Why does she– oh, right, Melody did explain the dog thing to him, Leareth just wasn't parsing things very well at the time. 

:I suppose so. Can she come up here and show me?: 

:Leareth says he's up for looking at dog pictures but he would rather not get up, we can go upstairs: Melody tells Dree. 

Then Dree can take her laptop up to him!

Leareth is sitting in a nest of blankets with his knees pulled up to his chest; he's not really making eye contact and there's a visible bruise on his temple, but he otherwise doesn't look vastly worse than before. He will accept a laptop and look at dog pictures. 

:I like the black fluffy one, I think? If they are otherwise approximately equivalent. ...I have done animal training before, though not with dogs recently, Melody said that is relevant?: 

"Normally you'd train your own dog yourself, but you can get it done professionally, or with professional support. That just costs money."

Nod. :I think I can probably–: Leareth stops. Thinks about it. :I could definitely handle it myself if I were more consistently functional. If it requires being very consistent at doing things every day, which I think animal training generally does, it could be hard: 

"I'm a cat person, personally, but I think the basics are the same - you get one that's old enough to already be clicker trained, if you want it to work soon instead of after it grows up a bit more, and then you keep the clicker on your wrist or your belt and have a list of what behaviors you're trying to shape. You don't have to work on it every single day actively as long as you can reward what you want it to do if it does it on its own, which it should since they're bred for this."

Nod. :Your world must be very advanced at purely non-magical breeding techniques! You can do things like that in Velgarth but it is much easier if magic is involved: 

"Huh! You don't have - herding dogs that if you try getting them for some other purpose will try to herd your kids?"

:We have herding dogs and hunting dogs, but all of those are breeds that have been worked out over centuries if not millennia, and I think many attempts to use nonmagical breeding to get a new specialized breed do not succeed? There was a popular period of breeding small lapdogs among the ladies at court in on of the kingdoms of Velgarth, and they were never able to get them to stop barking incessantly or trying to eat shoes even though these were highly undesirable qualities in lapdogs: 

"Huh. I don't think of it as being very complicated but I don't personally breed animals so perhaps it's surprisingly complicated somehow." There are recommended breeders of Ebony Curlies, that being the black kind he likes; Dree opens five tabs of ones that include their area in their service zone, looking for the ones that come with the most pretraining.

Leareth watches this over her shoulder for a little while and then, running out of energy, burrows under his blanket and hides. 

Melody nudges Dree with a private Mindtouch. :We should maybe go downstairs again. Also, er - I should check how much the dog costs, is this going to be an issue with our current money situation?:

"I have some budget set aside for this from the government since you talked to the Secretary, it'll cover getting a dog. Though once you've had a couple of weeks to settle in you should probably look into getting an income of your own."

:Yes, definitely. It'll be a lot easier once I'm getting enough sleep, which hopefully will happen one way or another:

"Mm-hm! I'm going to write to this breeder and see if they have a working-age young dog that might be a good fit."

:Sounds good, thank you! Er, is there any preparation we need to do for having a dog in the house? Obviously it'll need food and all but - do we need to hide or lock up potentially dangerous things like you would for a toddler?: 

"I'll ask about that, I think breeds vary."

Melody thanks her and goes to make more tea. 

Dree has an answer from the breeder half an hour later. "They have a return - one they sold as a puppy but it didn't work out and the dog was given back for a refund - and they're pretty sure there's nothing actually wrong with the dog, just a bad fit with the human, and have been training it themselves since then. They'll take it back from you too if it doesn't work out. They have a recommendation for another breeder with dogs a bit younger if you'd rather have one that wasn't returned, but those will require more training here from you guys."

:No, I think that should work fine, if they're thinking it was a one-off issue. Um, what kinds of things usually come up that make a dog a bad fit for someone once they've already done all the careful selection to choose a dog to get?: 

"Apparently they turned out not to like the way the dog smelled and weren't as tolerant of being licked as they thought."

:Mmm. All right, I'm definitely not very worried about Leareth having that issue: And if it turns out that she hates being licked by a dog, well, this isn't about her, is it. 

"Okay! They can bring the dog over to be introduced - tomorrow morning, does that sound good?"

:Sure! Maybe better if it's not too early, in case Leareth ends up needing to sleep in again: