"And yeah, that sounds super cute. I'd love to see a picture of mini-moon."

"We can go back to Earth?"

His face turns into something hopeful, then a scowl, before he smooths it over.

"Probably should at some point. I imagine being missing for three weeks or however long will be legally interesting. It's not like I had all the bills on autopay. Nevermind that. What were you shopping for? And d'you think I can pawn some amateur glassware?"

"Clothes, tools, personal care products, everything a pair of traveling girls need to stock their flying train with to make her livable."

She looks down at the bottles at his hip. "And probably. Best I can tell, this place loves to buy and sell stuff. We just offloaded some lumber, so I'm sure somewhere someone wants to buy your glassware."

Eva makes a wobbly hand motion. "Maybe. They seem to have plenty of glass around here, but you can't know till you try."

She looks over at Sable. "If the glass sales don't go so well, do you think we could spot Nick here enough that he can get some basics together? More than the set of clothes he woke up in?"

Sable frowns thoughtfully for a moment.

Then nods and smiles. "Yeah, we can. S'not like our operating expenses are particularly high."

"Looks like you'll be okay on stuff you can get from Rorch at least. You might have some trouble finding some of the neccessities, especially hygiene stuff — the Associates are stone, so they have different needs from humans — but hopefully we can at least get you something helpful."

"Stone, huh. Yeah, there's... A bunch of things I could use. I don't like relying on charity, as a personal thing. If I can sell it as... Furniture, or art, or stylish accessories, that'd be a nice angle. I can resculpt it. I can always see what kind of things go well and make another trip later after getting to know the place."

He pulls from one of the stoppered bottles (more a thermos with a wide, roughly threaded cap), a thin glass tulip, made of layers of black-red-clear glass to evoke the different shades and colors. It's... A little lumpy and smudgey, and slightly dented, but the aim and affect is clear. He makes to present it with a flourish, but seems hesitant and embarrassed about it and abandons the motion with an awkward shrug.

"Hey, that's not bad! Could use a little refinement, but the style's developing. I like the use of different colors of glass to evoke the texture of petals. Not sure how much it'll sell for but it's definitely evidence of progress. I'm impressed with how thin you're able to get the glass." 

"Ah- Thank you?" He glances away.  "Well, part of that is a power too, I'm pretty sure. I can mess with it like play-doh when it's fresh. I actually made furniture for my cave that way. Kind of desert punk?"

Sable grins. "That sounds like a pretty fun and unique furniture style. I'd love to see it some time."

The mall has been growing closer while they've talked, and now the sign looms overhead in Rorch's alphabet.

"What sorts of stuff d'you need? Aside from a new pair of jeans," she finishes with a laugh.

"...Man, I don't even know. Food? Tools. More clothes. Something to protect from space debris would be nice, that shit's scary and I've just gotten lucky so far, but I'm not holding out too much hope for something like that."

"I think we can manage some basic tools and clothes." Eva nods to Sable. "The Associates are bigger than humans so you'll need some alterations done, but it should work out."

"Never thought the highlight of my week would be a new shirt. Then again it's the little things, isn't it? You two seem like you have your stuff figured out. I feel out of place."

"I just got lucky. My awakening came with a library full of books by other Conduits. While I'm not able to read most of them, the one I could read — Journeys of a Conduit — helped a lot."

"Perhaps I could borrow it?"

"I think I'm cool with that so long as it doesn't leave my library."

Eva pauses. "Incidentally, do you have any way to be immortal that you know of? If not I might want to get you into my backup system just in case."

"-Uh. Not that I know of."

"We'd best get on that, then. Next stop after shopping?"

"I would appreciate a bit more explanation about the immortality thing," he says lightly, with a bit of underlying tension.

She looks back at Nick. "It's not really the best immortality method. It just lets there be a new you if you die, you lose all your memories in the time between you were backed up and when you died. So the you that died really does die — it's just that you get to have another you that carries on afterward. Better than nothing by a long shot, but I'd prefer something that worked better." 

Eva shrugs and spreads her hands. 

"How it works is that there's an egg the size of a person you can touch in my personal cavern world — it's called a Bevin — and if you die and I touch that egg I can call a copy of you forward from the egg with the memories of your life from when you touched it. It works automatically for me but not for other people, I have to make it work manually."

"Huh. Do you get like... notification or something? Does it let you know whether you need to pull a new copy when you update your own backup?"

Eva shrugs helplessly. "I have no clue. It's never happened yet and I can't think of an experiment to test it that wouldn't kill someone."

"Yeah. Well, good reason to invest time in finding a better option if we can, I guess?"