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Oliver dropped the dinosaur on the floor where the blankets were spread out, and sat down next to it.

"I brought something to eat," he said, pulling the suckers out of the pillow case like a kid showing off a good haul of Halloween candy. They all had brightly coloured wrappers, displaying a number of flavours. He set them on the floor next to the blankets, and picked a red one. Soon he was enjoying it with little regard to proper bedtime eating habits.

He pulled out his notebook, but instead of opening it he leaned forward to see what Arorangi was doing.

"Another word search? Does this one have a theme too?"

"But... I brought a pillow!" Oliver protested with wide eyes. Although his argument made little sense, he had not intended on displacing his friend when he agreed to the sleepover. It had nothing to do with whether Arorangi was a good friend or not, or whether Oliver wanted the bed, he only really cared about the company.

He scooted around so he could see the word search better. "It's okay, I don't want to- Look, is that one tapir? Is that how you spell tapir?"

With a couple crunches the sucker was gone, and quickly replaced by one that was grape-flavoured.

Oliver let out a sound that resembled both a snort and a frustrated sigh. Then he threw his pillow up onto the bed in resignation. Arguments with Arorangi were always very short ones.

"Nexth thime, I'll sweep on the fwoor, okay?" He asserted, the words slurred slightly by the sucker in his mouth.

The boy looked away from the crossword to grab the dinosaur plushie, and then root around in the small pile of candy. "Tootsie roll pop?" He asked, thankfully taking his own sucker out of his mouth before speaking. The lollipop in question was held out to Arorangi. "I really like these ones. I thought I had extra, but I must have eaten most of them already..."

For a second he looked at the crossword, and then a thought occurred to him. "Do you think Zac has ever seen a tuatara?"

Oliver looked speculative, wondering whether he could actually ask Zac himself. It was a bit of an odd question.

"Look there, titmouse." He broke away from tuatara-related thoughts as he spotted another word, and pointed at it on the page. "I don't know why they call it that, since it's really a bird..."

Despite his attempts to merely lick a sucker to completion, his teeth started to chip away at the night's second piece of candy. He mourned the inability to keep candy on hand far more than he was concerned about his sugar intake. Giving in to the urge, Oliver crunched the sucker in his mouth and soon replaced it with another.

Instead of continuing to back-seat... word search, Oliver opened his notebook to a page with a half-finished diagram of a small horned skull, with a vague resemblance to some of the dinosaurs he often drew. Up in one corner was a hastily scribbled profile of what had to be the living creature.

Oliver would have been super embarrassed if Arorangi had been laughing at the 'tit' in the word titmouse. It wasn't as bad as the 'blue-footed booby', despite being officially an adult Oliver was still shy about immature things like that. instead he smiled.

"I know, right? You would think the scientist who discovered it would have been able to call it something more appropriate." He smiled, and then followed his friend's glance towards the scribble.

Whoops, he might have been able to draw bones like a pro, but the rest of his skills were not well developed. The little thing up in the corner of the page was barely anything. "I-it's a koobo, um... it's supposed to be a koobo... One of the hunters in the minipet field saw one of my drawings the other day and asked if I could do something for him."

The boy stifled a yawn. "It's easier to draw something when you know where the zygomatic structures are..." As if to emphasize, he drew a half circle around the lower half of the eye, which then turned and arched towards the back of the figure's head. "The curve it makes when it joins the maxilla makes the skulls look like they are smiling." Another smooth line was added under the first, which turned downward immediately under the eye, and terminated in roughly squiggled molars.

"It's, um, like a little fluffy dragon thing, yeah!" Oliver smiled. He hadn't gotten to work with any during his own experience, but they reminded him a bit of dinosaurs and that clearly made anything good. A little fluffy... but then again, there was a species of T-rex that had dinofluff covering most of it's body. The science involved in archaeology was pretty cool these days.

Since pulling out his notebook Oliver had to juggle between holding it level in his lap, holding the pencil to draw, and holding the stick of his sucker when he spoke. It meant that as he filled in some little details on the larger skull diagram, his coherency began to suffer.

"The thygomatic thtructureth are cheekboneth! Itth not only the thygomatic bone itthelf, but all theeth boneth here are altho parth of the thygomatic arth." The boy indicated which area he was talking about on his diagram, but the words themselves might have been a mystery. At least until he put the pencil aside and removed the sucker from his mouth.

"I-it's nothing big, anyone could learn this stuff." Oliver might have responded modestly, but he seemed a little bit happier for having received the compliment.

A pensive look crossed the boy's face. That was the part he didn't like about minipet duty, knowing eventually they would meet their end. Not only that, but not all of the Life hunters were as gentle as he was, or as considerate of the little lives they had within their hands. To some people they were merely small monsters.

"I bet you would enjoy taking them for walks though!" Oliver chirped, looking up with a smile. "Most of them need out of their cages for a bit every day so they don't get all fat and unhealthy. I could show you them sometime."

The compliments were no longer things the kid could casually respond to, and a blush started forming on his cheeks. Although he had skipped a year in school without a struggle, it was only during his time on the island that his natural intelligence had been put to use. Usually it just got lost amongst the anxiety and shyness.

"I-I suppose they put me in the right division then," he stammered, scratching at the scar across his nose. He was too embarrassed to look up from his diagram. "I haven't done much work with minipets lately though, most of my shifts got transferred to a different project. Learning about brains is harder than learning about bones..."