Denice is in speech therapy. Today is pretty much like any other day. She repeats random syllables back to the therapist, as usual.
"OK. I'm going to get your tablet to show you some meal options. If you find one you like, you can touch it on the screen, and we'll get you that one. Otherwise we'll just get a selection and you can pick from that.
Whatever you pick is alright, we're just as glad to get you whatever it is you might like."
"I'm sorry.
You don't have to believe me, but it's ok, whatever problem there is we won't be upset at you and we'll do our best to help and whatever you need is ok..."
"Ok.
If you'd like me to stay with you, nod or do something like that? And if not I can leave you alone again."
That is not something like nodding, and this is the best she can do with what she has right now.
"Ok. The tablet will show you the meal ideas - you don't have to look at them. You can call us any time."
And she leaves.
She flinches, a little, when it starts, but keeps watching - she's not expecting to learn much from what's on offer and what they end up giving her, but she might learn something, and it might be important.
In what she may or may not find odd, basically all the food items are not going to look familiar to her.
There's familiar types of things - what look like fruits and vegetables, what look like cooked grains. And there's things one probably can't notice it with at this level of detail - bread and soup and and dumplings and such look pretty much like bread and soup dumplings and don't obviously display their ingredients. But the fruits, vegetables, grains, and so on are not going to be anything she's seen before.
That's weird. And alarming. Very alarming, in fact. She'd assumed - it had really seemed to be the case - that books and television were a reliable and relatively uncensored window to the outside world. But if they weren't - if they'd managed to keep something this basic from her, if they'd bothered to keep something this basic from her - then there's very little of what she knows that she can actually trust.
She curls up again. To think about it, supposedly.
Heria, meanwhile, is consulting with Shen again.
If she was guessing from Denice's responses she might have guessed something like 'punished for eating', but that didn't seem to be in the documentation?
Shen double-checks.
(Shen has monitoring going for things like alarming vital sign changes, but just curling up the body position won't send off alerts.)
Nothing in the documentation about being punished for eating, no.
Her heart rate is a little alarming. Breathing's not looking so hot, either. Panic attack, looks like.
She'll come running but not actually go inside - stay outside the door and out of sight. It's guessing and she wishes it wasn't, but Denice has generally seemed more nervous of them than lonely for them and calmed by them.
But if it keeps going on she'll try intervening.
Yeah, it's not going to stop that fast.
She's curled up in the chair by the window, still and quiet but very tense, her breaths quick and ragged.
She comes into the room, carefully.
"Hey,
It's ok, we're not going to hurt you -
Did something happen that hurts you?"
She doesn't move, doesn't respond. Tries to slow her breathing, doesn't get very far on that.
"It's ok to be upset, I'm not going to be mad at you, I only want to try to help..."
She tries to think - the food topic had obviously been fraught - but she was starved, of course it is likely to be, and the details she still doesn't know. But this hadn't happened until she'd left the room...
She looks at the tablet - untouched, still paging through foods. She has it stop that.
"Was there something upsetting on any of the food slides?"