He catches that one too and pops it on purpose and rolls it up into a squashy ball of goo.

Traveler chuckles and crafts up a squishy little glider out of the same sort of material and sends that his way, too - it won't keep its shape more than a minute but that's fine, it doesn't need to.

Woo! This one the child attempts to throw back to him.

It doesn't have the structural integrity for the return flight at all, but he just giggles and makes something sturdier this time.

The kid is VERY excited to play CATCH with an ALIEN and keeps looking at his parents to make sure they're watching (they are, and the mom is taking video).

The alien's having fun too, both with the game and with showing off different designs and appearances of gliders.

Oh good.

Eventually the child strays closer to him chasing a glider that veered off course and his parents panic and grab him away before he passes within plausible outflung-arm range of the alien.

Traveler flinches back - not when the child gets close to him but in startlement at the parents - right into the blue. He immediately jerks away again: Oh no, he didn't mean to do that, is the blue okay.

"- of course, I'm fine, are you all right -"

Yeah, he's fine, he's not the one who just got touched. -uh. -aliens, right. Well, he's fine, that was fine.

"Okay, good -" The child is disconsolately squishing his accumulated ball of crafting material while his parents trot away with him flopped on his mother's shoulder.

- the kid's going to be all right, right?

"Oh, yes, he'll be fine, he just freaked out his parents. We've told people that children don't trigger the territoriality thing but I suppose they're skittish."

...yeah, that's fair. Uh. (He scoots over on the bench, giving the blue a bit more room.) Is there some usual way of letting everyone know things are fine after something like that?

He's going to send a text to his secretary to go chase them down and tell them everything's okay and maybe buy them dinner or something.

That's good. (He's also a little worried about concerned passerby, and checks to see if there are any still watching.)

A construction worker taking a break is looking at them but this is otherwise not a very crowded area and the construction worker seems reassured by the blue being calm.

That's fine then. He goes back to his crafting, his mood a bit more subdued, and when he gets to the end of his boulder he suggests that he head back home for tonight and visit their researcher again tomorrow.

Okay! He can be helicoptered back out to where they found him.

He pauses there to look for the crafter diplomat - gone - and then for Sun, to ask if she'll hold onto a network-connection to pass along if she sees them before he does.

Sure, she'll do that. Does he know how to make them? The physicists really want to experiment on one.

He does! What do they know about them so far?

They know they transmit messages pretty fast, but it's very interesting if they can do it faster than light and in particular if they can do it faster than a subspace transmission.

Okay, if that's all they want to know then a standard pair will work fine - standard pairs change color and magnetization, color for a visible indication of what's going on and magnetization so they can interact with other machine parts in a dark box, always changing both aspects at the same time. Do they have a preference about the colors? Do they need a machine to change the magnetization on one or both sides?

Any color is fine and they can provide their own magnets but one designed to work with the machine will be convenient!