"I'm not going to give up that fast!  I reserve the right to stop playing this game if these amazing computer graphics show me human figures dying on the screen while they beg me to stop and negotiate instead, but that hasn't happened yet."

Thellim also resolves that she will not violate her deontology at any point while playing this game - no attacking anyone who doesn't attack her first, no denouncing factions just because some other faction demands it of her.  It's hardly a deontology if you switch it off just because somebody else tells you something 'isn't real'.  Maybe this extremely suspicious fantasy-scifi world's plot twist will be that the people inside Civ V are real.  She hasn't been through exactly that morally-educational-prank as a child; but she's been through enough morally-educational-pranks to be suspicious, anytime someone saunters up and presents her with an extremely reasonable excuse to switch off her deontology.

(Her Civilization does have zero-sum games, and even army-maneuver games; but they're all played with abstract pieces, not pieces supposedly representing sapients in any way.)

Eventually Isabella wants to go to bed, but Thellim can play Civ longer if she wants to.

This game is so incredibly addictive!

Thellim was super prepared for this world to produce hyperaddictive computer games.  With a fierce, determined expression matched only by her internal pride in her own virtue for executing the skill correctly, she promptly departs for bed the moment she feels tired.  Take that, Earth!  Your uncoordinated economy’s attempt at exploiting Thellim’s brain is no match for the public-good techniques of mental discipline produced by the collective will and prize funding of dath ilan!

Isabella talking in her sleep is not particularly audible from the couchbed, but her alarm clock in the morning is.

Thellim flails her way out of unfinished sleep, her brain taking a moment to identify the distant loud alien sounds as unfamiliar music.  She relaxes once she identifies the sounds; the idiom of music as a gentle but forcible waking signal is familiar to her.

Though it's surprising that she was sleeping so late that Isabella thought an enforced waking signal was better than letting her sleep?  Either Thellim is in an earlier time zone relative to her departure point in dath ilan, or, er, possibly among the effects of hyperaddictive computer games is that they cause you to start feeling tired later than you otherwise would have.

Either way, she will once again not be proving any novel theorems at the frontiers of mathematics over the next few minutes, even leaving aside that Thellim is not in fact a mathematician and can't do that anyways.  Thellim muggily struggles out of bed and starts putting on whatever clothes are to hand.

The music stops. Isabella yawns her way out of her bedroom and into the bathroom, waving sleepily at Thellim.

Thellim queues up at the bathroom once she's dressed, heads in when Isabella's done, and later emerges not that much less blearily than before.  What's the new state of the World Beyond The Bathroom?

Isabella has a bowl of granola! [Hey, you want some of this while we run down what you can do with yourself while I'm at work?]

Thellim is slightly confused about how Isabella ended up needing to wake before the end of her natural sleep cycle for "work" - maybe the start of Isabella's work day varies and isn't controllable relative to her sleep cycle? - but agrees that having this discussion was a good enough reason to wake Thellim before the end of her own sleep cycle.

"Yes please," Thellim says out loud, since she's not eating granola yet.

Isabella pours her a bowl. [I'll be out for ten hours all told. I can check in with you when I have meal breaks, which is often, and when I'm about to leave the office, but ideally you would not interrupt me while I'm working - what you can do is, if you have a problem that doesn't need me right that second, plan firmly to tell me about it like forty-five minutes later, and then I'll have a window to find a good time to respond, since there's some short downtime during work and I spend the whole day in lookahead. Does that make sense?]

[Think so,] Thellim responds while eating granola.  [I have grave issues with the fact that your universe can compute nested smaller versions of itself that way, and what this says about the probability that I'm in the top level at any given time, and what happens to the people inside when a nested version stops computing, and what that all says about what kind of place I materialized in after dying, but I think I mostly should first spend a whole day in front of a Network connection instead of bugging you about it.]

[Yeah, I can leave you the computer with Civ on it and just use my work computer today. I can show you... Wikipedia is probably the highest value single website, and then Google I guess, and that should hold you for a day probably. If you feel up to venturing out shopping for a change of clothes or for a restaurant lunch I can leave you some cash for that, or you can just microwave something out of my freezer when you're next hungry.]

[How dangerous is your world generally, if I try to do something like getting lunch without a psion protecting me?  Without the ability to coordinate, it doesn't seem like it should be able to protect itself against the kind of violence represented in Civ, since protection is a non-excludable good at that scale.  Is there a powerful mage that protects this whole city just to be nice, or...?]

[You are not especially likely to be mugged or attacked in this neighborhood but I suppose it seems likely that we have a higher crime rate than dath ilan. There's a psion who works in crime prevention but stuff is seldom escalated to him if it's anything short of arson or murder, since he's trying to cover a lot of people, so if you were lined up for a more minor crime then just being about to have a check-in with me would be your backup plan there, but it is not generally understood to be a particularly dangerous activity for people to go out and get lunch and go shopping in Manhattan.]

[I think I might be wiser to hide in your apartment of lower-environmental-complexity until I understand this world better.  There's just too much that isn't compressible and hits me in specifically low probability densities of my model, too many places where I'm stupid and not just ignorant.  Places where my model makes a routine strong confident prediction about how a human civilization at this tech level functions, and then yours does something wildly different, often not in a good way from my standpoint.  Your world's language has a shorter word for "genocide" than "cooperation", for example, and I would not have expected that to be the case for humans.  I might be having an easier time in some ways if I'd landed on a visibly alien world with crystal things or pulsating blobs.]

[Sorry for the lack of crystalline entities, I guess. Do you expect to need anything I haven't mentioned?]

[If the local environmental invariants like air oxygenation and thermal range stay within their previous range of variance, I should survive ten hours.  I hope I'm less stupid and bothersome when you come back.  Oh - you should either show me how to operate local microwaves and refrigerators, or trust to my ability to deduce that safely from whatever the Network claims when a weirdly stupid person enters search terms.]

[The refrigerator doesn't require operation, you just open it and then you close it when you're done and it will beep at you if you fail to close it, but fair enough on the microwave.] She demonstrates the microwave once she's put her bowl in the dishwasher, and then shows Thellim how to get to Wikipedia (the current featured article is about a historical painter) and Google (she Googles an arithmetic problem by way of example, and then at semirandom "Guam", to demonstrate the principle).

"Thank you again.  I'll try not to be even more of a bother to you."

"Don't worry too much about it, you're interesting." Isabella collects her cane and her coat and heads out.

Thellim gives her an Earth-wave-goodbye with one hand and a dath ilani handgesture with the other.

All right, step one in the investigation plan, see if Thellim can catch up on any more sleep.  This is going to be cognitively demanding and should be done on maximum available sleep!

All right, step one worked.  Now it's time for THINKING.  If she wants to actually do this correctly instead of turning into Science Maniac Verrez, she should actually list out all the anomalies and questions worth investigating, before she starts; then pick a first target based on its tractability X importance, instead of blindly maximizing one or the other; then try to come up with her own hypothesis before she starts looking at the data, so she knows what it is that she's learning and where her prior theoretical mistakes were.