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?

They do! The language is intended for letters and books rather than casual conversation, though, so the closest thing to 'goodbye' is more of a valediction.

When she seems interested in robots, honeysuckle adds that there's a roboticist living relatively nearby - about a day's travel, but close enough to ask the crows to carry messages and to potentially invite them over or have something brought over from them.

Excellent! Mabel is going to write "thank you" and add the emphasis marker. They've really done a lot for her. She tends to speak formally, so the lack of slang or most other casual conversation markers isn't going to phase her, but she does struggle a little with not having stock phrases for leaving/greeting/etc. 

She would love to speak to the roboticist! Or, communicate in writing with, as the case goes.

They can ask the crows to carry a letter for her as soon as she has one to send! They don't actually know the roboticist, so they can't really do introductions, but they have a notice up on the noticeboard, so sending messages is fine.

That's fine! She's excited; she's definitely going to practice writing a lot anyway because it's just practical, but the robots can be a little bonus motivator. She probably won't actually make any once she gets home, as she has a feeling that's probably frowned on, but it would be nice to know.

Does honeysuckle have a map? Mabel would like to try to find out where she is and how far away from home she might be.

There's one back in the main building, sure. She can check on dinner while she's there.

She's back shortly with quiche, toasted acorn-flour bread with jam, baked apples, and a map. It's a map of Earth, clearly enough, though some of the coastlines are different; it's fairly subtle in most places, but the area around England is land rather than ocean and there's a strip of land joining Alaska to the corner of Russia, too.

She recognizes... none of this. The continents are totally different, there are no marked cities, much less a marked Chabe. She figured that they probably wouldn't have maps exactly the same as she was used to but this is completely unrecognizable.

Is this the whole world? She asks this question in writing but it's pretty stilted and she's sure the grammar is wrong, but hopefully it will get across what she needs to.