"Well. It can wait."

Kisses?

Definitely. Kisses are good and this preference is stable under reflection.

Even with the world how it is now there's a limit to how much kissing is optimal to do on a plastic bench. Eventually it's time to explore the aquarium some more, and in particular to check if they have any job openings that will let him interact with the octopodes. If they haven't specifically banned uplifting them to sapience it's because it didn't occur to them to ban it, but the farther into the project he can get before becoming sketchy the better.

The receptionist says that, by coincidence, they are hiring a biologist who wants to study the octopodes and also a psychologist with a particular research focus on animal sapience. 

Nice! Bruce immediately applies for the biologist job and gives Leia an "Eh? Eh? Come on!" sort of grin.

(He also takes a moment to feel quietly embarrassed about the inevitable lack of meritocracy in this job search, but he does actually have an advantage in doing awesome stuff with the job for the same reason he has an advantage in getting it.)

"I'm a biochemist."

"But you're good at psychology whether it's on your paperwork or not."

"Yeah, but they hire people based on their paperwork!"

"Go for it anyway? I, uh, kind of suspect they're not going to get a lot of applicants, and if you get an interview you can make it obvious you're all polymathy."

"This seems kind of implausible."

"Oh, yeah, it's extremely implausible, that's how I know it'll work." 

"..right but you're probably going to have to have sex about it."

"That . . . shouldn't actually bother me more than getting a job through coincidence manipulation in the first place." So he's just going to decide not to be bothered about it. Look at him being completely unbothered.

Quest available: Honorary Degree

Get Leia a degree in psychology. With sex.

Success: +7,000 XP; ????
Failure: Reduced relations with Leia; 'Nerdy Scientist' status effect

"Okay but you are bothered!"

"Well, I just got a quest about it." (And now he's nervous, because while he knows that trying to do something nice for someone and failing isn't great for a friendship it's nerves-inducing to see it written down like that.) He reads off the quest text.

"'Reduced relations with Leia'? I would still like you fine!"

"I still don't want to screw up and look like an idiot in front of you though!"

Cheek kiss. "I would go 'oh good my boyfriend can make mistakes, he is not completely perfect and therefore utterly out of my league.'"

Blushing and smiling at the floor time! "Thanks. Any apparent perfection is definitely the universe cheating in my favor, but thanks."

"So what do we do now?"

"Probably depends on whether I accept this quest or not. I'm sort of morbidly curious where in the process of you changing your major it would suddenly be a good idea for me to have sex about it."

"...can I change my major. I feel like to get a PhD in psychology you must first get an undergraduate degree in psychology."

"I know people can get a bachelor's in one thing and a PhD in something else but I that probably does make it harder to change in the middle. Might be a matter of finding a lab that does something relevantly interdisciplinary."

"Ugh, that sounds like it involves doing my current major at all."