"Yeah, absolutely. - what's your blood type?" he asks, maneuvering them over to the couch to get a quilt out from under it.

"O negative, I think. Not really helpful for the current use case I suppose."

"Yeah, no, I'm A-poz. How about... you hold this quilt, I pick you up, you wrap us up in it, and then we go for a quick flight till one of us is too cold or I'm too backlashed and then we flee back in the house? Once I'm backlashed I need to be having a conversation but it can be about absolutely anything, if you want to brush up on French vocab or hear dungeon anecdotes or talk about Shakespeare or whatever."

"I'm...not the best conversationalist at the moment but if you tell me dungeon stories I can ask questions as long as you do most of the talking. And..I won't be bored." She would normally be able to generate opinions to Shakespeare but that (still) feels like a minefield full of exploding rabid weasels.

She reaches out one arm for the quilt (with a small grimace at the temporarily reduced skin contact.)

"Yeah, if you're asking questions and aren't bored that'll do me." He picks her up; one arm is quite deliberately placed at the shirt/waistband boundary and nudges the former up a bit. Once they're wrapped up, out the door he goes into the cold.

Snuggles. She squirms slightly when the shirt nudging is happening but as long as he doesn't go more than a few inches she'll settle down again.

"I've seen some photos from dungeons because I know a few people who are into photography and follow that sort of thing."

It's a very decorous waist-touch. He takes off, up over his house, whoosh. "I take lots of pictures in dungeons but can't scroll through them to show them off in the air! They're mostly on my blog but I redact the ones that have other people in them."

Oh wow, even more intense skin contact feelings..for medical reasons of course.

"I should look at your blog.For something to do while I'm...avoiding my social contacts for the week. I could also play phone games or something but the blog sounds...more productive. "

"It's mostly written for a layperson audience so it might be a decent way to get up to speed on dungeon related stuff if you didn't previously pay much attention to it." Soaring over to the next house and "catching" himself on the imaginary bubble six feet over its roof. She can tell when he's actively flying and when he's coasting by whether his backlash is going up or down, if she concentrates.

It's a little hard to concentrate on that in particular but she does feel something different and interesting and make a few small faces about it,  "It mostly didn't seem very relevant to my life in particular, no. Well, I know people who have been kidnapped but I'm a big city girl so that's not- notable."

Small frown, "Kind of sad that people being kidnapped by hostile pocket dimensions is just normal. Though I'm sure it's preferable as an experience to the 70s when people thought it might be the end of the world."

"Well, it almost was - not the world, I guess, but civilization that involves people congregating in numbers, it was a big shock to the system and a few systems did not in fact tolerate it well, Indonesia's still all messed up, the Philippines took it really hard... I guess we don't have access to a parallel world where we get a baseline comparison of how many states fail if dungeons don't appear."

"I am - or maybe was - thinking of majoring in history.General overview courses tend not to cover the global south much, but many of those countries didn't have a lot of slack in the first place I think."

"I didn't go to college and only cursorily finished high school. But yeah, low slack and high density were a death knell, though Egypt pulled through pretty well, I've got a post on that."

"Ah, something in my area of interest in particular."

"So, what other things do you tend to do in dungeons besides carry people out?"

"Sometimes I'm acting a sensor, in dungeons with really reactive monsters where anybody else who steps in gets jumped right away. Sometimes I'm catching monsters, though most of the time when I'm doing that it's on my own recognizance and I have to place them in a zoo afterwards, since you can't know for sure if they'll survive their dungeons."

"Why the effort in particular? Most zoos don't want that many monsters, if any, so it can't be easy to place them. Is it just because of Cricket or something else?"

"Cricket and also I think orphan monsters are part of any story where we eventually figure out what's going on with dungeons."

"Does Cricket remember anything from before the dungeon died? I heard that they mostly don't, though I'm sure math people will go on about extrapolating from tiny sample sizes."

"He doesn't have much, but, yeah, the sample size is tiny - most monsters don't live, the ones that live mostly don't talk, the ones that talk mostly don't remember."

"But you're hoping that one will, eventually? Seems like a very long term project."

"It could be going faster! There's not a lot of systematic monster capture unless something's really cute or looks like it'll produce something useful."

"You have different criteria or do you just try for as many as you can get?"

"I still have to place them, so I try for things that'll find homes in a zoo that seems willing to take more. Like, Ripley's is usually pretty happy to take monsters, the insect zoo will take really showy stuff but anything that's going to look unassuming after its dungeon kicks it they're less happy about, I've developed some sense of how much capacity each place has for more monsters with all the calling around with a leafy miniature dolphin in a fishtank in a warehouse."

"A leafy miniature dolphin?" Gosh.

"It's really cute, Ripley's has it now."