"It's programmed to make up new details for the games. They do start getting repetitive if you play it a lot but I haven't touched it in months." They can customize their weird blobby characters' features from limited combinatorial palettes; Nelen goes for a gold blob with a red topknot and blue eyes and black shoes.

Fere does an almost monochromatic red blob with short black hair. Valan hesitates because there are too many different systems of color meanings in the multiverse and the choice of which one to use is itself a possible avenue by which to communicate subtext and then decides to tiebreak that by going with colors he likes the look of; his blob is blue with mostly green details and white hair.

The first minigame involves trying to catch flowers falling from the sky; certain sequences of caught flowers form into various flower themed accessories and are worth extra points. It's not the sort of game that makes it hard to talk during. "I saw a graph once of how long it took folks from Hazel to pick up various things. Indoor plumbing. Allspeak. Video games. It's a funny looking graph, some are all in from day one and some take years to accept anything besides maybe healing."

"Who were the holdouts?"

"I think they're still trying to figure out what factors affect that besides individual personality, which we can't really detect statistically."

"Huh. Have you tried asking them?"

"That mostly gets us individual personality stuff. Plus guesses, which are worth checking, but they don't seem to have distinguished any from noise yet."

"Noise? What?"

"Uh, that's a term for when something happens at random and you can't figure out what makes it more or less likely, all you can do is notice which times it randomly happened and which times it didn't."

"Huh. Okay."

They are all awarded tokens for catching flowers. A random event gives Valan the option to choose the theme of the next minigame: candy, clouds, or caves.

"Are you supposed to ask people or just pick?" They probably don't have elaborate social maneuvering over influencing the theme-chooser, do they? Doesn't seem like a thing people in the multiverse would do.

"If you happened to know that Fere hated cloud minigames or something you could take that into account but it's your call."

No complicated games-around-games? Bah, when this gets popular in Sesat they'll make up their own. For now he picks clouds because clouds seem awesome.

They now have to jump between various clouds collecting snowflakes and raindrops and avoiding lightning bolts.

"Whoever lives under those clouds must be having some bad weather, huh."

"I guess so!" laughs Nelen.

The front door opens; a woman who looks vaguely like Nelen except a few years younger steps in. "- oh, hello."

"Ah, Fere, Valan, this is my aunt Sasa," says Nelen.

"Fere and Valan! Hi, I'm Sasa Sunflower," says Sasa. "Welcome, what brings you here?"

"Just a social call, we both know Nelen from his work. It's good to meet you."

"They were worried about me because of that book," Nelen explains.

"Oh, I see. Does that fellow even know that they tried just putting Charps down and leaving, in a few places?" She shakes her head and gets herself a cup of water.

"I wouldn't know, I don't even read books."

"Well, what happened was a Bell boiled up out of one of those worlds demanding to know why they were planning to let her die!" says Sasa. "There's no winning with some people."

"The Charps didn't tell her about resurrection?"

"Apparently they stick to math and science for the most part, yeah."

"Huh. Well, it's cool that they keep trying things."