It so happens that there is a Quasar member who has an omnidirectional defense and already speaks fluent Japanese. She's new, so Cricket doesn't have to come up with anything withering to say to people who didn't supply him with her before. Now he is thus equipped and can go into the dungeon, which people are already unofficially calling Paper Crane.

There is no particular reason you couldn't fold a piece of paper ana or kata, and the dungeon seems to be obeying the rules of origami otherwise. If you get a full look - the kind of look that only Cricket can get - at the monsters in the dungeon, they don't look that much like cranes. But they do have beaks, more or less, and they fly, and they're made of a thousand different kinds of paper, glossy or marbled or watercolor-stained or boldly brightly blue or even gold foil. They come in a few sizes - as though made of sheets of paper that notionally started out three meters wide, or ten, or thirty. Fortunately, being made of paper (or foil), they're fragile, but they're all bigger than Cricket and not fragile enough that he can just shred them with his claws before they could get a few hits in.

Cricket's wearing a camera on a collar, because Haru asked him to; it's worth it even in uglier dungeons for the data, but this one's pretty, and any images that don't come out too vomit-inducingly four-dimensional for mere humans will be well-received. The terrain's made of the same stuff as the monsters, stacks upon stacks of gorgeous dense paper thick and luxurious or onionskin and near-transparent, red on silver on washi-pattern florals on pink on rust-stained orange-brown, and can fold itself up into new cranes when nobody's standing on it but doesn't seem inclined to do it against resistance, just fluttering helplessly underfoot. In addition to the un-folded stacks and the cranes there are inert, decorative paper stars and paper fans and paper hypercubes and paper chains and paper fortune tellers that lazily open and close themselves like flytraps. Paper airplanes, at a completely normal and non-intimidating size, willingly crumple if he bats them with a paw and don't go for the eyes at all, just drift through the air, getting a little magical lift now and then so they never come in for a landing of their own accord.

And of course eighty people in here are suffering from lingchi, trapped inside paper hyperboxes lined with paper knives and restrained by brightly woven fingertraps that even people with the presence of mind to try pushing instead of pulling can't coordinate kata enough to escape, so they should get a move on.