The streets have an odd layout. This one, and the ones nearest it, are built on a square grid. She can walk through alleys over to a parallel street with different storefronts. But if she goes far enough, the streets will switch to a hexagonal layout — zigzagging back and forth, leaving plenty of room for little courtyards and parks in the odd gaps between buildings. That direction also has taller and taller buildings, though, so if she's looking for a sleazy neighborhood, she might choose to turn and skirt around the hexagonal area.

Eventually, after enough searching, she can find a shop with bars on the windows that smells like antiques, which seems promising. It's squeezed in between a shop that sells items made of leather, and an unmarked building that smells mostly of paper and dust.

She still has no idea what language this is... Well, she's picked up what are probably 'hello' and 'goodbye'. and hanging out invisibly trying to learn the language sounds... Boring.

Leather goods? Interesting. The other one seems like a bookstore, probably.

Before going in she transforms- Ugh, yeah, she's starting to expend noticeable amounts of energy- And pulls out from her tail gold coins with a square in the middle, strung on a long string, and a smaller pouch of silver and copper ones aaaaand... Hmm, not any of the wands or scrolls, not her jars of spices... The weapons and furniture she carries in her pocket space she mostly keeps for sentimental reasons... Yeah, probably best to stick with the coins.

She's now wearing a (partially illusory; she's adding extras to her usual tunic and skirt-type outfit) outfit that is sort of aping that stiff-fabric style, complete with a hood that should effectively hide her ears if they don't twitch too much in surprise, and a big coat to stick her tail into. Mostly tans and browns.

-Ugh, the curse has settled on making her eyes strange today. Deep amber and with odd pupils. Well, she can't do anything about that.

Into the pawn shop (if it's open)! Cheerful innocent shopper demeanor! Peering at the shelves! Polite hello once addressed!

She doesn't know the word for 'selling' so she'll just present several of the coppers and silvers. The coppers have a motif of a sun over grain field on one side and a crescent moon over a forest on the other, and a few words in the Northern Federation's language. The silver ones have an image of what might be aurora borealis on one side and clouds surrounding a comet on the other, and another few unfamiliar words.

þasatova finds working in his aunt's shop pretty boring. He's flopped over the counter reading a book on his phone, but perks up when she walks in.

"Hello, welcome to Tava's Trades," he greets. "What can I help you with?"

When she responds in a language he doesn't speak, he frowns. He peers at her eyes, noticing the weird contacts. She is definitely a dedicated cosplayer. Which is a shame, because that's not really his scene. He's never had a head for languages.

"Do you want to sell these?" he says, reaching out a hand toward the coins. "Are they real metal?"

He peers at the coins, and sighs. He doesn't recognize the language on them either, which probably means that she forged these at home. Which is cool and impressive, but that means that she's probably dedicated enough to whatever this is not to have used standard weights, and possibly not a standard alloy mixture, so he's definitely going to have to mark them down. He sets them on the counter and goes to fetch a scale and a hardness tester.

Yep, she unfortunately doesn't understand this language! Oh well! Yes she would like to sell them, she holds up her fingers in the shape of one of the paper-slips.

(The coppers are 4.07-4.12 grams and about 5% zinc, the silvers are 3.45-3.47 grams and are Sterling silver. Not that she can explain this. Here's a gold one too, with a square hole in the middle. It's bigger and more elaborate and octagonal and has a total of eight drawn symbols on one side, and eight ideograms on the opposite. 35ish grams. It's at maybe 80% purity.)

He returns with a scale, and carefully measures each coin. Then he tries to scratch one of each with several different materials, eventually concluding that they really are probably mostly silver and copper, based on the hardness.

He does some multiplication on his phone.

"If these were pure silver and I could be sure of that, I could give you 3 marks per coin," he tells her. Even if she's too proud of her conlang to admit that she speaks Smaller Continent Official Language, at least this way she won't be able to claim he defrauded her. "But since I don't know the purity or the provenance, and you can't make any guarantees about it, I'll offer you one mark per."

It is, in his mind, a pretty fair deal, given that there are plenty of ways to adulterate silver. Although these might be worth more than one mark each to a collector if whatever her thing is gets popular. He makes a note to tell his aunt about the whole transaction in as much detail as he can, just in case.

"For the copper ones — 0.012 marks per if they were pure, so I'll round up and give you 0.003, how's about that?" he asks. "So for the whole bunch ..."

He writes her up a bill of sale for the piles of copper and silver coins, filling in the appropriate values for the weight, quantity, and price. Then he turns the paper to face her and hands her a pen. The remaining spaces on the paper are a long line next to a short label, three short lines separated by colons with three dots, and a series of thirty-six boxes, where each box is split into two triangles. There's a similar box just above it, into which are neatly printed an apparently random string of digits.

Oh shoot. The papers might have been coupons. Is this place totally cashless?

Also it seems that silver is worth more here, compared to copper? So she'll remove most of the coppers to buy herself time to think.

Signature, date, and....... Card number?

"Yeah, I don't have one of these, sorry." She's pointing to the third line and sounds genuinely contrite.

5 coppers and 12 silvers are left.

... so her character doesn't even have a bank account? What does she expect him to do here.

He briefly considers calling his aunt to see if they have a store policy, but honestly this probably falls under 'humor weird and obstructive customers unless they're interrupting another customer, one of your mandatory tasks, or being a danger'.

He taps a finger on his chin.

"I guess I can cut you a check, and then you can go make a bank account and deposit it?" he muses.

He reaches under the counter and pulls out a different sheet of paper, only about a third as large. He draws an X across the bill of sale, and then fills out the different sheet of paper instead. He fills out all the boxes, not leaving any for her to fill in, tears off a slip from the end of it, and then holds it out to her with raised eyebrows.

....Probably the best she's gonna get. Twelve silver isn't nothing but it's also not a lot.

Thumbs up, and she puts the pouch of silver and copper that's not being sold and the string of gold coins into a 'pocket' and slowly reaches for the ?check?

She'll have to take it back to the bank and be a weird glitch in the Bureaucracy. If cops hassle her she can deal with some cops.

Maybe she will choose a different bank branch, though.

He lets her have the check without protest.

"Good luck with your ... thing," he says.

Outside, a small electric golf cart goes by at four or five miles an hour. One of the people riding in it hops out when it passes the leather shop and walks inside.

Perfectly normal citizen gawking a perfectly normal amount and acting like she's in a hurry and doesn't wanna talk.

She'll start going back to the square part of town that seemed denser.

Well, the people on the cart don't really seem to be paying attention to her. They're mostly focused on their phones. And all wearing purple pants, for some reason.

It's pretty easy to retrace her steps back to the square part of town. The people there are still milling around, doing their various daily activities. Her clothing doesn't seem to warrant comment, and nobody gets close enough to see her eyes.

Has she seen any bank branches other than the original one? Also, local fashion seems weird. The colors are meaningful? She's been struck by odd color choices multiple times now. Hopefully tan/brown is nice and neutral. 

There has not been anything that is definitely a bank, but she did happen to notice another building that has a counter, lines of queuing people, and no obvious merchandise, which seems like a promising candidate.

The colors are definitely meaningful. If she watches the crowds for long enough, she'll notice that nobody speaks to or looks at anyone wearing red — or with a red shining light clipped into their hair. The people wearing red generally have a flatter aspect, and rarely speak. People working at businesses usually have purple worked into their clothing, and people on the street don't. Most people have either a blue light in their hair, or blue somewhere on their clothing, even if they're otherwise wearing brown. Brown, tan, and green all seem to have no effect that she can discern. There are also some people with orange lights, although it seems like an unpopular clothing color, and she spots one person with a red-and-blue blinking light sitting on the balcony of an apartment and shouting down to someone on the street with a blue light.

Meanwhile, the Central River City Emergency Services Unprecedented Situations Rapid Response Team — which is so much of a mouthful that they usually just call themselves the Weird Shit Team — is brainstorming.

"... we can try to get a helicopter in?" Veramat suggests. "And watch through cameras?"

    "We can't possibly cover the full city. What I want to know is why the fox disappeared from the cameras at a different time. And how it was still apparent to the door sensor," their coworker replies.

"Okay, hear me out. What if we make a city-wide announcement that ..."

    "No way! One group of people saw one invisible fox. We can't just disturb the whole city like that."

Þummil pokes her head in from the call center. She's still speaking on the phone, so she signs to them.

Hey guys, we have an invisible fox turning into a non-invisible person of indeterminate gender on camera outside an antiques store, she signs.

    "... okay, maybe we can do a city wide announcement. What would you want it to say?"

She... Doesn't want to put on red, having observed its possible use for evading notice.

It feels like faking a disability. The internet would hate her for it!

...This line of thought is kind of distracting? Hmm. Also maybe nobody will take her 'check' for all that she wants a nice croissant and tea right now. Hmmmmmm. (Her tail lashes slightly as she thinks. It makes her back look weird.)

...More wandering, really. Maybe back to the park-ish zones to sit and listen and think.

There's plenty of little green spaces (or, white spaces, with the light dusting of snow) for her to sit and think. The city almost seems designed to encourage that kind of thing, and there are several groups of friends sitting around in the parks she passes.

Soon, she reaches an emptier park that has a nice little café, or something along the same lines, tucked into the back corner and selling pastries. The scent of fresh-baked bread wafts out in a curtain every time someone opens the door.

Just as she reaches it, all of the phones within earshot give the same little three-tone chirp, and many people stop where they are in the street and fish a phone out to look at it.

.....Uh-oh?

If she spoke the language, she might have a better idea of what just happened. As it is, a lot of people turn to start walking in a different direction than they had been going, or speak in excited or dismissive tones to their friends, or begin looking around at the other passers by.

A man emerges from the café with a thermos of something and then pauses in the doorway to look her up and down.

It's always men who

Wrongthought.

Ugh. Ugh ugh. Why did the rift have to drop her IN THE MIDDLE OF A BANK. She can't even be mad at the cops. Invisible giant foxes are pretty alarming.

Nonchalantly enjoying the park here, alert but not concerned. She stands and starts walking in a people-less direction.

The man calls out after her, but doesn't seem inclined to pursue. It's easy enough to slip away between the buildings, and find an unoccupied corner. This one is not a park, but a little loading dock area for a group of stores. There's nothing currently being unloaded, though — just some elevated doors and suggestive tire tracks in the snow. 

She (invisibly) clambers up to a roof and peers over the streets.

It's a shame she came up the back side, since the street-facing side of this roof has some ropes for self-belay and a set of handholds. The roof itself just has some sparse chairs and a big solar panel.

As for the people on the streets ...

It's clear that something is happening. Not everyone is reacting in the same way, but there's a sense of some unexpected disruption to routine. Where before, people were going about their business or sitting and chatting, now people are mostly walking with a determined stride, or discussing in large groups. During the first few minutes, a number of people put red lights in their hair, or change their lights from blue to red. A few minutes after that, the people with red lights have almost completely vanished from the street, although they left in different directions.

The smell of bread from the café is still apparent to her sensitive nose, even from the roof, tempting her.

Another golf cart is visible in the distance, a pair of people stopping people on the street and speaking to them before moving on.

In the distance, she can still hear the normal sounds of the city. Whatever they think is happening, the trains are still running, and people are still working and living.

"... so then we get some spotlights in, to make the right building really obvious," Veramat pitches.

Their colleagues nod thoughtfully. "So we can start with SCOL and LCTL, partially so everyone knows what's happening, and then what? Fox calls?"

    "Now that Smaller Continent Dispatch has confirmed it, I think we can probably get an expert on foxes pretty easily. Þummil, would you make the request?"

"What do we do if they don't show?"

    "We'll need to give them some time, certainly. But it's early in the day — we won't be doing anything that will need an impact payment until the evening. And then we can try again the next day."

"Are foxes nocturnal?"

    "I think they're crepuscular, actually, like wolves. I think it's worth the impact payment, personally. See if Dispatch will authorize the expense."

"Okay, what do we do if they do show?"

    "Senior Diplomat Tatenika and her team are already being flown in, just in case. Their plane should touch down in about four hours."

"I have a biologist specializing in dogs and foxes on the line," Þummil announces.

   "Put them on speaker — Specialist, what have you heard about the situation?"