It's midafternoon when Tim receives a call. He's recuperating from a dungeon. And by 'recuperating' the narration means 'sipping a banana-strawberry protein smoothie in a hot tub at a silo'. He's inclined to ignore it, but it could be an emergency dungeon. It's Bill, so maybe it is? He resentfully picks up the phone.
"Hey, Bill. What's going on?"
"Good morning, Tim. I've got an interesting dungeon for you. It's a 4D one. To reach the victims, we have to shift between 'layers' of the dungeon. They're all on different mountain peaks, but they're near each other to hear. I put it on the coordination app, if you want to look."
He does, actually! He pokes through the photos. Partly snowy, partly clear. Reminds him of early Spring or late Winter in Vermont. And with knives. That's a pretty notable number of knives. "I see why you want me. The knives are bloodthirsty?"
"How could you possibly have guessed." Bill's extremely sardonic. "They don't care about the vics, thankfully, or we'd've gotten a teleporter in already. They think the first gal in is going to survive, she was able to get back to the portal. But we need your power, badly, to keep the world's top 4D navigator in one piece."
Holy shit Cricket?! The monster kitty?!!?! "Oh, I've seen him before. The ki-cat, right?"
"Aghh, I was going to surprise you. Yeah. The dungeon cat. He's uh. Pretty grumpy, he doesn't like anyone except Traceless. Apparently there's something wrong with everyone, and he resents them for it. Sometimes it's something simple, like your, uh. Smell. Sometimes it's bad enough he can't work with you. If that happens, you still get paid something, it's just the risks of working with a dungeon kitty."
"Oh...kay..." So, it's just Carol all over again. "I can work with that. Be as inoffensive and respectful as possible. Got it."
"I put in a little presentation on how many dungeons this cat runs per week, along with a breakdown comparing how many dungeons a 4D esper can run per week. There's a comparison on how many dungeons Cricket can do per day vs. an esper, ranked by approximate difficulty. I also put in a list of the dungeons he's done."
Oh...kay? So what? He pokes through the presentation. His eyebrows rise. Then they rise higher. Then they touch the fringe of his hair. "Okay. That's, uh. A lot of dungeons. So he really is the best in the world."
"Right. He's Native 4D. He can navigate 4D dungeons like you navigate your bedroom. We navigate 4D dungeons like someone who's blind drunk in a landfill. He cannot be replaced, Tim. So you need to do your absolute best to come back with him. And beyond that, he's not a cat. He's not a human. He's a dungeon monster, and the only reason he's still running dungeons as far as I can tell is because he imprinted on Traceless like a little duckling. We cannot afford to have you alienate this monster cat."
Tim swallows, suddenly nervous. "And you think my power's a good fit to keep him safe, if he can stand to work with me."
"I know it is. This is what your power is best at, it's a perfect use case as long as you don't piss off the monster cat. If you don't finish the dungeon, even, that's still fine as long as you don't alienate Cricket from humanity permanently. That's your main goal here, everything else is secondary to not costing humanity its single best tool against 4D dungeons."
"Okay. Got it. I think I can pull it off." If there's one good thing I learned from Carol, it's how not to piss someone off. Nevermind that he'd actually learned dungeoneering at her knee.
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