She'd rather he not handle her instruments, but if he tells her what to do she can retune this one.

They go through a couple iterations of asking her to tighten this string and loosen that one, and eventually arrive at something that's quite close, accounting for differences in the shape of the resonating space (fixable) and the material of the strings (likely less so).

"What are the strings on your violin made of?"

"Gut, like these, but from a different animal and probably differently prepared, though sadly I don't know the details of how."

"Well, hopefully the local kind will work well enough. And the bow?"

"Animal hair, and under a bit more tension than this, but this should do nicely."

"All right! I can have that for you in a few decawakes."

"Excellent, thank you."

Onward to more errands! How furnished was the house they just got; do they need all new beds and chairs and dishes and so forth or did the previous residents leave anything?

The house has about half of its furniture - the occupants who moved took the beds and there are gaps where a chair or console table has been taken. There is still dining furniture in place and the old couches are in the living room and the old nightstands and one dresser remain near where beds once were. The dishes are gone, except for one very large tureen and a kind of ugly serving platter.

That platter is going to end up covered in experiment and Watson probably won't even mind. He'll get them some beds and chairs but hold off on dishes, since they may not end up taking food home very often. He recalls a furniture store over that way . . .

The furniture store has furniture. They have weird bike-drawn vehicles to get the furniture to the house.

Bikes aren't new but this application of them is! It's pretty neat. Also, now they have beds and chairs. Also also, it's lunchtime. He'll get something with that one root vegetable that doesn't have an obvious analogue in Britain, if anywhere nearby has it today.

Yep, he can get it in dumplings fried in butter down the street.

Delicious! Next stop, the nearest apothecary, or wherever one goes for basic reagents here.

There's a medicine dispensary, but he'll have to walk a bit farther to get reagents. They are all of course labeled in local parlance with no reference to the etymology of their English counterparts.

The periodic table is the same here, and he had Miriqua go over their notation for compounds, so if the distributor knows the formal names of things he'll be fine. If not, he may have to just note the location and come back later with Miriqua; much of this stuff is only useful if he's totally certain it is what he thinks it is, and dangerous otherwise.

The distributor does know the formal names.

How good of them. Now unless they happen to have delivery, he'd better bring these bottles home rather than carrying them around any farther than he has to.

This one isn't set up for delivery, although it's possible to engage a prole for delivering things that don't have in-house arrangements; this service is used by people with broken legs and the like.

Holmes does not have a broken leg and planned to spend all day walking around anyway; he'll carry his own stuff.

Then soon his house will have all his reagents in it!

Next thing to look for is a glassblower, for flasks and pipes and so forth, but before he heads out to do that he examines the kitchen. What facilities does it have for making things hotter or colder and keeping them that way?

It has a wood-burning stove with an oven compartment. It does not do particularly precise heats. There are a few zeer on shelves near a large window, though they've dried out and they're empty in the middle at the moment.

In that case, he might also want a Bunsen burner or similar. He sets out in search of one along with the glassblower, contemplating the experiments he plans to start today or tomorrow.

The glassblower is not hard to find and is working on a set of fluted glasses at the moment.