"Okay...  - Acknowledged.  Heard."  She starts in on her sandwich, one-handed.

"Sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry - uh, unless, magically you do - I just don't get it.  But I might if I think about it for a second."

"Part filler word, part I am concerned that I made you self-conscious by responding how I did to you saying 'okay' about a thing earlier."

"The thing I don't get is how reality not affecting your curse in any way.... works.  .....I could probably piece it together on my own if I thought about the way you've acted so far but maybe for magical curse reasons you want to try and explain it instead of there being quiet for me to think in."

"Trying to explain it definitely sounds easier. So, uh, I am experiencing the emotion of loneliness. Which I'm not used to at all, I'm introverted and have never been alone long enough for it to be a problem, it took me a bit to identify for sure. Sort of like a depressed person could continue to experience sadness even if they, like, got exactly what they wanted for their birthday, or if it was a really nice day out, or they saw a kitten, or whatever, I will continue to experience loneliness at roughly this level all week. But it's causing all the same impulses that normal endogenous loneliness would. I'm metaphorically scratching poison ivy here, turned up to eleven, it doesn't help the underlying emotional state at all but not doing it would take up an absolutely intractable amount of my concentration and I'd probably eventually fail at controlling myself, possibly in a direction that'd make me do something worse than simply snuggling people all week."

"Geez, gotcha.  No starving you on purpose, then.  ....Though we are going to have to switch sides once I run out of sandwich so I don't have to try and use a spoon left-handed."

"Super reasonable."

Munch munch.

"...You know, it's like super good that you showed up now and not a few years ago.  I've really gotten a lot better at being a person in the past while, and like, one of the ways that's true in is that I used to be really self-conscious about wanting anything, or like inconveniencing people?  To the point that I was really annoying to be around, because I just like, wouldn't express any preferences, literally at all.  But like, now you don't have to - or, hm... don't have any non-magical basis - to worry that you're bothering me, because I can and will just tell you about it when it happens, and then we can not do whatever the thing is.  It's kind of amazing."

"Well, if I'd landed two years ago it's plausible the first person I met on the street wouldn't randomly have known your uncle."

"That's also true!  I kind of think of him as knowing infinite people but this is not literally the case."

"I would imagine not. It would be different in kind from other interuniversal discrepancies."

"Yeah, I'd say that, and then next thing you'd be like, 'actually, my earth is flat, somehow, even though we have a moon that we've been to even if it was only once,' or something.  Probably something weirder than that, actually, that's still not really on the same scale as being able to know infinite people."

"Our earth is round, fortunately."

"Polite of it."

Xavier's own sandwich and soup are ready; he sits in the open spot next to Ari.  "Does your world experience sunstorms?  Solar flares?"

"I have heard of solar flares, I don't think they're usually very exciting to non-astronomers?"

"Ohhhh whaaaaat?  That sounds so convenient.  Here we like, launched a superweapon into the sun in the fifties so it wouldn't blow up on earth, but then now it still makes cell signal go out for a while every now and again; it's super annoying."

"Radio too."

"Yeah, also radio."

"Wow, uh, I think our sun is not in the habit of threatening to blow up the earth."

"...What?"

"So the superweapon wouldn't blow up on earth, not so the sun wouldn't blow the earth up," Xavier clarifies.

"Oh. Uh, why is the sun a better place for such a thing than just... the vacuum of space?"