Nothing else interrupts at the hotel. Samuel Brown is out front again at nine AM.

Blai meets him there and casts another Share Language.

"Good morning. Well. Morning, at least. How is the English coming? Slowly?"

"The spelling is very strange but I am making progress."

"Oh good. I have a work shift at the flying port in... Two hours, so I may have been a bad target for that spell today. Sorry."

"I have another, though I'm not sure there is anyone else I should be casting it on either, that'll depend on the Aura Sight. Do you want your Lesser Restoration here or somewhere else?"

"It won't look like any thing obvious, will it? May as well get it over with if so."

"It's got a slightly longer casting time but the effect is not visible." Cast cast cast. "Lesser Restoration."

He waits for it to complete. "...Wooooow, woah. Holy smokes. I really feel that." He stretches, twists. "...No way I could've done that when I woke up. I don't think it's all the way better but definitely better. Thank you! Yeah, uh by the way, people are passing off your weirdness and the Chelish language as- A religious thing, like bikers giving away old tools for good luck. I've been very vague about it, I don't think anyone will, like, call you out on it. And they don't think it actually works of course. Just thought you ought to know."

"...all right. Thank you very much for all your help."

"Any last minute questions or requests before I go catch my ride? I'll give you my phone number but it might be best if we meet in passing from now on instead of, like, scheduled."

"If you say so. I'm not immediately thinking of any questions, though of course some will come up once it's impossible to ask them."

He chuckles. "That's always how it goes. Okay, some last few pieces of sage advice whatever comes to mind, I guess. The whoring business is fucking vicious and if you try to help girls or guys in it, do it very discreetly or they'll get beat up or murdered by their - madams. They're almost slaves. It's one of the most fucked up parts of this city and that's saying something. Don't snitch on people generally. Don't sell drugs or spikes without also- Actually probably just don't at all. Don't be too nosy or people will figure you're casing them for a robbery and get preemptive about it. There's pretty reliable drudge work at the city dump. Shitty work but nobody really pays attention to trash sorters, you could do it while you learn English and figure out what next."

"I'm not sure I'm competent to distinguish objects of value from waste in this place. Can you go into more detail on what you mean by snitching?"

He can go over some quick categories of valuable stuff and point them out scrolling through photos; Spikes and other electronica are pretty distinct if you look for the connectors. Weapons, too. Or if he means for working as a trash sorter- They'd show him how to correctly sort things. It really is not very good work though.

He's not really sure how to define 'snitching'. It's kind of a know it when you see it situation. Telling Tower Group about someone who fucked with you in the hopes that Tower will fuck with them is definitely snitching in his opinion, however much they may be the closest thing to a police force Samuel Brown really has no respect for them, it seems. Any more ambiguous situations might be ambiguous.

--And then he'd better get going if he's going to catch his ride. He writes down his phone number. It looks a lot like the one the chess-playing biker woman gave him on his first day.

"Goodbye."

Blai buckles down to work on English. He has a full night of sleep behind him and a reasonably good theory of how to pace the Comprehend Languages castings with repetitions of the same books without it so as to be efficient about it. Does he have enough money for another night in the hotel?

He has $24, so yes. His books are about a sensationalized ground view of various battles in WWII (though it does spend a while on 'how guns work'), vampires having a shadow war with werewolves and witches in a city that sounds a lot like this one, a spanish-english dictionary, and a Calculus I textbook. And half a dozen newspapers, and whatever ads he sees or is willing to grab off the street. This is a pretty eclectic way to learn English. The first book has some badly written old-timey language.

Oh, those things are guns. That's good to know. Comprehend Languages doesn't allow him to distinguish archaic and modern English but it does allow him to identify bad writing; the dictionary is a pretty poor choice for anything other than looking up how a word is pronounced with the help of the phone. He notes the properties of local vampires, werewolves, and witches in case they come up in his day to day life, though he bears in mind that the novel may have sensationalized them. He mostly plugs into his inn room, though he will certainly appreciate the solar charger if he manages to go set up a church in the badlands.

Nobody bothers him on the day he used Lesser Restoration or the day after. However, at that point he is out of money to pay for the stay.

Yup. Time to start hiking out somewhere little-inhabited enough that he can sleep rough. Is there a map posted anywhere to help him pick a direction? (Did Mending work on the headphones?)

Mending did fix the headphones!

There are no maps trivially accessible to him. Though he may be able to understand having heard the phrase 'across the river, into the Badlands' in context of someone leaving the city, in passing.

It's as good a hint as he seems likely to get, at least if he knows where the river is.

He might be able to reference it from landmarks seen in aerial photos in the newspapers, that one corporate tower shaped like an X in relation to the curving blue one, as he can see both in the distance from some parts of the slums.

Sounds like a plan. Out he strikes. The armor is heavy enough to slow him down but he can make it five leagues before sundown if he has to, and if he's not out of the dense city by then he will risk Lighting his phone, he's seen them glow if not in exactly that way.

He hits Riverside long before then. The first sign of it is a tall barbed wire chain link fence with periodic signs - TOXIC WASTE SITE - CONDEMNED - DO NOT ENTER UNDER PENALTY OF LAW