Winona has a few things to say about the new coffee machine in the break room at work (apparently it's very complicated but makes good coffee) but nothing very interesting.

Perpetual motion machine it is - she clears out the living room and moves to the backyard. Can she... hmmm... power a fan that blows a real piece of paper into the air? If she puts up a net or something to keep the paper from blowing away?

The piece of paper will flutter against the net when blown!

Awesome. That probably means she can get cartoon machines and real ones working together in general, too, there's probably some clever stuff she can do with that. For now she just keeps tinkering away with the cartoons; she'll ask Julie and Winona about real machine parts if she comes up with anything especially interesting.

Julie pokes her head out. "Harvey's poker night?"

Oh! Yeah, that's important. She dismisses her perpetual motion machine and swaps wings and then she's ready to go.

Julie grabs a big bag of trail mix and her laptop so Denice can wiki during downtime, and takes her to Harvey's place. She stashes the trail mix first, then goes around and lets herself in by the side door. "Hey Harvey, this is Janet, she followed us home from Colorado - long story - and I didn't wanna leave her home alone."

"Hi, Janet," says Harvey.

(Shy shy shy doesn't hurt that this is a strange person she doesn't actually trust yet.) Hi.

"Can she just hang out in the kitchen while I play a hand or two?"

"Yeah, sure."

Janet is ensconced in the kitchen and Julie goes to the living room to play some poker.

Wikipedia continues to exist. She doesn't make any models here, though.

Julie comes out three hands later, munching pretzels and seventy dollars poorer. "All right, you ready to go home?"

Yeah.

Julie takes her home. "All right, I'm gonna go to bed. You have fun staying up however late you stay up."

She will.

She does actually make it to bed, rather than being found flopped over a cartoon gizmo when they come down in the morning. It's a near thing, though.

Julie makes pancakes for breakfast and stashes the batter for later; at lunchtime Denice can have as many as she wants because it's been weeks and nothing terrible has happened to her yet!

She was probably not expecting a slightly deer-in-headlights response to this offer, but here they are anyway.

...well, here's three blueberry pancakes! With syrup on them.

Sure, that works. Nom.

Anything interesting up today?

"We need to figure out what you're doing while I'm gone. You thought about any of the options any?"

She expects she'll be fine on her own, but she won't mind having someone around, either way.

"Okay. Winona had a good idea before she left for work this morning, which is that you might want to get to know places you can go hang out like the library and the park."

That sounds good, yeah.

"Cool, let's go see the library and the park and maybe you'll want a Y membership or a craft studio pass or something. There's probably a community center somewhere, I don't know what people do in community centers, let's find out."

Library first.

...........WOW that is a lot of books.

Julie laughs. "Yup! Tons of 'em! We can get you a library card but you don't have a last name yet..."