"Ooh, do you know if it'd be okay for me to try it now?"

"We can go look at it.  If it's not like what you know you should maybe wait until more people are gone to try it."

"If it's not... what?"

"The... something-o?  The instrument that you already know how to play.  This church follows the bounds of beauty, which are mostly about not making people sit through unrefined performances.  I think the sound would carry well enough to kind of count, if you tried something new to you while everyone is still here eating."  

"Oh."

"They'll disperse pretty soon."

"Okay. And whoever's still around won't mind if I experiment with a new instrument?"

"No."  She starts tearing at her empty paper plate, idly.  "You look kind of unhappy about this.  If you really want to go now you can, I just didn't think it was that time-sensitive."

"It's just been a while since I had access to an instrument, that's all."

"... Let me go check something."  She clicky-clickies a new instrumental piece into Rebecca's ears and leaves the table.

Oooooh pretty.

Thekla heads out of the hall and is back before the song's over.  She waits to say anything until it finishes, which is apparently information she can discern by looking at her oval.  "There's a synth in the purple room.  Synths have volume moderation and are generally quiter unless you use a separate thing which makes stuff louder."

"Oooh, cool!"

"Yeah.  Are you done with your plate?"

"...yes? Yeah."

"I can take it to the garbage and then we can go to the purple room, if you want."

"The plate is garbage?"

"Yes."  She sweeps the torn-off flakes of her plate edge onto the mostly-intact main body.  "Paper's pretty cheap here."

"Wow. Disposable paper plates." She will follow Thekla where she leads.

Plates go in a large open bin and then the three of them can go back towards the nursery and into a room painted pastel purple with two tables pushed together in the middle.  Thekla de-cabinets a long box with realistic images of a smiling family clustered around an instrument on it, then de-boxes the instrument.

It's piano-like, in that it has white and black keys. They're in four rows of hexagons, with the first and third rows repeating three white three black and the second and fourth four white two black.  There's no space built in for resonance; the entire thing is less than double the size of the keyboard.  Thekla manipulates something on the side with her fingernail and part of it lights up.

Headtilt. Experimental poke of all the notes serially to see if she can find a scale.

The first thing she notices is that the keys on alternating rows are connected underneath; when she plays the middle black note on the bottom row, the equivalent one on the third row depresses too, and vice versa.  It sounds... kind of like a piano, but not really.  Certainly much less so than the one in the sanctuary did.

But if she follows the three white keys on an odd row and then steps to the four white ones on an even one (and then down or up for the final do), that's a major scale!  (And in fact if she plays that same pattern starting from anywhere it still is, regardless of color.)

Now that she is oriented she will try to pick out The Holly And The Ivy.

The key width difference and unusual vertical element mess up her muscle memory a little bit but other than that it's really not hard, at least while only aiming for a one-note-at-a-time melody.

Oh, it's like when she started playing as a kid and her hands got bigger. Her hands have got bigger again, after a fashion. And also it's gone and crossed itself with an organ. Can she get some Bach happening once she's done a few practice tunes?