Twintails has sometimes wondered where humans sleep. Aside from 'inside their buildings', that is. She can attest that sleeping on the ground is extremely uncomfortable when you're not surrounded by water cancelling out your weight. And grown humans weigh even more than she does, so it's gotta be worse for them. Since they make so many things, she always figured they must have come up with some way of sleeping more comfortably. She wants to see what a 'bed' is like.

One of the things Twintails hasn't wondered is what they do about bodily waste. It's not something you have to think about in the ocean, or rather it's not something there's any point in thinking about. But now that she is thinking about it, she's wondering what humans do with it, since it's apparently more complicated than just leaving it on the ground someplace out of the way.

"I don't really know what kinds of problems I might have… And I don't think I'll need my own 'kitchen'…" She's been eating privately for nine moons; she's looking forward to not having to do that ever again as much. "I think I'd like to see some rooms please."

Then she'll take Twintails on a tour of the (functionally) randomly generated rooms of the refuge. This is a bedroom. This is a sitting room. This is another bedroom. This is a bathroom. This is a kitchen. This is a dining room. And so on.

These rooms are not laid out in any kind of sensible way, and the she'll clarify that to Twintails, but each individual room makes sense and has a specific function in mind. She explains how each of them would be used, if it was in a normal house. Each room has a coherent style, but practically no two rooms look like they were built by the same civilization. The apparent technology level of those hypothetical civilizations varies widely, but the top end is roughly equivalent to victorian England. Most of the rooms look like they're designed for human or humanoid bodies, but not all. Some of the them have windows, but it's too dark to see outside. Most of the lighting is done by wall-mounted lanterns, glass panes covering a bright, smooth-burning flame.

…Huh. Why do humans do all these things in different rooms, instead of one big room?

She'll ask that later. She doesn't want to get sidetracked again; the Hearthkeeper has been very nice to her, so she doesn't want to waste their time while they're on a mission.

So that's a bed. How do you even make something like that? (She wonders, for the umpteenth time in her life.)

Different rooms have different coloured walls from each other. Some of them even have an artistic pattern to them. That's so neat.

"Can I… pick what my walls look like?"

"In the long term, you could paint your walls to be whatever you want. In the short term, if you want a specific solid color I should be able to get you something pretty close, and if you see a room with wallpaper you like—that's the patterned stuff on the walls—I can put that up in your room. But I can't get you an arbitrary wallpaper design."

Ah. Darn. She had the most wonderful idea, but… Well, maybe she could paint it herself, if she ever gets that good at it. It might even be fun, and if she did a good job she'd feel really proud of herself.

But she might as well make the biggest part easier: "Can you make it the kind of blue that underwater looks like when you're near the surface on a sunny day?"

"Yes."

She smiles. "I think I'd like that, please."

When they get to a room with a window, she points: "Is that a hole in the wall? Where does it go?"

"It's a window. A hole in the wall filled in with glass, which is a transparent solid. In a normal house, it lets light in and lets you see outside. Here, it lets you see one of the gardens, which are spaces with plants and dirt and no roof that kind of pretend they are outside."

Pretend they are outside? That's something she can ask about later.

Well, she knows what plants and dirt are. She's seen enough land plants to think that sounds kind of nice.

"Can my room have a window?"

"Yes. Do you want it to persistently display one location, or should I let the house change what's on the other side of the window from time to time?"

A grin slowly spreads across her face. Getting to see different things without having to travel sounds AWESOME!

"A changing one, please!"

She sees some patterned bedspreads and asks, "Are the bed tops like the walls, where you can make them have a pattern but not an arbitrary one?"

And she sees a room with a sculpture on one of the tables and asks, "Is that art? For decoration? Can I have decorations in my room? Can you make them be a certain kind?"

And also, at some point, "If you make a room for me, and then a few days or quarters or moons later I realize there's something I want in it that I didn't think to ask for in the beginning, will there be a way to get it or make it?"

"Yes, the bedding is like the wallpaper."

"That is art. A sculpture, made by one of my guests a long time ago. There aren't very many that don't already belong to someone, but you can have anything you want from any of these rooms. If you want something specific, you'll have to make it yourself or get someone to make it for you."

"For most things, it won't be very difficult for you to add them to your room later. There are some things that you'd need my help for, and a few where you'd just have to get a new room, but if you do I can move your things easily enough."

Oh, the decorations weren't generated by the Hearthkeeper? Darn, thwarted again!

That last part is good news, though. She doesn't have to worry about whether she knows absolutely everything she might ever want a room to have.

"Okay. I don't think I care too much what the top of my bed looks like, but maybe it would be nice if it was the same colour as the walls."

"I can manage that."

This is so nice. Getting to just… have things. And have at least some of them be the way she wants. She could get used to this.

…Actually, supposedly she can literally get used to this. She's supposedly spending the rest of her life with a host who… cares about how she wants things to be.

That's. A lot.

"…I think that's everything. Maybe I could think of more things if we did this longer, but I'm pretty tired."

"Then I'll find a room for you."

And off they go through the hallways and rooms of the refuge, along some inscrutable path. After a few minutes of walking, several of the doors along their path begin to open of their own accord.

"I will eventually need to explain to you how this place works, and how to navigate it. But that may be an extended conversation, and considering that you may have to wait a day or two to get places on your own, I think it can wait. In the meantime, I can carry you around if you want to go somewhere."

"Thank you. …If I'm somewhere you're not, how do I get your attention?"

"If you call for me, I will hear you. That doesn't mean I hear everything—what you expect to be private will be."

Finally, she comes to a door, opens it all the way, and walks inside. It's a bedroom, with a futon mattress on the floor so Twintails can crawl in and out of it. The walls and comforter are colored aqua. It has two floor-to-ceiling windows with aqua curtains and a door leading to a bathroom with a shower, squat toilet, and low-set sink. There are lanterns on the walls for lighting, each set about a foot and a half off the ground.

"Here you are. We might need to redesign some things later—I wasn't sure exactly what would be comfortable for you to use—but I think it will do for now. Would you like an explanation for how things work?"

✨ Ooooh ✨

She LOVES how big the windows are! She'll be able to see the 'gardens' really well! And she loves that they have coverings the same colour as the walls, so that the 'underwater' theme can still work when she wants it to.

"This is great!" Her few remaining strands of 'hair' are wriggling and undulating and flapping around. "Thank you!"

She saw a bed like this in one of the other rooms during the tour, which had her wondering why there are different bed heights, but that's something she can ask about later.

"I think I need you to explain the bathroom again. Please." This one looks different from the one she saw before, anyway.

Then she'll explain how to turn on the shower and faucet, point out the soap (it's a bar), how to flush the toilet, and how to turn on the bidet.

"I don't actually know if you'll need or want to shower, but if you spend extended periods of time outside of water, it's possible you'll get stinky."

…How, though.

Wow, she's racking up so many questions to ask later. She wishes she could write so she could make sure she doesn't forget them. She needs to find someone who can teach her how to write. …Well, first she needs to find someone who can teach her a language that actually has a writing system.

Anyway, she's pretty sure this question counts as relevant enough to not be wasting the Hearthkeeper's time:

"What is the soap… for."

"It helps remove oily substances that are hard to wash off with water. To use it, you get whatever you want to wash wet, rub the soap on it, then rinse off the suds."

She washes her hands to demonstrate.

Twintails is still confused, but she gathers that the soap serves a cleaning purpose somehow, and that's good enough. "Okay."

…Oh no, she just thought of a problem that really should have occurred to her sooner!

"What if I vent when I'm not close enough to the toilet?" Presumably the point of the toilet is to not soil anything you don't want to get dirty, and she doesn't want to get any of this other stuff dirty. What if she vents while she's asleep and soils the nice bed?! What if she vents while she's outside her room and gets someone else's stuff dirty?!