On the bright side, she can mostly without much difficulty figure out what the items are. The only ones she doesn't already have on her are the chemical packs; these ones are less than perfectly useful to her, it's fairly intuitive what they are but, without ripping them open to guess at the actual chemical contents, she can't tell for sure which is which. Probably the blue one is cold and the red one is hot? She's not sure how culturally contingent color-associations like that are, though. 

Either way, she doesn't need them right now. She puts everything away. 

"We should also look for a sink or bathroom, for water." Food, too, but she's not expecting there to be any perishables left around and there might be nothing at all. "Um, does your world have plumbing?" 

:Yes, though not enough of it that I'd expect a random unoccupied building to have it:

"I...think plumbing is easier than electric lights?" 

They're going to have to venture upstairs at some point anyway, but for now Merrin just looks around for any doors on the first floor that might, if opened, prove to contain a bathroom. If this is the kind of building that has bedrooms at all, they almost certainly won't be on the first floor, but a bathroom is the kind of the thing that someone coming inside might want in a hurry. 

She's also going to try opening any and all cupboards or drawers or other receptacles she sees. 

The desk drawers contain more random writing implements, binder clips, rubber bands, a bag of individually wrapped foodlike objects with a picture of a crow and a magpie on the package, sticky notes, two more pushpins, three copies of a booklet with a picture of what might be this building and environs in the wintertime with a bunch of happy bundled-up people on sleds and digging snow tunnels and making ice sculptures in among the incomprehensible text, and a little square battery which isn't the same shape as any Merrin has ever seen but which is more likely a battery than anything else.

The foodlike items seem like a good sign - not that there can possibly be very many calories, there, and she's not sure what they are or whether they're intended for human consumption, they're clearly not made of bird meat so maybe the images mean they're for feeding to birds - but it suggests this place wasn't so thoroughly packed up that all the nonperishable snacks were taken away. 

She hands Belrun one of the booklets. "I have a guess that this place isn't actually abandoned, just - seasonal use only, maybe? This looks to me like an - advertisement? For some kind of recreation. ...I wonder if they have spare warm clothing in storage, for visitors coming in winter. That would be good to find, in case it gets cold at night and we can't find fuel for the fireplace." 

She sits down at the desk for a moment, frowning. "I think we should go explore upstairs, but maybe first we should finish coming up with a list of basic phrases for you to learn in Baseline, in case - something unexpected happens and you end up using a lot of magic." 

:Why wouldn't the visitors bring their own clothes? Which would fit?: says Belrun, settling down in the desk chair to transliterate some Baseline.

"Presumably they would but I think it's fairly common for well-organized places to have spares, in case someone, I don't know, gets wet or something. Seems worth checking." 

Merrin has been mulling on this, and comes up with a list of about twenty phrases for conveying: basic physical needs, several different types of warnings-of-danger, and some variations on 'I have a plan to handle this', 'I have a plan that needs input from you to complete', 'I have a plan that needs you to take an action', and 'I don't have a plan and am hoping you can do something'. The latter category is apparently something that can be crammed down into a surprisingly efficient number of syllables for Belrun to transliterate. None of it is terribly hard for her to pronounce. 

Belrun writes it all down in the alphabets she knows.

With that taken care of, and the ground-level rooms thoroughly explored, maybe they can try exploring upstairs? 

(It continues to be obvious to Belrun's Thoughtsensing that Merrin is tracking her surroundings very carefully, and apparently keeping a perfect mental inventory of every single object she's seen so far and its location and potential uses, in addition to constantly planning ahead several steps. Her situational awareness isn't quite on the level of Leareth's but this has to be half because she lacks Othersenses. She is not at all giving the impression of being someone who has difficulty absorbing new information.) 

Belrun's not trying to read her mind but bits of it come through when Merrin says something.

Upstairs there are empty vending machines and a hot drink dispenser (empty) and hotel rooms - they're locked, but Belrun can Farsee into the first couple and determine they're all about the same except for having different color schemes and being mirrored relative to each other. They have ensuite bathrooms. At the end of the hall of hotel rooms there's a room with some more of the carnivorous-looking furniture looking out onto the slope they walked down, with a couple of arcade games up against one wall and a place with glass display cases that looks like it might sell food if it weren't closed up.

Merrin continues to memorize the locations of everything. She's starting to hit her spatial-working-memory capacity by the end, but this is the kind of memorization task that she's best at, where her training helps the most. 

When they reach the end of the hall, she sits on one of the chairs, or rather sinks down into it. "...Right. So we've got places to sleep and a source of water, but no food unless there's some in cupboards. And - I still want to do a second pass, but I didn't see any kind of communications device either. So I don't know what our options are for finding a person who can help us figure out where we are, except for...waiting, I guess? Or trying to find a map and walking to wherever's nearest here. Which I'm not up for, right now, and it might be even harder for you." 

:There's more floors, upstairs, but Farseeing up it looks like more of the same that's on this floor: She flips through her booklet looking for a map; there is an extremely desultory one marking two points with a wiggly line between them. Some of the background is white and most of it is green. There's no indication of scale. :I think possibly I should look around for wildlife to turn into dinner before I start getting low on reserves from hunger, rather than after:

"Do you have a good way of finding wildlife? I, um, technically did a training once on setting traps for animals, but it's pretty hard without any supplies, and I'm not sure how well I could make do with the objects we've found here so far. And I never actually got good at the tracking animals part. I know about edible plants in my world but there's no reason to expect them to be the same here." 

:I was planning to touchsight for something that burrows, or maybe Farsee into the woods for a deer, and then kill it with Fetching. I too could not confidently identify any edible plants:

"Your magic is incredibly cool. Should we go do that now, then? What's your range - do we need to actually walk around in the woods to get close enough to something?" 

:My Farsight range isn't incredible but it's good enough that I won't need to startle a deer. And if I find a rabbit or spot a pheasant or something before then so much the better. You're coming along?:

"I'll come." She's very very tired, but not to the point of significant physical impairment, and given Belrun's mysterious balance problem, she would rather be nearby to clear a path and be within reach if Belrun trips and injures herself, and maybe be the one who treks through underbrush to actually retrieve a dead animal. (She's noticing quietly to herself that she isn't delighted at the concept of killing and eating an actual animal, but she's not squeamish about it, per se, she doesn't expect to have any trouble with the process, it's just not ideal.) 

Back down the stairs they go, then. Belrun pauses at the edge of the nearest clump of trees, scouting ahead by magic. :- Quail: she says. :I'm going to head for them so I spend less reserves on range, and when they notice the approach and try to run away start killing them, they're little and we can probably eat them all between us:

"Sure, all right." 

Merrin accompanies her. She's actually pretty good at moving through the woods silently; she's clearly had practice, and the clothing she selected for a grueling day of training is more appropriate for this than what Belrun is wearing. 

Yeah, the slippers aren't helping at all, though the Whites aren't awful. Tromp tromp. The quail startle when they're quite close, launching themselves into the air in a flurry of feathers; one by one Belrun snatches them out of the air and slams them into the nearest tree.

Merrin only winces a very tiny amount, and then wades in to collect the bodies. 

"...Is your magic any good for cooking? I didn't see any proper kitchen facilities, the probably-a-food-place upstairs seemed to be just snacks, so our best other option is probably to light the fireplace and, um, skewer them on sticks and roast them? If we can't find anything better I can probably butcher them enough to get the guts out with my scalpel although I won't want to use it for anything medical afterward." 

:Fireplace and roasting sounds good to me:

"I still haven't seen any fuel. I - guess we can technically burn some of this?" There's a dead branch on the ground. She gestures at it, but can't pick it up because her hands are full of quail. "The smoke will be awful though." Merrin's thoughts make it clear that she feels burning random deadfall wood from the forest is an appalling fallback option when you have literally no other choice. She technically knows how to light a fire with wood. She's done it before. She did not, then, stick around in order to breathe in the resulting smoke, because even authentic training is not worth the higher chance of respiratory problems. 

:The fireplace does have a chimney, though I suppose I should check if they have it blocked off while the place is empty:

"I guess it's not going to increase our chance of lung cancer later in life by very much if it's only a night or two. Though if the chimney's blocked I think it might also make the entire building uninhabitable so we should definitely check that. I'll make a run back after this for wood, if you want to start de-feathering them?"