"Well, it's got cheese on it.  Unless Haru extracted the one you tried from its cheese glob."

"It does have cheese on it. It tastes like a tater tot with cheese on it." Tot is gone. Fish time.

"Well, I can appreciate honesty."

In addition to casserole Solène-Luce also brought dessert!  It's a banana pudding pie with chocolate crust, and a can of whipped cream which she passes around.

"Yesssss thanks Mom -"  This one is really good actually.  Bug would maybe put sprinkles on it, but those wouldn't really impact the taste per se.  If he exists later he's absolutely teaching himself to actually cook.  With proficiency and whimsy and not just necessity and recipes.

Cricket declines pie, presses his nose to Haru's cheek, and goes to his TV-watching nook.

Yum, whipped cream. On it goes.

On it goes!  Enough to get a forkful of by itself!

(With a calm and dinner-table-polite demeanor.)

Ren collects everybody's dishes at the end. "Do you want me to wash your pie plate and casserole dish and get them back to you, or...?"

"It's a bit of a drive, so it might be easier for me to take them now if you've got leftover containers, but if you don't then it's not as if I'd terribly mind an excuse to visit with my son again."

"Oh, I've got containers around somewhere." She can find something that will hold the remaining half a pie and third of a casserole.

"Thanks."  Once Ren's occupied with the casserole and the pie dish's empty, Solène-Luce takes it to the sink and starts handwashing it.

Ren almost says something but then doesn't.

She tries to get the casserole dish, too.

If she insists!

"Well yes.  I may be the guest here, in a literal sense, but in my mind this is purely for ease-of-travel reasons.  I wanted to thank you for putting up Julien in a difficult time."

"Oh, don't mention it, I remember Haru's awakening. I really don't understand why the hospital esper doesn't poke out her own head to catch more of them..."

"Her backlash isn't public but I bet she's pushing it pretty hard on a daily basis and it could easily be a bad mix with crowds or monitors or the smell of rubbing alcohol or a million other possible things."

"You'd imagine they'd troubleshoot it pretty hard, with bringing people to her instead of the reverse, or something.  - By which I mean they probably have already troubleshot it and none of the things worked."

"Yeah. Plus as far as Paula's been able to tell there is no mechanism for the hospital to pay for checks, so someone decided it wasn't cost effective."

"Gwuh.  Maybe I'll find a way to personally fund some of this.  Without falling prey to snake-catching problems.  ...I guess not really snake-catching problems, because it's not like people lying about whether they thought someone was a probable case causes there to be more unknown awakenings, but.  Some standard of evidence would be necessary, is what I'm saying."  For a moment he feels stupid for saying the dumb little catchphrase he made up to distinguish himself more from Julien in front of his mom, but then - she's never heard it before and would have no reason to believe it's anything other than something Julien picked up, even if he said it a bunch of times.

"At a big hospital the main cost is getting someone to show up at all on a given day - and I guess maybe for the cases presenting as more physical than psych you might need them to wash their hands for every case, but the marginal difficulty isn't much. So I'm not sure evidentiary standards are the big blocker."

"Right, but if I pay - I don't remember her name, the hospital esper - enough to make the marginal difficulty worth her while, then the thing that matters becomes not 'is the evidence enough to make her go over to them on her own' but 'what's stopping her from touching ten extra nearby people on the way back because they could in theory have been espers, even though no one thought that was very likely'."

"Epione. Yeah. I do think this should maybe be a thing that espers whose powers kind of suck do but I think a lot of people whose main qualification is being a marginal esper are actually in security, they poke everybody trying to get into a building to make sure everyone who's presenting as a regular guy is one."

"That makes sense."  He has some more ideas but he's really definitely not going to be the first person to have thought of this and more research will need to be done.  (He expects Julien to care about this, too.)