John mostly leaves him alone: he does not knock at the Sixth door anymore, he keeps his distance at meals, one time he walks into the bathhouse and the Sixth get to exchange awkward silence with God in a towel. The atmosphere is brittle and tense.

HOWEVER, he cannot resist sharing necromancy and lore tidbits, and sometimes waves Pal over to the table where he's having tea. Pal is always stiffly, formally polite, but sometimes gets distracted long enough to sit and have a look at John's theorems.

John sometimes chooses a nearby table in an agonizingly silent room until Pal caves and shares whatever notes he's working on.

Pal can notice that John spends a substantial amount of time with Dax doing seemingly harmless nerd shit and with Flynn fucking around or making increasingly complex treebark constructs.