She finishes taking notes, exchanges some texts with Dree, and departs.

"Okay," says Dree, "we can get you hauled to the cottage now."

Melody has been sipping and greatly enjoying one of the tea samples - the one from the teabag that smelled best - and she's not quite done but it seems silly to delay just for that. 

She tucks the remaining teabags into a pocket of her robes. :Right, of course. ...Er, can I take the hot-water-heating thing here or does that belong to the hospital? If the cottage already has one of its own then that's fine, I guess: 

"The kettle belongs to the hospital. The cottage might have one and if it doesn't they're not expensive."

:- Sure, that sounds fine, as long as someone is willing to walk me through how to buy a new one once we have money: 

Melody is a little cranky about going somewhere ELSE without a reliable source of tea, but she did sign up to go to another world, and 'not having tea' is a pretty minor problem relative to all the other problems here and elsewhere. 

Dree calls them a taxi, which is shaped much like the ambulance with the driver in a separate compartment and the back open, but it just has benches instead of a miniature medical facility. There's a central ottoman-thing between the front- and rear-facing benches, which has, inside, bottled water and barf bags and three choices of air freshening spray and a stack of clean dry towels and the controls for the music, intercom to the driver, and window tint. Dree settles in the sliders and explains all these features while the taxi starts up.

This is fascinating. Leareth nonetheless spends most of the time that it's being explained with his eyes tightly shut and his hands over his ears. He follows the explanation via mindreading, which is what he would have done anyway, he doesn't speak the language. 

Melody tries to nudge Leareth to follow her into the 'taxi'. She listens attentively and then thanks Dree for her helpful explanation. 

If Leareth is going to cover his eyes like that Dree can black the windows? In case that helps?

Melody is a little concerned that this will do the opposite of help with whatever Leareth found distressing about being in a moving vehicle before, it had seemed a bit like he was getting seasick and she thought being able to see the horizon helped with that, but also Leareth does seem to immediately relax at least a little once the interior is darker. Probably it's fine. 

(Leareth is multiplying prime numbers in his head to avoid having to notice his environment.) 

Some people do get motion sick in cars, yeah.

The driver gets them to the cottage eventually, and Dree has gotten ahold of the code to let them in. It has a kitchen-and-dining area, a half-bath, and a sitting room on the ground floor, and upstairs there are three bedrooms and a full bathroom shared between them. There's a floorplan and things renting parties might need to know in a booklet on the kitchen counter. Dree checks, and it does have a kettle, though it hasn't been de-limescaled in a while. It also has a handful of things in the freezer - take and bake breakfast pastries they can leave out to rise overnight and stick in the oven in the morning, a flatbread thing, half a package of breaded chicken pieces. The pantry has a can of soup (tomato bean) and a mostly empty bottle of olive oil. "Do you want me to set up a grocery delivery for you?" Dree asks once she's assessed this.

Melody is so distracted by utter fascination and amazement at the various foodstuffs available!

(A pastry that comes in a nonmagical freezing box and can be put in the over and baked? And chicken pieces in bread, is that like a pocket pie, Melody has had those with fruit and fish and beef but somehow never chicken and it sounds delicious? Oh and what are "cans"? -) 

Oh, right, she's being asked a question. 

:Er, yes, I would appreciate that since I have no idea how to do that myself! I'm not sure what to ask for, though, I'm really not much of a cook and also I don't recognize the foods here and the kitchen setup is weird - amazing, but weird. Can you maybe just call for a range of standard food things that an unskilled person can cook without messing up too disastrously? I can do pease porridge. ...Oh, and tea. I would really like more tea. The kind that wakes you up, not herb-tea that you take as medicine: 

"Let me show you how to use the stove," says Dree, "and the kettle -" She does that while thinking aloud about what food to get. Bread and cold cuts, eggs, fruit, cheese, peanut butter, oatmeal, rice, lentils, frozen peas, packaged cakes, and a caffeinated tea assortment?

Electric kettles are Melody's favorite thing about this world! They're almost as good as being a mage who can heat water just by thinking about it! Maybe better, actually, on the one hand you need the proper device with the whole rope that goes into the wall but on the other hand it doesn't make you personally more tired! 

Leareth has headed straight to the sitting room and found a corner to sit in. He is, however, still reading Dree's mind at a distance in order to follow the conversation. 

:- Ask her for bread and cheese: he suggests to Melody. :And eggs: He's fairly sure those are being translated clearly. The mental concepts associated with 'peanut butter' and 'packaged cakes' also seem like they should be low-effort, but Leareth has never heard of those foods and is dubious; he also doesn't recognize whatever 'lentils' or 'rice' correspond to AND they're not coming across as clearly low-effort or hard to mess up while cooking. 

(Leareth suspects he was, at some point, a decently competent cook. At some past time that is not the present time, he was decently competent at most things. He really really doesn't feel like taking responsibility for causing edible food to happen here, though.) 

Oh, right, foods are being suggested. Leareth's requests seem pretty reasonable? Except that Melody is not actually sure if she's competent to cook eggs and have them turn out edible, she really hasn't done a lot of cooking for herself in the last decade. 

:Er, if you have bread here, that doesn't require cooking at all and I can definitely handle it. And things that go on bread - in Velgarth we would have butter, and cheese and sometimes salted meat or salted fish -: 

"That's what cold cuts are, yeah, meat and fish, and I can add butter to the list."

:That would be great! And, er, maybe we should get some fruits or vegetables that are edible raw, in the meantime while I get around to actually learning how to cook on this stove, I feel like just eating bread and salted meat isn't a totally balanced diet: 

"Of course. Fruits and veggies, which ones do you like - if you have humans you might conceivably have grapes, much like you apparently have tea -"

:- I guess we have grapes but I don't love them just to eat raw?: 

(The strains of grapes grown in Valdemar and adapted to its climate are mostly turned into wine, and it's not even very good wine compared to the production from Iftel or Rethwellan.) 

:We have apples and cherries and blackberries?: Melody tries to push across as much extra context about what those fruits look and taste like as she can, though this is hard with a non-Mindspeaker and she doesn't want to disorient the poor social worker too much. 

"- gosh that's weird. Okay, we have those, I can get some of those. For vegetables, uh, what's good raw - carrots? Broccoli? Snap peas? Cucumbers?"

Melody doesn't make a habit of mindreading people who she doesn't share a language with; she's trying but not super following. 

Leareth is so exhausted, and sort of gradually melting into the softest piece of furniture available in the living room, but he's still mindreading from a distance and he's more practiced at it.

:Carrots - good. Peas - we have peas, there was a modifier applied in her thoughts but it probably does not matter what exact substrain of peas. Cucumbers are fine. No idea what broccoli is: 

That sounds exhausting to convey and also Melody doesn't even personally like carrots, especially not raw. Melody is perhaps not the most vegetable-favoring sort of person. She's mostly asking for Leareth's sake and because it seems vaguely healthy or virtuous. 

:Er, can you just pick some things that most people find inoffensive, or something?: 

"- sure, most people are pickier than that but I suppose it's not a disaster if you wind up throwing some out." She fills up an online cart. Bread of the boringest sandwichest kind, butter, cheese, cold cuts, eggs, apples - hm what kind - well, this kind's cheapest, they're not going to know what kind they like - cherries, the ones closest to the same color as the mental image even though Dree likes the yellow ones herself - and blackberries, the new soft-seeded kind, that will plausibly be unfamiliar but like who wants blackberry seeds in their teeth - carrots and cukes and peas, and, let's see, if that was all that was in her kitchen what would she most be missing - lots of things honestly, but within the constraints - Six Sandwiches makes a nice range of stuff to put on bread and it's on sale, she'll throw in the chickpea salad one and the strawberry cream cheese one. And these people are so sad and need DESSERT but she'll make it ice cream in case they are going to be suspicious about it for weeks before they get around to it. And tea, five kinds is probably enough that Melody will like one - green black oolong white and white-with-raspberry - does she take it with sugar - eh she'll get a little squeeze bottle of honey, if she doesn't put it in the tea it's nice on bread. She clicks DELIVER.