"You know, there are lots of people who are lonely and can't pay people to be their friend."

"Only because our society isn't good enough, for most of them. Or because there aren't enough of me to put five of us in every nursing home in the world and have any left over to adopt all of its disabled children. That's - way too long to go without hugs for someone who ever wants hugs."

"I should be grateful. I mean. To get hugged at all."

"You have excessively low hug availability standards. And I find it totally implausible that you actually have to pay people to hang out with you, I've known you for like three hours and it didn't take me all three of them to figure out that you were adorable."

- aaaaaaaaa.

He has a tiny and heartbreaking smile.

She probably doesn't mean it. He is, after all, paying her to say nice things to him and give him hugs and talk to him about comics. But it is really nice to hear anyway.

"People don't usually. Like me. Very much. Unless they are Claire or my employees."

"Well, that's silly of them. I refuse to believe the entire planet has such poor taste. You should test it again. Sometime. If you want. I can't tell you how to live your life." Pause. "I need to do some math to determine how many extra hugs you need to make up for like thirteen hugless years, but I do think it might be impractical to try fixing it all in one go."

"Maybe you can stick around for a bit and make up for it?" He sounds uncertainly hopeful.

"Maybe I can." 

This honestly mostly depends on Lev, given the givens, but she doesn't want to sound super pathetic. Better to only be moderately pathetic.

Snuggle snuggle hug.

Coincidentially, Lev thinks it mostly depends on Karen. 

"Honestly, this has been one of the best afternoons of my life."

Lev really needs to have some better afternoons.

"Well. Hopefully you'll have more like it."

"I hope so too!"

To pancakes!

To pancakes!

Karen is pretty easily impressed by pancakes. It helps that she hasn't been to a restaurant in months.

Edith is also pretty good at pancakes!

She leaves out the nice maple syrup in a fit of optimism, even though as always Lev drowns his pancakes in the fake kind where high fructose corn syrup is the first ingredient.

Karen does, in fact, like real maple syrup, though she doesn't ever buy it because it costs, like, money. She pays high compliments to Edith.

Edith is pretty easily won over by people who compliment her cooking, even if they appeared mysteriously one day despite the fact that Lev never leaves the house and that's kinda suspicious. 

Yeah she's probably pretty suspicious. Less suspicious than the organization that dropped her off here, but still probably pretty suspicious. 

She happily eats her pancakes and then asks if she should take her dishes back to the kitchen herself.

"Oh, don't worry, I'll get them," Edith says from the kitchen. 

"OK! Thanks so much!"

She's not suuuuper sure what they're supposed to do now but maybe Lev will save her.

Lev is going to go for broke on Normal Human Experiences He Has Never Had. 

"...I haven't actually ever watched a movie with a person before."

"That's terrible!" she says, but she's smiling. "What do you have?"

"Everything, because I have the Internet."

"Not everything is just on the internet! Like - there's this really great hard science fiction anime about people in the near future who collect space trash to keep it from running into spaceships, and I have never been able to see the ending because it appears to exist solely in the form of boxed DVD sets that cost a couple hundred dollars."

"Correction. I have the Internet and three underemployed employees whom I can get to buy DVDs and rip it to the house server. --I don't really watch anime though so that one might take a day or two. What's the title?"

"Planetes. It's not like a weird anime, it's genuinely the best hard science fiction TV show I've ever seen. Very gentle introduction. But in terms of things you are more likely to have on hand, uh - do you like Pixar?"

Lev texts Shelly that she should put Planetes on the house server when she has time, no rush. 

"I love Pixar!"