The Puchuus settle on a disused kitchen cabinet on both ends, for semi-permanent portal locations. They are happy with just the chicago-portal-just-in-case for now.

Sporty Lime comes back and nods at him, looking a bit down, but doesn't say anything. She starts making a sandwich with cold cuts instead.

Oh gods, he's so bad at this. What's he supposed to say? 'I'm sorry what I said upset you' sounds patronizing. 'Do you want to figure out what we actually believe' sounds - dismissive of her reaction earlier.

Maybe he'll just let her be. She didn't say anything, so probably she doesn't want to talk to him? He's just in her kitchen. But then shouldn't he leave, since he's done here?

He looks at Jasper mutely, hoping for advice.

"Want a sandwich while I'm making one anyway...?" She asks tentatively. "We don't have to talk about upsetting stuff. Or at all. If you don't want to."

"Yes, thank you. And - I was the one upsetting you! I'm sorry I did, and I won't talk about - all that again if you don't want me to. I, um, I do think the things I know aren't the ones that - people used to hurt you with, so maybe it will help to clarify that..." He's blushing a little.

"Or we can talk about other things, what would you like to talk about?"

"It's a hard topic. I don't really want to get into it again right now. I leave that stuff mostly to the Puchuu. D'you have video games where you're from, portal wizard?"

"I don't recognize the name, what are they?"

A smile. "Hard to explain. Interactive games- Ones that can be a lot more complicated than a board and dice, for example. I'll show you Portal, where I got some of my ideas from, later."

He'll probably have trouble with the controls, though. New gamers often do, and some people just don't like games that much.

"There's a... game about portals? I'd like to see it, thank you!" That actually sounds like it might be a great idea, and not just a conversational diversion. 

"Jasper, is there anything else you'd like me to do for you, while we wait for the boat to be prepared?" If there isn't, he'll spend his time making planar portals, maybe he can work out something about the places he can get to even if he can't open a portal to a particular place on demand. He'd need the safety ward for that, though.

[We don't need anything else at the moment. If you want clean and dry clothes, or to use the washing machines at the Champaign house, or to use the toilet and baths, maybe we should show you now. We might suddenly be busy later.]

"All right. I do have the laundry spell, though, I don't need to impose on your washing machines."

Jasper shows Ahmose various modern amenities. 

Not long after that, Sporty Lime is done with her sandwich and shouts for him through the pinhole cabinet portal. "Want to go to the game room and try Portal?" At some point, she untransformed, and now has more ordinary brunette hair in a messy pile, and is wearing baggy sweatpants and a long-sleeved hoodie. 

"Yes! I'm coming!" Ahmose is excited to see what kind of games people play with portals when they don't actually have portals.

"Yay! Hmm... Maybe you watch at first and learn to play later? I know it's hard at first."

The game room has a big TV and a bunch of couches and armchairs. She sets up an XBox 360, controller in hand, and the Portal 2 title screen is soon appearing on the TV.

"You control the game with these," she says, waving a controller. "The box is a computer, they do all sorts of things involving numbers and displays..."

There's an illusion in something like a picture frame, and an artifact with buttons that lets you manipulate it. Understanding that, intellectually, is the easy part; he's not going to ask about the numbers for now.

Getting to anywhere near Sporty Lime's level of fluency controlling the device is much, much harder, but he's used to magic devices taking a long time to master. This one seems to be a combined cunning / dexterity one, which makes it a purely dexterity-gated one as far as he's concerned.

What does the game-illusion show?

She has a Portal Gun that spits out blue and orange ends of a portal. They don't have to be on the same orientation, but they have to stick to walls, not free-float- And they're always the same size, and only white walls.

The challenges involve things like getting around beams of radiant damage, or redirecting them into targets in order to open a locked door, or moving spheres and cubes and beams around through creative portal use. They're not nearly as flexible as his portals, aside from the bits where they can be different orientations (leaving a cube bouncing up and down in two side by side portals, once), and how you can move one end independently of the other.

Also, there's a disembodied voice sarcastically threatening, joking, or insulting with the player as she progresses. The production value of the illusion is pretty good. The music, too.

"It's all a big puzzle, really. Do you want to try? There's a two-player mode, I never did much of it."

Sure, he'll try it. Does it reward being slow and careful, to negate his dexterity penalty?

"What is this - based on? My portals aren't like that at all. These seem more like a single permanent portal whose ends can be moved around."

Two player mode has a reddish and violet portal for the 2nd player. Right now as they're going through the intro scene, he has space to learn how to move around and look around on his half of the screen.

"It's basically completely made up?"

Huh. 

...this game is weird. Ahmose doesn't think he really gets it. He'll diligently keep trying, though.

To be fair, he's lacking a lot of context.

To get to the end of the two-player levels, they have to work together to chain portals around! Blue (her) goes here and opens the way for Red (him), and then they have to use four portals at once to move a cube, and so on. Sporty Lime is a little bossy about it.

"It's okay if you're not having fun though. Not all games are for everyone, and I have to admit this isn't necessarily the best first ever video game."

"It's mostly puzzling," he admits. "Every detail I see just raises more questions, because why - why everything? The cubes, the portal 'gun', that voice, the weird way the rooms are drawn, everything in them that you can't really interact with and I guess is all there to make you feel some way, but I don't know how to feel because it's from an alien culture to me." It doesn't look at all like the houses he's seen so far, either.

"Video games are weird as heck, yeah... That's part of the fun. They don't so much have stuff we see everyday. They have stories, the weird and strange. Science fiction, other peoples' lives... Magic. Weird to say that video game magic feels more magical than mine sometimes, but it's the novelty, really. We could try Super Mario Galaxy 2? Mario games are supposed to be really good for beginners. Just as absurd though, if not more."

Other people's lives and magic are weird and strange? Illusions of magic feel more real than the real thing? He is clearly missing her point. This feels like a conversation meant for someone more splendid than him, which is entirely unsurprising given the set-up.

Ahmose knows intellectually that Sporty Lime is a mage, and that her society might not have a prohibition on men and women being alone anyway. It's still his first time alone with a (beautiful) woman. Luckily he's supposed to look at the illusion and only listen to her; if he had to look at her his conversation might not stay very coherent. He focuses diligently on the game, because it is wonderfully distracting and also he doesn't want to deliberately be bad at it since she's bothering to show it to him (for unclear reasons).

"Um, whatever you think best?" he offers.

"...Ahuh. It's fine if you're not into my hobbies."

"I don't think I understand it enough to know if I would like it if I spent more time on it," he says truthfully and hopefully diplomatically. 

"...I can't spend a lot of time on it, I'll need to get back to working on my portals eventually. Sorry."

"No worries. Too much new stuff all at once is... A nightmare, so don't let me keep you? Uh..."

She shifts to look at him. Then says with surprise and a bit of embarrassment, "Oh. You- Lots of places have rules about chaperones, I didn't even think-"