Petal is so excited to do puzzles with her nose. She might need some help interpreting some of them, but she is very enthusiastic about this interesting new game.

Also, it transpires that she can see and, with some difficulty, count individual pixels. She only resorts to this when a particular puzzle is otherwise very hard to gauge, because sometimes she loses count and has to start over, but when things get really close she starts muttering "one two three four five six..." and eventually triumphantly declares "...twenty-nine thirty thirty-one small square!" and boops the correct answer.

That's so good! Ari is so impressed! Petal gets a 99th percentile score and the screen plays a few seconds of little animated rainbow fireworks.

Happy bounces!!!

"Tomorrow you will meet a new friend," says Ari. "My husband, Kalen, will come here."

"New friend!" she says excitedly. "What's-that husband?"

"He's my very best friend. We do a lot of things together. He's very excited to meet you and be your friend too."

Bounce bounce. "Meet friend, do thing!"

"Oh good. At some point we're would like to introduce you to more people, and a lot of them will want to ask you a lot of questions and watch you merge things and take the merged things away for a while to look at them. But if you don't want that, we can keep you secret so you only talk to us, or you can meet other people and tell them no about things you don't want them to do. Does that make sense?"

Petal echoes several of these phrases in a quiet mutter. "Meet people... people ask question... people watch merge thing..." Eventually she concludes, "Yes, sense."

"Does that sound like something you want? It will happen if you want it and not if you don't." She mentally games out both options. If Petal wants to stay secret and can't be left home alone with several plates of food and the ability to call her, she might need to take a leave from the school, or at least go part-time; Kalen is happy to help but his job is much harder to replace between elections so she's the logical one to take the leave. If Petal wants to go public she'll still want to take time off work to interface with all the scientists and newspeople. Her grandchild Athie works in tech support partially because it has a lot of downtime they can spend knitting; they can probably be bribed with money and/or fudge bars to work from her apartment a couple days a week and be emergency backup against Petal deciding to use the stove.

Petal scrunches up her tiny face and thinks very hard and then says, summoning all her still-clumsy ability to use language, "Meet husband. Next find out meet people."

"That is a very good plan," smiles Ari.

"Good plan!" she agrees.

If uninterrupted by exciting things like novel foods and puzzle games, she will be content to keep up her pattern of napping and harvesting and napping some more until the arrival of Friend Husband.

Ari will need to sleep for several hours in between; she muses that lots of little naps would have some good points regarding scheduling but that the overhead of getting up and going to bed is best done as rarely as possible. 

The next day: Kalen!

"Hello! So, where's this new friend I've heard so much about?" he asks, hanging his travelling-coat by the door.

"Welcome back!" Ari says, giving him a hug and a hairpet. "She's taking a nap but she'll be up any minute now."

(Indeed, her little nest is emitting the tiniest snores.)

"Oh, she's adorable! The pictures were an adequate warning but they did not include sound."

"She's a total sweetheart. So how was your trip?" 

"It was good! The Sycamore City rep showed me some very interesting usage statistics that totally changed my guess about the ideal order for electrifying our rail links."

A tiny yawn issues forth from the nest, and a sleepy creature emerges, levitating up to Ari's shoulder height to peer curiously at the new arrival. "Friend husband yes?" she inquires.

"Yes! Hello friend Petal, I am Kalen. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Bounce bounce. "Happy meet friend Kalen!"

"She's picking up Convergentlanguage so fast! I wouldn't have guessed she hatched yesterday."

"She is! I'm so proud*."

*Translator's note: Convergentlanguage has several words that could translate as "proud"; this one refers to admiration for an intellectual accomplishment in which the speaker participated only peripherally.