As Fin unfolded himself from within Rowan’s car he savored both the freedom from those cramped quarters and the mercifully cold air that greeted the bare skin of his arms. The frogs might be hiding for the winter, but he would take the kind of sticky cold over the very sticky heat of that torturous summer. He suspected that there were only so many times he could get caught in the cold boxes of the “convenience stores” before some overzealous shopkeep called someone with more enforceable authority to remove him. His musings accompanied him past the gates and in the direction of where Yaboi and Izusa said they were to meet. He didn’t exactly know who they were looking for in terms of appearance but at the sight of a pair who looked like likely candidates he raised a long arm and waved. If they were the wrong people, well they could deal with the unsolicited greeting.
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Rowan was grateful to Cardinal for the opportunity to bring her less than healthy roommate along for a healthy activity, not to mention her own excitement at the prospect of seeing the animals. It had been a long time since she’d been to a zoo, so it was a nice excuse to go. Fin’s insistence upon leaving in a t-shirt was unsurprising, and she had to remind herself both that he was far more adapted to the cold than the average human and that despite her protective feelings toward the alien, she was not in fact his mother. She’d been called a “mom friend” more than once and the fact that he was more than forty times older than her did very little to deter her from fussing over him. Scanning the crowd she spotted the others around the same time Fin did and walked toward them, hoping they’d guessed correctly.
