"Check out the construction site, see if the Trill missed anything?"

"Acquire something that can break into a zoo."

"That's probably not that hard, anyone have one of those squirrel traps?"

Asher and Lev don't but Asher guesses he can figure out how to make one.

"All right. That's probably enough for now, unless anyone has something else? We can meet for lunch from now on and go over whatever we've figured out."

"Awesome!"

Lev has friends now! Sort of.

Karen is really not thinking about whether these people are her friends or not, because if she did she would probably melt. 

"All right then. Nobody do anything totally crazy."

"That's hard. I can aim for 'not anything more totally crazy than usual'?"

"Nobody do anything likely to torpedo our chances of responding appropriately to the Trill, I think."

"All right. I will fail to do my homework and almost break my neck dancing, as usual."

"I hope that works out for you. I'll - see you guys tomorrow."

"See you."

Lev is not even pretending to pay attention in his classes for the rest of the day.

Neither is Asher, but that's more normal.

Dennis pays attention to everything and only occasionally scribbles animal names in the corner of his notebook.

Karen's attention is completely shot. This is pretty usual but it isn't usually this bad. Her primary concern is whether she can somehow get un-grounded early, possibly by coming up with a plausible cover story for whatever she was doing last night. It'd also be good to practice morphing, but she doesn't want to start with flies, and her door doesn't lock, so she'll have to be careful and maybe shouldn't test this at all until she has better options. 

Her sister picks her up from school.

"Hey. Tough day?"

"They all are. Where's mom?"

"Making a very involved dinner. You have homework?"

"Literally always."

Dinner's not a good enough reason to call in Azalea; Azalea probably offered.

"It's not like you didn't do worse stuff."

"I'm not here to scold you. I'm just concerned, it's not like you. Maybe wondering if I haven't been there like I should."

"Nah. You're fine."

They drive a couple streets. 

"You know, you can make cool friends without having to do stupid stuff. I thought for the longest time you couldn't, but it turns out there are lots of better ways, y'know? If you came to the Sharing sometime I could introduce you to all the cool people."

"I'm grounded and stuff."

"You're not allowed to be alone. If I'm with you, you're not alone, are you? It's a brilliant plan, if I do say so myself. A work of absolute genius."

Weak laugh.