"Good enough for me."  Flooooop.  "I guess microwaves also exist."

"You can microwave bready stuff but it comes out kind of gummy, doesn't it? Maybe you have weird microwaves in this timeline which don't do that because they are actually using gamma radiation, or something."

"Man, I dunno.  There are options for not making them cold and hard.  ...Making them not cold and hard, whatever.  Were you singing earlier?"

"We were figuring out whether Christmas carols match. A lot of them do but some do not."

"If you want - if... if it would be correct social, you could sing to me while I wake up a little more?  And that might be.  Better.  Than this."

"It might not work for very long but I can give it a whirl. Uh. Are you going to Scarborough Fair, parsley sage rosemary and thyme..."

Ari tries to be extra snuggly about this.

He can sing two verses and start a third and then he chokes to a halt on the third "parsley".

"- You okay?"

"The social anxiety facet of the thing doesn't like it when I'm repetitive and this applies to song motifs."

"Okay.  Well.  I'm at least a little more awake now.  Did you get enough pancakes?"

"I have room for another pancake."

"Then let's go get pancakes."  It takes a couple of seconds before she actually starts moving.  "...Hup.  - Coffee also, for me.  Maybe for you?  Do we care about there being drugs in your blood anymore if there's an eight year old?"

"I don't know if we care about that. I don't need coffee, it's not like my alertness is the bottleneck on me accomplishing anything today. I don't know how the eight year old will change things but before he got texted about her we were observing that maybe if you sleep later than your uncle does I should stay up late so I won't be the first person awake, crash with you, and then if I'm up before you are I can bother him."

"...Eeeeeeuhhhhh."  Oh, there's batter left over, Ari will just get the griddle hot and make herself a fresh few.

Can she do this while being hugged. "It is understandable not to like this idea but I had to wake him up this morning so I could go to the bathroom and then he wanted to go back to bed for half an hour and it was not great."

Yes.  "I think I would like, literally rather stay up all night and crash at like ten.  Than that."

"That's probably not worth it because then there would be large periods of time where, even without mystery eight year old related errands, I would be supervised by only one awake person. Maybe the eight year old is an early riser, I think kids often are."

"Yeahhhh.  'Works at a summer camp' voice."

"I might be in the exact right mood for certain brands of eight year old, the kind that just want to talk about cartoons and video games all day nonstop. I would bring my whole backlashed self to a conversation about Pokémon right now."

"...Oh, was that an option?"

"Sure, tell me about Pokémon, I'm working from like three episodes of the 2025 anime and the first half of Pokémon Saturn from when I wound up babysitting one of Ren's students."

"I actually know like nothing about Pokémon.  But I do have so many thoughts about the plot of Yours, Weeper and would be happy to tell you about them eight year old style."

"Sure, go right ahead."

Then Ari can dive into how some aspects of the plot are really good, like the character development of the person who comes up with all your upgrades, and the mechanical effects that interacting with their emotional struggles can have on what sort of tools you get - and how for an optimum endgame speedrun (which is down to under seven hours as of a couple months ago) you have to be really manipulative and cruel to them, because this gets them to build you a really incredibly useful gadget, but it fucks you over plotwise in the postgame content - to the point of kind of failing to eat her pancakes.