"Well sure but when your power is breaking the laws of thermodynamics to make flowers appear it kinda defeats the point a little."

"I mean maybe it's drawing mass off a black hole somewhere and conservation of energy is preserved."

"Then it's breaking locality, which is even worse."

"When I said that it was a shorthand for 'we don't have enough information about these thnigs', I don't literally mean that it's- breaking locality or conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics or not. And doesn't the current understanding of quantum mechanics possibly violate locality anyway?"

"Not as far as I know, but anyway, I was mostly joking, I know what you meant. What I meant was just that, yes, the cards are incredibly powerful, but they're still, as a group, incredibly silly. Not that I wouldn't be able to abuse even the silliest of them, but still."

"I, uh, rescind my annoyance. Though if slash when we take over Mars NASA's going to have an absolute fit, I bet."

"...would it be bad of us to stick cameras in there so we can watch their reactions in real time?"

"Probably we can have just as much fun giving them a phone call and listening them splutter at the explanation of 'magic!'"

"Can you call NASA, just like that?"

"Probably not? But if we leave an email address on a sign in front of Pathfinder and tell them to arrange it I bet it'll happen in a week tops. The Phoenix lander might be there by then too, but I think Vikings 1 and 2 are broken by now."

"Well, 'then' can be a substantial time in the future, we don't know what we're gonna do or when, or how."

"It's slated to launch in 2007, so. Anyway, I don't have homework hanging over my head today! We should do something with this freedom."

"Ooh, freedom. Do you have anything in mind?"

"Your program you wanted to try writing, or ice cream on me. Both are worthy courses of action. Possibly magic practice but I feel a bit saturated on that having experimented a lot until yesterday. "

"We could do both, ice cream first then program."

"Then let us go find cold deliciousness."

And she makes use of the fact that she's a girl today to plant a peck on his lips and then take his hand.

That gets a surprised happy sound, and they walk off toward the edge of the park. "What's your first-try-at-a-program supposed to do?"

"Basic binary operations from text input."

"Solid start, interesting and slightly finicky and not ridiculously overreaching, good choice."

"I didn't really deal with most cases where the user could input something bad, though."

"That's a due diligence sort of thing - good practice but not essential. A generic check if it's a number in the right range and EEENH! Try again! If they did it wrong is good enough, or at least an error handler, try-catch and all that... Did I explain try-catch?"

"You did not!"

So he starts explaining proper error handling practice and its myriad benefits, even sketching out code on his notebook.

They're at the ice cream place well before he's done. Terry orders mint chocolate chip.

She gets strawberry! And listens to his explanation, enraptured. She's a very good listener, and asks questions sometimes that indicate she understands what's being said.