Haru returns. "I'm doing fine on the introversion front, especially since I can leave you two alone with each other some of the time, but thank you for thinking of me," he says, handing the pliers over and tapping his ear.

“Esper senses are gonna be great!”

AUGH RIGHT ESPER EARS

"Okay cool cool glad that's settled! And, uh, sorry for talking about you behind your back like that."

"No harm done."

Okay! No harm done. 

Pliers in hand, she removes the top of the red marker carefully, extracting the ink cartridge. "Time to put this in your hair?"

Giggle. “No, that’s not quite how it works.” She gets a small bowl, puts a little bit of water in it, and starts working to drain the ink out of the cartridge.

"....Ohhhhhh! Ink soup...."

She watches with interest. 

And then once all the ink is out she wants to comb the slightly diluted red ink into the lower halves of four of the seven sections! Alternating which ones do and don’t get colored, obviously.

Ink soup, apply to hair! She'll follow Lucy's instructions carefully. Comb comb comb.

"Do you do this often?"

“Not often. I like my hair the way it is.”

She sighs happily as she combs the red in. "You do have incredible hair."

“Thanks! People sometimes assume I bleach it, if they don’t notice my eyelashes or assume I’m very stupid.”

She actually stops combing for a second while she thinks about it. "... oh wow yeah there would be no way to do that safely! Huh." She resumes combing.

"In their defense, your eyes are so striking I can understand missing your eyelashes for them! In their prosecution, your eyes are... a bigger clue anyways." 

“One time a guy I was talking to insisted that albinism doesn’t actually exist.”

"And... what, that you were cosplaying humanform Bunicula? Some people I want to pin down and inspect under a microscope, like, what was going on there?" 

“Well, you see, albinism can’t exist, because albino plants would immediately die from lack of chlorophyll! And animals evolved from plants.”

She has to put real effort into not giggling so much that she makes a dye-related mistake.

"Oh. Oh wow, that's. That's incredible, actually. He was really trying! It didn't help him, and in fact made things worse, but he was trying! I wonder if he thought I dunno, sickle-cell anemia is fake too, why would plants have that?" 

“Dunno! I never saw him interact with someone with sickle-cell anemia.”

"I suppose it's less visually advertised, so it might not have come up." 

Comb comb comb and they're all done! "Now we let it dry, right?" 

“Right!”

Also, his take on me was that I had very pale blonde hair, and very warm brown eyes, and needed to not be dramatic about it.”

"Warm brown?" She's glad she's done combing because now she is laughing so hard she's shaking. "Warm brown.... your striking warm brown eyes....." 

“In his profoundly limited defense, I think that he would agree that I am allowed to have white hair and red eyes on account of being an esper, and am allowed to be dramatic about that.”

struggling against the fit of giggles, she manages to eke out "But Lucy... how can that be? After all... espers evolved from plants!!" 

“White flowers exist!”