"Unlimited Create Water, Purify Food and Drink, and Guidance would all be incredibly useful in a disease outbreak. I'm not sure how they'd compare to doing channels in a city for a week, though."

Liss comes back at this point with a gigantic bag of donated shoes and a stack of blankets. "Sorry that took so long, the blankets weren't sorted. Want some help stowing it?"

"Yes please," and Raafi lays out his portable hole and climbs down into it to receive the bag and blankets, taking his belt off and setting it by the edge of the hole before going in. Blai can get a brief look inside; it's pretty cluttered in there, with shelves full of wands and potions and scrolls at the back and open baskets full of coins littering the floor at the front.

"That makes sense, I'm not accustomed to any large concentration of people drinking well water but if they are - yes."

GOD this guy is painfully rich.

"Yeah, some places have magical fountains but that's not where outbreaks happen, usually. Oh, hey, Liss, while I'm down here, how's funding looking for that program at the orphanage?"

    "Which - oh, the field trips one? Slower than you'd like, I'm sure."

"Well here, then." A bag of coins comes sailing out of the hole and Liss reaches out to catch it.

    "Thanks, I'll make sure it gets put to good use."

"Thanks." And Raafi hauls himself back out of the hole and dusts himself off before packing everything back up.

Maybe everyone here is rich, and the orphans eat every day, and their keepers never "indenture" them to Katapeshi traders who aren't bound by Cheliax's laws against human slavery, and it therefore makes any sense at all for anyone other than specifically this absurdly rich cleric-of-travel to spend money on sending them on field trips.

"All right, the market or the library or the other temple, do you have a preference for what's next?"

"...if you don't have laundry wizards I should probably have a change of clothes sooner than later."

"Oh, absolutely." He takes another little notebook out of his belt and pages through it. "I liked the tailor's on bootblack street last time I was looking for clothes here, and they did have pre-made. That's by the adventurers' district, I can leave you to shop and go check for bags of holding if you'd like."

"That sounds efficient, thank you."

And so they can head out. Raafi doesn't seem inclined to keep a conversation going, whether because it'd be difficult in the noisy crowd or to avoid distracting Blai from seeing the city. There's plenty to see: merchants whose stalls spill out onto the street, precious goods supervised primarily by the patrolling guards as they haggle with customers; children darting between market stalls playing a game, unworried about the adults they're inconveniencing; a Pelorian cleric sharing a bench and a friendly conversation with a tiefling. It may seem odd to Blai how unafraid these people are; it's not that they have no problems - there are beggars, there's trash, he can spot people with pox scars (though not whip ones) - but for the most part they move with the same kind of easy confidence that Raafi does, and some of the beggars even play instruments to attract the attention of passerby rather than hiding in the shadows.

It's not too far off from how he imagined Absalom except that he hasn't spotted a whorehouse yet.

It's seven blocks to the tailor's, and there doesn't happen to be one on the route they take.

Raafi pauses outside the shop and counts ten gold from a purse from his belt. "That should be plenty to get you started; I'm not sure how you want to handle not overburdening yourself but if you'd like to put anything in my storage, I've got room."

"Most of my load is the armor and that seems prudent to not put away in a portable hole, but thank you."

He could want a lighter coat or something. It's not worth pointing out, though. "All right. I should be back in 45 minutes or an hour, so there's no rush; if I don't find you here I'll try the temple of Pelor - do you want a map, for that? - and if you need to find me, asking around for the greybeard cleric of Fharlanghn should work well enough. The adventurers' district is over there, the magic shops are on the east side and I'm not planning on going anywhere else."

"A map would be good to have just in case."

He sketches one out in a notebook, including a handful of prominent local landmarks, and tears out the page to hand over. "Anything else before I go?"

"Am I likely to be hideously ripped off if I naively go buy an outfit?"

Ah. "No, they'll have prices on their premade clothes, you can haggle from there if you want to but you'll be fine if you don't - a basic outfit will be about a gold and a nice one will be about five, so you aren't on a tight budget at all."

"Good, thank you."

And he will wade into the chosen shop. It's been a while since he got anything new. He has plainclothes, which he's wearing, having left his uniform behind to be a spare for anyone who needed one at the fort, but they're the same ones he wore off duty the last time he was on leave for a recruitment tour five years ago.

The shop is reasonably sized, with one display wall dedicated to sample garments and fabric and the other holding racks of premade clothing, with a pedestal at the back for customers to stand on to be measured, currently occupied by a slightly younger man. "I'll be with you in a minute, feel free to browse," the shopkeeper says, looking up from where he's writing down a measurement.

The premade clothes are organized by size and then by price; the most basic shirts are four silver and the pants start at six, as Raafi promised, in simple cuts and a selection of basic earth tones, and they go up from there for fancier fabric, more interesting detailing, rarer colors, and so on. There's also a freestanding rack of outerwear - a light jacket or cloak suitable to the oncoming autumn has an asking price of about a gold - and a selection of accessories at the back.

His current outfit is a red shirt, faded to a sullen dried-blood burgundy with age and wear, and black pants, similarly deflated to a dark (if you're generous) grey. Red and white are Iomedae's colors, but since he's specifically buying a change of clothes to account for the fact that a laundry wizard can't Prestidigitate him where he stands, possibly white isn't a great choice. Nobody here is going to recognize Her colors anyway. Though the paler end of undyed linen is close enough for most purposes. He dithers over the price hike for scarlet. It's probably not Lawful to take into account the fact that this is Raafi's money and it will otherwise go to inexplicable orphan field trips, and anyway more colorful outfits are not obviously a more justifiable expense than are inexplicable orphan field trips...

There are three different kinds of red dyes in evidence; the least expensive is a brick red, adding a silver or so to the price of a shirt, whereas a bright orangeish red will add three and the couple of scarlet options are among the more expensive items in the shop, though they're not actually out of his price range if he's only going to get one outfit. Pale undyed linen is well-represented among the basic offerings, and brighter white options are also available for a few copper more.

He'll just have to ask the shopkeeper if anybody does prestidigitated laundry at all and it's just on a tighter schedule; it only makes sense to get a white shirt in that case. Maybe there's a coat in red... he's pretty much talked himself into nondescript brown pants.

There's a brick red riding duster in his size with generous hip pockets, and an orange-red vest with a geometric pattern reminiscent of stars or suns embroidered on it in white.

Well, the suns aren't exactly the sun that goes behind the sword but it's not not that either... expensive though...

The shopkeeper comes over while he's considering it. "Can I help you with anything today?"