Ari floats down to the ground!

He feels... bleary. Like he just woke up. Actually woke up, though, which is better than the fake kind. His brain comes back online gradually, as he sips some cocoa provided him by a nice young lady who looks like she's volunteering to fill an educational credit.

Who's the nearest person. That guy. He will walk up to him and ask "excuse me, do you know the man who saved me? James, he said James Lim? I want to send him flowers. Do you know his contact details?"

"Uhh hold on let me see if it's on file..." He checks. "I have an email, not enough for flowers but?"

"Hmm... can I go buy some and leave them for him, maybe?"

"Sure! But do you want the email?"

"Sure!"

He recites the email.

And Ari will go buy some flowers! And a little card inside with his name, phone number, and hotel room. And leave these articles with the nice support person. And go back to his hotel to recover from a mostly pretty awful experience, the last bit of it aside.

A couple of hours later, he gets a text.

Hello! Those flowers were lovely, thank you so much!

you are quite welcome! thank you for saving my life!

if you would like to be thanked more personally you know where to find me, or we could get coffee or beer or something!

I wanted to make sure you were definitely awake before taking you up on any of that

I'm also not totally sure about the professionalism of the situation 

though perhaps that is a subject best thought through in person

coffee, then? i think not beer, you've seen enough of me stupid

and I don't really drink if I can help it, though I pretend to sometimes 

there's a nice and cozy little hole in the wall a couple of blocks from your hotel

He sends a link to the address.

meet you there!

Ari dresses up a bit, with the cowboy shirt he got in Austin and the tighter of his current set of available trousers. Also, a flower behind his ear, he picked up a couple of loose blossoms at the shop. Then he heads down to the cozy hole in the wall.

James is already there and waves him over to a little booth by the wall when he spots Ari.

Wall booth! Ari takes a back-to-the-wall seat happily. (It isn't that he's hypervigilant per se, but there's something about being in a position from which you can see your entire environment.)

"Hello! I hope the dungeon has not been too much trouble since I left it?"

"That dungeon is really only a problem to the victims. There is barely any action when you're not being forced to feel like you're in a dream. It has so many fake cores, though."

"Oh, I hate fake cores. Really I hate the... the bureaucracy? Of having to bring them all back, even though of course none of them are the core... but what if, what if!"

"And if we didn't bring them all back the dungeons would just take that as an excuse to be lazy and in fact leave their real core among them."

"Exactly. Scheißkerle. Not like the kind too new to have clever tricks; those can even be fun."

"I don't have any German so you'll have to forgive me for not understanding your cursing, but I agree with the spirit."

Here is a waitress offering them cute little menus for them to pick their orders from.

"Thank you very much."

Ari accepts his menu and goes looking for sugary treats. "Thank you! -yeah, it means not much of anything anyway, it's just 'shit guy'. We have lots of words for guy who sucks, it's like the forty words for snow. Many Scheißkerle to go around, plus Arschlöcher and Hurensöhne and Kackbratzen and Sackratten too."

"German might be competitive with English in breadth of cursing."