Verity portalsnaked to MidChilda
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She decides she likes this place.  It feels like the comfortably empty corridors in the very early morning, but properly lit.  She leaves the couple alone, and considers hanging around the pool but eventually decides that given everything else the pool might be considered crowded if more than one person is in it, no matter how many wailords would fit by fleet standards.  Instead, she decides to sit in the lounge for a little while, and read about cultural differences and hiking unless interrupted.  

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The chairs are plush and comfortable and no one disturbs her.

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Eventually she starts to get hungry.  It feels silly to walk all the way back and then call a drone to deliver food when she's already at the place the food would be delivered from.  She goes looking for a table at the restaurant or bar area, then queries the terminal for how to order and what the choices are.  

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This sorts her choices by options that may be delivered from this location. There are a lot of options, represented in a cloud of labeled photos that enlarge and center when she looks at one, popping out a textual description (the thus-redundant blurb about the restaurant is shrunk into a smaller font).

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That is a lot of options.  "Please select whatever is most popular around here for me," she tells the terminal, not wanting to spend the next hour reading all of the descriptions.

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This will get her a succulent steak dinner with a colorful steamed vegetable mix with a potato-like side-dish. The meat is beautifully textured, unnaturally so, and too regular throughout to have plausibly come from an animal. She is charged }-4.29 in total.

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She's not familiar with even the concept of meat, and therefore doesn't recognize it.  As she's not sure what all the vegetables are either it doesn't stand out, and the entire meal parses as 'strange but good very foreign food.'  

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Then she can have a nice peaceful dinner that, in a lower-tech world, would have probably given her digestion issues that she will in actuality never have to know were even a risk.

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Then she can return to her cabin, slower this time and spending longer looking at the flowers.

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Nothing interrupts her peaceful walk.

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"Are these hand terminals waterproof?" she asks said terminal, going towards a bedroom.  She normally goes to sleep in the ship's equivalent of late afternoon anyway, for her very early morning schedule.  "And can I order clothing through this?"

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It is waterproof, of course. And she can peruse a selection of popular clothing-design communities and services and browse these recommended assortments or queue for time on one of these Intelligent clothing-design suites.

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She just wants pre-designed clothing, and adds onto the search that she's looking for things that can be delivered within a day, considering that she only currently has the one set.  Clothes that won't cost too much for her to afford and still have food and money left over for other things.  Also things that cover most of her skin other than hands and head but would be fine for being outside in this climate, mostly in a fit of pique rather than caring about her arms being seen or the (probably nonexistent, given everything else) risk of sunburn.  She debates whether to suggest the clothing be blue, or anything else except blue, but eventually winds up not asking for either.  

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Her current balance is }-994.03 and if she just wants generic, functional clothing in printable materials she can get that delivered from the clubhouse's textile printer for the cost of raw materials and drone time, which for a single complete outfit is measured in fractions of a single unit of currency.

Is she sure she wouldn't like something less crude? Something with self-cleaning fabric, self-cooling fabric, hydrotransient fabric (breathes and is not waterproof, but can't itself get wet), frictionless fabric, tear-proof fabric, or perhaps even biotically-laced auto-bandaging fabric?

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Verity is being stubborn and demanding normal fabric.  The clothing she picks is non-blue after all:  Something vibrant green with coppery metallic threads, and a muted dark purple with thin lines of pale pink concentrated most densely around the hems, and an outfit made up of sunset colors worn over a mostly-concealed black underlayer.  All colors that were considered unseemly for a water-type by the fleet's standards.  Three sets is more than enough for now, each intricate enough to hopefully not stand out as shabby, loose enough to run around in and pants rather than skirts.  

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Skirts do not seem to be available at all among the generic varieties of clothing.

The concept of the (non-sports) bra also does not seem to exist, here, nor anything that shows cleavage. It is also somewhat difficult to find the more elaborate colors and accents she wants in tasteful sorts of designs, but 'difficult' is relative and she might not even notice the (by local standards) lack of selection in her preference niche.

Everything she does order will be tailored to fit her perfectly, though.

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If most of their bridges are made of glass, she can see why skirts wouldn't be popular.

She finalizes the order and asks whether the drone can let itself inside to put the clothes near the door or something.  Even if it'll show up in five minutes she's already sitting on the bed and doesn't intend to go meet it if she doesn't have to.  

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Given the degree to which some feminine styles show off the hip-area and upper legs, that is probably not why there are no skirts.

She can give that drone one-time permission to open her front door, yes.

It will, in fact, take a bit longer than five minutes. The textile printer in the clubhouse is primitive and slow by modern standards.

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Verity gives it permission, kicks off her boots, and climbs into bed.  Araeneve jumps up and curls up around her protectively.  

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As usual, she wakes up well before dawn.  She retrieves her new clothing and takes a quick shower, standing in a small corner of it for just long enough to scrub clean before changing into the green outfit, Araeneve standing beside her.  That out of the way, she orders yet another meal - whatever is popular and different enough from the first to be novel - to be delivered for breakfast.  She also asks for something to be delivered which can make a decent lunch after a few hours in a bag, as she hasn't yet gotten used to the idea of drones finding her and not an address.  

It's been put off long enough.  She goes to retrieve some hiking gear, and spends the remaining time until morning figuring out what to bring for an entire day walking around and looking at trees.

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Ordering lunch while out on a hike wouldn't be sporting anyway.

The nearby areas of woodland are mostly flat, cut up by the occasional shallow creek or small, easily-scalable cliff. The weather is temperate, and the sky clear. The trees are tall and stately and the underbrush is thin.

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They run around and explore the forest.  Occasionally she runs her hands over the bark of the trees or smells the plants, since it isn't a VR simulation this time and she can finally do more than just see and hear things.  Araeneve leaps around on top of the creeks, following them for a short while, and Verity clambers up the small cliffs.  Every so often she stops to ask the terminal for information about unfamiliar species that stand out.

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It's an eclectic mix of native flora and imported flora, none of it dangerous. Some of it is mildly poisonous. Some of it is actually a mystery, non-native to the planet but not traceable to any of the seedstock used during terraforming. It could've been anyone from the Belkans to the lost Al-Hazard, but under unguessable circumstances since MidChilda was not settled or strategically relevant until the founding of the TSAB.

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Ooh, plants of mysterious origins.  

Around early afternoon they get tired and start heading back.  Then food, another quick shower, reading some more, and sleep.  She misses cooking her own food, a little, but nowhere near enough to take time away from the other things she could be doing.  The cleaning part she doesn't miss at all.

The next few days are much the same.  Sitting beside a creek and listening to the water while eating lunch.  Looking at the variety of rock types found in the water-smooth pebbles.  On the fleet, a stone that daemons can't generate were precious keepsakes from the dead world, but on a planet they're just common rocks.  Standing right next to a tree and looking straight up, to get a sense of the scale of how tall trees can get when not constrained.  

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After several days of idyll, while wandering a patch of anonymous wilderness, Verity gets a notification asking if she would like to share her current location with Eelesia Rimac.

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"Okay."

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