"Is 'monster' a natural category?"

"A few - a very rare few - aren't particularly evil and aggressive, but anything that's magic, and not a nature spirit or genie or spirit bearer or an object or construct made by same, is a monster. Almost all of them rot human constructions near them, attack and kill anything that moves, spew toxic slime, or do other bad things like make people more violent and suspicious, kind of like your mental monsters."

"What makes the nonevil ones different?"

"They're more like wild animals. Keep to themselves, sit under bridges or act all territorial about a particular tree, and if one eats you it's probably because you provoked it."

"Okay, but why?"

"Who knows why small monsters act the way they do? Only Named Beasts talk."

"And a Named Beast is?"

"...A big monster. The kind that almost always refuses to properly die after a beatdown and runs away to attack somewhere else later. The kind that can ruin whole cities if left to rampage long enough. The Evertree. The Hydra. The Monster King. Abbadon. And the Miasmata. There's more, about four per continent, those are the ones whose ranges cover where I usually am..."

"Continent here defined such that Earth has seven of them?"

"Six? Unless Antarctica's your seventh. No monsters there for the most part. Because no humans there for the most part, is the going theory."

"Antarctica's seventh. Why do monsters go near humans?"

"It's just how they work. Monsters hate humans and do everything they can to destroy us for the most part. Some theories say we're creating them. That they're a gestalt of our fears and biases and violent tendencies. Can't rule it out, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it as opposed to other ideas, like pollution doing it, or them always being there and only attacking humans a lot more recently."

"Do you have that big patch of floating junk in the Pacific? If pollution did it..."

"I wouldn't know, to be honest."

"Possible I should be getting my information from Bar, I guess."

"You might be able to get encyclopedia-style stuff like that, but it'll probably miss a lot of the daily life of a Spirit Bearer."

"Yeah. Ideal would be getting encyclopedia overview first, but time's weird in here."

"I'm going to spend days in here. Not including when I get around to holding the door so time passes for Rosa, and making those calls to New York to hopefully secure precog time."

"Yeah, but it's weird as in inconsistent, if we aren't interacting your days could be my minutes."

"If I sit next to you and read another world's novels and drink interesting things for a few hours it probably won't, right?"

"Yeah."

"So I'll do that and you can read an encyclopedia and related works. I kind of want to spar, but since that drains your charge..."

"It actually doesn't do that here, or I'd be in a tearing hurry, which as you can see I'm not."

"Oh, huh, that's great news for you! Except it still doesn't sound like sparring is a particularly enthusing idea."

"Not especially. My fighting style is 'stop time, shoot at it'."