He uses April's phone to demand large amounts of ice from a posh grocery delivery app that he knows from past experience will happily send stupid orders to weird places very fast, and uses his own phone to quickly check if there's somebody else who looks like they'd be in more of a hurry themselves, to get their hands on such a freshly killed lizard. If not, he can talk to the Toronto Parabiology Institute.

He can send it to a place in White Plains, New York if he can get signoffs from the DRT that it's a real monster and not some kind of prank/protest/art project.

Is it also obvious at a glance how they expect their deliveries to be transported, like do they have a prominently advertised business partner for that? Because he doesn't super love the idea of that janky icebox getting loaded onto a truck and driven to another country without anyone slightly more qualified than a random teenager taking a look at it first.

They will dispatch a courier!

A courier who at least looks vaguely like they might know things about transporting dead dungeon monsters in good condition? Yes? Then he'll hop out of the car and talk to the guys in White Plains about his freshly killed lizard, and to the DRT about certifying the provenance of said lizard.

They will have to do a bunch of tedious things in the correct order due to various dependencies and the lizard can be off their hands. It is then midafternoon.

The tedious delays are fine by April, who spends this time flopped on Tim.

Sean reports to the guiding tent, lightly splattered with melting fragments of ice, when he's got it all wrapped up.

"Thanks, Sean!" She sits up. "Not bad for a first dungeon, I think."

Tim's patiently able to put up with this, as long as he's got a way to keep himself occupied.  Relatedly, Juggernaut is now sporting a pretty decent set of braids.  "Any dungeon you walk away from, right?  What do you think went well?"

"All the parts about, like, wandering around murdering stuff were pretty easy and straightforward."

"Hard to improve on that, really.  If there's a monster that can stop you from wandering and getting murdered, I don't wanna meet it.  What about things that could get improved on?"

"I still kinda feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. And next time I should decide ahead of time whether I'm gonna try to capture something or not, the whole dryer lizard situation was kind of a fiasco and I definitely spent more backlash on it than the rest of the dungeon combined, especially when we were hustling out of there at the end."

"So, plan better, more thoroughly."  Or at all.  "We know you're good at wrestling things, or your power is?  But if you're going to be consistently trying to catch stuff you need to have cages ahead of time, maybe think about teleport budget or helicopter delivery.  As far as what you're doing is concerned, I'd say the answer is just practice, practice, practice.  Some people read AARs, too, I put 'em on like a podcast while I jog."

"I'm good at wrestling things but it sucks a truly crazy amount. I think it's—well half of it is that I didn't know how hard I needed to go to get that lizard in the box immediately so I overdid it on purpose, but even before that, having to hold my power high for a while at a time is way harsher on backlash than just casually being a little bit invincible except when I need to smash something real quick."

"Nope, that's exactly the right take to have.  I do it pretty often, somebody gets something taking a swing at them, I give them a split-second of extra reinforcement, just in case.  I don't have to keep it up, but it's better than them getting hurt.  But it sounds like you might have, uh, endurance problems if you're in, say, Volcanic Range."

"I dunno, I mean, even when I really pushed it here I never started bawling, right? It feels kind of shit to say this, but I think I might be more limited on how much I hate my backlash than how much it objectively stops me. Maybe that's just hubris, though."

"Nope.  You're not allowed to feel guilty for that.  I'm, uh, a huge hypocrite for saying this, but any esper's rich as anything, right?  We don't need money.  If you do dungeons, it's love of the game, or you're a white knight type or something.  You could do dungeons for a year at a miserable pace and retire.  You gotta make sure you're not pushing through being miserable constantly, or you're gonna quit and go live somewhere tropical."

"Heh. I guess you're not wrong."

"I know.  If I were wrong, I wouldn't have said it."  He sticks his tongue out at April.

"Pfft." She ruffles his hair. "All right, let's get outta here so they can pack up the guiding tent. Wanna come hang out at our hotel until I'm zeroed again?"

He leans into the ruffling a plausibly deniable amount.  "Yeah, sounds good to me.  I'll text Sara so she doesn't think I got lost.  And uh, if she asks this was a milk run.  Because it was."

Back to Sean's car with them, then. In the backseat she retrieves the bead she grabbed early on. "Gonna make this into a necklace, I think. And then not wear it into dungeons so I don't break it."

"Lemme poke it?  It's probably nothing, but you never know."  He extends a finger.  And also flops his legs over hers.

Sure, he can poke the bead if he wants.