Leareth (who is still mindreading from a distance) thinks that he likes this person? Or, well. Would like her if he were in a mood where he could have preferences other than "wanting to be home" and failing that "wanting there to be no people he hasn't known for over a year within his considerable Thoughtsensing range". He can still notice that in the abstract she seems admirable. 

Melody putters around the kitchen and waits for the kettle with water in it to boil and looks for cups to make tea in from her existing pocket-stash. Leareth is being very quiet over there but probably he's fine? 

There are cups, two mugs that match and three that don't and a couple of tall glasses. Dree is now replying to an email about the gold coins.

Melody is not even paying attention to which mugs match or don't. She eyeballs them and picks the biggest one and stares at the kettle until it boils, and then pours water on top of her tea "bag" (what a good concept!) and bobs it up and down on its string in the cup while, still, staring at it. Dree seems busy anyway so it's not like it's rude to ignore her, if anything it's more polite.  

They're both distracted, maybe Leareth can slip away to one of the bedrooms upstairs without either of them noticing? He so badly wants a surface to lie flat on. 

Melody, who has Thoughtsensing, obviously notices. She doesn't say anything. 

Dree glances up when she hears footsteps but is hardly going to stop him from ascending the stairs.

The bedrooms have beds. One room is painted pale butter-yellow, one summersky blue, one with white walls but a lavender ceiling. The decor doesn't match well, it looks more like spares somebody put in here just for completeness rather than like anyone made purchases for the occasion, but there are blue sheets in the blue room and warm colors in the yellow one and mostly off-whites in the lavender one. The blue room is the only one that also contains a chair; the lavender one has a bookshelf, though, and a beanbag, and the yellow one has a window seat.

Leareth barely has the energy to stay on his feet, at this point, but he does try to give all the rooms a quick survey. 

Having a bookshelf nearby seems more important than having a chair nearby, given how most of the time he only reads in bed anyway. He's not sure what the non-chair non-bed floor furniture item is but it looks sort of cozy? The color scheme is fine. 

Leareth flops onto the beanbag, just to see what it's like, and discovers that it also feels cozy, and stays there. 

Melody has tea now, which is a good state of affairs! She leans back against the counter and waits to see if Dree has anything else to discuss with her. 

Dree finishes catching up on case-related email and puts her phone away. "We should make a plan for when I should come back, assuming there's no emergency developments between now and then," she says. "Tonight? Tomorrow? It might be a good idea for me to stay until the groceries come, too, in case the deliveryperson gets lost, but I can wait outside if you prefer."

:That seems like a good idea. Um, and I do want to have a way of contacting you if something comes up before your next planned visit, but I have fairly decent Mindspeech range, if you'll be within twenty or thirty miles I can reach you. I'm fine with you waiting inside - I think Leareth maybe wanted some space but he went upstairs so it shouldn't bother him if we're in the sitting room: 

"Let me see how far my place is..." She checks. "Looks like less than five, actually, in a straight line. So that works, although normally if you had an emergency in the middle of the night one of my colleagues would pick your case up for the duration. Would you be able to do telepathy with someone I introduce to you over the phone?"

:What a good question. Maybe? I haven't ever tried it before but - if I knew what someone looked like, and I'd heard their voice over the 'phone', and I knew approximately how far away they were and in what direction, that might be enough to go on? I think Leareth could–: go on way less in order to Gate somewhere, but actually the reasons why Leareth can't Gate right now are both private and not something Melody incredibly feels like getting into, so she won't. :- Nevermind, sorry. If she's also within that range, I'd be happy to get introduced tonight and test out whether I can also Mindspeak her while we're already talking on the 'phone':

"All right, I'll stay till the groceries are here, leave you to settle in, and swing by once my nocturnal counterpart responds to a message and is able to be introduced." She composes that message now, it's asynchronous.

:Sure, works for me: 

The groceries take another twenty minutes to show up but then there they are in a couple plastic bags on the front porch. Dree brings them in and puts them away for Melody, who might not know which things belong in the fridge.

Melody is not super familiar with 'fridges' but - there's a cold compartment and an even-colder compartment, it looks like? And if something would become less edible if left out in the snow to freeze, it should go in the less-cold of the cold compartments, is that about right? If there's some kind of organization schema more sophisticated than that, Melody has no idea. 

"People have different ways of organizing their food - I like to put fruit in the fridge because I like to eat it cold but some people forget it's there if they do that, and it'll last longer in the fridge but if you abandon it there for weeks it's done for. The cold cuts have to be in the fridge, the spreads do too, the cheese does, ice cream in the freezer. Most people would fridge the butter too."

:Huh! ...Valdemar doesn't have 'fridges' and we don't even really get mages to keep things cold - I guess we had cellars to store vegetables and fruit overwinter, and the idea is that it was colder underground...: 

Leareth set up some kind of magic to keep meat frozen for that with the Quendi in Arda, in preparation for the war, but that is yet another complication that Melody is not inclined to get into. 

Once the groceries are away and Dree has located a yellowing old bag-accumulator mounted to the wall next to the door that already has a bunch of bags stuffed in it to which she adds these two, she bids Melody goodbye and departs to meet an electric pedicab she has summoned to pick her up.

House! She is in a new house and she can now explore it freely! 

- she will check on Leareth first. 

Leareth is, to external appearances (and also to Thoughtsensing), fast asleep, sprawled diagonally across some sort of soft roundish giant cushion that Melody doesn't recognize. 

...Ugh. She's not going to wake him up now but this isn't ideal. 

Melody goes around looking for ways to close curtains or turn off nonmagical mage-lights and otherwise make the room as dark as possible, which might at least buy her more time before Leareth inevitably wakes up from a nightmare. (Even if they've arranged it so that no one else is in range, it's still going to bother her.)

How dark can she make his room, given that the sun is still up outside?  

The curtains aren't blackout but they're fairly thick. She can get it dim.