Margaret Peregrine is a high school sophomore. Most of the time, she's either at school, at the school robotics club, at the school chess club, or doing schoolwork. Today, she's cleaning out her late great-grandmother's attic.
"Yeah. I wonder if not having so much time pressure will make people take up more hobbies at once, or focus more deeply on one thing."
The move into a sculpture gallery. It has lots of Greek and Roman statues, most of them lacking clothes and some of them lacking limbs or heads.
"Bet it depends on the person. Man, it is so hard to imagine making one of these and then deciding what it needs is ultra bright high contrast psint."
"Yeah. Maybe it's just because we're used to unpainted, but they really do look better this way. Except the eyes. Unpainted blank eyes look kind of creepy up close."
"I'll give you that but I don't think a coat of cobalt blue fixes it."
"Hmm, yeah, probably just differently creepy. I wonder what the original artists would think of the modern insistence that unpainted is better."
Art art smiling at Bella art. Given the time zones, it's not much longer before the museum kicks everyone out.
"Sure! I'd suggest going to yet another time zone to make it even more ambiguous, but actually I want to try French food. Want to walk around until we see something that looks good?"
"Sure. You pick, you can read signs and I assume no restaurants serve exclusively escargot."
"Okay!"
They stroll down the street for a bit, and soon enough Margaret points at a storefront and asks, "How do you feel about crepes? It looks like they have some savory ones if you want it to be dinner and some sweet ones if you want it to be brunch."
Then they can go in and order some crepes! Margaret is available to translate menu items if wanted; for herself she orders one of the fruity cheesy breakfast kind.
"What's 'fraises'? There's a picture but I'm not sure which thing in it is the fraise. I want this one, at any rate -" She points, for the waiter.
"Fraises is the strawberries." The waiter is quite used to tourists and has already gone off to put in their orders. "Being able to go wherever we want is great; I haven't been abusing it nearly enough."
"I do! Though my latest experiment has a lot less paperwork and a lot more waiting, so I should have more free time than I did previously."
"New York is fun. I've never seen the Grand Canyon, I should do that. And there are tiny islands in the Pacific that nobody goes to because the flight would be awful but they're supposed to be amazingly beautiful."
"I haven't heard about those; what are they like? Besides salty, I guess."
"They look like a mirror when they're wet. The pictures are gorgeous."
"That does sound pretty." Possibly it sounds pretty because her mental image has Bella in it but it's probably pretty on its own too.