"I see what you mean."

"I do not feel personally responsible for equipping San Diego with a party and I'd need to check in with my partner to overstay my plans but it's not like it's a bad idea."

"I think it could be fun to throw a big party at the hotel, invite the folks we've worked with from the DRT, any locals we collectively know who can make it to the hotel..."

Mandragora nods thoughtfully along.

"Yeah! I can help, I love parties." 

Peeler keeps her sigh internal.

"Maybe we can invite everybody who got themselves a pet monster. Would it be mean to talk up zoo security and how often nutjobs try to steal the furbearing snake? I'm not going to steal Raspberry the magic walrus from a little girl, but if someone else does the zoo only has an interest in retrieval if it's ours..."

"Oh, inviting people with pet monsters is a clever idea."

"Preparing people for the realities of their situation can be done unkindly, but is not itself mean, I don't think."

"I wish Menagerie'd hit somewhere closer so the lifetime membership'd be more of a draw. Plus it was a bad combo with the quake, it might have attacked half as many people in Chicago."

Nod nod. "Yes, that was a very bad coincidence, if it was one."

Peeler frowns. "We don't know if they'll survive the dungeon closure yet, right?" 

"You think dungeons can predict natural disasters? Analysis on that is subjective as hell and I'm not convinced they've accounted for emotional saliency bias. - I think they will, because they were fine for years in Vadodara et al. But it could be they all die when we kill this thing." That's a real big cage with a chinchilla sized pet bed. Picture goes flash and then another without to capture ambient lighting information.

Have they seen any pet beds sized for bigger critters? Watershed is keeping an eye out now that she's been prompted to be curious.

"I don't know if they can or not, it just seems premature to rule out the possibility."

Some beds are generous but none are absurd for creatures that weigh twenty pounds tops but may have long tails or other extremities. The bed size correlates only weakly with cage size, and only some enclosures have beds instead of bare bars or perches or wood shavings.

"I do want to see more research on it, but I'm unimpressed with the people currently on the topic."

Curious noise.

"The main name on disasters and dungeons publishing in English is - ugh, I forget her name, starts with an M - she coasts on these things that are like, this heap of citations show that dungeons can ever aim and time appearances for conditions on Earth at all, such as 'is it night right now', and also precogs exist, so in theory they could predict the weather, here is a case study on a hurricane and a single handpicked dungeon in Miami during it which maybe benefited in some speculative way from this event. It's, uh, really not how I'd do it."

-nod. (That does sound sloppy!)

"So how's Cricket doing these days? Haven't seen him in a while."

"He's doing good! There's a new guy he'll tolerate. I have begun to wonder if he systematically disprefers women but he thinks it's a coincidence and he's turned up his nose at a few shieldy dudes too."

"Ooooh, who's the new guy? You met him?" 

"Aumento. Buffer-healer all-rounder. We both had Arrakis involvement and also spoke on the phone while he was deployed with Cricket. Green but I think he'll grow into it, you know?"

...huh, she's heard that name but she's not sure where...

"Yeah, for sure! We have a pair of fresh faces in my part of the the Seattle scene right now, actually, Silver Bulwark and Foreshadow. They're pretty neat."