First it bobbles up to its usual height when she releases it, and then when she tries to pick it up, it resists the pull a little and then goes just like a normal pebble. She can even pick it up with her fingers underneath it, if she wants; there's no extra resistance there.

But if she sets it on top of her hand, up it hops to its customary hover height.

And she can't feel any weight or texture on her hand at all? What if she moves her hand slowly sideways? Does the pebble stay fixed relative to her hand or does her hand move out from under the pebble and drop it? She keeps her other hand ready to catch it in case the latter hypothesis is correct.

There might be a weight; there isn't a texture. The pebble, when resting on the air above her hand, holds position relative to her hand, although if she tilts her hand far enough she can tip it off and it will fall—weirdly slowly—toward the ground.

Time to drop the pebble from one hand to the other several times! Does it land flat on its "cushion" without bouncing or does it go below that height and bounce back up or does it land at that height and bounce above it? While it's falling does it accelerate to a low terminal velocity like it has a lot of drag, or does it accelerate more slowly from the beginning like it's subject to lower gravity?

It bounces into its "cushion" slightly, as though the "cushion" is soft; it falls with both more drag and less acceleration than a normal pebble.

Does it feel like anything when it lands in her hand? What if she has one hand under it and gently squashes it with the other?

It doesn't feel like much by itself; when she adds her other hand into the mix, she can feel that, but it's very evenly distributed in a way that makes it hard to even tell where the boundary is between parts of her hand/arm that are getting the force of her gentle squashing transferred into them and parts that aren't.

It's getting to have been nearly twenty minutes and she doesn't want to do anything too aggressive with the pebble, so she inspects it for damage and puts it back in the hex grid.

Petal wakes up, yawns adorably, inspects the hexgrid, and nudges the floating pebble by a nearly imperceptible amount.

That's delightful and now Ari wants to find out if she has the implied level of ability to visually distinguish differences or if she's just sensitive to mergeable hexgrids in particular. "That reminds me of a game one can use to find out how well one can see. Would you like to try it?" she asks while refreshing the snack dishes. Perhaps Petal would like to try a spoonful of peanut butter in addition to her previous favorites.

"Yes try!"

Peanut butter is investigated. She licks it like ice cream, then makes comical muffled noises as she contends with the stickiness issue, then takes much smaller licks next time but seems happy with the outcome.

Her tongue is so small! The noises she makes are so small!

Once that's managed, she pulls up a popular handcomp app called Visiontestgame Green (to distinguish it from all the other visiontestgame apps by different researchers). It has a lot of sections: size estimation, color distinction, ability to identify shapes displayed for only a fraction of a second, etc, all adaptive-difficulty. She turns off the "you may use my data for science" setting so Petal's data doesn't get confusingly integrated into a dataset of humans and starts up the size and distance estimation one. It's a lot of "tap the shape with the greater area" and "tap the longer line" and "tap yes or no for whether this circle could fit through the gap between these two squares" and similar. She can put Petal's answers in for her or put the phone down on the couch and let her try to put in answers with her nose, whatever works.

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.