At approximately four in the afternoon, Jon rolled just enough out of the badly kept futon to plop down on the floor and start his very, very late morning routine.
His son would be getting out of school any moment now, which meant he had a little extra time in the day to enjoy a nice cup of coffee on the couch before enlisting the resident alien clown child in continuing their project. Completing an interdimensional warp portal was proving to be far more...time consuming than the first iteration. But they were so close now.

The only thing getting in the way was the increasingly persistent lab calling him in. Apparently Chris was off the table due to an environmental project he was working on.

Jon fed the mice, sprinkling food in all six bowls before making his way downstairs to start his own meal.
The usual, half cooked cup ramen with a sizable slathering of extra spices seemed a perfect choice. But as time would allow it, he went instead for the leftovers of Oliver's tikha pudla.

Jon tossed the reheated meal onto a plate and circled back into the living room to enjoy the moment of peace and quiet before a very loud bleating crashed through the front door along with a trombone, a clown, and Oliver.

"How did-"

BLART

"How did she get-"

BLAAAARRRRT

"Oliver, where did-"

BLAAAAARRRriiiiirrroorrppp

Oliver snatched the trombone out of Dindet's hands and crammed it off into the corner, shooting a glare at her before she could even try to pick it back up.

"She met a band kid today," he answered finally, just as the alien picked it back up to play with again.

"I can make it do really weird stuff!" She giggled, and pressed it up to her face, blowing as hard as possible. It created a terribly cacophonous noise that blorped up with a gurgle as a ginormous bubble rose up from the bell of the horn and popped, scattering little bits of sparkles and confetti on the three of them.

"You sound like a dying goose!" Oliver yelled through her blurts and bleats. She stopped, for one very brief moment and cocked her head.

"What's a goose?"

"Duck but worse," Oliver answered, taking the opportunity of distraction and stealing back the trombone from her. "You can have it back, but only if you play it in the In Between."

Dindet shrugged, allowing him to hand it back to her so she could promptly pop out of this dimension and occupy whatever insatiable need she had to make quite possibly the most god awful noise known to man.

As soon as she left, the boy slumped down on the couch next to his dad, rubbing his eyes with a little groan to relieve the headache he had. "She's been like that all day."

"You get along well though," Jon remarked, taking a bite from his upma and offering one to him.
Oliver obliged, and snagged a decent sized portion for himself before falling back to rest his head on the couch arm and his feet on his dad's lap.

"She doesn't listen to anything I say," he argued, "and if she does, she doesn't understand half of it!"

Oliver sat up. "Today I had to stop her from melting in front of the whole class! And she nearly made me fail English because she could barely read our passage!"

"You're the one that taught her to read."

"That's not the point!" Oliver huffed, dramatically throwing his hands in the air, "the only reason she's any help is cause she got rid of Matt."

"And now she thinks that because she did something nice that she's not..." he trailed off for a bit, electing to roll over and face the television as opposed to his father, "she's still sort of dumb."

"Well," Jon patted his son on the back and lifted his feet so he could get up. "Sucks for you, cause she's a great lab partner."

"Speaking of which," his father followed, stopping to drop his bowl in the sink before heading back to the attic. "AKAN is wanting me to start work back up again, so I'll be home less often. You two can hold down the fort without me, right?"

Oliver responded with a low grumble, and some inaudible negatives about the whole situation, but ultimately let the small slight go.

Dindet's childish approach to just about everything may have been infuriating, like dealing with a toddler. But the worst part of it was dealing with everyone around her.

It didn't matter if she were standing in front of the whole class or on a world freaking stage, the second she got even a bit uncomfortable, she would start changing colors and Oliver sincerely hoped he was the only one who noticed.

***

"Oliver." Dindet hovered over his head, and he peeled open a eye to stare at her and her dopey grin.

"What?"

"Wanna go somewhere really fun?"

"Last time you said that, we almost got killed," he retorted softly, not bothering to sit up. Dindet shook him a bit, with meager effort to get him to at least look at her.

"I promise this time it'll be different- it's like those uh, the lines?" She doodled something in the air, trying to find the right word to say. "The ones on tree slices?"

"Drawings?" he corrected, shaking the hair from his eyes as he sat up.

"Yeah, but when you make them they turn real!" She bounced a little, hoping his moment of contemplation would come to an eventual 'yes'.

Oliver sat there, mulling over the idea. It would be pretty cool to draw something and have it come to life, actually.

"Yeah..alright, we can do that."

Before he even had time to prepare, Dindet tore him off the couch with an excited burst of laughter, dragging him off to some world that looked like a town made of lined journal paper.

He didn't really have much opportunity to admire it though, as he was having quite enough trouble sucking in air- regardless of how much he gasped.

Dindet glanced around for a bit, until she caught a whiff of his panic and whipped around to face him.

"I forgot the lungs!" She squeaked, promptly pressing her hands into his chest and adding back the vital organs.
The kid heaved in a breath of fresh air, and let out a hideous cough, then swiped feebly at the clown as small payback for nearly killing him. Again.

"How....could you....forget....the lungs??!" He bent over, still dragging up a few breaths while he glared at her stupid, confused face.

"You have a lot more organs than me, It's a lot to remember!" She retorted, "pancreas, kidney, other kidney, appendix, liver, heart, intestine, other intestine, weird little sack of DNA-"

"I get it!" Oliver snapped back, but quickly dropped his resentment for one small question. "How many organs do you have?"

"Oh, I only have four!" Dindet folded up the list she had created, and shoved it somewhere inside herself. "Nucleus, matter, digestive vacuole, and contractile vacuole."

"That's just an amoeba," Oliver remarked, taking the pen she created and offered him to start on a picture. He knelt down and started on a giant robot, hoping it would peel off the floor and grow eighty feet tall.

"If you're just a cell, how come you're so big? Amoebas are supposed to be, like, really, really small." He asked, recalling the way she seemed to morph and grow fifty times her usual size- when the occasion called for it.

Dindet's smile fell, and she plopped down on the ground, scribbling little circles on the paper floor in her increasing reluctance to answer.

"Clowns are really big, some of them..I just happen to be bigger than most."

"Is that why you can grow giant?" Oliver finished up on his robot and took a step back to admire it, "how do I get it to come to life?"

He glanced back at her. She was remarkably uninterested in joining his artistic endeavors. Which was strange, because she had a habit of doodling on all of his homework- between his doodles, of course.
Oliver rolled his eyes and poked through the film of her head to get her attention. The clown looked up from her little scribbles over toward his big, flat robot with a small, uncharacteristic sigh.

"Give it a name," she said.

Oliver tapped his finger on his chin, thinking over some choice names for this new robot, then he held out his hand in the most dramatic way he possibly could, and lowered his voice to sound as deep and gravelly as he could manage.

"I name thee Butt Nugget!" He bellowed, trying very hard not to drop the act. "Rise Butt Nugget! And be the Buttiest of Nuggets you can be!"

Oliver lifted his arm up, growing more and more red in the face as he tried to hold back his ridiculous amusement.

The lines on the paper floor peeled up, stacking and multiplying as they began to tower over him, the robot took one giant step toward him, and made a stance that mimicked the power pose he drew him in.

"I AM BUTT NUGGET."

Immediately, the kid buckled up, dropping on the ground with howling laughter at the robot's really stupid name.

"Dindet!!" He screeched, crawling on his hands and knees toward her to get her attention. "Listen! I named him Butt Nugget!"

He leaned on her, and immediately she was swirled up in his unabashed joy.
She dumbly glanced up from her bad art to look at the robot.

"I, BUTT NUGGET, AM YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT." The giant and absurdly serious robot dropped down on one knee and bowed its head toward Oliver, who just as quickly wheezed with another fit of giggles until Dindet too
broke up with the contagious laughter.

"Draw something." Oliver hummed, pestering the clown with his pen. "Draw something too."

Dindet waved him away lightly with a little chuckle and began on a picture herself, though it was small, and she was very, very bad at drawing.

"Baby butt," she stated, watching the novice lines and squiggles peel up from the floor to make what was probably, and supposed to be something.

"What is it?" Oliver poked the thing, letting out another slightly less enthusiastic laugh.

"It's a robot?" Dindet circled her finger around it, as though that would clarify what amounted to a wonky cube with eyes and wheels, and some weird triangular thing sticking out of its back.

"Wow, you're really bad," Oliver remarked, poking the toy with his pen. "Want me to show you how to draw?"

A humble offer, but he kind of liked being able to do something she couldn't.
She nodded, and he took it as cue to start a little tutorial.

"I usually start with shapes, like a circle, or square or something." He bent forward and sketched up a big circle, "then you add lines around it to make a guide for the body, see?"

Oliver stood up, gauging how far out he should go to match the proportions as best he could, then did exactly as he said, drawing out some lines to make the circle more like a stick person.

"After that, you make the arms and body and head and stuff- if you're drawing a person." He glanced over at her, and while she stared intently at the little progress, he recorded a few details, deciding on what to draw exactly.

Once he finished up, he sat back with a triumphant little smile, and gestured for her to judge. Dindet scooted closer, cocking her head.

"What is it?" She said after a solid thirty seconds of trying to figure out what it was, she was at a complete loss as to what he made.

"It's you, dumb." Oliver's brow furrowed, and he pulled himself to his feet, taking her with him so she could see the full picture. "How did you not know that?"

"Well, I don't know what I look like!" She retorted, "I've never seen myself before."

Oliver rolled his eyes, "well, you look like that."

He gestured back at the drawing, and began pointing small things out, "see? Here's your hat, and bowtie, and your big feet, frilly collar thing. I don't know why you're striped, but you are, and if I had colors, I would color it in and you would see how badly you match too."

Dindet shook her head, placing her hands on her hips as though she were ambivalent that he drew her at all. "Is that what a clown looks like?"

"Yes! That's what a clown looks like- It's what you look like!" He threw his hands up, growing more than a little frustrated at her. "Look, if I could do realism, I would, but this is the best I can do, and I think it's really good, okay?"

"I think it's really good too."

Wait, what?

"I really like it." She continued, smiling back at him and catching him completely off guard.

"I mean, it's not perfect- I could have done a few things better." Oliver backtracked, "I sort of messed up on your nose, it's not that big- and the pink circles on your cheeks are a bit lower than they're supposed to be.."

"No," she corrected contently, "I think it's perfect."

***

Dindet brought them back from the newly coined Doodleland, and Oliver immediately went for some long awaited dinner.

He came back from the kitchen with a plate of pizza rolls and promptly plopped down on the couch to flip on some background television.

"Next time, you can take me to the Cornucopia," he suggested half-mindedly, stopping Dindet from heading off to the attic. The alien froze for a moment, tensing up as a bit of her seemed to jerk and wile under her skin.

"No."

Oliver frowned, and looked at her. "Why not?"

"That's where you're from, isn't it?" He hunched forward, sizing up her opposition. "We let you hang around here all the time, so why can't I get to see where your home is?"

Dindet bubbled a bit longer, and shrugged him off with deliberate dismissal. "You wouldn't like it, it's really boring."

"A place full of clowns. Like you. Is boring," Oliver argued. She was making this way harder than it needed to be. It's not fair that he has to deal with her all day long, messing up his house, intruding on his space, and she wouldn't even entertain the idea of taking him to her home dimension?

"I bet you're lying," he said, prodding her in the side until his finger poked through the surface of her skin, "I bet it's just as weird as you and if you just-"

"I said NO!" She barked, turning bright red when she swatted his hand away with a short and wild glare.

Oliver retracted, clamping his mouth shut at her obvious displeasure of the topic and shifted further back in his seat to create some idle distance between them.

"Geeze, forget I asked," he muttered, letting her off to go help his dad. She lingered for a moment though, uncomfortably shifting colors until she looked positively regretful of her outburst.

"I..." she swayed, knotting her fingers up in her jester hat until they tore off and floated in the air around her head.

"Just forget it." Oliver shot a glare at her, which quickly faded when he caught how distraught the subject made her. She stared at him a tad longer, as if she were expecting him to say something else, but he didn't.