Melody spends about half a candlemark on the language software tutorial, using Mindhealing to eke out more practice-oomph per minute, but she's slower at it than Leareth and half a candlemark is the limit of her patience for it. She moves on to watching one of the romances. 

She can't understand the dialogue, which proves to be very important for knowing what the heck is going on, but there's a man and a woman and the woman's relative-of-some-kind and the man's best-friend-presumably-not-related-because-he-is-a-different-color and also a small child who is around for some reason. The woman pines after the man, acting very silly around her relative of some kind about it, watching him from afar, having what are probably some kind of fantasy sequences about an imagined future with him that are cut into the movie with a transitional convention to mark where they start and end; meanwhile the man is mostly focused on trying to stabilize himself in his career, which has something to do with computers and possibly also the manufacture of crayons. The child who is around for some reason is a crayon product tester, although it seems like she might also separately live in the woman's house. Eventually for reasons that probably make sense if you can understand more words of dialogue than "hello" and "thank you", the woman is in the crayon factory where the child tests the crayon related products, and the child draws her silhouette around her by standing on chairs, using hundreds of experimental shades of metallic-looking crayons to do it, while the woman laughs and tries to hold still for this process. The man shows up with another batch of crayons and there is a slow-motion shot of the woman laughing and he is quite clearly thunderstruck by the way it transforms her face. He drops the crayons and runs away. The best friend and the relative - and also the child, whose presence in this meeting is only revealed halfway through the scene - contrive to get them to stand near each other in line for a fairground ride and then the best friend yells at them - something presumably aimed at getting them to kiss, since that's what they do. There is then another extended fantasy sequence about their future together, but this time it turns out to be the child narrating while she draws on the crayon testing surfaces; the non-fantasy couple are just going for a walk and do not in fact have three children or a horse yet.

It's exquisitely well done! Melody is delighted! The emotional arc would probably be a lot more meaningful if she understood any of the dialogue, sure, but possibly her complete lack of any idea what's going on makes it even funnier than it would be otherwise. The scene with the crayon-silhouette-drawing and the man's reaction to it practically has her rolling around on the floor. 

Leareth manages to sleep for a couple of candlemarks. He half-wakes a couple of times, disoriented, but it's much harder to get upset about this when he's waking up snuggled against a warm fluffy dog. He does toss and turn and make unhappy noises in his sleep quite a lot. 

Eventually by this process 448 winds up kind of on top of him and licks his forehead a lot. He will wind up with some of his hair quite plastered to his face by dog spit.

Leareth eventually drags himself fully awake, nudges 448 off himself, and notices the hair situation. He's not very bothered about it but it's not ideal; he can already predict that Melody will be bothered, and want him to wash it, and he's going to have to get over his terror of the shower at some point but he would really rather not deal with that today.

He sighs and gets up, coaxing 448 to follow him by repeating 'come'. Maybe there's a website that has a list of dog names. He's almost to the point of sufficient fluency to use the search engine, another session of practice will probably get him there. 

Melody is watching some kind of moving picture on the laptop and laughing uproariously; it takes her a minute to notice Leareth is there. She fumbles to pause the movie. Makes a face about his hair and them diplomatically refrains from comment. 

"You hungry? I'll get you some food. And I'm guessing you're going to want the laptop back?" 

He does but it seems unfair to interrupt Melody in the middle of her using it. "I can wait. I need to do some training with 448 anyway." 

"If you're sure."

Melody makes Leareth another sandwich and then goes back to her movie. 

...Oh right, locally they have the clever system of using clickers for animal training. Leareth isn't sure if 448's owner actually left one for them to use, though. He asks Melody if any dog effects were left behind with them. 

Yup, they have a clicker and the bag of treats and a collar and leash.

Amazing. Leareth will try to clicker-direct 448 to the fuzzy blanket on one of the sofas, and reward her with a treat if she gets there. 

448 is very excited to be doing clicker training and once she realizes that's what they're doing her first step is to turn in a circle to see what direction she's supposed to go! This gets her to the blanket pretty quick.

Leareth is so delighted and pleased with her! He gives her a treat and pets her. 

It turns out that Leareth has the stamina for about half a candlemark of focused attempts at training, during which he tries to chain 'going to the blanket' with 'picking it up in her mouth' and then 'bringing it to him', and tries to get her to repeat this sequence with other blankets in the house, and then gets in a few minutes on trying to associate this sequence with the hand signal he picked. 

448 is a quick study. She doesn't have the hand signal down by the end and just keeps heaping blankets on him but once he stops clickering she will settle down with him and his huge pile of blankets.

....Yeah, okay, he's actually very tired again and will maybe just lie here in his huge pile of blankets and pet his dog. Who is very good. 

Melody, after finishing her movie and grabbing herself a snack, comes looking for him. "....Leareth? Are you all right?" 

"Yes. Fine. - Are you finished with the laptop now, I was going to do more language practice." 

"Er, yes, I'm finished the moving picture story. It was so good. I mostly didn't know what was happening but it was still so good. ...Um. Are you going to just - stay there?" 

Apparently yes. Leareth feels reasonably capable of language tutorial practice but not especially capable of moving again. 

Sure, okay, he can have the laptop for a bit while lying on the living room floor along with what looks like every single blanket in the house. In the meantime, she paces and waits for groceries and dog food deliveries to arrive. 

They appear after not too long!

She puts them away, including a stash of nonperishable snacks in Leareth's room, and then she sits down at the table with a fresh cup of tea to sample one of the custard-filled-cake flavor variants. 

It's yummy! They do not fuck around with food yumminess here.

Wow! That's really delicious! 

Melody is maaaaaybe going to eat three of them before she manages to stop.