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?"

Cheerfully, "Petal want sleep!"

And she curls up in her nest for the traditional post-harvest nap.

What good sleep decisions unlike certain human babies. Ari spends this nap filling in her husband on the latest developments and going through her email, then doing a quick network search for any reports of similar phenomena to this one and coming up empty.

Petal wakes up after slightly less than twenty minutes, yawns, nibbles a peanut, and harvests another clover seed to put beside the first.

Ari gets a magnifying glass and checks out what the clover seeds look like under it and shows Petal too.

"Small... big?" she says, entranced. "Smallbig!" She points at the magnifying glass. "Smallbig."

Awww. "Yes! Also known as a magnifying glass.*" She can show Petal more things with it if Petal would like!

*Translator's note: literally "biggerlens".

Petal is SO intrigued by the smallbig and will happily watch Ari smallbig all the things. Eventually, in fact, she grabs it herself and starts flying around the room inspecting objects at random.

(It turns out, meanwhile, that all the harvested objects appear to be ordinary objects of their kinds... but the merged objects, those fancified petals, don't look quite like any real petal Ari has ever heard of. They look like someone took the original petals as inspiration and built a Fancier Version from scratch. And yet, under the scrutinizing eye of the smallbig, they do appear to have living structure just like real petals.)

Awwwww, a little explorer!

Has Petal shed any fur into her bed-box? 

She has not! Nor has she made outputs of any other kind. A very tidy creature.

Smallbig the dandelion head in resin! Smallbig the sunflower head! Smallbig Plasma's head! Smallbig Ari's head! Smallbig this peanut! Smallbig that bookshelf! Smallbig ALL the things!

Would she like to try out the microscope? It's like a smallbig but even more so! She has to be gentle with it and probably shouldn't try to pick it up--it's bigger than Petal is and much heavier--but Ari can put things under it.

"Smallsmallsmallbig!" she says excitedly. She would LOVE to look at things under the smallsmallsmallbig.

Awwwwww.

At some point Ari needs to screw her courage to the sticking-place and take Petal outside. It's just so hard to be sure she won't zoom off into the distance and never be seen again and possibly get eaten by a hawk. Most babies have a lot more time to establish patterns of behavior before they become able to exit stage up. At least it seems pretty likely that Petal will come back inside for food or naps.

"Petal, do you want to go outside and see more things?" She points illustratively at the window.

"Outside?"

She flies over to the window.

"More things!" she says, gazing wide-eyed out at the world. "More more more things!! More things yes!"

"This way!" Ari says, opening the hallway door. The courtyard has more stuff than the balcony and is slightly less tempting to fly away from.

Petal follows Ari by floating slightly above and to the right of her right shoulder.

They pass a kid of maybe fourteen halfway down the stairs.

"Woah, what's that?"

"Recursively nonpublic."

"Garbage. I mean, uh, I'm super curious and frustrated."

"I've heard swearing before, kiddo."

"All my coworkers cuss and I'm trying not to get in the habit. Good skill with your secret stuff."

"Very sensible of you. Goodbye?"

"Goodbye."

They get down the stairs and into the air shaft at the center of the building. It has a red maple tree (currently green), some planters of flowers, and the abandoned chalk drawings of the building's small children.

"Recursively nonpublic!" says Petal. Quite possibly while the kid is still in earshot.

The kids stares back, then shakes his head and moves on.

Ari starts naming the things in the courtyard, including using the flowers to explain what it means for something to be a subtype of something else.

This is so interesting! Also Petal harvests the maple tree and puts the resulting seed on top of Ari's head.