Plants and eggs she can work with!

She is doing alright! She nods.

She really wants to ask if she can teach or make up new gestures for communication right now, but that's unfortunately really hard to do when she's not able to communicate. She's hopeful that if she can be taught to read she can read whatever books they have on how to do telepathy magic, that would make things so much easier.

All right. She shouldn't hesitate to use the call bell if she has any problems.

The medic is planning to go ask around a bit this afternoon and see if she can find out where Mabel came from - she's guessing there's a traveling household visiting the community right now that she hasn't heard about or something. Her household has been told not to let any strangers in and she has no intention of making Mabel go with anyone if she doesn't want to, she just wants to figure out what's going on here. Is that okay?

That's... not remotely at all what happened and it seems like a lot of assumptions are being made here, but any attempts to communicate this will probably just cause more confusion.

It is okay, even if it won't be useful. Mabel nods.

(There are definitely some assumptions being made, but it seems wise to make at least a few, given the situation - the burns could have been an accident rather than an assault, but how would someone who can't craft get acid like that?)

All right, good. Her daughter has the call bell, and they've shuffled the chores around a bit so someone might have time to start on the dictionary with her before dinner, but no promises about that.

She leaves her alone again, and Mabel has a couple more hours to herself before she hears someone moving around on the porch (or maybe doesn't, if she's in bed with the soundproofing on). There's a window there, if she wants to check what's going on.

Mabel has mostly been poking around the house, pressing all the buttons except the call bells. A few times she spends five minutes turning the mirror or wall transparency on and off. 
She will go over to the window and look out!

Yep, there's someone out there. He doesn't move like a human - his legs are short and tilted forward, giving him a more gorilla-like gait, complete with knuckle-walking. He has tentacles, longer and thinner than the medic's, that he touches everything around him with, and a pair of bushy mothlike antennae, and his general aesthetic is black with bright blue highlights at the tips of things - the ends of his hair, the last few inches of his tentacles, his antennae. After a moment she catches a glimpse of his eyes, and they're a solid shiny blue; the way he's touching everything makes a little more sense if she considers that he might be blind. If so, it isn't slowing him down much; he has a small bug-legged platform piled with mottled grey objects that he's unloading onto the porch.

More people to struggle to talk too! Also, whatever race this is really has staggering biodiversity, Mabel is very impressed. She wouldn't be surprised if she has actually heard of them before but in the sense that someone saw one or two people and generalized incorrectly from all of them.

She is going to go open the door again, but she's not going to try to invite him in this time.

He notices immediately, and pauses to greet her: This stuff is the kitchenwares that peaches said she needed, and honeysuckle will be by when she's finished doing garden maintenance to fix it up with Mabel's aesthetic and bring it inside. Or she can take it now if there's something she needs, but he knows he can't do a very good public-use grey, so. She can touch the tentacle he offers her if she wants him to go over what everything is, but she does have to touch it, he can't see gestures at all. Or, uh, make noise, he guesses, he's heard she does that.

Most of this is vaguely familiar but she'll touch his tentacle anyway, she'd like to avoid any mistakes and assumptions.

She doesn't really care about things matching her aesthetic but it seems to be important to everyone, so she'll wait until honeysuckle comes back to take the things, she doesn't need anything just yet.

Most of the stuff is boxes of plates and cups and utensils and cooking tools, but there's also a mini fridge and mini freezer, a countertop-sized oven, and a set of self-heating pots and pans to cook in.

Actually since he's got her attention anyway he'll ask if she wants a stool for her kitchen area, too, while he's got the crafting material out.

Wow, these are some fancy iceboxes! And self-heating pots and pans... when she can write she's definitely going to ask how they made these and try to replicate it at home.

She would love a stool, thank you!

All right, he'll take care of that as soon as he's done unloading this stuff. (It's going to be a bit, he doesn't move very fast with his hands full.)

She doesn't mind! She is going to hover awkwardly in the door for a bit and then sit on the ground and watch.

She braids her hair while she waits, for something to do.

He doesn't seem inclined to chat while he works, and more or less ignores her - the only obvious adjustment he makes to account for her is that he's careful not to get his tentacles too close when he's passing by. He does pause after unloading the last box, though: he expects that she's going to have a really rough time communicating with him, what with the blindness, but if there's something else she needs and she wants to try to tell him, she's got his attention.

Not chatting is fine; this way she doesn't have to panic about finding a way to respond. She just watches him and does her hair.

She doesn't need anything else! Really, what she needs is to learn to write, and will just wait for those lessons to start before asking for other things. She doesn't know how to communicate this so she just stays silent and keeps her hands to herself.

He heads back to the main building after giving her a few seconds to respond and telling her he'll be right back with the crafting material and stool models; he uses a tentacle to grab a handle on the platform, and it walks behind him as he goes, following him inside. A few minutes later he's back with a pile of cubes and a small box full of miniature chairs that he offers to her; on examination four or five of the miniatures are indeed perfectly proportioned stools.

Do any of those look good to her as is, or does she want tools to modify one or make something from scratch?

She cannot make anything from scratch either with their magic or her own culture's woodworking! She's not good with her hands.

She is going to pick a stool option mostly at random. Whichever has four legs instead of three, probably; she does want whichever looks the most stable.

He takes the model she offers him, steps over to the pile of blocks, and transforms it into a perfect human-sized replica of the miniature, with a couple of blocks left over; the new stool can go on the porch with the rest of the things, and the miniature can go back into the box to get put away.

Honeysuckle should be by soon; he just needs to put this stuff away and he can go help her finish up with the gardens.

Great! She wishes she could say "Thank you" and "goodbye," this is honestly the hardest part of this. What if she is being rude and now they all hate her.

She's going back in the house and is going to watch her stuff out the window. Probably nobody will steal it because nobody has seemed worried about things being stolen. But it's worth being careful.

Nobody steals it; in fact, nobody walks by at all, though at one point a crow lands on the porch railing and looks at her curiously for a few seconds before flitting off again.

Eventually presumably-honeysuckle and the black-and-blue themed man turn up, leading a larger walking platform piled with weeds past her to the main building; a few minutes later honeysuckle comes back out with a stack of books, half green-and-gold and half white-and-grey, and heads for Mabel's cottage.

Oh, books! Literacy! She is very excited about this and opens the door before honeysuckle gets there.

Cute!

The green and yellow stack is for her to read from, and Mabel can follow along in the white-and-grey stack, which she's crafted up to take marks from an implement. (The implement doesn't have a pen- or pencil-like tip and doesn't leave marks anywhere else, but does indeed allow her to take notes in the books.) Presumably they should start with the basic vocabulary and grammar volume, but there's also ones on crafting, crafters and crafter society, tools and objects, plants and animals (which includes talking animals, in this case, she notes), and natural phenomena including terrain and weather; they can do those in whatever order Mabel prefers - she suspects they'll have time for the basic vocabulary volume and one more before dinnertime. Or she can get the kitchen set up first if Mabel wants to be sure that gets done tonight; she doesn't expect to get distracted from it but that is possible.

Basic vocabulary and grammar sounds good, and she's also interested in the one on crafters and crafter society, mostly because she thinks most of her pressing questions are going to be about this.

Mabel doesn't really care about the kitchen that much; reading lessons!

Sure thing!

The language is, thankfully, fairly straightforward, with each word getting its own glyph made up of simple shapes, and the glyphs themselves having a sort of internal grammar of how they're constructed that makes it relatively easy to remember their meanings and guess what new ones mean; it also has a set of general-purpose modifiers that take the form of drawing a circle or oval around one or more glyphs and adding markings to it.

The book on crafters starts with general relationship categories like friends, neighbors, parents, children, and romantic partners; they also have terms for households, heads-of-households (the people who claim the territories that households are in and are ultimately responsible for keeping them running), and household-members (animals or people other than the head-of-household who live in a particular territory and are the head-of-household's responsibility). There's also a concept of guests; being in a household's territory as a guest is like a much less intense version of being a member of that household, where the household is responsible for your well-being while you're there, mostly in the form of helping with freezing-instinct problems but also including things like offering food and other amenities during longer visits.

With inter-crafter relationships covered, the book switches to giving vocabulary related to the freezing instinct; from the explanations she can gather that crafters have a real problem with interacting with things they perceive as owned by another person without that person's direct permission, including not being able to enter each other's territories or move around within them without an escort. This explains the focus on making the things they're giving her match her clothing: a person's color scheme is used to indicate which things are theirs, or are intended to be used by them, and without that indication they wouldn't expect her to be able to use them. It also covers public-use objects, which honeysuckle explains are done up in plain grey around here, and group-owned ones (the marking scheme for those varies, mostly by how the group is arranged), and abandoned ones.

Next it talks about things people do, without particularly distinguishing between productive work and hobbies and without mentioning money or careers at all; things like hunting, building robots, breeding animals, and maintaining public utilities like pebbleclinkers (primitive computers, based on the description) are listed alongside producing various kinds of art, participation in recreational groups for things like writing or playing games, and going on journeys to do things like picking up skills, answering questions, or collecting things. Farming isn't mentioned, though breeding and crafting plants and animals specifically to change their traits and breeding animals for food are; constructing buildings is only mentioned in the context of making robotic walking ones; government, law enforcement, and retail shops aren't mentioned at all.

This is all very interesting and also really helpful for helping her figure out what's going on here! It's also really far outside of her experience; although she can definitely relate to feeling really uncomfortable in spaces or interacting with objects that aren't hers, the root of that feels different than it does with these people.

She's also specifically interested in robots -- she's never actually met a Coldsteel, and as far as she knows the only people who know how to make them are other Coldsteels, even if logically someone had to have made the first. Maybe these people?

Do they have a way of saying thank you?