"Ooh. I don't have like... any... money on me or I'd buy books from other universes too."

"You saw what Bar said about not enforcing tab paying though, I'm moderately tempted to just take the amplifier anyway and hope I end up rich and find another door later."

"Maybe..."

"I'm not actually sure what the downside is to racking up a huge tab, I don't think Bar actually needs money for anything."

"Yeah, I don't see how she could. I guess if she wanted magic things? But she doesn't seem to already have any, and she must have loads of money people have paid her."

"There's probably some downside, or it could mostly just be that people don't like to think of themselves as being in debt, even if the debt has no meaningful consequences and the person you owe money to doesn't care if you ever pay them back."

"Yeah, I'd be worried it would mean I didn't get more doors."

"I...guess? Naively I'd guess that being in debt to Bar would get you more doors so you could pay off your tab, but that's just a guess. We could go inside and ask."

"I did, actually. She can't be sure if there's any trend because time doesn't pass at the same rate in worlds and anyone she tried to keep track of could spend a trillion years just stepping away from the first door they got."

"If there isn't any evidence either way then there isn't really any reason to think there would be...but now I'm worried about it."

"Yeah, me too. I'm not sure if I want to risk it yet. I'll stay longer before I decide."

"That's probably the best plan. The amplifier probably isn't worth not getting more doors, considering the vast resources Milliways represents..."

"I'll definitely start carrying money with me, anyway."

"That's a good plan. I had some money on me but I can't spend everything on nifty extradimensional things; I still have things back home that need paying for."

"Well, you could get nifty extradimensional things that you could use to make more money than you'd spend on them, maybe?"

"Ideally. I considered trying to sell the books I got to publishing houses and claiming I'd written them, but that's a bad idea for a wide variety of reasons. I'm not in the best position to find people to reverse-engineer technology I could bring home, either. The problem is that a lot of the money I have I'm going to need to spend sooner than I could expect dividends from bringing things home to pay off."

"Maybe you could just buy... out of season fruit," says Stormy. "...That's not especially interesting, though, so maybe not. It would just be sort of easy to sell for more money."

"Out of season fruit is actually really easy to get where I'm from. And it would be kind of hard to sell, generally when people want fruit they go to places that make a business of selling food rather than someone who won't suffer if they don't get repeat business because there was something wrong with what they were selling."

"Oh."

"It was still a good thought, anyway."

"Why can't you do the books thing?"

"Well, first of all, I didn't write them. Someone else did. I feel...not entirely okay with claiming their accomplishments for my own. More practically, anyone I sent it to might notice that it had already been professionally edited, and once I ran out of books that had already written I would suddenly be mysteriously unable to write good literature anymore."

"Nobody in your world will get to read the books at all if you don't bring them back and share them. I never wrote but if I did I'd probably rather you pretend they were yours than never let anybody see them. And you can space them out and pretend you take ages to write and just say you have good spelling or got a friend to proofread."

"I'm probably going to release them anonymously. Publishing houses also are not actually guaranteed to take them, even though they're really awesome, whereas the anonymous method is a lot more reliable at getting stuff out there."

"I guess that's good too."