"y-yeah." She hands it to him, then curls up further. 

scary. 

He discards the incomplete form and pockets the phone.

Hm. How to solve this problem.

“Tell us something non-private that you like about yourself,” she suggests.

"I like how easy it is for me to meet and like and care about people! So many good things in my life have happened because I bumped into someone and spent a few minutes or hours listening to them talk about the things that are important to them and came away from it understanding them or the world or both a bit better, even if I never see them again." 

... Lucy is really sweet. She gets a nuzzle from Cara. 

"I gotta steal your conversational scripts, I'm still falling back on tortured smalltalk way too frequently."

“Scripts?”

"I don't know if they're - implemented as scripts or not in this case but I'd be borrowing them in that form? Things to say that get to meaningful interesting conversation with strangers."

"Openers! Or icebreakers, or whatever you want to call them. I just think about them as - ways to ask people about what's important to them, or on their minds recently? And once I know that just ask them for details about the parts I find most interesting or think I might have something interesting to say about." Hmmm, what's a good example to poke at...

"Haru, what were you planning on doing, before your awakening?"

"I wanted to be an epidemiologist."

“Oh, okay. You are welcome to make scripts out of what I say. Within reason. I wanted to do data science for DDSI.”

"I actually meant I wanted Cara's scripts, your question was good but I wouldn't call it a script by itself."

“Oh okay.”

 "So - why epidemiology? What drew you to it?" and hmmm, how to weave Lucy into the conversation, this is easy as a 1:1 thing but with 3 people it's trickier "...Actually, Lucy, do you know the answer to this one already? I know you two were friends before all this happened." and wait, how did that happen, she should ask about that soon.

“Malaria is bad! Hey, do you know Ballad of Smallpox Gone?”

"We still may die of other things, but we will not die of this!" She sings.

"Have either of you seen the gene drive stuff they're working on to try and wipe out the mosquitos? Everyone I know who's qualified to read those papers seems super excited about it."

"It looks very promising, yeah!"

“Yeah! Of course, mosquito nets are still the bread and butter, but I think we can all agree that inventing jam is good.”

She nods. "The AMF does incredible work! But it'd be great if they didn't have to, anymore." Thoughtful face. "Or pivot to something else? That'd probably be more efficient."

"The personnel might pivot, if the org didn't make sense afterwards."

“Oh no. I hope they’d at least change the name. APF or something.”

"Yeah! I was thinking that there's a lot of organizational value in the institution, they might as well rebrand for whoever's next on the list."

Oh, she really likes these two... she wiggles happily.

"Tell me about how you guys met?"

"I pulled her out of a dungeon!"

Huh! But presumably he pulls a lot of people out of dungeons, and... Oh!

 She tilts her head. "Hmmm. How do you handle your backlash, Haru?"

"...is the answer you want 'I talk to people' or 'I put my feet on June's feet while Cricket purrs on me'?"

She giggles. "The former is more what I was thinking of! But also, wait, what, feet? What's her backlash?"