"Awwww." No wonder they weren't phased by an amnesiac time traveler. "I take it he communicates by writing?"

"Sign language, mostly, but he'll write if someone can't keep up."

"Ah, makes sense. I know the alphabet but I'm not, like, fast and I don't know any words. I'll need to practice."

"You might be able to persuade him to slow down for you while you're learning. I make no promises."

"I can see how slowing down would be super annoying. Maybe you could help me practice. . . . Also does he see or hear or both or something else?"

"Both. I suppose helping you practice wouldn't be too tedious. And I could use a brush-up on the signing side of things myself; I hardly ever need to use it. One gets rusty that way."

"Awesome. Want to do more engineering but you sign at me instead of talking?"

Instead of nodding, she signs 'yes', which is like nodding with your hand instead of your head.

The way she signs looks weird to someone who has a vague idea of what ASL normally looks like, because she learned it from a hand, so a lot of the signs are modified for a context in which your right hand is your whole body. She deliberately slows things down to give Miranda a chance to follow along, and repeats herself out loud or in slow fingerspelling when asked. It does slow down the pace of their engineering, but it's still fun, and Thing will appreciate it.

Miranda's signing proficiency goes from "utterly lousy" to merely "embarrassingly incompetent" over the course of the next hour. (Her knowledge of ratchets and cams is still decent.)

The sound of indistinct voices drifts down the hall. Shortly, Morticia opens the door, and sweeps into the room with two unfamiliar figures trailing in her wake.

"And here we are," she says. "Dearest, Pugsley, this is Miranda. Miranda, this is my husband Gomez, and our son Pugsley. Thing is in the kitchen helping Lurch put the fish away."

Behind her are two individuals.

One is a snappily dressed short round man wearing a slightly rumpled pinstriped suit with small dark cufflinks, white shirt and tie. His hair is black, shiny, and well-coiffed. Upon seeing the two of them, he reaches out warmly towards his daughter, offering an embrace. 

"Good afternoon, my little storm cloud," he says, his voice full of unrestrained happiness. "Let me see the young lady that have found room for under your black umbrella."

The other is a small round boy, smaller than Wednesday, in a green and white striped shirt and a pair of dark shorts. His hair is short and black, and though it clearly has seen a comb in the past it hasn't seen one lately. He stays hiding behind his mother, peeking out from behind her to look at the girls. 

(Wednesday, as usual, dodges the hug with a sort of resigned tolerance.)

(The dodge, rather than dismaying the man, has the opposite effect, and he lowers his arms with a smile as Wednesday successfully evades.)

She smiles at them. "Pleased to meet you both. It's very nice of you to let me stay over. How was your fishing trip?"

"Oh, quite excellently, we caught nearly four dozen of them, Lurch is cleaning and freezing the extras in the icebox as we speak. My young rabbit even managed to get five at once with one truly inspired toss." He tilts his head to indicate Pugsley, who shrinks further behind his mother's skirts. 

"Nice! How do you do that? I don't know if I've ever fished but I thought there was only room on the hook for one or maybe two."

"Not when you're fishing with grenades."

"Gosh. That doesn't pulverise the fish into inedibility? Cool." It sounds like it probably kills them a lot faster than piercing them with hooks and pulling them out of the lake to drown in the air. She tentatively approves.

"Oh, if they're far enough from the blast they just swim away after a minute or two if you don't scoop them up fast enough. They're hardly pulverized at all." 

"Wow, cool. Oh, I mixed up the kinds of grenades and had a mental image of frag grenades for some stupid reason. Concussion grenades makes way more sense." This conversation is making her want to watch Mythbusters. Or possibly do some things Adam and Jamie always tell you not to do. If she's staying at a friend's house it doesn't count as "trying this at home", right?

"Nothing to worry about. So my darling jasmine tells me you come from us with a mysterious and uncertain origin and a clouded past." He looks at her with piqued curiosity and attention. 

"Yes. I have an adult mind from the 2020s swapped into a child's body, I can remember facts about the world but nothing about my own past, and based on what I can remember I'm not from our future but from the future of an alternate timeline. It's a weird combination of things."

"A most peculiar circumstance. Well, given that my little dart frog has taken an interest in you, we would be happy to be a waystation as you find your bearings, or even a haven for you if you wish to linger in our home for as long as you may desire." 

"I appreciate it." She's not sure how to express her desire to get back on her feet and contribute to society in a way that isn't super socially awkward and laden with class assumptions, so she just says "I hope I'm in a position to pay it forward eventually. And Wednesday's awesome. Couldn't've picked a better person to turn up next to if I'd tried."