"I'm kind of sick of sudoku but I have other games if you don't have another suggestion."

"It's probably safe enough to, like, go for a walk, if that sounds better. Keeps us down to arm-linking guiding amounts, though."

"Do you know of anywhere we could go where there wouldn't be" (fake) "people around?"

"I do not have spaces available that are closed to the public besides this house."

"I guess we could walk around the house."

"Sure, why not, I never actually gave you a tour."

Julien positions himself to be led around.

The house is very nice, but it's not stupidly enormous; its occupants are not homebodies. Julien has seen most of it - garage, if only incidentally, with Haru's truck and storage locker and room for Ren's absent little car; open plan living room and kitchen and dining room; downstairs half-bath. There is a sun porch they have not visited but it's pretty hot in the summer and full of eclectic junk, years' worth of impulse purchases from every art fair and rummage sale. Upstairs is the master bedroom which Julien saw on the way to the nice bathtub, the guest room they sleep in, and Haru's room which they should skip because Cricket is sleeping there. And the linen closet.

There are stairs tucked between the sun porch and garage doors leading to the giant half-finished craft basement, which contain the remains of about thirty temporarily embarrassed hobbies. It's a bit better organized than the sun porch in the sense that almost everything there has at one time had a home in the room to return to and is not just indefinitely couchsurfing on a stack of six paintings and a record player in their hospitable flatness. It looks like Ren might be recently into model airplanes.

And they don't have much front yard but they have a back, with privacy-height cypresses and a bench swing and a table with chairs and some neglected raised flowerbeds.

"Oh, this is nice."  Maybe they can sit and swing a minute?

Sure.

Something about being on an object harder than a couch and more continuous than a pair of chairs gives salience to how much shorter Julien is than Haru.  It's not very much, but it's enough for very convenient headtilt-shoulderresting, and also if they swing enough his feet don't always have enough friction to stay in the same spot on the ground rather than dragging along it a little.

Maybe they will just sit there quietly. It's a nice day if you like it warm.

Julien will sit there as long as Haru wants.

Though if that's a while he'll get kind of fidgety.  Finger tapping on the bench, it starts as.

"So did you have a sub-branch of the dungeon mats field you were interested in? Harvest triage, industrial applications, making espers poke everything to see if it's batteries, lab testing?"

"Labs, yeah."

"I assume that has subfields too and different people are handling suspicious liquids versus dungeon plants versus rocks."

"Yeah but I'm just an undergrad.  I still have a bit before I have to decide."

"Present tense intentional?"

"...No.  Would have had."

"It's not that you can't, but."

"But kind of, what's the point, yeah.  From either of our perspectives."

"Though no guarantee your powers will be any good, about half of them aren't, and there's people with unsustainable backlash accumulation rates, and you might or might not like any of the career standards for espers who don't have usable powers."

"From one of our perspectives there might turn out to be a point."

"Yeah."

"...How many more days of me still being awakening would it take to convince you there was definitely something up?"