christina, but she has no other particular demands on her rescuer.

She avoids touching the knees  "Medical will look you over when you get out, okay? Want some water? They have snacks outside too."

"Yeah I could really use water and like - what do they have snackwise -"

Here's some water.

"They've go granola bars, and chips and stuff. It varies depending on what whoever's buying the stuff happens to get and I didn't look this time around. If you have allergies or anything you can ask them to help you find something."

"Chips sound great, I think I must need salt."

"Sweating a lot loses you salt as well as water so that makes a lot of sense.They'll have something salty even if it's not chips specifically."

"Do you know how long I was in there - it felt like forever -"

"No, but I can get the time for you," peek at watch (her watch has glitter glued to the band)  "It iiiiis...two fifteen. In the afternoon."

"Five... hours. Five hours of evil yoga. No wonder my knees are like this..."

"That is way more yoga than anyone needs at one time."

"Is the portal somewhere stupid that it took hours to find..."

"Nah, they just have to secure the area and fill out the paperwork before they let anyone in, and you're the third person I've had to escort out so far."

"Paperwork! I have bad knees, I might not be able to walk again for their paperwork!"

"They have to do the paperwork so they know who to call in. This one really needed a specific kind of power because anyone else would have gotten electrocuted. You can ask the support guys how to apply for compensation for dungeon-related injuries."

Christina resumes crying.

"...When we get the portal I''ll call a support worker to catch you so you don't have to try standing right away, okay?"

"They could drop me..."

"They're trained to carry people safely when necessary."

"Shouldn't there be one of those trampolines like for burning buildings?"

"It's not really necessary. if you get dropped or jump out of the portal you just sort of slowly float down. Most people can land on their feet easily."

"I can't! Was it picking out people who it'd fuck up especially for some reason -"

"They seem to go for people who will have strong reactions to whatever it is they're doing. So, probably. There was an old lady too. They'll send you a bunch of surveys later, They use them to figure out what the dungeon was selecting for, and try to figure out more general patterns. So, fill them out if you can possibly stand it."

Crying!

"Sorry. We're almost back. It'll just be another minute. Do you have someone who can come get you?"

"I g-guess my boyfriend can if he can get off work."

"Okay then. And here we are at the portal. We have blankets!'" She can start the process of collecting a blanket and wrapping her charge in it.(avoiding the knees).

It's sort of hard to wrap someone thoroughly in a blanket when they can't stand and you must not involve their knees in any capacity but eventually Christina will survive the waft to the ground and can be tossed out.

(do not say 'say hi to your boyfriend for me', that's insane behaviour')

Anyway, once more unto the breach.

The portal opens into a corner of the dungeon, not the center, and Traceless has been clearing out closer rooms first - they don't all lead to all adjacent rooms but enough of them do that he's been able to spread out in a pretty neat radius. But every time he's a little farther away. This time the map shows him down past the yoga room into a mani-pedi one and he's keeping the monsters off the victim while he tries to wipe the most recent layer off his toes and get the crick out of his neck.

"Hi Kuroko! I think this one has a stiff jaw or something or possibly doesn't speak anything I speak, and hasn't given his name. Do you need me to come with you to the portal?"

She covers the victim. "Yes, please and thank you. You could tell me more about the monster zoo. Also the last two victims have needed somebody to catch them, so probably we should just be handing everyone down to the support people. They've been in here a while by now. Also it might be picking people who are more likely to get physically messed up."

"That wasn't in the report from Chengdu but I guess that was then. Or it's a coincidence. I hope they manage to find a good relief shift sensor to find anyone it picks up when we need to be off duty." They can step over a pile of towel monsters to get out of there and head for the portal. "I don't think one of these things would be a very good prospective attraction for the zoo even if we find the core, they're not very visually appealing and also probably wouldn't survive."

'I guess it could be a coincidence. Though they do get meaner so who knows." She kicks a piece of towel monster 'They're kind of creepy really. And not even pretending to have biology. Or physics."

"I do want to get one out to be dissected, the hands are mechanically interesting and somebody might want to crib how their tendons work for robots or something."

"I'd like to find more interesting things to bring out of dungeons but it's hard to tell what might be useful. I guess ideally we'd be testing a lot of things but of course there's only so many people available to do that kind of stuff so you have to figure out how to pick stuff."

"They're probably going to want all the lotions and oils and nail polish and stuff like that. I think the towels are just nice towels. Water fountains might do perpetual motion or something like that, since it's not like the place is wired for electricity with the city."

"Well at least these people will get a free nice towel out of the deal. Assuming they're allowed to keep them. Not really amazing compensation but it's something."

"They don't even say 'I got kidnapped by Still Spa and all I got was this lousy towel'."

Giggle "Very rude of them really not to come with labels. If I was making fancy towels I'd monogram them."

"I guess I'm curious about whether the, shall we call it a camo effect, persists when they're dead." He picks up the next dead monster they step past and brings it between rooms; it remains a now rather out-of-place cherry blossom pink among the roomful of caramel accessories.

"Guess not. Too bad. Might have made them more interesting to study."

"Yeah, though it might rely on a correspondence between the colors and specific dungeon rooms that nobody would be able to replicate."

"Maybe yeah. I'm guessing you're the sort of person who thinks that we could like, explain all this magic stuff, someday. I was a pretty average student mostly, but one time a science teacher said that just because you can't see what the rules are doesn't mean they do't exist and it kind of stuck with me."

"It would be really nice to explain all this magic stuff someday. I'm not particularly optimistic about it happening any time soon." Portal. Blanket on guy, support catcher flagged down, guy dropped. "But we can chip away at it. It took a very long time to explain a preponderance of the non-magic stuff but even Stone Age people were able to learn things and use them."

"We have a lot more tools that Stone Age people, but maybe they're not much better than rocks when it comes to this stuff. Or something like that. That sounded very clever in my head."

"On the contrary, in dungeons like this I'm really glad I have a gun." He checks his ammo supply and deems it sufficient for another run. Back in they go.

"Not quite what I meant but guess 'how many bullets does it take to kill this thing' is information."

"Data science is modern too, and I'm glad we have that."

"I did tell Christine she should fill out her surveys but she started crying so maybe I shouldn't have said that."

"Dungeon victims hate being told to fill out their surveys. If only we could acquire useful data by instead telling random people on Fiverr to fill out dungeon surveys instead."

"I wouldn't have minded if she'd yelled at me about it but I was worried she'd end up crying too hard to talk to me. It's sort of useful sometimes with people like the old lady that I mostly stop caring if people yell at me as long as they'll talk to me. As long as I don't forget that I shouldn't provoke people on purpose."

"Being professional around backlash is a whole thing. I get a fawn response issue so I keep caring about how people seem to feel about interacting with me the whole time."

"That sounds much more pleasant for them, if not for you. I'm a little surprised my family still talks to me since I kind of made their week hell, even after they called in more-extroverted backup."

"My parents had to take shifts with me - they're divorced so this involved a cross-country flight, too. I spent the week very concerned that I was effectively committing elder abuse by making it really marked and awkward to avoid me when they would obviously want to do that but that was the backlash talking."

"I suppose I should be glad we have a number of relatives nearby. I had no qualms about constantly bothering people at the time but I got to be retroactively mortified by my behaviour after the fact and it would have been much worse if somebody had had to fly out on my account."

"I bought him a boat. And her a house."

"I paid to get the backyard landscaped by a fancy professional company. They already liked the house but the backyard was neglected and they kept swearing they were gonna landscape it but it turns out it's a lot of work to do it yourself and expensive to hire people. And now we have a pond with a heater so it doesn't freeze and some koi."

"Aww, that's sweet, I bet they liked that. I've gotten decent at backlash management but at the time I really envied people who are just in the hospital for a week."

"Some people get to be in a nice peaceful coma for a week. Of course that sort of thing can kill you before anyone notices you have a problem if you're unlucky so I probably shouldn't be flippant about it."

"Yeah, I avoid playing whose-backlash-sucks-more, but the jealousy like the loneliness is none too rational." Here are more towel monsters! No vic in this room but the towel monsters die anyway and they can move on to the next.

"Yeah it's not really productive, cause what do you want? A medal for winning at misery poker? the 'unluckiest cosmic dice roll on the planet' award?"

"Maybe if we find the single worst backlash and all agree on it, that person gets to have powers without backlash as compensation."

The next room has a victim in it getting his massage. He's... asleep.

"I have been preventing victims from hearing the shots because I don't want them to twitch and get zapped but I didn't think anyone actually managed to sleep in here," Haru says, slaying the masseur. "Maybe he's only been in for a little while? Or was asleep when it took him?"

"He must be one of those people who stays very still in his sleep. Couldn't be me. Anyway got him covered." She's pretty tense but it would be UNPROFESSIONAL to slap the guy awake and he'd probably prefer to stay asleep if possible even though it's ANNOYING.

They can wrap him up in a towel, which does wake him up. "Whoa, what the fuck, who are you -"

"This is Kuroko and I'm Traceless! You got dungeon-napped but we've gotcha and you'll be out in a jiffy."

 "Hi, you're very lucky you're a sound sleeper because this one is pretty mean. But it can't do anything to you now cause the monsters can't see you."

"The monsters? The - oh, shit, why am I naked -"

"It's a spa theme," says Traceless, taking point in case any monsters have drifted back into their path.

"We have blankets by the portal so you won't freeze. What's your name please?"

"What do you need my name for?"

"When possible it's good to match things up with missing persons reports."

"If we can match any missing person reports up with rescued people it means we know if there's known or suspected dungeon kidnappings that haven't been retrieved yet. Which makes it less likely that somebody gets left behind. So, your name please?"

"Nobody's going to have noticed me missing," says the guy.

"The support guys are going to ask too and they're not in as much of a hurry as we are," Traceless says.

"Look your name won't be made public or anything. There's privacy laws about this sort of thing."

"They don't talk to immigration controls or anything either," says Traceless. "Your first name alone will probably do unless it's so common that two are missing with the same one."

The guy sighs. "It's Eric."

"Thank you, Eric."

"So you were asleep the whole time? Do you just not move much in your sleep?"

"How should I know if I move in my sleep, I'm asleep when it happens," says Eric.

"But you don't remember being taken?"

"No, I don't."

"Well, the monsters shock anyone who moves, unless the dungeon instead wants them doing evil yoga. Or anyone who tries to come in. That's why they had to bring in stealth espers. So you must have been awfully still in your sleep. What time did you fall asleep?"

"I don't know, I was asleep at the time."

"What time did you go to bed?"

"I dunno, like 8?"

"Night shift?"

"Yeah. You guys are real chatty."

"It's a stealth esper thing."

"Yeah. We'd really appreciate if you'll humour us a little longer. You can pick a topic if there's something you'd rather talk about."

"I wanna go back to sleep. Are they going to let me go back to sleep?"

"Not immediately, they're going to want to give you a checkup, but shouldn't be too long before you can go home."

"You can probably get the night off if you're supposed to be working and need to catch up on sleep instead."

"Not everybody's workplace'll do that," says Traceless. "The good ones will but -"

"Yeah no my boss is a dick," says Eric.

"I'm sorry to hear that. Normal jobs seem like they kind of suck honestly. I've never had to work one because I won the cosmic lottery two months before graduating high school. "

"Love to know that my life is in the hands of some kids who didn't complete a high school education," says Eric.

"I did graduate," Traceless volunteers.

"I also graduated actually. I was a little late finishing the actual coursework but it did get finished and I have the diploma." They were willing to let her attend the graduation ceremony, which she did long enough to walk across the stage so her parent's could take a picture which is a very cool reason to do things before immediately leaving before she could be cornered by her former classmates. But she's not going to say any of that since Unbacklashed Meghan would hate it.

Here is the portal. Here is a blanket. Toss. "I think I want another few magazines on me and maybe some water," Traceless tells Meghan, "those things take a lot of bullets to go down."

"I should also refill my water bottle probably."

"Geronimo." Out he goes.

She follows him and attempts to land artistically. She's still workshopping this stunt. "You have water in your truck?"

"Yup. Pickups, gotta love 'em." It's the kind of jug with its own spigot. He fills up his water and glugs.

She fills hers as well, "Don't see many of these in the city."

"I think it'd be inefficient for most people to have them. I'm not even sure they make them self-driving, you can get an autonomous wagon without a cab if you want to transport stuff and get something you can lounge in for passengers. But it fits in my garage and carries my stuff."

"If everyone had one they'd pack the road and the emergency vehicles wouldn't even be able to get past. So that would be bad."

"Well, not everyone would be driving their cars at the same time any more than they do now when the cars self-drive, you could maybe expand road capacity to fit," glug glug, "but parking would be a misery, you'd need a whole tower of cars on every block."

"Oh, man with cars that don't self-drive you have to go get the car instead of telling it to come round and pick you up."

"Yeah, exactly, which works for when I'm going between my house and a dungeon and back and need it on standby all day every day anyhow, but is way worse if you wanted it to handle a few separate commutes or if you lease it to a taxi service while you're at work or whatever."

"My parents staggered their work schedules for years so my mom could be home in the mornings before school and my dad could be home after school. Doesn't really work as well if the car can't get places on it's own. Someone would have to take the bus."

He tops off his water bottle, caps it, and puts it back where it goes on his person. "And the buses didn't use to drive themselves either. Lot of wasted human capital." Back up the ladder.

"Really such a waste of people's time." And off they go again.

"It was interestingly more difficult to get driving lessons than shooting lessons."

"Oh really? I haven't tried to get driving lessons yet. I'm not sure I should be trusted to drive a car while backlashed. If nothing else I would be so tempted to slam the horn like it was a candy machine."

"Oh no! I talk on the phone while I drive but that's all." Die, towelmonster with creepy hands, die.

"That's something that would be so dangerous if a lot of people were doing it. But fortunately most people are letting the car drive."

"Yeah. I like having Cricket along to talk to when I can but he's a kitty, he's gotta sleep a lot and can't always accompany me, and today he's got his own dungeon."

"He can operate in 4D cause he came out of a 4D dungeon right? That's pretty convenient. Even people who have powers that are useful in 4D usually can't operate easily like that."

"Yup! He is an infinite-no-backlash 4D navigator, though he always needs esper bodyguard with an omnidirectional defense."

"Well the navigation is definitely valuable enough for that. I think most 4D navigators have terrible backlash rates for it."

"Yup, it seems to be more power-intensive than anything in conventional space. Maybe eventually we'll have math about it and learn exciting things about physics." They've really thinned out the monsters in the portal-corner of the dungeon but presently find a bunch more crowded around a man in a sauna, who is apparently crying uncontrollably between paralytic zaps till Traceless kills the monsters.

She dashes forward immediately to cover the poor guy as soon as Traceless is done shooting. (She would love to heroically dash in to stop the monsters zapping him before they're all dead but that is against safety protocol) "Hi, we're here to rescue you. I'm Kuroko and this is Traceless."

"Do you need some water, sir -"

The guy nods and drinks half of Traceless's water bottle. Traceless grabs him a towel from the next room which is cooler than this one and he can be wrapped up and lean limply on Kuroko's shoulder.

"Let me know if you want more water, it's a little bit of a hike back. The medical people will probably want you to have some sports drink too to replace salt."

"Pretty sure I saw a Gatorade truck," Haru says.

The guy's mouth is too dry for him to talk, but he nods.

Well nodding is a lot better than no response at all. "Hope you weren't in there all day. You're not supposed to be in a sauna for longer than 30 minutes, even the non-evil ones."

The guy glances at his wrist but the monsters did not think he needed to have a watch so this doesn't do anything. "The medics'll sort you right out," Haru says. "They're going to want your name but if you can't talk for a while you can tap it out on a phone or they can just be patient."

"Being patient is the job. You want me to change positions or anything? Sorry I'm just saying things looking for a response right now. You can just nod or shake your head."

The guy drops his head onto her shoulder in what is not really either gesture.

"I'm not totally sure he's with it enough to understand everything we're saying, he must be incredibly dehydrated and overheated."

This is a really awkward level of interaction actually. Ugh professionalism.

"So what do you do in your spare time? I play the piano and I've been doing parkour because it's the sort of stunts I'm pretty tempted to do anyway, so I figured it was probably better to learn to do it safely rather than just try to do stunts on the strength of esper athleticism and overestimate what I can actually pull off."

"That's a good idea! I have a blog, and I also like classic literature. Big advantage of getting good at French, there's loads in French."

"Oooh a blog. What do you blog about? The only French classic literature I'm thinking of off the top of my head is Les Miserables, what else is there?"

"My blog is about magic stuff, dungeons and espers and monsters. I've had it since before I awakened, it started as a translation project for school. The Les Mis author has written other things, like Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Jules Verne is also French, and there's Cyrano de Bergerac and the Count of Monte Cristo and Candide and everything Balzac wrote..."

"You were prepared in advance then. I kind of scrambled a bit because I didn't know a lot about the details."

"They have pretty good intro materials - I've been sitting for ages on a half-finished roast of an absolutely deranged pamphlet from '82, you had better than that - but yeah, I had a leg up because I was always nerdy in this direction." Monsters are piling in from a side room to right some displaced things; he shoots them.

"The only thing I've ever been slightly nerdy about is music. I was thinking about getting a music degree but my parents wanted me to do something more practical. I guess they technically won that argument. Though maybe I'll get that music degree in 30 years or something. Should I be imagining like, terrible sexual politics? People were pretty misinformed back then probably but I don't know if that qualifies as deranged."

"Lots of it touched on that, yeah. They were motivatedly misinformed about a lot of things - it was teaching the controversy about whether compatible guiding was good or bad for you because there was a huge movement that really did not like that sexy superheroes were getting it on, frequently queerly. Trivially falsifiable made-up numbers about female espers being weaker than male ones, reassurances that female espers can get pregnant as soon as they're ready to retire - not take a break, retire is what it says - there was a bit that was trying to tell trans espers that just because you've grown tits or a beard as the case may be that doesn't mean anything because it's all random hormone changes and you're still a perfectly lovable young man slash woman -"

"I guess some people probably benefited from being reassured they could still have kids, I'm sure there was a lot of confusion at that point what with all the chronic backlash people were carrying and the fact that espers don't get periods, but they didn't have to phrase it like that. Also if you discourage people from getting guiding they definitely aren't having any kids. I'm surprised that stuck around that long, it's wildly counterproductive."

"It looks pretty puritanical from here and by the time espers had existed for ten years they really should have known better, but I try to have any charity for the first people to wonder if 'if it feels good do it' wasn't a perfect guide."

"I guess there's lots of stuff that feels good that you shouldn't do, or shouldn't do too much of. Like recreational drugs."

"Yeah, people thought it was like heroin when they didn't think it was like gay sex, which at the time was equally outré."

"I wonder how long it would have taken to get better acceptance of queer people if we didn't have like, a lot of rich and famous espers being queer? I think things were sort of headed in that direction but very slowly."

"It's hard to know! And AIDS was a big factor too." Here is the portal. Guy: wrapped and dropped.

"There's a lot of ways things could have gone differently I guess." And she's about out of things to say on this topic so it's time for a topic change. "Do you read Shakespeare? I've been getting into it a little because it's literally made for dramatic readings. Though I usually have to read passages once or twice sober first to figure out what it actually means since I can't really stop and figure it out while backlashed."

"I love Shakespeare! I have not gotten into performing it but I read it, I memorized a few sonnets for extra credit way back and I think I could still pull those out if called upon to do so, and Cricket watches all the film adaptations and tells me which ones are the best so I can see them."

"is he a good judge of media quality? Should he be starting a Youtube channel? I bet that would get lots of comments. But maybe he doesn't actually want lots of people to comment on his media tastes. I've thought of doing Youtube videos but I'd probably just end up with a lot of sloppily filmed and unedited videos that nobody would actually care about and I'd be embarrassed about later. I could do them unbacklashed and then read the comments section later like a dragon sitting upon it's horde but that only works at pretty low levels so it would kind of defeat the point."

"I read comments at low levels too, that's when I get most of my moderation done. Cricket should maybe have a Youtube channel. He's considered having a blog, but he's impaired at typing due to the paws, and didn't start out knowing how to read, a channel might be more workable - but he doesn't really like Youtube, like, culturally? Finds it insipid and unserious. I don't spend enough time there to really know what he's talking about."

"It's not really the place to go if you're looking for like, thoughtful commentary and not just lots of engagement."

"I'm not sure he'd read his own comments. Or have them turned on, I think you can have it so nobody can leave any?"

"You can yeah. I want to say that sort of defeats the point of having a channel but that's probably the backlash talking so."

"Cricket'd probably say the point of having a channel for him would be to make the correct opinions on film and television available to anyone who is incapable of generating those opinions themselves."

Giggle "Well if he just wants to express himself and not allow counterarguments then turning off comments would probably work well for him."

"He is terrifically contemptuous of almost everyone. He likes me - he has liked me since almost immediately upon meeting me, I don't know what he was picking up on but it does not seem to have left him with an opinion he had to change later - and basically nobody else in the world. But he still runs dungeons and saves people."

"I hear cats are often only interested in one person. Though I wouldn't know. My dad is so allergic to pet dander that if I ever pet one I have to wash my hands before I get home. Though it didn't come up that much until after I awakened since I was a little allergic to dogs before then and avoided interacting with them too much in case it got worse. Did you ever ask him what he gets out of running dungeons?"

"I have not asked per se but he seems to really like it if I butter him up about how brave and heroic he was afterwards. - you know, I'm not actually sure if Cricket is allergenic. He probably is, but he's not following all the cat biology standards."

"You could probably test for that. By taking samples and seeing if it's the same kind of protein. Or by asking a volunteer to hang around him which is cheaper but you have to find the volunteer."

"Yeah. I just don't have a lot of houseguests and when he's working dungeons he's hanging out with espers, who definitely aren't allergic, so it's never come up."

"It might come up with victims but I suppose he's not interacting with them for very long at a stretch."

"Almost never, yeah, he can't exactly carry them."

"It would be very silly if he could. Convenient but very silly."

"He coulda before he shrank... with some difficulty because he was venomous and would have had to get them aboard without using his teeth at all but he was big enough."

"Big enough to carry a person off and also venomous? That dungeon wasn't f-messing around."

"Oh yeah, it was full of big modified winged animals in four dimensions and it breached, it was pretty bad. They brought in Columba."

"You know it's bad when they have to bring her in."

"Yeah, that poor woman. I've never gotten to interview her, she's very reclusive when they're not pulling her out for the highest spatial density of nastiness available in the Great Lakes deployment region."

"Man you'd think she'd enjoy being famous -- oops, that should have stayed an inside thought. I'll be embarrassed about that one later."

"I won't tell and the monsters won't tell." Die die die towel monsters.

The next victim is getting acupunctured, and whimpers while the thin needles get pulled out.

Well she can also help remove needles once the victim is hidden from monsters.

"You can move a little but try not to move too much til we're done."

She's doing her best poker face but it's not that good.

"We won't zap you but you might budge a needle the wrong way," Haru clarifies. Pull pull pull he's been in here a while and there are a lot.

"Some of these are in pretty deep - don't worry, we'll get you to the medical team."

"Chengdu report thinks that the monsters do acupuncture surprisingly correctly as far as it goes but that it's a bad combination with the zaps."

"Yeah, that's not gonna end well. Also, think normal acupuncture probably involves...fewer needles at the same time. But it's interesting that they're getting them in the correct places."

"And 'surprisingly' isn't 'perfectly', though I suppose it's possible that skill at acupuncture could be one of the things the dungeon's working on as it grows?" Pull pull pull, good thing he's wearing gloves because he just brushed Kuroko's hand but no harm done, pull pull. "I think that's all of them?"

She does a once over of her own. Fortunately esper eyesight means this involves considerably less leaning in close to this guy's bare naked ass than it would otherwise.

"Yeah looks like that's all of them."

"Kuroko's gonna carry you and the monsters won't even know you're there, okay, sir?"

"Parlez-vous Français?"

"Ah, oui -" They can continue in French from there.

She can switch languages too though her accent is less polished than Traceless'

"I will get you a towel now." She gets a towel and carefully wraps it before scooping the guy up.

"What's your name?"

"Jean-Paul."

"The medics will look you over, and get you some water or Gatorade, and get you patched up and on your way home in a jiffy, okay?"

""They have snacks too. Do you have a favourite kind? I am personally into sour cream and onions flavour potato chips." Hopefully that's not too challenging a conversation topic.

"I would kill someone for a donut," says Jean-Paul.

"Well, don't do that, I hear they take normal money at Tim's these days."

"They might have Timbits among the snack items available. Full sized donuts you will have to get on your own time."

"I'll settle for bits," Jean-Paul says. "Am I bleeding, it wouldn't let me look and at this point I'm scared to."

"A tiny bit. I don't think you need to worry too much about it from a blood loss perspective and the medics'll make sure you're disinfected and bandaged up."

"Yeah, you have a few little bloody spots that I can see from here but I think almost all of them have already stopped bleeding and the ones that are still bleeding are just oozing a bit so they should stop once they get bandaged up, if not before."

"You're gonna be okay, Jean-Paul." Monster in a side corridor, bang bang, bye monster.

"We are about halfway back. Or thereabouts."

"Since Jean-Paul can talk I should maybe go find the next one and bother you on comms as-needed? We could stand to pick up the pace."

"Yeah. If there's any remaining victims they've been in here kind of a while and might not be in great shape. See you in a bit."

He splits off. "I wish the layout were consistent enough that we could hit all the saunas and skincare and yoga places first. The people on the massage tables are also being tortured but it's less likely to matter if we get them an hour later."

And she keeps trekking towards the portal.

"If we see any monsters we can just ignore them, they don't know we're here. But the area near the portal should be pretty thinned out by now, we've been going back and forth most of the day."

"You talking to me or to him?" Traceless asks. "Guess that's a drawback of splitting up at this level but I really want to clear this place before I go silo."

"They don't spread out?" croaks Jean-Paul.

"I was mostly talking to him but you can consider yourself part of this conversation. And yeah, we do nooooot want to leave people in here overnight if we can avoid it. And Jean-Paul, they do spread out but not fast enough that you can't mostly clear out an area for a bit. Also there's a finite number, though it may be quite large in a big one like this."

"Chengdu report says people didn't die in the dungeon but did sometimes wind up slipping away in the hospital, it might be one of the ones that's got a hidden life support function. You probably read the Chengdu report, sorry."

"I read it but I think you might be better at keeping track of all the details so I don't mind reminders."

"Oh, okay, cool. It's the dungeon nerdery."

"I'm still a little new at this so reading those reports and extracting all the details is something I'm working on."

She spots a monster in the hallway ahead of her while it's still too far away to be made out clearly by normal people's eyesight and takes a small detour to go around it. If she were alone she'd just casually duck right past it but that's harder to do while carrying a person and might freak him out.

"I don't have a post up on How To Read A Dungeon Report but maybe I should, do you think that'd be useful?"

"It might be yeah..It's one of those things that's not really in any of the standard introduction packages so most people just end up kinda figuring it out on their own, unless they have a mentor who's big on that sort of thing."

(she prods Jean-Paul "hey are you awake there? Almost back now.')

"Ow! I'm awake," mumbles Jean-Paul. "I really hope you're right about the Timbits."

"There might be prior art on it but I can't call to mind having seen any," says Traceless. "What are you doing to that poor guy, he just got stabbed like five thousand times."

"Sorry! I was trying to be gentle. I was just getting a little antsy.because he went quiet. It's been a little bit of a long day."

"Yeah. Do you need a break? Do you have a partner who can be around, I don't but I might be racking up less than you."

"Yeah I'm covering other people, It's not too bad if it's only one other person and I'm carrying them basically the whole time but I bet it's still more then you're getting. My partner's in a hotel room in town. I could call them over here in an emergency."

"I think we're probably looking at twice as many still in the dungeon as we've already grabbed. You maybe shouldn't wait for an emergency and just take a guiding break at the halfway point."

"Yeah, I'll call them. Halfway point is probably about right. You can text me while I'm doing that if you want. Or just chat with the support guys. About a minute out from the portal now."

"I'm maybe not past texting yet but I will be soon, I'll get somebody on a voice call while we're breaking. Power doesn't work over comms, gunfire incoming." Noises.

"Yeah, okay, I can do more dramatic readings or something, that'll be a lot easier than texting especially if whoever I text can't respond right away."

And here's the portal. 

"I'm going to get somebody to catch you at the bottom. You'll just float down but you'll probably find it easier if somebody's there to catch you given how long you were in there.. I'll tell them to make sure it's somebody that speaks French.

She's wrapping him in a blanket as she talks and then sticks her head through the portal to call for the support team.

"Okay, ready?"

"As I'll ever be," whimpers Jean-Paul.

She gently drops him for the support guy to catch then starts heading back towards Traceless' location at a jog

"On my way baaaaack."

"Great, I found another sauna and she's chugging all my water. Jean-Paul okay?"

"Yeah, I told them to find him a support guy that speaks French. I don't know if I should be offering the lady mine as well. Might not be a good idea without also replacing salt. Maybe I should grab a couple of things of gatorade on break."

"I think drinking water is better than not doing that when we're going to get her to the Gatorade in a few, but it wouldn't hurt to be carrying more, I think I'm not suffering from encumbrance much in here and should grab some."

"Well then, the lady can have some more water and we should both get some Gatorade."

"The Chengdu report thinks the water features are not drinkable, by the way, but I'm failing to remember if there was... heavy metal contamination or if it was something else. Safe to touch but don't drink it."

"I was told that you should default to assuming you shouldn't put anything you find in a dungeon in your mouth until determined otherwise."

"In this case obviously we should just get more totally normal Earth water, yes, but vics who are in a long time occasionally get a chance to drink water and that can be the best way to hold out for rescue. Still can even if there's heavy metal contamination, we can treat that and can't treat dead."

"Fair points. If you're stuck there the risk assessment is different. But we can in fact just go get more water."

"There've been recorded dungeons where there was safe food, which is interesting, to say nothing of all the interesting drugs that have come out of researching dungeon mats."

"If they ever get vat meat production out of a dungeon it'll revolutionize the food industry."

"Can you imagine the kind of dungeon that would have that going, though, the PR situation would be ballistic."

"Mad biotech dungeon? Yeah I guess it would."

"I was thinking it'd be like, we'd be pulling folks out of vats."

"Oh, thaaaaat would totally happen..."

"Yeah, dungeons are jerks. Map taking you to us okay? I've got her out of the sauna in the unoccupied manicure room next to it."

"Yeah, I should be there in a couple of minutes."

"Great. Uhhh we've barely touched the monster zoo, do you have questions about it? Have you been there?"

"I went with some friends when it opened. I've been sort of meaning to go again but I've been pretty busy. Do you have an exhibit you're especially proud of?"

"We've got a starfish I love that changes colors and patterns in response to music, it's only been there since, when was it, last February? The color changing was exhibited in their dungeon but the music response is new since! We put in a jukebox sort of setup."

"Oh, I'd love to see that. It sounds very cool! Does it respond differently to different kind of music? Is there an obvious pattern?"

"Yeah, it'll like pulse to the beat and stuff and female vocalists and string instruments tend to get more radial patterns and there's a whole writeup from the guy who's been studying it on the zoo website. If you play the same song enough times it performs more complicated reactions to it but usually sticks to the same color palette. Treats covers as totally different colors, though."

"Neat. Also. Incoming."

"Hi there! This is, I think she said Louise but it could have been Elise or something, she's very thirsty."

"Hi. I'm Kuroko. I'm making sure the monsters can't see you anymore. Also I have more water." She hands over the water bottle.

Louise or Elise takes the water bottle and makes to drain it. Traceless shoots a monster that drifted into the sauna before Kuroko's power was covering the victim. And they can all make the trek back to the entrance.

She reclaims her water bottle once it's drained.

"Stealing towels from a hotel is a victimless crime, but stealing towels from a dungeon isn't a crime at all. Maybe I should post that on Twitter. It's inane but so is Twitter."

"Depending on your contract about dungeon loot it could be a breach of that. Probably not if you only take a couple though."

"Couple of months back there was this pirate treasure themed dungeon that had a lot of treasure chests except most of them were like...mimics and would bite you if you got too close.But some of them were real and full of real gold and gems. They brought me in to find all the real ones and I kept some of the coins because they had weird random pictures on them and they make a good conversation piece. I gave some away as gifts too. It was kind of a fun treasure hunt for me. But a couple of people lost fingers to the mimics so it was kinda nasty. Dead now though."

"Victims or DRT?"

"Victims. A few more of them had less permanent, though still pretty gnarly, injuries. The bites didn't bleed as much as you'd expect but I think some of those people might have bled to death anyway if we hadn't got there in time. But everyone ended up surviving. I heard one of the DRT guys almost got bitten but his squadmates stopped him from touching things."

"Kind of a, like, the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin situation." Since every time Traceless finds a victim and has to wait for Kuroko, monsters pour into the room to correct the victim's posture, they're thinned out throughout the dungeon by now and they have a pretty leisurely jog to the portal.

"Kinda like that. They thought it was probably selecting for victims who would try to grab loot and get bitten. Or at least be tempted to."

"I am so curious about how dungeons do that - they get better at it over time, I think - you're gonna fill out your dungeon survey, right -?"

He gets a scared nod from the victim.

"The field of data science will thank you. I am also curious. Sometimes it's easy to guess what they're going for when choosing victims, other times it's much harder. And of course all our guesses are just that, even if some of them seem pretty obvious."

"There's a regular commenter on my blog whose shtick is going, okay, suppose we figure out how they pick people, what good is that, it's not like you can direct evacuations that way, we don't know which dungeons will appear where - but there's a lot of knowledge that will only be useful in combination with other knowledge, that's no reason not to be working on it in parallel."

"it's not like we have a lot of avenues to learn about this stuff, and we need more information if we ever want to be doing more than damage control. Which we're getting pretty good at but it would be better to find a way to stop the damage at its source."

"Sometimes I think about, like, what if we could domesticate them. Dungeons can come back even if they don't have anyone in them when they vanish, they aren't obligate carnivores - they want something from us but it's usually not death. If we could be good enough at killing every dungeon that stepped out of line I'd really want to experiment with letting the gentlest most useful ones go. See if they breed or something."

"That'd be pretty cool but I think it'll be a long time coming if it ever happens. We're not getting as many new big scary dungeons these days but we're still getting some, and I think still more than we're killing."

"Yeah. Not in my lifetime. But we might be almost breeding for the opposite, right now - or, not the opposite, you get nasty dungeons that suck at hiding their cores, but if we are breeding for anything it's hiding the core and that's correlated with being mean."

"The treasure dungeon just had the core in the bottom of one of the treasure chests, which wasn't trivial cause you still had to avoid the mimics but it was the obvious place to look for it, right? It had a moat around the boundary and separating the area immediately near the portal from the rest and it was fast moving and full of rocks, and it must have been quite deep cause I couldn't see the bottom. I think we'd have had a much harder time getting the core out of there. Not the worst at hiding the core but not that great at it either."

"Tomorrow when we're fresh we've gotta clear this place of overnight victims and then trash it looking for the core. I don't like this dungeon and don't want it to have babies. It's not somewhere obvious, they're not slouches in China, but maybe they didn't have the right espers to really take their time unrolling every towel and checking for refractive-index-matched objects in the bottom of every hot tub."

"I don't want any more dungeons like this and also I don't want anyone to find out what new forms of torture this particular one will come up with if it gets the chance. Unrolling towels and stuff is boring but it'll be worth it if we can kill this thing." Also maybe the media will want to do a story on it since this is a repeat dungeon. She's not going to say that because it's unprofessional.

"The boss is supposedly a big goo monster that smells like eucalyptus but I haven't found where it's parked this time around yet and in Chengdu it didn't have the core. We're gonna want to separate it into containers, it can re-form but it can't open screw lids."

"Might be hanging around near where the core is so might be worth paying extra attention to that area if we find the thing. Or it might just be decoying I guess."

"Yeah, there's really no way to know. I guess it's possible that it's something stupid where if we find a way to kill it deader than 'in several barrels sloshing around helplessly' then a secret door opens, dungeons sometimes do dumb things like that."

"Stupid video game logic. You could try burning the thing but maybe they tried that in China. Probably not worth it unless we run out of places to look anyway."

"They tried boiling it but it was too oil-based for that to work very well. We could try... soap. Gallons and gallons of soap flakes."

"That's a bit of a silly image but it sort of fits aesthetically so maybe it would actually work. Also it's probably less logistically challenging than freezing it, which was gonna be my next suggestion."

"Yeah, they don't make icethrowers the way they make flamethrowers - maybe liquid nitrogen but I'm not trained in handling that. I am liking this soap concept."

"If you wanted to try freezing it you'd probably have to drag somebody with ice powers in here and I don't know if there's any of those nearish that might be willing to come in to try something that might not work. We can totally just get a ton of soap."

"I'd know who to ask if I really wanted to try ice but soap first."

"Yeah, for sure."

"Maybe from a distance in case it has some kind of area-of-effect attack this time instead of just slamming into people like it did in Chengdu."

"Could be fumes..."

"That would also be new, but yeah, could stand to go in gas-masked."

"Do you own one of those? I've used em a few times but only when they already knew people were gonna need them."

"Yeah, I have one, you really want a good fit so once it came up twice I got one."

"That's a good idea. I'ma tell my phone to make a note." She flips apps long enough to tell her phone to make a note.."Glad I found a good notetaking app with good speech to text support cause otherwise I'd forget  so many things from not being able to concentrate long enough to write them down."

"I spent so long calibrating my phone so it can tell when I'm having it call people and when I'm just having a conversation without tripping over my problem with talking to robots instead of any people at all."

'I added emoji to all the names on my contacts list so I can tell them apart at a glance without having to do words. And if that fails I can hand off the phone to my partner and get them to start the call for me."

"I usually have Cricket with me in the silo, I can't ask June for anything ever but Cricket can do relatively limited device interfacing tasks in spite of the paws."

"That sounds like a really inconvenient situation. For both of you really. My partner's backlash would be sort of inconvenient that way if they had more than a little of it it but their power is pretty useless so they don't. They just play around a little to speed up the guiding rate, without letting the backlash accumulate."

"I hate mixers and June might hate them more than I do, not that I know since I've never had a conversation with her, so we've been in the same situation since shortly after I awakened. I sort of figure anyone I'd be as compatible with is going to have the same problem, and I'd trade for somebody with a power that doesn't see much use who'd make up for it in bandwidth if we were going to have a great personal relationship, but for a purely business arrangement it seems like a lateral move."

"I sort of feel like that if I tried to have a partnership based on a personal relationship I'd end up eventually saying something rude and obnoxious while badly backlashed and then they wouldn't want to have a personal relationship with me anymore."

"Huh, even if they were like - read in? Personal as opposed to professional doesn't mean they can't, like, make accommodations, stare deeply into your eyes the whole time or whatever."

"Well maybe. I'll probably go to more mixers at some point, if nothing else it's an excuse to travel a little when I'm not strictly working, and maybe I'll find someone and give it a try. But what I've got going on works okay."

They can dump another guy out of the portal and make sure Meghan's partner is en route and go hunt for the next one. "Yeah, me too. I have one of those feel-it-before-you-even-touch compatibilities with June, that's a real thing, some people don't believe in it."

"Wow. I've met somebody who met somebody who claimed they had that but that's a lot of layers of hearsay so I wasn't sure about it."

"It's not like, from a block away like in stupid fanfiction, but a few inches yeah. I cut my backlash allowance a lot closer if we're in the same dungeon because I will not forget that other people exist in the world if I'm getting even tiny specks of guiding from her whooshing past me."

"If it gets bad enough especially if I'm left without anyone I can try to interact with, I can get convinced that everyone has forgotten I exist. One time, there were a couple of injuries and the guy I was talking to on comms was also dealing with that but it meant he wasn't talking to me enough,- and, well they found me before I decided to just let the monsters have me. Obviously."

"Yeah, my usual metonymy for how I'll go if I fuck up is 'introducing myself to a monster'."

"Would be good to have a partner I could do dungeons with. To avoid. That. I've tried to budget better for situations like that but..."

"I'm usually not in dungeons with June, it's a rare one that wants that power combination. Just once in a while, and then it's a pretty heavy dungeon where it's advantageous to be able to push."

"She's what, a speedster?"

"Speedster and aggro draw. So we have completely disparate monster management strategies, I'm prancing around among them taking photos and she's leading them all into a killbox."

"I sometimes have to be reminded to stay on task and not take too many selfies with things. Though I think I'm getting better at actually taking decent photos."

"If you email me later I can send you links to the photography courses I used to self-teach. I got a lot of photos when I was waiting with the guy who'd managed to sleep through his kidnapping and there's the one I'm wearing also but I do have a slightly different approach in the torturey-er dungeons like this one."

"Ooo yes, I'll do that. Fortunately this is not one of the ones that really tempts me to stop and take selfies. It's pretty but it's just rooms, not giant waterspouts or whatever. I did take a selfie with one of the chests in the treasure dungeon but that was after al the victims were already out and we were just going through the loot."

"I'm usually not in the pictures but one time there was one with miniature waves in the water, like the fluid dynamics were miniaturized, and the one that came out best had my foot in it for scale."

"I am just way more motivated to take selfies than other pictures. I try to pick interesting ones. Though I still end up deleting a lot of them later."

"You shouldn't delete them, file storage is cheap and we don't know what might turn out to be important, you can get Library and Archives to hold them if you don't want to deal with it."

"Yeah I definitely don't want to store all that stuff locally. It'll get to be a lot eventually."

"Yeah. Library and Archives Canada'll take it, that's what I do with all my shots that aren't suitable for the public because they have other people in them who haven't okayed it."

"Yeah I got the lecture about that. Gotta be careful about it."

"Some people are into published selfies with their rescue esper but I try to wait for them to ask."

"I love when they ask me that. But yeah, I try and wait for them to ask."

"Do you get fansites? I was so weirded out when those started happening to me, I don't really like that kind of thing when I'm not on backlash."

"Not yet. My public twitter account is starting to pick up followers though. My agent found a guy to manage it for me. Tweets are short enough that I can write them on too much backlash to have good judgement about what should go on the public Internet. So they get run by somebody else first. My personal twitter is private and only visible to approved followers and I'm not allowed to give it out while backlashed and I'm very sparing about who I give it out to otherwise."

"That's so valid. I'm not on Twitter, I don't have the lean you do toward one-to-many communication so much I think?" - that was a zap noise. Toward the zap noise.

"Yeah with social media the sheer volume of possible attention is, very attractive even though it's asynchronous. Also I was already using Twitter. Livestreaming would be even more shiny but also it provides way too much opportunity to do something I'd later regret, and I can delete the site's recordings later but I can't delete whatever people saw. Or recorded locally."

"Yeah." Gunshots. Monster dead. The victim clutches at one of her badly abraded feet, sobbing, and a few more monsters come in quick before Kuroko gets in there to cover her.

Well she'll get in as fast as she can. "Hey there. You're safe now. We'll get you out of here and they'll patch you up." She can tie a towel round the lady's ankles to cushion the injuries before scooping her up. At least this one has clothes. "What's your name?"

"S-sonya," says the victim, flinching when the towel touches her.

"Comms chatter while I go hunting again?" Traceless asks.

"Hi Sonya. I'm Kuroko. Sorry about that, but it'll be more comfortable while we're moving."

She waves at Traceless, "Yeah, good idea."

Off he forges into unexplored rooms. Chatter continues till they break and then it continues separately. He finds the dungeon boss; soap irritates it a lot but does not seem to kill it deader than getting it into several barrels. They get the place clear - for the time being - and hand it off to go recover for the day.

She has a late dinner and then snuggles up in bed with her partner for the night (both wearing shorts).

Haru sits up for hours with June and go to sleep still backlashed and finish up in the morning. So it goes.

She brings her partner with her the next morning (they immediately head for the break tent to wait).

She'll have to wait a bit for Traceless, who is still zeroing, but since she's starting zeroed and has a partner to take breaks with she can do some running around fetching overnight victims before he gets there.

She can totally do that yeah. It sucks doing it without comms chatter in between victims but that's how it goes, she can compose social media posts in her head.

He shows up before she's been at it too terribly long with coffee and donuts. "How goes?"

'Hi, there should be one more overnight victim and then we can start trashing the place."

"Awesome. Sorry I'm late." In they go. The monsters are so thinned out by now, only a few replacements made overnight, that he barely has to use his power at all, though he does obligingly chat anyway: is that her original hair color, it could go either way. Has she been deployed out of town before. Was she sure right away she wanted to do dungeons.

The hair got a little brighter but it's pretty hard to tell unless you look at photos side by side.She's been deployed out of town once before. She was pretty sure but it took her a while to feel emotionally ready to cope with her backlash again after hell week. Also her parents wanted her to wait until after she'd finished her high school curriculum.

"I finished high school but I missed a lot of class. Fortunately it was near the end and I was nerdy enough that I could coast if I didn't care about getting into the best university any more."

'I finished high school remotely. For reasons. What were you planning on studying?"

"I wanted to be an epidemiologist!"