“Excuse me, Traceless?  My name is Rhonda Vue, with the EDN Show.  Do you perhaps have a few minutes?  If you’re available, I was hoping to ask you a few questions about the the ‘dungeon monster zoo’. It’s a fascinating concept.”

"Oh, good morning, nice to meet you! I'm always happy to talk about Ontario Monster Park."

“Wonderful!  Give me just a moment, we’re going to set up.”  Rhonda gestures at her camerawoman.  “I understand that you’re more comfortable with a conversation going.  Is there anything you’d like to bring up before we have a camera rolling?”

"You probably don't want to ask for my talking monstercat to show up, he's not as friendly as I am."

“I had heard the rumors.  Is he really as forthright as they say?”

"You can read authentic Cricket dialogue on my blog, though of course that's filtered for the choicest bits."

“I will admit, this was a chance encounter.  I got rather distracted by the dungeon photography on Eventualities.  Some of them are beautiful.  Or haunting.”

"Reporters lurking outside of dungeons serious enough for espers to be involved usually don't try to claim it's a coincidence, especially if they have a camera operator along."

“Well, it’s not exactly a coincidence.  They say you make your own luck.  I was hoping to be able to talk to an esper, but I didn’t plan on it being you, specifically.  I did get lucky, though, Ontario Monster Park is genuinely fascinating.”

"I'm very proud of it, though on paper my relationship with it is a mostly informal matter."

"We're just about ready, Rhonda."  The camera has indeed been set up, there's a big parasol-looking light reflector set up to ensure Rhonda and Traceless get good lighting.

"Thank you, Sam.  Anything you want to cover before we go live?  If there's anything you say that you need to cut, just tell me right away.  I'll clap my hands to make the sound engineers happy, and we'll cut it."

"That's very generous of you, I'll try not to need it. I'm good to go till my partner's ready."

"Excellent.  Cameras rolling?"  Upon receiving an affirmative, Rhonda claps.  "Three, two, one, and go."  Rhonda turns to Traceless, takes half a breath and settles.  Her posture widens and opens up a little bit, standing at an angle so that both Traceless and the camera can see her face.  "Good afternoon, Traceless!  Thank you for joining us on the EDN Show.  I appreciate you taking the time to have a quick word with us."

"It's no trouble at all, you caught me at a good time!"

"Well, if you hang out near enough dungeons, you're bound to talk to an esper eventually!  Normally in an esper interview, I like to talk about their powers, their experiences in dungeons and the like.  But your unique relationship with Ontario Monster Park really caught my eye.  Can you tell us a little bit about it?"

"Ontario Monster Park is a zoo devoted entirely to the care and display of dungeon monsters. It stocks exhibits exclusively from confirmed-destroyed dungeons - except for the plants, most of the plants are normal - and it's out on an artificial island on the lake so it's at minimal risk of being visited by a dungeon itself. My power set is pretty good for live capture and I supply a plurality of the exhibits. While a lot of monsters die when their dungeons do, there are lots that don't and every one can tell us something more about the magic we've shared the universe with since the seventies. Conventional zoos are sometimes willing to host monsters - Ripley's in particular has a fair few - but they have an unrelated research mission because monsters can't tell us much about conventional biology and evolution, so having a dedicated institution seems to me essential for advancing the state of knowledge."

"That makes a lot of sense.  And for those of our viewers at home who might not be familiar, your power is stealth, correct?"

"I have a few but that's the main classification that matters for this! I can sneak up on a monster and put a cage around it before it knows what's happening."

"No wonder you're responsible for so many of the captures, if you can just appear a cage around a monster.  From its perspective, at least.  What's the most interesting critter you've gotten to the Park?"

"The Park's got a talker! I have a roommate who is also a talking monster, but living at the zoo itself is a robot bird named Mori. He runs on electricity and enjoys doing art commissions and talking philosophy."

"Well.  That definitely qualifies - I like to ask open-ended questions because I never would have thought to ask after THAT.  How about plants?  You mentioned there were fewer plants than animals.  What are they like?"

"Plants are easier to harvest than monsters - you don't need powers to do it, for a lot of them - so there are plenty living on Earth, but the Park doesn't specialize in dungeon plants; we've mostly only got them to supplement the habitats for monsters from the same dungeon when that happens to be convenient. They're lower maintenance, as a rule. You still have to take care of a plant, but you don't usually need to worry about it escaping, and most of them don't need to be fed anything but water and sunshine if they can live out of their dungeon at all. So they wind up scattered across various labs and there's not as much call to have a specific facility for them."

"That makes sense.  It sounds like you've been doing this for a couple of years now.  Have there been any captures that were harder than - " Rhonda mimes putting a cage over an invisible monster. " - boop, you're in Monster Jail now?"

"Yes - anything really big is hard just to move, espers are strong but I can't carry an entire rhinoceros. Some monsters are fast enough, and flighty enough, that I can't catch them just because they can't tell I'm there; I have to guess where they're going and have a cage in the way and get it closed smart quick, or I have to try many times, or I have to figure out how to get them to roost, or, once, I caught an injured monster and crossed my fingers that if it lived it'd heal - it didn't live, so I don't know if I would've been right. Plenty of monsters are pretty dangerous just to be near, and need specialized cages and I have to go in with extra protective gear. I would rather like to have some kind of lava monster but I've never even tried that."

"I understand the curiosity, but I'm a little relieved there's no captured lava monsters.  I'm not sure how you'd manage to keep them!  Why such the emphasis on capture?  Is it just that you're uniquely-suited to the role, or is there something deeper?"

"You'd sure have to build an interesting enclosure for a lava monster. I'm very lucky that my powers lend themselves to monster capture, but I care about it as a scientific pursuit first and foremost. We don't have a way to study a dead dungeon any more than we manage to while it's still around, there's no dissecting one. Photography, which I also do, and statistics, and victim reports, and artifact extraction, all matter for getting as much information as we can so that we can learn more, both to protect people in and from dungeons more effectively and to find out more about the fundamental question of what is going on. Effectively, aliens invaded in the seventies, we keep killing each other, and we don't know why! And monsters are part of the whole picture, and I want as many pixels as I can get for humanity's greatest minds to squint at."

"I could quibble about the 'invasion' part, but you're not wrong about dungeons being alien.  You see a lot of dungeons that almost seem like there's a guiding force behind what they do.  Do you think they're genuinely intelligent, a reflection of our subconscious, or something else?"

"One of the most important facts about dungeons is that they at least sometimes do, at least, contain potential people. Cricket is a person. Mori, the aforementioned robot bird, is a person. What this means for whether any dungeon monsters are people before they're separated from their dungeons, or whether the dungeons themselves are, I don't know - we need more data. I'm not certain exactly how many person-monsters there are around but it's almost certainly fewer than fifty and most of them remember very little from before their dungeons' deaths - but maybe the hundredth one will know more."

"It's a little like dating, then.  At some point you hope you're going to find someone suitable, but you don't know if any given first date is going to go somewhere."  Except for how usually, you wind up with a lover at the end of it.

"I am not aware of any emancipated monsters who feel that way about human beings but if we keep trying, who knows."

"If you ever do become aware of a partnership like that, I hope to get a call about it.  That would be quite the interview for both of them.  What's the survival rate like, for captured monsters?  About how many survive the dungeon collapse?"

"So that's complicated because we do have pretty good guesses about which ones have a chance of making it, and we therefore aren't as likely to try capturing any that obviously won't. Monsters that basically run on biology have a pretty good shot, whereas something like a water elemental doesn't. If you take out some dead monsters and see how they're put together you can get an even better idea. But there are surprises, like Mori, who is obviously not biological at all. I'd say that a monster I catch expecting to keep, I get to keep about sixty percent of the time, and a monster I catch on purest optimism will make it less than two percent of the time - which of course also affects how often it's worth it to try those that will have interesting care and feeding needs, since we have to have those ready to go in advance on spec."

"I'm not surprised to confirm that keeping monsters alive is tricky business.  Are monsters typically fertile in captivity?"

"Approximately never. I still catch multiple of the same kind if they're pretty small and I expect them to display together nicely, but the results we have suggesting that they can reproduce usually turn out to be overblown in the headlines. Doesn't stop people from trying, though."

Seems like a series of compounding moonshots.  Still, it's big if one pays off.  "Well, I for one would love to see baby ex-monsters.  Do you have a favorite discovery that was made as a result of the study done at Ontario Monster Park?

"Unfortunately, the field isn't so much one of discoveries as one of likelihoods. Different data points point in various directions, suggest different theories, but it's pretty seldom that we can come to a firm and permanent conclusion about any underlying fact. The things you could call discoveries are things like 'this kind of monster can survive without its dungeon'. The incremental work is things like taking data about how fast monsters that shed interestingly supernatural material can replenish it; we can fill in a graph over time but not make definitive pronouncements."

"So instead of discovering, for example, the speed of terminal velocity, you're able to build heuristics about how dungeon monsters are likely to behave?  Is that a fair gloss on it?"

"That's a decent summary! But 'behave' in a broad sense. Especially since ones with living dungeons act very differently from their emancipated counterparts, but their capabilities still tell us things about what is possible and let us feel out something about what the limits might be."

"I assume their capabilities tend to be lessened when the dungeon dies?  Has there ever been a case where a dungeon monster has gained abilities from being emancipated?  Aside from language and the ability to think, of course."

"Unclear! Monsters belonging to an active dungeon tend to have a pretty narrow range of things they might try to do and not be very amenable to attempting other things on demand. I think it would be strange if language and thought were the only add-ons an emancipation could provide, but I don't know whether things are just strange in that way, or those monsters could technically already do that and their memories are just murky and they didn't choose to do so beforehand, or if they're gaining other abilities that are hard to compare and contrast."

"It seems we could learn so much if dungeons could just cooperate a little.  But if they did, life would be so much different.  If you had a truly arbitrary budget but could only earmark funds for one specific problem, what problem would you want to solve?"

"Oh no, that question just makes me want to blatantly cheat regarding the definition of 'one specific problem'. Is a great NGO that I'm not personally in not having unlimited funds a specific problem? I assume it's not. Is 'Indonesia' a specific problem?"

"For the benefit of any viewers who haven't researched Southeast Asia recently, what issues does Indonesia face that you think would benefit from an arbitrary budget?"

"You don't have to have done a lot of recent research - in this case, no news is bad news. Indonesia is extremely densely populated, which attracts dungeons, and has been poor since before dungeons began existing. The seventies hit a lot of places with that combination really hard, like the Philippines and Egypt, but Indonesia came off particularly badly and has been failing to catch up since despite occasional attempts by its neighbors to set up some kind of bailout. This doesn't make Indonesia itself wind up with more or worse dungeons per capita, since dungeons don't seem to care where exactly on the globe they appear. But it does mean that Indonesian dungeons are especially likely to escape with victims inside and reappear later, poorly documented or not documented at all, because their response is shoestring in organization and equipment, and a lot of their espers choose to leave as soon as they're awakened, if they live. Which they're also less likely to do given the state of the medical system. International deployment for bigger older dungeons helps there as everywhere, but every bigger older dungeon was once brand new, and a lot of them start in Indonesia."

You're not an ignoramus, Rhonda, you're just making sure your viewers are informed.  Still hate having to ask that kind of question.  "That does indeed seem like a worthy goal indeed.  It sounds like the tragedy of the commons on a massive scale, to humanity's detriment."

"It's a coordination problem - any specific country or other sort of organization putting a ton of resources into Indonesia gets only their population-based share of the reduced long term risk - and a political problem - Indonesia is, reasonably enough, suspicious that anyone trying to show up and exert a lot of influence there has interests other than the dungeon problem. But if I were writing a blank check to anyone earmarked 'Indonesia' and you didn't give me time to do more reading and interviewing first, I'd go with Dungeoneers Without Borders. They operate in a lot of places but Indonesia's a big one, and while their ability to recruit espers might not flex much with more money - they tend to get espers who like the low-red-tape adventurism approach, we can make money anywhere - they'd be able to get more support and equipment and airplanes and all that good stuff."

And then he reacts to a sound, though it's too soft for a non-esper to hear, and checks his phone. "My partner's ready to meet me at the silo," he says, "so I'm going to have to cut you off here, but it's been a pleasure, and you can get ahold of me through my agent if you have any follow-ups!"

"Not a problem in the slightest, Traceless, thank you for your time today!"  Rhonda has gotten good as saying that fast, and almost as soon as "today" has ended the camera's off.  "I'll let you go, if you need anything from us let us know, we usually air within seventy-two hours, take care!"  This too, is practiced-fast.

"Thank you! I'll call my PA so she has a heads up -" The phone reacts and starts dialing while he heads to his black pickup truck and gets behind the wheel. Wave wave.

Wave!  Rhonda cracks her neck twice.  Love it when I get a good one.  "Alright, Sammy, how'd we do?  Any of it usable?"