"I haven't," she agrees. She goes in to perform some maintenance tasks on the fellow with the crush injury.

"I'm told it's common to live with one's teachers while a student. Should that happen here, or should I stay in my current temporary lodging?" He asks when she's done with the maintenance tasks.

"It's not common here and I don't think either Beretn or I has the space. Arrange that separately," she advises.

"I shall. Any particular places I should look at or avoid?"

"No, apart from your own personal tastes in the matter."

"Okay." He should probably get some food, and then he can go back to observing Risan.

There are plenty of places with food, and they will serve him for free.

This is an excellent and no longer surprising feature of this place. He gets something that reads to him as lunch.

They have invented the sandwich, after a fashion - more like a pita pocket, full of hardboiled egg and interesting sauces and fried vegetable slices and salad. There isn't a lot of meat around, although he can find something like chicken with a bit of looking.

Sounds delicious. He asks the food provider if the egg-equivalent is from the chicken-equivalent. It's probably a stupid question regardless of what the answer is, but he's curious.

The chicken-equivalent does lay eggs, and they get eaten, but those eggs are more useful in baking than as whole egg product like what's in his sandwich. They use a different kind of bird to make eggs for eating straight.

That's interesting to know, and also these eggs are tasty. He finishes his pita pocket and heads back to the office.

Risan tells him things and quizzes him as she works, briskly, on each patient.

Watson absorbs things and correctly answers quiz questions.

Meanwhile, Holmes has been walking the streets of the city in a pattern as systematic as their street layout permits, taking in everything. He isn't sure if he and Watson will stay here long term, but if they do he will eventually come to know it as well as he knew London. He still can't read all of the street signs, but that's less of an impediment to building a mental map than it would be for someone else: he remembers each street, not by its name, but by how it's paved and what shops are on it and how it slopes and whether it curves and what sort of people tend to walk on it and what they're doing as they go and the smell of the air and a dozen other things less easily expressed in words.

Nearly all of this round is city, though it has more and less dense sections - some detached houses with trees around them, some tightly packed avenues full of shops and apartments. It has hundreds of square miles to cover.

London is well over a hundred square miles as well, though it lacks the distinction of taking up an entire celestial body. He enjoys the denser sections of the round the best, and spends most of his time in them.

In New Riverround, there are factories, many towers with sails coming and going, loading and unloading, theaters, stores, restaurants - lots of them - offices, museums, temples, government buildings, and many homes.

He builds up a picture of all of this in his head; much of it is still new enough to be exciting. What sort of religion or religions is practiced in the temples? What sort of plays are going on in the theaters? 

There is one religion practiced in all the temples; it seems to be a sort of animism. The plays include:

- a comedy about someone who makes herself a husband but screws up in a way that gives him (ultimately endearing) foibles
- an opera about a historical war
- a heartwarming drama about a moderately dysfunctional polyamorous family unit who create a child who brings them closer together
- a romance between a person from this civilization and another "less civilized" one, both parties created as children but from very different worlds
- various concerts and dance shows; one dance show has a plot that sounds like it was something somebody had a dream about, with a lot of fox imagery

If the concerts are as free as the food, he'll spend an hour or two listening to music.

The concerts are as free as food, although the first one he tries is full up and some of them don't let people enter in the middle; once he finds one that is letting people in he can take a seat and enjoy some stringed instruments stringing along.

Delightful! After the concert finishes he grabs some lunch and continues exploring the city. What sort of housing options exist for the people who aren't solely focused on some sort of productive work? He can't make specific arrangements for himself and Watson until he knows where the latter will be commuting to, but he can scope things out.

There are apartment buildings with one or two bedrooms rooms each; there are many fewer houses with three and four, a little more remote. There are a couple of branches of an office which handles keeping track of who lives where and suggesting empty places.

He can tell which ones are inhabited by looking at the outsides; he'll have a list of two-bedroom places in various locations ready to hand when he meets back up with Watson that evening. Between prospective houses, he amuses himself by looking at other passers-by and deducing their professions, pastimes, and problems.