Denice is in speech therapy. Today is pretty much like any other day. She repeats random syllables back to the therapist, as usual.
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?"
Meanwhile - Heria is sharing with her, updates as she sees or thinks them.
hadn't happened until she'd left the room
and oh, oh hell, if it is -
She casts to the house's ward monitor, runs through it, runs through it again, runs through the actual wards - nothing, nothing, but -
She used to say things to me in my head at work sometimes she sends back to Heria (who knows that) just - out of nothing, if she wanted to. I wouldn't have panicked at it, I didn't, but -
I checked all the wards, there's nothing, but if she wanted to get in and leave nothing enough she could do it -
She doesn't flinch, because that would not be the body language she's holding.
"Ok.
I'm so sorry, I didn't think of this, Shen just reminded me - did you hear someone saying things your head, or something like that?" (Denice doesn't seem to have the actual word - has a word ('telepathy') for something like fictional kinds of mental communication, but not the actual one. Not necessarily strange, that, and documentation's already told them limited magic exposure.)
"It's ok, it wouldn't be your fault, we wouldn't be mad at you, we - " (what and how much does she say...) "we think we know who'd be doing it, and Shen will try very, very hard to get her to stop and never bother you again, we won't give you to her..."
(There's still no messages there's nothing in the wards did she do something to bring this on what did she do how does she fix it -)
"Can you - nod if you heard someone in your head, shake your head if you didn't? If you can't it's alright, we won't be angry with you."