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The recognition of who Robert meant by 'she' did not directly come to mind; Mimsy had to consider the significant women he'd associated with, and finally determined that he must have been speaking about Clarice. She managed a sympathetic nod and as comforting a smile as she could produce.

It felt more than a little disingenuous, considering her reaction to her death.

He spoke to her as if she had gotten this too late, and she swallowed past the bitterness in her mouth, telling herself that she would have reacted the same way, had he failed for days to understand a concept she explained to him. She still couldn't stifle a small frown.

"I appreciate the thought, but excess has the potential to distort clarity. One is more than enough, considering its ability to grant understanding. Should you name this one, too?"

She paused. This was not about the flower, even if it had served as a direct line to connect the dots.

"I understand because you are so diligent in offering proof of this fact. A hypothesis needs..well, supporting evidence, and you most definitely provided this. I just needed to process the information to come to the correct conclusion." As she spoke, she swayed slowly back and forth, trying (with great difficulty) to prevent herself from staring at only the flower. This was not about the flower.

A distraction hadn't worked before, but it might this time. It might if it was something that was actually distracting. She'd previously just tried something to small. That was it.

"However, my research has determined that there can be no excess of this variety of evidence." She expectantly tapped her lips with one finger and waited, head tilted towards him.

Should she be awed by her own field of flowers? Was it filled with insects, or just flowers alone? How was that romantic? Was it romantic, or was she misinterpreting that gesture entirely? Mimsy blankly watched him as he tried to work through his own thoughts on the subject, and eventually gave a low-effort shrug.

"No. I find it more meaningful when you have selected just one option." That implied more thought, as every possible answer was narrowed down to one single choice. She wondered if that was what he'd done, or if this was entirely by chance, but was too afraid of her own inadequacy on the subject to ask.

And there were other things to attend to, anyway; he kissed her, just as she'd suggested, and it felt different than those before it. Less cautious, maybe. She clung to him and returned it with every ounce of need she felt (even if it was for different reasons) and persisted through the faint tingling that crept across her skin and inability to properly breathe, as if she couldn't bear to stop. This was quickly becoming her favorite part of this systematic progression, because it was so incredibly simple, and she didn't have to think--

When her Jabberwocky's consistent humming of nonsense songs grew so loud that she could no longer hear her own thoughts among them, she pulled away, her half of the kiss becoming a crooked smile. She was very careful to avoid a loss of logic, to get swept up in this game instead of sticking to the rulebook - neither Svensyl nor the strange sensations she didn't comprehend could be trusted at the moment.

It was only then that she noticed she'd been smudging soil over his neck and cheek, remnants from the hand that she'd pressed into the dirt.

"Oh." She stared down at her filthy palm, blinking at it as if it made no sense to her. "I suppose I should have cleaned this off."

After examining it on either side, and determining her palm had the worst of it, she glanced up at him, smiled, and pressed her hand across his face with a dutiful level of care.

"Oops."

Dirt was a plaything, and always had been. A much younger Mimsy made dirt-and-moss houses for spiders and beetles and spent many nights scrubbing the dirt out of her cuticles after exploring in the forest. The Mimsy of today still used it as a medium to be playful, even if it was significantly different now. The addition of human interaction changed much of that.

It was amusing and nostalgic, like colored clay and fingerpaints were to others - and none of that meant she wanted to share dirt via face-to-face contact. That was an action so bizarre that it didn't even deserve to have a name, in her opinion.

"Oh, what the ********, wait--Robert...!" The look of resignation on her face was the same look one might give a muddy dog who had already shaken itself off on the clean floor. Too late. She scrunched up her nose and closed her eyes and attempted to wait until he got that out of his system.

She was not patient enough for that, as it turned out.

When she finally managed to free one of her arms, she snatched up a fistful of damp soil from a nearby pot. The plantless pot then tipped over and went crashing to the ground near their feet, wasting both ammunition and a perfectly good setup for a seedling. In the meantime, she triumphantly stuffed the soil down his shirt and wiped her hand on his face.

Which was immediately transferred to hers again. She wasn't sure what she had expected to happen there.

Truly, 'what the ********' did not encompass the situation Mimsy had been in before. Not when she found herself in the situation she was in now, some kind of blinded shirt burrito with bee rainboots that wiggled more frantically with each passing moment. Her dignity was slowly fading. This was the fate of a shirt burrito - to be wounded with dirt, then buried beneath it. Or placed upon it and smudged with it, which was close enough.

Svensyl made a noise of confusion, because the situation had miraculously surpassed his variety of silly.

She was not the most delicate and ladylike of shirt burritos, as evidenced by the fact that she was kicking and flailing and should not have been while wearing a skirt and no leggings. When she remembered that, all movements of protest came to a halt, the heel of one boot against his chest, the sole of the other awkwardly on the ground.

One bee smiled up at him, and one bee smiled down at her, though she could certainly not see it.

"All right, all right." She was out of breath from tactical combat, and the rise and fall of her chest was rapid enough to send a few clumps of dirt tumbling back to earth. "I propose a temporary truce to discuss the terms of this dirt conflict." Her muffled proposition of peacetime earned her a mouthful of shirt, which, unsurprisingly, tasted like soil and fabric and salt.

A very disheveled Mimsy did nothing but stare at him while he rescued her from shirtlike containment. She continued to do nothing but stare while dirt rained down on her head, doing a more effective job of 'burying' her than he had with his hands. The staring continued until he tried to get the dirt out of her hair, at which point she gave up, because wordlessly staring then was more effort than it was worth.

"Yes, but most modern warfare is prevented until a moment of perceived necessity." A loose-fitting sweatshirt was, in fact, the worst choice of clothing to have worn today, and she was discovering as much while she tried to pick dirt off of it. "So, perhaps you were the one who started it after all, by proving to me that it was crucial to mar your appearance with dirt."

The idea of being able to 'pull off' a look was a bit beyond her, so she did not comment or make a similar retort, and accepted the kiss as penance for the burrito incident.

She put her hands on his face and smushed his cheeks - an action that he might find familiar from her angle - and gave him a tremendously piteous frown. Her shoulder drooped with exaggerated sympathy as she began to shake her head.

"Aww." A pout. "At least my mind is not filthy."

Because that was what mattered.

The request for her to actually explain something to him impressed Mimsy more than a hydrangea ever could. She stared at her hands as he held them, an absent smile spreading across her lips as she watched his thumb move over them. The smile was better attributed to the thoughts she was lost in, of searching for knowledge and gaining experience and looking at the stars and seeing numbers and information, but her thoughts were not obvious at a glance.

She missed it, and thought that she probably always would, but the moments when she could speak about it almost made her forget any regrets.

"Okay. This is both complicated and important, as a forewarning." A stern, steady stare was directed towards him over her glasses, lingering long enough to ensure he was serious. Well, one way to find out.

With a deep breath, she tugged her dirt-covered sweater over her dirt-covered head and dropped it on the (dirt-covered) ground beside her, because there was very little that could be done to it at this point to soil it further. There was an ill-fitting tanktop beneath it, bearing a kangaroo pocket that drooped with the weight of something inside. She slid a small pen and a pocket moleskine notebook from it, fidgeted anxiously with the pen, then opened the book to a clean page.

She started writing a formula, thought better of it, and stopped. She started on another one, stopped in the middle again, and slowly shook her head. When she stopped writing, the only completed formula was the simplest concept she could think of:



"I will steadily increase the difficulty of the information through physics and aeronautics and human space flight until you would like me to stop. I would prefer to not go beyond a point where you would no longer be listening." The pen tapped the page, leaving scattered dots. "Are you familiar with Newton's laws of motion? This is the third, which covers the concept that all forces exist in pairs, and is the basis for the law of conservation of momentum. The 'F' is for 'force', the 'A' is for 'object A', and the 'B' is for 'object B'. This formula is a fairly literal translation of the law it correlates with: 'to every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction'."

The second half of the law was purposely excluded. She nudged him with her shoulder and smiled.

"Like us. We are opposites, providing equal actions towards one another." Though she'd been busy scribbling nonsense and shapes on the page, she set the pen down and took his hands, held them up, and leaned gently against them. "It works generally like this. I am pushing against your hands, but your hands are also pushing against me. When...um, when you kiss me, I am kissing you."

It looked like that was difficult for her to say, but science took precedence over everything else, and those were terms that she knew he would understand. There was no room for her personal comfort when lack of scientific knowledge was a risk.

"It means that there can be no isolated forces. No force can act alone. In this instance, it means I could not do this without you." Her fingertips were jittery against his hands. "And that the force we apply to each other is equal, despite perceived differences between us."

Truly, Mimsy had set the bar fairly low. If Robert even caught the words that she was saying to him, she reasoned that it would potentially be an improvement from their previous conversations. He would need to work harder from that point to be able to achieve a greater understanding, but it was doable.

So she'd considered where to go from here, had already begun to think of new ways to explain, effectively distracting herself from the actuality of the moment. She could hear him repeating bits and pieces of it back to her, and she nodded slow, distant nods, lost in the thoughts of the intelligent diction of the future.

He told her to wait. She smiled politely.

"There is no need to be discouraged if it does not quite make sense. I can elaborate if necessary, or we can progress onto subjects with less formulaic approaches, or...wait, wait, you...understand?" Her hands clutched his in amazement. Those were words that she never expected to hear from him, and she had been the one to elicit them. This was a new variety of accomplishment, and it felt so exciting that it was difficult to breathe. "Absolutely incredible! Well done! This is a vital turning point in your capability to absorb information! You legitimately grasp th--"

A sound like a hiccup came out instead of words as her voice caught in her throat, and though she tried to clear it, she still spoke soft and strained.

"How long have you...ah...glasses?"

Bad news? Mimsy's grip on his hands loosened, and her brows furrowed with concern. Surely there could be no bad news in a successful experiment with physics. There was no possible scenario that she could imagine where bad news would be involved.

Then the bad news happened. Right before her eyes. He was saying something, but she wasn't listening clearly again; this time, it wasn't an excess of thoughts that caused this problem. It was the lack of any relevant thoughts at all, because she was the one who couldn't understand now.

"No." Her stare was fixated on his hand and the glasses it held, and the word was an immediate retort to the claim that they made him look 'stupid'. Absolutely not. There was a whole list of reasons that she might have rattled off, if she could think clearly, but she couldn't. She added nothing to that argument but stunned silence.

"Put them back on," she gasped, words muffled through the hand that was covering her mouth. The way she stared at him implied that he had done something actually terrible.

In her expert opinion, he had.