"Thanks, Ito-sensei!" She smiled big, and tried not to let her expression falter too much as the door clicked shut behind him, leaving the atmosphere in the room considerably heavier.

Turning around, she saw Genma still suspicious and dour-faced, looking ages older than his files had said--eighteen, only about a year older than she was. If he was eighteen, he should smile. She paused for a moment, uncertain--had she done something wrong?--before deciding to just plow ahead.

"You must get a lot of visitors, huh?" The bright grin was back, edging its way from under her serious-face. Flipping through her notebook, she pulled out a sheet of thick paper that she'd slid between the pages, and unfolded it until it was nearly as wide as both of her spread arms. "I hope you don't mind if I put this here," she asked belatedly, already laying it across his blanket-covered knees. She peered at him in her peripheral vision; he just watched her uninterestedly, eyes dull.

"It's a diagram, see," she pointed out enthusiastically, smoothing the folds until it lay flat. Maybe he'd be interested! She would be, if it were her hands. "It's copied big so it's easier to follow, and here, I've written in annotations and references for all the less-common patterns." She shifted proudly--it had taken days to find all the information within the unfamiliar medical texts. And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. "Now I'm going to trace the flow through the seals on your hands, and make sure everything's integrating properly. If you want, I can--"

Looking up and seeing him still stoic and unmoved, her face fell. "You aren't interested at all, are you."