"Yep! Ururu, we're making Tempura."

Jinta grabs a container off the shelf with what looks like... a mix of flour and cornstarch, and unscrews the lid on a container of oil.

Ururu just nods, but brings out a container of soup, strips of chicken, eggs, and... seltzer, apparently, which the two busy themself with.

"It shouldn't take much longer; could you tell Tessai it's time for lunch?"

Ooooooh. Tempura. "Sure!"

She heads cheerfully back to Tessai's office, knocking again. "Mr. Tessai, it's lunch time!"

"It's noon already?"

He shakes his head to collect himself, and then glances at the hands of the clock on his wall; it happily confirms her account.

"Thank you for the message. I'll just be a minute while I finish this bit."

She nods and smiles. "Okay!"'

When she gets back to the front, she reports, "He says he'll be just a minute finishing the current bit. And since it's Mr. Tessai and not Mr. Urahara, we can probably believe him, I bet."

"Yeah, never listen to anything Mr. Urahara says about time."

As promised, about a minute later Tessai emerges - just in time to get some of the tempura, miso soup, and rice that the kids are serving.

"Excellent work as usual, you two."

Ururu simply nods quietly rather than verbalize a response.

She sits down and enjoys her own lunch. "This is delicious. Thank you both."

"You know it!"

Once the dishes from lunch are put in the dishwasher and the food eaten or stored, Jinta disappears off somewhere and Ururu reopens the shop for the afternoon.

Sable practices intermittently with her flash cards, unless interrupted by a customer arriving or a someone trying to talk to her.

There is an irregular flow of customers into the shop, all of whom presumably have a rich inner life of their own and none of whom are really able to demonstrate it across a language barrier while acting as customers. A few of them try to ask her questions, but Ururu is able to answer them until she and Jinta swap places at some point mid afternoon and he takes over the task.

"We do stay open later than this, but mostly only because that's occasionally spirit business. If you want, once you handle the sweeping you can step out, but if you want to roll the dice on today being interesting it's fine to stick around."

"Might head back then, just to see if Mr. Tessai has suggestions about where he wants lost teenagers to sleep, or if we can get a tiny bit if today's pay as an advance to buy basic daily living supplies with."

She grabs the broom and gets to sweeping.

When she finishes her cleanup and heads back into the building, Urahara is waiting for her. The first time she sees him, it's like her eyes pass over without seeing them, but then half a second later she double takes and he's clearly visible.

"You've certainly been keeping busy."

Oh, there he is. Waaaait, was he...? Doesn't matter.

"Oh, hi boss. Yeah, well, I got dropped into a shadow war that's older than I am, no point wasting time. Having fun with our phone?"

"Oh yes, it's a fascinating bit of hardware; I even had to make a new etching machine when it turned out my old one wasn't precise enough to imitate the microchip. The only real disappointment was the display; I had hoped they'd catch up more given another 20 years."

He flutters his fan slightly, and then the phone appears in his other hand. The device looks intact, but when he hands it over the casing is recognizably different from how it looked just a few hours ago.

She smiles, a hint of relief flickering through her as she examines the new casing for a moment and then turns it on and inspects the software and the data. "Glad you had a good time. Judging by your comment I take it you believe us a bit more?"

"Oh yes; if the hardware wasn't enough of a sign, the software was incredibly clear about that. You being a ploy of his would imply that he not only has time travel but also decided to warn me about it in advance, in which case I've already lost anyway! That, I believe, leaves us two items on our agenda; first, making sure you don't know of anything time critical that I need to respond to as soon as possible, and second, getting you a gigai!"

He pauses a beat.

"Normally this would be where I tossed you an item to separate you from your body, but I actually need to take a few measurements first to make sure the shape imitation function plays nice with five souls until you're ready for individual bodies long term."

She bounces in place. "Eeeee! Yay!"

Wait there are things to address here.

"Ahem. Um. The version of events I remember has him fake his death when the team busts into Soul Society on a rescue, and I think Ichimaru and Tousen are his collaborators. Also I think he's recruited a whole bunch of arrancar?"

"Oh. Also. How's that even going to work? Will it respond to changes in who's fronting? Or will it try to find a compromise between us? Or something else?"

"It's hard to imagine what his goal could be with recruiting Arrancar; there just aren't that many of them, frankly. I'll have to see if I can figure out what he's up to there. As for the Gigai appearance, that depends on exactly what the internal relationships of your souls expressions are to each other and how similar your self images are. They can handle relatively small changes to self image just fine, but they're designed not to shapeshift freely. Make them too sensitive, and you have people's appearances fluctuating wildly with their mood, and you wouldn't believe the issues we had with dysmorphia and the uncanny valley when I tried letting people design their appearances by hand. Plus, some people are just not meant to be artists."

Urahara shakes his head solemnly.

"If I calibrate things properly, switching who's in front might mean changes to hair style, eye color, and a bit of flex on body shape, but you'll probably end up looking similar to each other; more variations on some kind of central template than unrelated appearances."

She giggles a bit at the artist comment, then tilts her head thoughtfully. "We're not very similar in body, ideally. Different builds and figures. We're a polycule crammed into one brain, not branches off a tree. But we can tighten it up to a narrow set of variations. Hmmm. No point listing it, you won't be coding 'em in, but thinking through it a little gets us cozier with where we'll end up, makes it less of a surprise and might make the process easier. How much flex is there on hair color? Length? Presumably height can't go more than an inch or three, how far can figure stretch?"