"Uh, I don't think so...? I'm not sure, honestly. ...I mean, uh, okay so there's another—I'm not sure I—sorry. I don't know. I will have enough time to spend with the people I want to become or currently am close to, no matter how many of them there are, but I think that's more making sure that I won't have trouble with all of the extracurriculars and whatnot that I might want and less inserting endless time into my day so long as I'm spending it having quality time with someone.

"...but we could always. You know. Test it? See if time decides to not pass if we get too distracted watching that? Except I'm not entirely sure how it would respond to being tested, hmm. I wish I still had the magic notebook that gave me these powers, I bet she'd know or at least intuit the answer."

"You really do just say words, sometimes. I'm sorry you don't have your appropriately feminine magic notebook for a consult. I would also love to test your timesliding on Kill Six Billion Demons, though I'll have to formulate a decent test. Maybe something about committing to watch the first season, starting late enough we'll be miserable in the morning if we don't get a pass, and leaving it to the dice? Because I can take a miserable morning in the name of science."

"I may or may not sleep wonderfully anyway, fair warning. ...and yes sometimes I do just say words, I hope you find that charming rather an obnoxious."

"I much prefer being gently baffled about your feminine notebook to having no idea she exists! The former lets me potentially reference her to baffle others!"

"She also accepts 'it' pronouns but given a number and breadth of givens that I haven't even yet entirely explained to you it feels much more appropriate to call her 'she'."

"I'd probably feel more comfortable that way too, if she can evince pronoun preferences at all. Unless they were very specifically for 'it'."

"...it would be cool if some people called me 'it' sometime. Huh. That's a gender preference I had not expected."

"Won't be me, but I invite you to say that to Tom."

A sufficient amount of tea has been consumed, and their dessert lies conquered. Edmund stretches. "Should we head towards an inadvisable anime binge, then?"

"No, first you should show me somewhere secluded but nevertheless pleasant to be in so that I can put my old face on and kiss you. Then we can go on an inadvisable anime binge."

"Oh. Yes, I should."

Their waitress collects their plates &c as they leave. Edmund leads Pete, as the sky darkens more and more, to a little garden, and in that garden to an interestingly shaped bit of rosebush, with a little stone bench concealed thereby. He sits and, displaying the skill of pattern recognition, turns to take in the details of a particular white rose.

So Pete takes a moment to himself and...

...nothing happens.

"Um?? I was assured I'd keep my old face???"

"- try putting your makeup on?"

He does.

Nothing happens.

"—oh. Is someone...?" He looks around, trying to find someone with line-of-sight of them.

Edmund squints at one of the covered walkways. "They'd almost have to be right there - we're otherwise enclosed..."

He rises and stalks over.

He returns. "I didn't find anyone... but I wasn't looking when you tried to change, and I didn't look until after the second try. They had a good few seconds to get away, if they were there, and if they saw you suddenly looking alarmed and thought you heard something... try again."

This time, he stares directly at the probable hiding place.

Makeup?

(It's not just makeup but that's a good shorthand anyway.)

Makeup.

"Oh, of course."

"Of course?"

"Mmhm. How much, ah... I'm not sure what the right actions for good pacing and plot development right now are. Or the right things to say. Let's maybe find somewhere even more secluded than this?"

Edmund leads him into a nearby library, then into a single-occupancy men's room on the third floor of said library.

"Less suited for kissing, better suited for spycraft," he mutters, leaning against the sink.

He changes back to "no makeup" on the way. "So I do believe we had a peeping Tom, there."

"Oh, God. Do you think he - knows?"

"Which part? He totally knows I'm a Transfer, now he probably at least suspects that I'm the type of Transfer who can Do Things, but I have no idea what his plot is going to be, yet, we've interacted for twelve cumulative seconds so far."

"You should be more concerned about this."

"I think..." He stops and tries to think about it for a little bit to formulate what he wants to say. "...I think that I want you to tell me more about what you're thinking and feeling."