Lornell skips along beside.  "How much time is there before you need to sleep?"

"Uh, threeish hours at this point, why?"

"I didn't know when was normal and it seemed sociable to ask as a segue into what activities you want to do now or whether you want me to leave you alone for a bit!"

"Huh... oh hey, do you like card games? I can't get most of my friends to play with me because I'm good at card games and they never win but you can just be as good as me."

"Sure!"

So they can spend the evening playing all of Chirun's favorite card games, including a ferociously overcomplicated trading card game where they are dueling and a less ferociously overcomplicated game where they are building competing zoos with fantasy animals. There are many huge stacks of different cards involved.

Lornell is not quite as good as Chirun at the more complicated ones, to start with, but they improve over the course of playing the same game a few times and can keep equal pace right from the start of the ones that are more like what they're used to.  They remain consistently bad at anything that requires bluffing.

These games do rely on hidden information (what cards you have on hand, mostly) but not bluffing so much.

After somewhat past Chirun's usual bedtime he is ready to pack up the cards and go to sleep.

"May I borrow a book?"

"Sure, go right ahead. Uh, top shelf is stuff I would not normally recommend to fifteen year olds, like, you can look at them if you want, but I don't want to interact with that fact if you do."

"I will avoid it.  Goodnight!"

"Night!" And Chirun retires to his bed.

Lornell does not even glance at the spines on the top shelf.  What's the rest of the selection like?

A fictionalization of the card game duels; Collected Parables of Truth; a bunch of series about sliders and aliens; a few pop history books; a cookbook; a small selection of kids' books on the bottom shelf, perhaps for visiting children.

It seems good to have a better sense of what kind of expectations the people here are going to have about Lornell; they pick up one of the slider books.

These sliders have magic, but completely unlike the copying thing; instead they can do interesting tricks with magnetism and the author has put a lot of thought into all the implications those would have for conflict, industry, and everyday utility. It's also got a romance A-plot.

Neat!  Lorn will keep going through those until Chirun's up, frequently from strenuous positions and occasionally relocating to avoid the cat if that proves necessary.

The cat is not interested in Lorn at all although it does spend some of the night awake.

Good kitty.

At Lorn's casual reading pace they'll probably get through another book and the start of a third before interrupted.  All on the subject of sliders.

In the morning the cat has a job to do! It leaps onto the counter, starts the coffee machine, puts an instant oatmeal in a portion of the coffee machine that will fill it with hot water, wakes Chirun up and receives breakfast for this task, and then settles down to eat while Chirun takes a quick shower.

Huh!  "Good morning," greets Lorn once Chirun seems reasonably unoccupied.

"Morning," yawns Chirun, sitting down in his bathrobe to eat his oatmeal and drink his coffee. "Do you want an oatmeal? Or something?"

Lorn finds the yawn contagious.  "Yes please.  I'll pay you back once I earn some money."

Chirun sticks another oatmeal in the coffee machine. "No big, oatmeal's cheap. I guess it would be nice if you paid rent at some point but no rush."

"I don't expect it to be particularly hard for me to get very rich here."