Leareth has more energy today, maybe because of his nearly-uninterrupted night of sleep, and manages to spend nearly the entire hour on dog training. Can he get 448 to the point of reliably recognizing a hand signal and bringing him blankets in response to it and only then? 

(Melody does not comment even though she is definitely going to, again, end up being the one who has to put all of those back in their proper places later.) 

448 remembers the hand signal from yesterday! Time to bring him every blanket in the entire house!

The therapy procedural's first episode is about a new graduate from a training program for psychologists showing up at the practice that's given her an office and meeting her new colleagues - a psychiatric pharmacist, the office manager, another couple therapists, a retiring counselor who is opening up the spot for her, and the office cat. They all have color coded outfit preferences and quirks, and the subtitles helpfully repeat their names whenever the speaker changes. The show ends with her first patient, who is seeking help for her skin-picking and hair-pulling habits, and eventually walks out with recommendations for fidget toys and lotions and a referral to the pharmacist.

That's such a helpful character-tracking convention! Melody is still not entirely following the conversations, even after she figures out how to pause and restart so she has more time to slowly puzzle through reading the subtitles. 

Melody is slightly confused at this being a sufficiently typical sort of problem to see a therapist about that it would be the first example shown; she doesn't think she's ever treated a patient for that? She's tried Mindhealing herself into not fidgeting and it does sort of work but didn't seem worth it because it mostly displaces the urge-to-fidget into an entirely mental phenomenon and then she can't maintain focus on what she's thinking about.

Her main takeaway is that apparently you can get TOYS for FIDGETING??? Melody is amazed. She wants one so badly now. Unfortunately she is not savvy enough on the laptop to find the search bar that Leareth was using and she's already forgotten how to spell the word for 'fidget'. She'll ask Leareth later once he is no longer buried under every blanket in the house. 

(She can hear him laughing occasionally, which is bizarrely heartwarming.)

Leareth gives 448 a treat for successful blanket-delivery, and then spreads the blankets out again (randomly and all on the main floor, rather than going upstairs), and then starts testing whether he can turn this into 'deliver one blanket and stay' by interrupting using the 'here' or 'wait' command. Though he's not sure he really minds the 'every single blanket' thing. It's actually very comforting to suddenly be in possession of a nest. 

He's probably going to still be at it when Dree arrives. 

448 can be interrupted from blanketing him with "wait"!

Dree knocks, and she has the programmer respondent she picked out right behind her.

Leareth scrambles up from his blanket-nest and then finds, inconveniently, that he seems to be stuck on the action of 'approaching and unlocking the door.' 

Melody is not even slightly surprised. She pauses the next episode of the therapy show and gets it. :Morning! Thank you for coming: She smiles at the new arrival. :I'm Melody! You must be the person who can help Leareth with, er, the programming thing?: 

"Yeah! I'm Shory," she smiles. Fistbump? (Melody has seen this done on TV.)

Fistbump! :Thank you for offering to come! Apparently programming has a reputation for being incredibly frustrating, and I'm already miles behind Leareth on everything related to using the laptop Dree gave us, I definitely won't be able to help him with weird problems. Though hopefully it'll turn out to be a really boring problem mostly caused by the fact that he started learning Kayshu two days ago and probably misunderstood something in the instructions he was following. Anyway. Come on in!: 

Leareth is currently watching while hovering mostly out of sight half-behind the door into the living room, like a particularly skittish cat. 

"Hi Leareth! I'm Shory."

:Thank you for coming to help: Leareth says. He is still not moving out from behind the corner of the wall. It seems like it should be very easy to do this but movement is not happening. 

...Right, he was going to try to figure out a way that 448 could help with this problem and then train her to do that. Unfortunately he has neither figured out a reliably helpful action nor trained it. He doesn't even have a prelearned command for 'go over there' that would let him just follow her, which might work. 

:Great, let's go to the kitchen!: Melody says cheerfully. :Tea, either of you?: 

For some reason he can do that. 

"Follow," he tells 448, and heads over to join Melody in the kitchen. 

448 is at his heels!

"What kinds do you have?" asks Shory.

Melody has no idea what any of the teas are called and still cannot really read the labels but she points out the row of little tea boxes on the counter beside the kettle, which she takes and fills. (Electric kettles are a glorious invention and she loves theirs very much.) 

Leareth sits down and pets 448 until he feels steadier and then slides the laptop over, minimizes and hides Melody's show without closing it and losing her spot, and tracks down his tab of instructions and his currently-mysteriously-nonfunctional code editor. 

Shory picks out a teabag and leans over. "Ooh, huh. Do you want me to just fix it or do you want to know exactly what happened insofar as I can figure it out from here?"

Leareth's spoken comprehension is lagging significantly behind his reading comprehension; he gets less than half of the words, and has to resort to reading surface thoughts anyway. 

:I would like you to explain what you think might have happened. It is probably something very stupid. I think the last thing I was trying to do was import a library - here, in the instructions - and then it did something odd that was not what the instructions said it would do, so I tried to undo it but I think I do not actually know how to go back and undo things in this program...: 

"Yeah, okay, so first you can undo like this -" she does a keyboard command, "but I think what happened is -" And she walks him through her diagnostic process.

Meanwhile, did Melody have something she wanted to bring up with Dree?

She did! 

:Hmm, so the first thing is that Leareth complained about a side effect from the sleeping pill we tried last night - it's this one on the instructions, the third in order - and wanted to know if it's normal. I don't know how to look that up but I'm kind of hoping it's normal and expected to go away after a bit, it worked really well other than that. He said it - made it hard to wake up? In context I'm guessing he meant he was having a nightmare but couldn't fully wake himself up out of it even once he realized he was dreaming: 

"Well, let me look - hm, that's on the uncommon side effects list and people sometimes compensate for it with a supplement that isn't in this packet, but I can pick some up the next time I'm by the pharmacy or get it delivered depending on how much that particular option otherwise worked? If you'd rather just try the next thing and see if any of them work well and uncomplicatedly that's also fine."

:It worked a lot better than anything else ever has before! I think we might as well try the next ones and see if any of the other three are just straightforwardly better but I'll keep in mind that if not we could go back to this one and try your idea. Other things... Still not urgent, I continue to be way behind Leareth on learning Kayshu, but I was wondering if you had any leads on therapists who might be interested in talking to me? I started watching one of the movies about it, too, it was more useful than I expected, but I would still get a lot more from a conversation with someone: 

"I can probably find one of those the same way I found Shory, but do you have an idea of a specialty or background that you'd find most useful so I can narrow it down?"