"Wow," yawns Deshi, "that's a lot of lapis. How come it's all laid out like that?"

"Zhoop!" she explains.

"...if you want to zhoop it why didn't you? What does that have to do with the layout?"

"...zhoop like that. Not like that, can't zhoop."

"...why can't you zhoop things if they're not in a grid?"

"Doesn't know..."

"Were you waiting for me to wake up so I could see them before you zhooped?"

"Yes!"

"Awww, thank you! I'll take a video, how about -" She sets that up. "Okay, ready!"

And: zhoooooooooop!!

The mass of pebbles contracts together next to the larger pebble, and then the larger pebble joins it as it extends outward again; the whole assembly flashes in and out like a strangely frantic tide a couple more times before settling. There are now two fist-sized, alarmingly beautiful lapis-lazuli-inspired blue rocks on the floor, arranged in a neat triangle with one smaller rock that looks like it might be the stage in between those and the previous larger pebble; the two of them are identical to each other. Petal busies herself rearranging all the stuff on the floor to re-consolidate it all into a single hexgrid again, since all that zhooping has left some gaps.

If Deshi examines the video, she will observe that indeed, intermediate entities in the multi-stage zhooping process appear only as blurry, translucent silhouettes in single frames before being reabsorbed into the next zhoop cycle, confirming Petal's impression that any floatgoats she might create in the process of zhooping herself would not really have time to meaningfully exist.

"Ohhhhh those are so pretty," sighs Deshi. "You worked so hard to make them, too, you've probably been up and down all night - what will you do with them?"

"Doesn't know!" Thoughtful pause. "...make more?"

"...well, sure, you can make as many as you want, I guess, but are they for something? Do they do anything besides being pretty? They're gorgeous but they're nearly as big as you, you can't exactly wear them."

"Pretty rocks!"

"Do you want them near your nest?"

Perplexed burble.

"...do you want them at all or do you mostly just like making them and not having them?"

"...like make rocks. Like zhoop rocks. Like look at rocks?"

"Okay." She picks up the rocks and puts them near the nest. And buffs the fingerprints off them.

Petal adjusts the position of the rocks and begins transfering her whole hexgrid over to nest-adjacent territory.

"- well if you put it all there you'll take over my whole desk - you could go under the bed? And have a booklight so it's not too dark in there -" Deshi digs up a clip light and stashes it and the nest and everything else Petal-related under her bed, which was mostly swept under last week and has only one box of storage under it. "You can turn the booklight on and off like so." Click, click.

Petal boops the booklight. Click click! Click! Happy burble. Cheerfully hexgridding all her items next to her nest (which is not, itself, exactly part of the hexgrid, though it might take a ruler for non-Petal individuals to pick up on that detail).

When she's all set up down there Deshi takes a picture.

Petal has no knowledge that she is being depicted, but luckily she is outrageously adorable 100% of the time. In this particular case she is hovering just above her nest and surveying her tiny kingdom, adorably.

"Look!" says Deshi, turning her phone around.