"Perhaps we should have a conversation, for our new friend's sake?"

Aly makes a frustrated noise, not having been provided with such a convenience.

"That'll take hours. And she seemed to have something she wanted to say right now?"

"You can't rush these things."

Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Well, not any more than we already have, at least."

Tappety-tap.

"We've confirmed what we needed to in the initial interview. Let's adjourn for now, let the doctors do their jobs."

The doctor, still standing by the door, beams.

Aly looks doctorward.

"We've already got a room made up for you. And food--you'll have to let us know if anything isn't to your taste, we just took best guess at nutritional balance based on your physiology--and numerous ways to familiarize yourself with new words. Dictionaries very much included."

As she speaks, Edith and Sanjana pass behind her and exit to the hallway.

Aly gets up to follow the doctor.

They have, indeed, provided her with a room!

It has a bed, a desk, a computer, books, some colorful things that are probably toys of some sort?

What are the colorful things named, she can say their names while sounding puzzled.

In lieu of a verbal answer, the doctor will duck down and demonstrate the use of the colorful things.

They light up and make sounds when they get slotted into each other. There's some sort of pattern to this, but the specific correspondence between block-combination and output isn't obvious.

An accompanying 'screen' offers some clues, perhaps? Text scrolls out across it as the blocks shift.

"It's hard to explain," she says. And then she says an inexplicable thing ('coding logic tutorial'). "If you're ever restless but don't feel like leaving your room, though, this is something you could do with your hands?"

Nod. "Dictionary?" She was careful to memorize that one as it went by.

Dictionary!

The doctor points one out and cracks it open.

The big book contains densely packed words organized based on definitions of Large Bold Words (and those words seem to be ordered by first-letter)?

"There's a dictionary on the computer, too, but you'll probably find the book easier at first."

Nod nod.

She starts paging through the dictionary; she doesn't stop to read every word, she doesn't need all the details on what an aardvark is, she just goes through it and pauses to note locations of important words.

The doctor leaves her to her work.

Comes back a minute later with refills for the hangy drippy things ('IV lines?') running into Aly.

"You can use this here to call for me or one of my coworkers." She points to a button on the wall. "If you need help with something, or just want to talk. We don't have any other patients in this wing right now, so someone should be available at any point in the degree."

('Degree' feels intuitively similar to, but not quite the same as, the word for 'day' in her own language)

"Clothes," says Aly, having found the word.

"Oh. Sorry." She opens a closet recessed into the back wall of the chamber. "Here."

There are several sets of clothing. All weirdly-textured, but all in her size.

She thinks she might remember a possessive pronoun. "My clothes?"

The doctor shakes her head.

"The clothes you arrived in were processed while you slept. You might be able to recover some of them at some point, but I'd have to contact the lab at Outpost 5..."

"Processed?"

"We didn't know what you were." The doctor considers using more tact, but tact doesn't work well on people who barely know your language. "Or how you got here. And you didn't have any way to tell us. So we studied everything about you that we could, as thoroughly as we could manage to without hurting you."

"Processed??"

"The specifics would be... difficult to explain, with your current vocabulary?" The doctor looks sort of apologetic and sort of lost and slowly backpedals out of the room. "Maybe another degree, after you've learned some more words?"

Rrrrrgh she could understand if she explained it, she can look up as many words as she has to, insisting on waiting until her expressive vocabulary and her retained vocabulary that she knows even when she isn't looking at it is stupid - but Aly can't say that. She makes a frustrated noise.