Man. What an amazingly fancy place. ...What's a piano.

Musical instrument. Tonia plays a few chords, which summon Wendy rocketing down the stairs to slide onto the bench and play Für Elise. She has it memorized and is competent at it.

Whoa. Fere stands with her head tilted for a moment and then starts grinning.

Wendy beams back at her.

Oh, good, that seems like an encouraging response.

Wendy will carry on playing a bit, grinning when Tonia ruffles her hair. Then it is time for Tonia to teach Fere how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, because the kids will eat like six of them in a day sometimes and their parents like them too and so it's a pretty good introduction to cooking with local appliances.

Ooh. It's sort of theoretically a normal kind of thing, except the cheese is different and the bread is different and then it just gets weirder from there. It's not particularly hard to learn, either.

There. Now there exists a grilled cheese. Fere can have it, Ms. Wright has plans with friends in town. "I should be by after the cleaners get started but before they leave if watching isn't good enough."

Nod nod. Fere tries to eat it in a way that seems less feral and starved but doesn't really succeed.

"Wow, didn't those boys you landed on feed you?"

"They were very generous." She shrugs, embarrassed. "In Sesat they stopped caring if I ate enough a while ago."

"Well, don't make yourself sick, you can help yourself to anything without masking tape on it -" she gestures at the rolls of colorful masking tape hanging off a doodad on the fridge. "Last minute questions before I'm off?"

Shrug. "I can't think of any."

"All right. Back in a couple hours." She whisks herself away.

Fere takes stock of what there is that doesn’t have masking tape on it.

A carton of eggs, a tupperware full of mysterious stew, peanut butter and three flavors of jam, a remarkably diverse cheese drawer, and half a lasagna.

She takes a reasonable amount of cheese and waits for the cleaners.

In they come; Wendy points them to Fere and they gesture her along through their process, which involves picking up each room, sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, tidying child-related objects into a memorized organized state, scrubbing most of the surfaces in the bathroom and kitchen, wiping down the windows throughout the house, taking out the trash and replacing the bags, tossing the dead flowers, doing all of the dishes and putting them away, and replenishing various paper products.

Okay, she's not actually going to retain all of that the first time but she does follow a lot of it! She watches closely and quietly.

When the cleaners have moved from the ground floor up the stairs, Ms. Wright comes home with her friend, leaves the friend sitting with a cup of tea, and finds Fere to see if she has any questions.

She has some.

Mrs. Wright can get the cleaners to re-demonstrate things and clarify details for her till she knows how to clean the house.

Then she will know how to clean the house.

Eventually the kids come home and Fere gets introduced to them - the older boy is Noah and the younger girl is Stephanie. They wave at her and say hi.

She waves at them. She says hi. She's vaguely melancholy about it.