"Yeah, it's from the late eighties, it's a big jerk now and Seuss lived to see it - well, not in person, but to know about it. The official name is Solla Sollew but people also call it Whoville, and, of course, just 'the Dr. Seuss dungeon'. None of it is exact copies of any Seuss stuff, if I nabbed a lorax it wouldn't look precisely like the book one, but the style is straight on, the colors and the plants and the architecture and the monsters."

“Oh, man, is there anything from the birthday one? I loved the birthday one.”

"I don't think I remember the birthday one, what's in it?"

Quick Google search. “Well, there’s the Birthday Bird, and the telling-time fish, and an assortment of pets—the book asserts that you get the biggest one, but I always found the smaller ones charming.”

Haru peeks. "Nothing exactly like any of those but the style's Seussish, there were similar 'birds' and 'fish' and weirder stuff."

“Yeah, fair enough. I probably shouldn’t get excited about the possibility of removing monsters from a dungeon that keeps escaping, anyway.”

"I would really like to have a whole habitat for Seuss creatures in a zoo somewhere but the place is too big for Columba to find the core in and regular searching hasn't made any headway."

“I hope the giant crocodile dungeon doesn’t turn out to be universal in its monsters having no idea where the core is.”

"I don't see why they would usually know? Maybe boss monsters know but a lot of dungeons don't have an identifiable boss."

“Oh, no, I suspect it’s normal, but if even boss monsters don’t actually know—I guess it might not really matter, tactically speaking, but it would be so cool to make a boss monster bring the core of its dungeon to the entrance, break it, and then immediately exit. Has anyone captured a boss monster before?”

"Not that I know of, they're normally guarding the core and often too big to get through the portal. It's probably happened ever, but it might have been thirty years ago and promptly slain by third parties or something."

“Well, as far as ambitions go, capturing boss monsters goes beneath all the actually specifically useful stuff, but it’s still on there.”

"It'd be cool to have them but they're really big, it'd be hard to place them and hard to warehouse them in the meantime."

“Well, if they bring their cores to the entrance, they wouldn’t need to be warehoused long. But, also, there could be interesting data if boss monsters survive dungeon deaths at a different rate from non-bosses.”

"Why wouldn't they need to be warehoused long if they bring their cores to the entrance?"

“—Mm, because I wasn’t modeling the logistics well enough. The idea I had was that you could destroy it immediately, but if there are still victims inside you can’t do that, and there’s no reason to leave the core alone until you’ve got all the victims out.”

"And once you've got the monster out and the core destroyed, the monster, if it survives, has to be somewhere until there is a place ready to receive it for the long term."

“Oh, I guess I misunderstood ‘warehouse.’”

"Yeah no it is often a literal warehouse."

“Wow! I, uh, hope that’s just the not-people-y ones.”

"I've never captured a peopley one myself, most of them aren't. If I had to put a peopley one in a warehouse I would at least order up some amenities for them on a temporary basis."

“Yeah, I’m terribly biased, I never thought about dungeon monsters at all until I read about Cricket on your blog.”

"Most of them don't survive the dungeon, and the ones that do are mostly just - critters. You might be able to distinguish between a smart critter and a person that can't talk, but my guess is those aren't commonplace in part because of how weird it is that any of them talk at all - they don't do it in dungeons."

“I wish more monsters survived the deaths of their dungeons. It just feels so unnecessary for them to die, when we know that some of them survive.”

"Yeah, I don't have even a guess about what controls that besides that the monsters usually - only usually - need to be biological to come through alive."