"Nah, tracking down those leads will be lots of travel. We just have to wait for, like, two weeks, so we can be better supplied when we go out."

"Oh, okay. I vote for that one."

"Cool. Me too, I hate this city."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It has a lot of laws. And a lot of people. I don't really like laws. Or most people."

"Why not?"

"Well, a lot of laws are just about who's allowed to hurt who and which things you're allowed to count as hurting you. And a lot of people treat children very badly and treat animals very badly and treat slaves very badly and treat their wives very badly and so on."

"Huh."

"You don't have to hate the city, though. Most people like it."

"I dunno. I've only been here a day."

"And we didn't get to see very much! Tomorrow maybe we can go see more. Maybe with local clothes for the two of you so you don't stand out."

"Okay!"

Well she doesn't have anything else pressing to say to these people, really.

"There's gotta be something in the city you wanna see," he says. "We've got - a big featureless black dome you could stare at?"

         "Hagan," says Fazil.

"I'm trying to be culturally sensitive!"

"What... else does it have."

"There's the port, there's the canals, and the canal district which mostly has canals instead of roads. There's the Bazaar. There's museums - there's a museum of the pharaoh and a museum of commerce and the Osirion National Museum which is mostly about history. There's a theatre. There's sports - kayak racing and airball and alligator wrestling and mudputt and shortthrow. There's a big replica of Aktun you can wander around in - Aktun's Abadar's district in Axis, this place tries to get everyone to Axis so they'll try to sell you really hard on it. There's the national public library. There's ancient catacombs that have been cleared out of everything interesting so that tourists can visit."

      "We could enter the lottery for a tour inside the dome," Fazil says, "but we probably won't win, they only take 100 people every day."

"Also it's just fancy rich person houses inside, I've heard," Hagan says. "Pretty boring."

"Museums and sports sound okay. And maybe we could see the catacombs. Or the replica of Aktun."

"Sounds like a plan."

"Okay."

"Anything else you wanted to know?"

She looks at Korva.

"Who, uh, are you guys?"

They look at each other kind of sheepishly. 

Fazil answers. "I'm a priest of Abadar. I grew up here, in Sothis, and it's where my family is. I became an adventurer when my sisters and brothers were grown up, and that's when I met Mahdi and Hagan. We've been adventuring together for seven years. Mahdi grew up here, too, and Hagan won't tell anybody where or what he's from."

"Once upon a time, there was a wizard who was experimenting with variants on Polymorph. He cast one on a seagull that had flown through the window and it turned into a man. That man was me."

"Well at least you made something of yourself."