"I--Ari--get more things Petal did not make? Experiment." She realizes she just defined 'experiment' before the concept of preferences or 'could', which is very the sort of thing she would do, and this is amusing.

"Experiment?" she echoes curiously.

"Do a thing and see what it does!"

"Do thing!" she says supportively.

Plasma interrupts by flying down and saying "Why do things disappear? Give sunflower seed?"

"I don't know! I'm trying to find out!" Ari says with a laugh, forking over some sunflower seeds.

"I will go and I will come back," she adds to both of them and leaves the apartment for a few minutes.

Petal goes to sleep.

Plasma eats one of the sunflower seeds off the floor and then goes and hangs upside down from a rope and chews on his cuttlebone.

Ari comes back in with several dandelions in each of yellow and puff, and a couple of clover. She observes the missing sunflower seed and says "Plasma, have you been making mischief?"

"Yes."

"Don't eat food on the floor, okay?"

"No!"

"I mean it, Plasma! It could make you sick. Don't eat food off the floor."

"Ooooookay."

"That's a good birdie." Scritch scritch pet.

"Good birdie!"

"Yes you are." 

She sets down the flowers in a little hex grid of their own, which contiguous blocks of each type, cancels the cleaners and tells the Zendo team that weekend practice at her house isn't happening this quarter-segment, and gets herself some lunch while she waits for Petal to wake up.

It's very convenient that she doesn't have work today or tomorrow, and she really hopes that by the day after she'll be confident that Petal can be alone in the apartment with Plasma all day without either of them having any problems. But hope is not a strategy so she orders a webcam for delivery by tomorrow.

Petal wakes up, yawns the teeniest yawn, nibbles a peanut, and inspects Ari's hexgrid.

"Merge no," she diagnoses. "Make yes?"

"Yes, please do."

She harvests a clover and obtains thereby an itty-bitty clover seed.

That's a bit inconvenient but makes a lot of sense given that the dandelion is one seed and not the whole puffball. She puts it in the hexgrid.

Petal meeps in mild surprise when Ari takes the clover seed, and follows it to its place in the hexgrid, and nudges it slightly to get it into better alignment.

"Sorry. Only Petal put seeds, not Ari?"

"Petal make seed, Petal put seed."

"Yes, okay." She is getting reminded of her manners by a baby alien. What a wonderful day to be alive. She spends a while extensionally defining "want" (Petal wants to put things, Plasma wants to eat sunflower seeds, etc) and then asks "What does Petal want to do next?"