"It can be selfishly good for both parties! All the best situations are like that."

"Well, fair enough."

"Anyway, I'm off to bag a bunch of shiny rattlesnakes, wish me luck." He collects his possessions and orders up the teleport.

"Luck."

Bzhoop.

And now to find something to do with himself. 

...he's gonna go read more of Haru's blog. This time out of interest rather than spite or fawning instincts. He is a very charming and interesting writer.

Here's a profile of a completely normal dungeon:

1. It's a first-timer and the size you would expect from one of those.
2. It kidnaps people by direct apprehension rather than by sending out monsters; its monsters don't seriously attempt breach.
3. The terrain, which is three-dimensional and Euclidean, looks like some kind of enclosed setting (indoors or a cave or otherwise not open air where you can see the edges).
4. The monsters are all the same kind and look basically like Earth animals, but larger and more aggressive. It has a single boss monster.
5. It's not dangerous to just stand around in - the air's breathable, the temperature's human-safe at least if you're dressed for the weather, it's not radioactive, etcetera. Electronics work in there too.
6. It's not psychic.
7. The core is hidden in a somehow-distinctive part of the dungeon.
8. The victims are restrained or guarded by monsters or both, but not tormented particularly.

So, I counted, and in the last year in the entire Great Lakes deployment region we have had eight completely normal dungeons...

How do we discover power batteries? I wasn't sure - nobody's ever asked me to come to a warehouse and touch 500 dungeon samples to see if I could put a little invisibility into them - so I called up Dr. Mayhew of the Exotic Substance Institute, who knows all about it. The transcript below is edited for concision and flow but you can access the original audio here...

I've been able to confirm the existence of a total of 34 talking orphaned dungeon monsters, counting Cricket. This isn't enough to perform robust data analysis, but some commonalities:

- They speak the local language, or one of them in highly multilingual areas, but may or may not be able to read.
- They have dim and shaky memories of their pre-orphaning time, if any.
- They are no longer particularly hostile to humanity, though they have what seems like a human-typical capacity to be irritated and aggressive.
- They often (but not always) retain some "superpowers" above and beyond the mere fact of existing and continuing to function. (I scare-quote this because: what is and isn't a "super"power relative to the "normal" power level of some imaginary baseliner winged cat or unicorn?)
- So far there is no obvious evidence that any of them are aging (though, again, what is the baseline developmental progress of any of these beings?)
- They do not begin with names; they do know how to move around, have some instincts about what they can eat, and the amount of factual and procedural knowledge they start out with supports their language fluency but doesn't extend beyond that...

...that's really interesting. He knows he's thought this before but Traceless—Haru—is a really interesting person.

Jaeha will—well, he'll figure out what they'll have for dinner, he can probably do something with the leftovers that's still nice, but during/after that—read more. The blog's been running for over ten years, there's a lot of backlog.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Vadodara Incident

Here's why the Ontario Monster Park and every sane zoo that harbors monsters at all will not accept a creature that is not confirmed orphaned, not just abandoned.

In 2001, Menagerie (a dungeon tentatively traced back to a 1994 dungeon that escaped in Jakarta, which also appeared in 1998 in Nairobi) opened in Vadodara, India.

In 2004, Menagerie reappeared in Ahmedabad, barely a hundred miles away.

Now, Menagerie sends out lots of monsters. It likes (it's still alive) sending out swarms of mouse- to cat-sized critters, no two the same, mostly very cute, from portals that are often hard to find. Like Volcanic Range, it doesn't bring anybody inside itself, and I wasn't able to find any photos from inside of it. They attack people, but only people who run away; anyone standing their ground or approaching a Menagerie monster will find it harmless, even friendly. By the time Menagerie's portal in Vadodara closed, forty-one people were in the hospital, several of them children, and twelve eventually died; but some hundred-odd monsters had mostly been chased down and many were still alive, in various terraria, cages, baskets, boxes, rafters, etcetera. With the portal gone, the monsters didn't chase even people who flinched away from them, and remained harmless to anyone who did care to try to poke one. They became a popular exotic pet in the area; some were sold, including overseas, but many remained in the possession of whoever had happened to catch one or their friends.

Three years later the portal in Ahmedabad opened, and not only was Ahmedabad swarmed with Menagerie creatures, but the ones in Vadodara and other areas within a certain radius of Ahmedabad... reactivated. Seventy-five people, disproportionately the friends and family of the rich and well-connected people who had gotten their hands on a one-of-a-kind pet, were hospitalized or killed. The monsters were tracked down and destroyed over the subsequent several months, and similar monsters in Nairobi and Jakarta were also targeted, though those had not reactivated...

Espers Since The Seventies is the best book of its kind, but that's not saying very much...

I finally managed to get ahold of Vera Ablinger, the teleporter whose limitations originally seemed to make her all but inapplicable for any practical purpose but who's recently become a huge mainstay of North American teleportation capability. If you've ever seen someone have their colors go strange before they disappear, that's Vera. The transcript below is edited for concision and flow, but you can access the original audio here.

Traceless: So, getting right into it: why was your power so little used last year and so much this year?
Vera Ablinger: They finally reverse-engineered that marble from the kinetic sculpture dungeon. It can "remember" that I touched it, and then it acts like I'm there, for a few days. My power works by reference to my location, but I can orient around the marbles, and now we have more than one of them.
Traceless: You used to live in Louisiana, right?
Vera Ablinger: The midpoint of the line between New York and Mexico City falls in Louisiana, so yes, I was based there and I'd swap espers between the two. My teleportation isn't too expensive, but it's very, very specific: I can move somebody from one side of me, to the same distance in the opposite direction, from me. I can't move myself, I can't move things in any other direction or distance. I had an office and I'd take people from specific transfer points in the two cities and back when called. But now there's so many marbles! I can live near my family again, and just remind the marbles that they're "me" when they arrive in the mail and send them back out again. I get an alert about which marble to use and who I'm targeting and then bam.
Traceless: So tell me about how your relationship to the dungeon marble was first discovered...

How does he get Traceless to talk to him like that? He sounds so competent and put together and attractive in these blog posts...

Pull yourself together and stop simping, you idiot.

God, you're hopeless.

Haru is teleported (by, presumably, Vera Ablinger) that evening. "Hello again! I'm starting to suspect something's rotten in the state of SWAT training."

"—well that's a conversation opener if I've ever heard one."

"The geysers-and-rhinos dungeon that I wasn't a good fit for, turned out they'd asked for me by name but they'd mixed me up with another esper who has hydrokinesis and would've been great in there. Nobody caught it even though at least three people should've seen the request before it got as far as Paula, who figured based on the report that the rhinos were in my wheelhouse and didn't think anything of it. So we've got a not very thorough report, we've got people who don't know their local espers making bids for specific ones. Which would be one thing if it were just the rhino geyser dungeon but today I heard from Rhombus that her morning dungeon had particulates in the air and she wasn't warned to bring a mask, she had to back out and go get one and all the victims had to wait an extra half an hour."

"...that seems weirdly incompetent. Has that happened much?"

"No, I think it's something relatively recent, but I'm starting to put together little things from the last threeish months. It seems like genuine incompetence so like I said it may be a training problem of some kind. I have some phone calls I want to make about it if you don't mind filling in when the phone's ringing."

"Sure, can do."

"Great, first off I'm going to call Jean Puckett," the phone responds accordingly, ring, ring, "he's with the province dispatchers, he'll know who else I need to talk to..."

"Have you had to talk to him a lot in the past?" He's gonna also start serving them dinner.

"I interviewed him once a few years back but I don't routinely -"

"Hello?"

"Jean! It's Traceless. I find myself curious about dungeon SWAT team training and licensing. Has something changed recently? Have we got a new cohort out of the academy?"

"Not just recently, they graduated in October."

"October, huh. Who's training them, who's testing them?"

"It's a whole academy, there's plenty of people involved."

"Anything going on with their budget? The academy's?"

"Not that I know of... I can dig up some numbers and text you."

"Thanks, Jean, I appreciate that."

...oh. Okay. That's. Kinda hot ngl.

Haru hangs up on Jean with a stillness that might be trained to replace a flinch. "These aren't greenhorn mistakes. Greenhorns write excessively wordy reports, or they ask for espers who are overpowered for the needs of the dungeon, or they have shit time management. These are moron mistakes. Why is the SWAT pipeline full of morons, they're allowed to do IQ tests..."

That is a lot more than just "kinda" hot, goodness. Uh. He should probably not be staring at Haru slack-jawed, here's food.

"Do you have a theory?"

"Well, I asked about the budget because that'd be a good explanation, if they're lowballing the compensation and can't weed out as many recruits as they should be - ooh, what is this -"

"Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, and roasted vegetables, with a tahini sauce."

Okay but can he go back to that other thing. The previous thing. Before the food. The other thing. The th