Nobody has any reason to expect that! The store wants money. Some guy trying to hawk decorative-patterned starglass eating utensils, plates and cups and forks and so on, from a cart wants money too. He throws one to the ground and picks it up, unscathed, to demonstrate its durability.

He likes the look of the cups but he needs food too and there's no telling how long it'll take before Nick can get anyone to buy his inventions. Valanda checks on what the store has that's edible for humans.

So many things! This isn't a specialty food store, but they have all sorts of prepared foods - fruit and vegetables, bread, biscuits, jars of honey, meat (mostly dried or very fresh), nuts, eggs and butter, all kinds of spices, a weird family of foods called 'dairy', as well as ingredients - flour (for making bread), oils, salt, sugar (expensive!), vinegar, dry oats and rice, pasta, something called baking soda and something else called baking powder that are not, apparently, the same thing, various spices and seasonings... It's kind of a lot. The cheapest stuff by volume is dry oats and onions.

He gets an onion and some oats and a pot to cook things in.

The bored cashier doesn't bother trying to upsell him to bread, nuts, and meat.

Wonderful. He takes all that home and has oatmeal and an onion. The onion's got a nice crunch to it.

Then there's still time before Nick's note says he should be back, so Valanda goes out again to see if maybe there are any bookstores or libraries nearby.

There's a bookstore! There is a sign that says "I will kick you out after ten minutes unless you buy a book".

Well, that's certainly a way of doing things. He can find out what kinds of books they have and how much they cost in less than ten minutes, right? Probably.

There's a big fiction section! There's also a non-fiction section with stuff like cookbooks, histories, guides to wildlife, "self help" books, textbooks of various kinds, a dictionary, 'principles of aeronautical engineering', and so on. The books are mostly written with blocky characters that look like they're inked in with some sort of stamp, with hand annotations and illustrations in some cases.

Books cost about as much as a shirt, more or less depending on the book.

Whatever spell sent him here has been a good enough dictionary so far. He definitely wants the one about aeronautical engineering.

"Hey, if I get this now can I spend more than ten minutes deciding what else I want?"

"Sure, kid. Long as you don't sit here and read a whole book, that is."

He gets that one. Then he reads titles and skims tables of contents of the textbooks and histories for a while, looking for things that might help him get his bearings or understand all the alien things happening around him.

Nothing is tailor made for-

Well, there is 'The Complete Guide To Adjusting To City Life, For Rural People'

Sure, why not. He'll probably learn more from what the book assumes he should know already than what it says, but it'll probably help. Even if he's not exactly rural.

"Have you read the books you sell?"

"As many as half of them, at some point, probably. Not so much the fiction - not my taste, I have someone else who knows what's good give me advice there."

"I could use a recommendation for a history book for someone who doesn't know anything about history yet. And I do mean anything."

He picks two options. One about folklore of Earth and the Ancestors and early Cloudbank settlements, one a compilation of histories and stories of major Cloudbank cities, covering the last two hundred years. "Twenty percent off if you get both."

He gets both, and the guide to city life. And whatever novel is the cheapest.

The cheapest novel is a tattered copy of 'The Red Lightning Flyer' and seems to be about a man who flies around in a shiny red ship having adventures for a living.

He takes his books home before he's tempted to buy so many he can't afford dinner.

He reads the compilation of Cloudbank histories while he waits for Nick.

Nick shows up soon enough. "G'day. I found workspace for us. I also have a meeting tomorrow to show off whatever we can make between now and then. Hope I'm not moving too fast?"

"I've got some metals for you already but I don't know what we can do with this much."

"Well, if we need more we can get more. I'm also interested in the possibilities of chemical plating, or chemical batteries. If you could make a radioisotope thermal generator that'd be mighty convenient, but RTGs are horribly radioactive if the casing breaks. Messing with nuclear material is not a good idea without better tools. But some lithium might make us a good battery, or just some lead acid if I can't make those work without blowing up."

"Lead's dangerous. I can do lithium, though. How much?"

"Lithium is also dangerous, though more in a 'fire' way. Possibly moreso than lead in this case. I know enough not to eat the stuff. We can discuss it in the workshop, I'll show you some documentation and plans."