"Frosting is easy, we've seen people do it, you just steal a thing—"

"Buy a thing."

"—buy a thing and put it on the other thing and there, frosting."

"What thing?"

"Dunno. Some thing. We've seen it."

"Ah, but did you know that you can turn basic ingredients directly into frosting? That way you can pick ratios of sugar and what texture you'd like and if you'd like to add any flavoring. You could try different stuff and see what you like best."

"...hmm. Complicated. We like it, you have a deal!"

"Pleasure working with you." She leans up to kiss Zash's cheek. "I should go give them baking lessons sooner rather than later, it's not like we'll have much of a kitchen in Jeneora, so."

"Have fun with that, love! I'll make myself busy."

"Mhm."

And then it's off to baking lessons for Zazi! Bribery: it can be delicious, actually.

Zash's comparative advantage isn't logistics but that doesn't mean that he can't do logistics. He wants to catch up on what's been happening here, the details of the plans, etc etc, and find out where he can improve on autonomous robots driving vehicles in tunnels when it comes to transporting goods and making sure they arrive at the right place.

And since he can't psychically hide like Nai can, Nai can find him pretty easily. Even though Nai, himself, is still hiding.

"Hey, Nai."

He still has very good hearing, psychic senses or no.

"...hi."

And that seems to be it, he's back to reading logs on the console and checking plans and blueprints.

"Kh—"

"You're the one who's psychically hiding," Zash says before Nai can do more than let that frustrated throat noise out.

"...what?"

"You're frustrated that you can't communicate properly with me using just words but you don't want to become psychically visible because you're worried—anxious, maybe—about how that'll go. You're scared because that conversation before I left didn't go as planned and you don't understand why not and you extra don't understand my reaction and why I abruptly left the way I did. You're afraid of fucking up more in a way that is completely opaque to you. You don't know where we stand and you're afraid to find out. You missed me. You want to spend time with me, you want Yvette and me to be right so that you can just be with us even though you're not sure you're ready for the emotional reckoning this will entail.

"I missed you too, little brother."

"How did you know all that?????" he wails in despair.

"I'm not invisible to you, you can pluck the answer to that question right out of my brain."

"I'm looking at it and I still don't understand."

Fundamentally, it's about knowing someone so well that you can just predict what they're thinking and feeling, that there's a little model of them in your head that matches up to reality.

Okay but he still—Zash can't hear him.

"I know you best of all. I think. And I can't do that."

"Can you even do that to yourself?" It's a rhetorical question, Zash knows that he can't. Nai often doesn't know his own mind and heart even as they think and beat inside him; Zash often knows them better.