I'll tell Paula. Is she a Maple?

Yeah! I wasn’t overridingly prioritizing that but it was, like, a factor.

Yeah, makes it easier for them to find us dungeons together. Do you want to do a shift in the Seuss dungeon? Read some Sneetches, see if anything can lead you to the core?

I would love to!

I'll tell Paula, you tell Rebecca! But make sure she knows not this evening :)

NOT this evening, no <3

<3

Italian place is here

Be there with bells on!

When she shows up to the Italian place that evening, she is, in fact, wearing earrings with a bell motif.

"I thought that was just a saying. Do they ring?" He might want to flick one.

They are made of glass and make a delicate chiming sound!

"To the best of my knowledge it's just a saying, but hey, I had the earrings and they're pretty."

"Well, they're cute and you're cute." Elbow-linkage on the way in, yes?

Yes!

(She wasn't actually sure what the restaurant's dress code would be, so the rest of her outfit consists of a little red dress suitable for a range of formality levels, a choker with a pendant of oddly-shaped swirling fused glass hanging from it, white tights and low-heeled red pumps. So she's probably covered no matter what.)

She's a little overdressed, but in the plausibly deniable way where maybe she dresses like that to go to the grocery store. Haru is as always in jeans and a T-shirt. In they go and get menus with a variety of Italian foods.

Absolutely nothing in the outfit was purchased for more than twenty dollars! This is fine. Lucy likes gnocchi and will avoid calamari like the plague. 

Haru's getting the fetuccine alfredo with chicken and broccoli in it. If she doesn't say anything about calamari he will not know.

"Do you want to split an appetizer? I'm good with any of the appetizer options except the calamari."

"Don't like squid? They have a good stuffed artichoke."

"I don't eat cephalopods. Squid less emphatically than octopi but octopi are so smart. Stuffed artichoke sounds good."

"Did you get a chance to read any cephalopods at the aquarium, remind me -"

"I did not. But also I only get, like, senses, and to a limited degree the context necessary to interpret those senses, I thankfully do not straight-up read minds."

"I know octopuses can open jars and stuff but I don't know them to be smarter than, like, pigs? I'm maybe not up on the latest in this department."

"I can't immediately cite my sources but a figure I vaguely recall and can't be confident in is there are supposed to be octopi as smart as a human five year old."

"How do you even assess that when they can't talk - or do they have them using picture boards or something -"

"I think it's mostly about problem-solving?"

"Five year olds are pretty good at solving problems but limited by their motor ability, I'm still not seeing how you do the comparison straight across."