He gets a text from Katherine's mother not too long after she falls asleep

Thank you for the video recording. I've texted Erica so you can let her know that's taken care of for now.. I still want to talk to you but she can just take the phone long enough to say hello if that's easier for her. I'll call around six.

Understood

She will wake with a bit of a start and blink confusedly for a few seconds

"Oh. Hi. What time is it?"

"Almost three thirty. Your mom's going to want to talk to me and hear, like, 'hi', from you, around dinnertime."

"I can probably say 'hi' into the phone if that's all."

"That's what she suggested."

"Okay. Is that all she said?"

"Do you want to read the text?"

"Does it have any...'mushy stuff' sounds middle-schoolish but..."

"I don't think so but I don't have a hypersensitive mush meter."

"I'll risk it, I'm not as bad off now...as before."

He turns the phone to her.

Slightly strained face "I'm glad she took care of that for me..it..was not urgent..but it was important enough to at least deserve an apology for the..lack of response."

Nod.

She can dig out her phone and...avoid the messaging app and social media.. "Can I find your blog by searching for your codename?"

"Sure. The blog itself is called Eventualities, that should make it pop up higher in the results."

"Thanks." Websearch, search for 'Egypt' on blog since she wanted to read that.

Why did Egypt come out so well in the onset of dungeons, when other poor and population-concentrated countries did so much worse? Well, they were really lucky.

That's not to say it was all luck. There were heroes. But Egypt got more than its share of those, and was extremely fortunate that their sense of propriety did not cripple their ability to take advantage of the discovery of guiding, and came out extremely well in the power lottery... and they poached. Egypt was by global standards poor, but had the advantage of sharing Arabic with several poorer places...

"I bet the tourism money was really helpful for Egypt in particular though I'm sure it dropped off a lot for a while."

"The pyramids are still there."

"Fortunately. Did you know they built a new archeological museum? Took them a long time to build but it opened in 2025. It's now the largest archeological museum in the world."

"I didn't know that! Did they get stuff repatriated for it?"

"Some stuff, but there's still some major artifacts that various museums don't want to return. Especially the Rosetta stone. The British Museum is really bad about refusing to give things back. It's not actually true that most of their artifacts were originally taken from other places but a lot of the more famous ones were."

"I think I'm abstractly in favor of some amount of cross-exhibition so that there's some Egyptian artifacts everywhere and some Greek ones everywhere and so on and so forth, but it's harder to justify for the big names."

"You can use replicas to replace most of the original artifacts that the countries of origins want back. Not the mummies of course but most things. Not as much of a status symbol as having the original but a good replica is just as educational."