"Sure," Danika agreed. Her face showed her curiosity as he crawled over and moved the bag, before hurrying back to the pan and turning the latest crepe.

He watched her pull out the clothes she had chosen and scoot into the bathroom to change. The door closed firmly behind her, and he smiled a little. In some ways she was quite forward with him, like telling him to keep her key, but in other ways she showed that there were definite lines that he wasn't allowed to cross yet.

He glanced at the bag that held the futon. When he'd seen the street vendor's display he'd immediately stopped. It seemed so perfect for her that he was a little afraid that she wouldn't actually like it. It had also been kind of expensive, but he'd never seen ones like it anywhere else and suspected that they were a.s.sembled by hand.

The dragon futon had the usual large rectangles of the foldable kind as the basis of its design. But this one had the image of a slightly blocky dragon face and body printed on the center square. The top and bottom squares had wings on them, and then there was a fourth "square" divided into two triangles, that could completely detach or velcro to either end, which had double sided blue wingtips on them.

None of the edges of the pads were completely straight, they had gentle contours that matched the edges of the ill.u.s.trations. One side of the three main pads had a green dragon whose wings shaded from turquoise into blue, and the other side had a red dragon whose wings shaded into purple and then blue, so that the wingtip pieces matched either side.

She got dressed so quickly that he knew she had skipped bathing, and he was still cooking the last of the batter when she came out of the bathroom. She looked at the last crepe with approval and complimented him, "That one is very pretty."

s.h.i.+nichi looked at it and then agreed laughingly, "I guess? It's at least mostly round?"

After they a.s.sembled their crepes with toppings of cream and berries, Danika commented happily, "Dessert for breakfast is nice!"

"Dessert?" s.h.i.+nichi asked after he finished his first bite.

"It's all sweets and cream, not the usual savory breakfast toppings," she pointed out. "But don't worry, I love eating them like this, and I usually eat some kind of fruit for breakfast."

"I know," he teased. "And ZipZing lives off of fruit and cream candies."

She giggled, and then agreed, "I guess I can't argue that, except to add that I also have caramels? Or maybe I've run out again."

He laughed, and they ate pretty quickly. As soon as they finished she looked questioningly at the big bag. s.h.i.+nichi grinned at her and said, "If you like it, I thought it could hang on the wall behind the VR-medi pod when I'm not here. It's the futon you said I could bring over."

"Okay, why does it matter if I like it or not?" she questioned.

Instead of explaining he crawled over and pulled the bag off of it and then unfolded it to the green side and attached the wingtips.

"Wow! That's so cool!" she exclaimed. He breathed a sigh of relief and grinned at her as she insisted, "I totally want you to hang it up! I've never seen anything like it? Was it a custom order?" She didn't give him a chance to answer before asking a little doubtfully, "Will it be comfortable? It kind of looks like it was made as a decoration?"

s.h.i.+nichi laughed again. "I don't know since I haven't slept on it, but it has memory foam over a firm core that seems pretty standard? It's not one of those super light toy ones. I didn't order it, but I think they are handcrafted. I picked it up from a street vendor who had a variety of them in different themes."

He pulled out the hooks that he'd brought, for the little hanging loops the vendor had added for him on the spot, and asked, "How high should I put it? Should I leave it low enough that you can get it down?"

"If it's just hanging from those two hooks I'll be able to get it down no matter how high it is, I'll just have trouble hanging it back up?" Danika pointed out reasonably.

She scooted back to sit beside the table while he held it up against the wall. After a bit she decided, "Just put it as high up as you can. The pod will still cover some of it when it's open, but there's nothing you can do about that."

"OK," he agreed. He tried to be careful putting up the hooks, so that they wouldn't pull out and drop it when he wasn't around to pick it up. It was a little embarra.s.sing to have to read the directions so carefully in front of her, but he wanted to do a good job.

When she moved to start cleaning up the small disaster area he'd created with breakfast, he told her, "You don't need to do that, I can clean up before I go."

Danika stopped and gazed at him with an expression he couldn't immediately identify, which made him stop what he was doing. After a long moment she said firmly, "s.h.i.+nichi, you don't have to try so hard. You don't have to prove that you can do ordinary domestic stuff too."

He moved the futon to one side and crawled back to her before answering. He reached out and took her hands and took a deep breath. "Yes. I do," he insisted. "I need you to know that I'm just ordinary."

She gazed at his expression worriedly before telling him, "I think I don't understand what you're trying to tell me?"

He thought for a moment and then tried to explain. "Everyone, I mean, I know that you're different," her expression turned so wary that he stopped. "Danika, I really like you, but everyone else that I've, that… They all thought it'd be like a dream or a fantasy. Some of them even said things like, 'it's a dream I'll remember forever!' I don't, I'm not," he wasn't sure how to continue.

She squeezed his hands and said simply, "I know you're real." He clung to her. She gave him a wry grin and added, "But I can understand why people would tell you you're like a dream. And not just because of your career s.h.i.+nichi."

"Oh? Then why?" he asked doubtfully.

She grinned at him and said, "You cooked me breakfast and now you're insisting that I let you clean up? I mean, in a way, I love it. It's cute, you're really cool, but… I think you'll get tired if you try to do everything? Like those career women who complain about the world expecting them to be both successful and perfect housewives at the same time."

"Oh," he replied. He couldn't even really argue. His life had felt really hectic ever since they'd started Underneath. But he still protested, "But when I have time I want to do these normal things with you."

"Then do them with me," she agreed laughingly. "Last time I cooked and you cleaned up, this time you cooked so I'll clean up. Getting that dragon to hang straight looks like it's going to be difficult enough and I've got almost half an hour left before I need to log in."

"Ok," he agreed happily. They clung to each other's hands with silly grins on their faces for a long minute before separating to do their small ordinary ch.o.r.es.