Leareth is pretty good at navigating to the website for ordering dog food with only minimal instruction; he can't exactly read yet, but he has the alphabet fully memorized, and the system is designed to be a lot more user-friendly than any of the previous magical artifacts he worked with. 

That's very impressive and Melody isn't even going to try to keep up. 

The grocery delivery website cares so much about being user friendly, as though much of its operational lifespan is spent with consumers having the ability to charge them a dollar in exchange for producing a rant about the inadequacies of its organization and algorithm. "Anything else we should order or are you two still good on food?" Dree asks.

:We're fine on quantity but could probably go for more variety? Is there a way for Leareth to sort of browse around and look at what's available, the way you could in a normal store? If there are pictures it won't even matter that he can't read all the words yet, and he can pick out things he likes: 

See, that would require making DECISIONS, which is terrifying. It's clearly not going to cause anything terrible to happen if he orders the wrong food, but STILL. 

Leareth puts down the laptop and flomps his face on 448's neck again, in hopes that this will prevent him from pointlessly spiraling into panic about the concept of ordering groceries, which is incredibly stupid. 

:...Or I could have a look: Melody offers. 

The website is browseable by recipe link, category, food group, brand, packaging color, assorted user tags, and purchasing history. (This account, attached to Dree's case budget, has only the purchasing history of their last order.) The options are pretty overwhelming but if you start with "category" you get a fairly manageable number of top-level options to drill down into, albeit with some overlap between them (produce, convenience food, shelf stable, animal supply, kitchen and household supply, frozen, dessert, imported...)

This is amazing and it's probably good Melody isn't making Leareth do this, it's overwhelming even for her. (She does need quite a lot more handholding from Dree in order to make sense of the menus and options and figure out how to navigate from category and drill down to more specific things.) 

'Convenience food' is also just a neat concept! What sort of convenient foods exist here? 

The broad categories are things that you microwave or toast or fry but don't have to do anything else to, things that you pour boiling water onto, things that you buy already made and can eat as-is cold, and snacks and sweets that are intended to be eaten at room temperature.

Melody is very intrigued about 'things you can pour boiling water on' to turn into food! She's going to start missing soup, she's just solidly not a good enough cook to want to attempt it from scratch (and is also lazy). 

She also wants to browse for snacks that can be stored and eaten at room temperature, in case there are any good options for food that Leareth can keep in his room, if he doesn't want to get out of bed and she's out of the house or something. Once she's gotten to the relevant screen, with lots of prompting from Dree, she shows Leareth. 

Leareth can handle looking at even a kind of overwhelming number of food options if he's also petting a dog at the same time! 

She can get instant soup that she just has to pour boiling water onto in a dizzying number of kinds!

Snack categories include nuts/seeds, chips/crackers/popcorn, dried fruit, various "bars", candy/cookies/cakes, and a catchall category with stuff like jerky and granola and mixes of various different things. There are... so many kinds. So ludicrously many kinds. Currently highlighted as on sale are peanut butter and fig bars, a particular brand of lentil chip with lime and red pepper, candied pecans, chocolate covered cranberries, a kind of custard-stuffed cake available in lots of flavor combinations (the cake comes in vanilla, chocolate, almond, and coconut, and the custard comes in plain, chocolate, raspberry, and caramel; they are out of double chocolate and almond-plain but expect to have more in tomorrow), freeze dried pineapple, spicy herb-coated peas, and hazelnut nougat.

That's so many things! This world is so incredibly wealthy and Leareth is in awe. 

Also, looking at pages and pages of options for just one subcategory of food continues to be really overwhelming and stressful, but it's maybe good practice for that, just because it's so hard to imagine any bad consequences coming of it, especially with Melody and Dree as final checks. 

He has to take breaks a few times, but he ends up selecting some of the nuts that come with flavorings, the spicy peas, peanut butter fig bars whatever those are, a different kind of 'bar' that claims to be a balanced meal replacement and has a lot of kinds of seeds in it, and a couple of flavors of 'popcorn' – which he thinks is made of actual corn similar to the corn in Velgarth, according to the pictures he saw earlier in his language tutorial. 

Melody's waistline is not going to thank her for the number of cake/custard flavor combinations she orders, but whatever, her new dresses have room. 

There they are, in the virtual basket! If he's all done Dree can check them out now.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! 

:Can you check that none of them are somehow an incredibly bad idea? I realize this is a strange and pointless request to make but: 

"It's a lot of flavors of popcorn? But I assumed you just don't know what kind you like. Nothing really weird."

Leareth is having to tell himself very firmly that Dree is not going to be angry with him for ordering too many flavors of popcorn, which is plausibly an indication that he was being stubborn and kept trying to do the stressful thing for too long. Fortunately he has a DOG right there to put his entire face on, which helps. 

:Go ahead: Melody says to Dree. :Thank you: 

Groceries: ordered. "You're welcome!"

Leareth was looking forward to training 448 to find the nearest blanket (step one in training her to bring him a blanket in response to a hand signal), but actually maybe he needs to lie down for a while first, this was enough things in a row to be tiring. Even if it's kind of silly for 'meeting a dog' and 'ordering snacks' to be so exhausting. 

Does 448 follow him up the stairs or does he need to prompt her to do that? 

When he tries to get up she lifts her head to let him, and watches him and takes one step and stops.

Oh no he's forgotten the command for this! Leareth freezes for several seconds and then thinks to dig out his list and check. 

"'Here'?" he says, enunciating carefully in Kayshu. 

Trot trot trot! Here she is, wagging!

He bends to scratch her head and then continues to the top of the stairs, repeating 'come' as needed, and once they've reached his room he offers her another treat from the bag still in his pocket, before half-collapsing into bed.