Wait, this is the house?  Seems small for a moderately wealthy person.  Maybe it's just her off-house for when Isabella is visiting this region.  Or maybe there's some kind of enormous supply-demand snafu for housing, but Thellim should not be leaping to this conclusion every time something seems off.

"Thank you, shall I try to set up the couch the way I'd predict it to work and you can correct me if I accidentally turn the entire thing inside out?"

"- okay I just checked and you were totally going to turn it inside out. Sort of. It's supposed to be flat now that it's folded out, please leave it flat."

Thellim takes another look at the couch.  "Oh, I just lie on top of it?  It's not supposed to fold back around me to keep me snug?"  She is also having all kinds of weird feelings about having been precogged but she can deal with those later.  "Nobody in your world knows how to design a bed, by the way."

"When you have your own place you can get a hammock or whatever you're imagining. Or, like, a weighted blanket, if that's what you're going for? Anyway, if you're not tired I can show you Civ now."

"Let's go!"

Isabella boots up Civilization V and starts a new game. The settlers have to build cities and defend themselves from their neighbors and collect resources.

Thellim starts taking the sort of early actions that somebody would take in Civilization V if they had never played this game or any game like it before.

Isabella is there to tell her what all the buttons do and give her advice, like that she really does need to build some military units ever even though it's very tempting to focus exclusively on infrastructure, because the neighbors will definitely attack her sooner or later.

What has she done so wrong that her neighbors think her an enemy beyond all negotiation?

"Uh, the barbarians roaming around just want your stuff, I think, and the other state civilizations sometimes you make friends with one and then they get in a fight with a third and want you to help or they'll be mad at you, sometimes they want your land, if you have different ideological commitments that can make things tense, if you denounce them or their allies that does too, if you won't denounce a third one they're mad at... Usually it takes a few things piling up for it to turn into a war but there are lots of things and it happens sooner or later, I've never gotten through a game without building military units although I have heard rumors you can build up to being such a ridiculous powerhouse that nobody challenges you."

"I'll just pretend this is a neat game mechanic, and has nothing at all to do with the way anything actually works in your world or in prehistory, and that will make everything fine because if you keep your map blank the territory can't become real."

"You don't have to play it if you don't like it."

"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.]