Nod. "If I'm not back by the end of the day Monday you can put them back up for sale, I might still be interested but I'll be out of town."

And what's Captain Abernathy up to, is he findable?

He's available half an hour after being asked for (he needed something to do with the port authorities).

"Ah, did you go shopping already?"

"Mmhmm. I might get both of these -" he shows him the notes.

"Hmph. I never did like that old beast of a gun. Reliable, sure, but the rate of fire is really quite dreadful. What if you miss your first shot and don't get a second? I've had the privilege of shooting the other one, it's very serviceable even if I like more heft."

"Hm - I do have magic that helps with accuracy but I'd rather not rely on it. The other one she had was-" he more or less remembers the name, close enough to be recognizable at least.

"I confess an unusual fondness for revolvers, there's something stylish about them. But if you don't care about style I could understand passing it by. The prices seem slightly high but I've never had cause to question that gunsmith's quality and you get what you pay for. Incidentally, if you smell gunpowder in a gun shop, leave immediately. It means they're terrible at hygiene and safety and general diligence."

"That's good to know. I do care a little about style, she just made it sound like the only advantage it had was ease of cleaning, and I will be using magic for that. But it sounds like this one will be fine by itself, if the only downside to it is that it's a bit weaker."

"You could get a motif or engraving if you'd like, for style. Or have the exterior blued or blackened or bronzed, or a walnut grip, or any number of other things. And yes, it's a very fine weapon if you don't mind a slightly small bullet. It won't go through cover or armor as well, but if you're fighting something with armor you need a cannon and if you're fighting someone in cover you need a rifle. Of course, everyone including myself can argue endlessly for their favorite calibers."

"I'll have to think about how I want to pretty it up. And it sounds like I'm decided, then, thanks for the advice."

"Glad to be of service, such as it is."

He'll hang around for a while longer to chat, and then go pick up his gun and get some more work in before evening, when he retires to his hotel room to read his library books and hopefully get a little bit of sleep.

The gunsmith includes a cleaning kit, common spare parts, manuals, and a lesson on maintenance. And ammo, of course.

The advice book emphasizes faith and the common virtues of humility, diligence, kindness, and peace. It advises readers to avoid sloth, excesses of passion or debauchery, and the dangers of envy, jealousy, and greed. It describes Hell much like Raafi knows it, a realm of eternal torture, but it believes Hell is ruled by a demon named Lucifer who rebelled against God. Heaven is a paradise where the good go to eternal joy. The neutral afterlife is Purgatory, and after some indeterminate time there, neutral souls may ascend to Heaven. They don't have a law/chaos spiritual divide - just a good/evil one. It has a quote from a bible passage for many occasions, most of them urging one to be (though they do not put it in these terms) Lawful and compliant and Good, in that order, or warning for punishments against those who do not have faith. It issues stern warnings against paganism and heretics and maintains that the "gods" of the sky, the Judgements, are in fact either mistaken servants of Heaven or overblown evil beings trying to lead the faithful astray.

The religions book is "A Historical Survey of Various Beliefs" and talks about the history and development of various world religions from Old Earth in a dry and somewhat condescending tone. The various sects of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Shamanistic beliefs of the American and African "savages", Buddhism and Taoism and Zororastrianism, the paganist and folkloric beliefs of the Welsh, of Zee-farers, of those of the Elder Continent, and more recently of sky-sailors (the Burrower Below is said to transgress and transcend barriers, the Waste-Waif is the avatar of the forgotten, the abandoned, those left to die, the Storm that Speaks collects souls and stories and sometimes gives back secrets and power) and in Eleutheria (very little can be safely written of the unhappy undying things there, apparently). It's not particularly biased against anything because it's biased against everything except the New Sequence, but you get the sense that the historian was almost sarcastic in his praise of the 'most recent invention in our understanding of the cosmos'.

Apparently they have the concept of dragons here, if not the actual creatures. The Feast of the Red Saint doesn't really start until around noon, thankfully for Raafi's sleep schedule. When it does kick off, the theme seems to be dragon-slaying, with bright red artsy banners and floats and six people in a long paper dragon being chased by costumed 'knights' (or vice versa). Music fills the air and food stalls throng the streets, all of it going cheap and much of it chestnut-based. The Red Saint was apparently partnered with a dragon, going by the satirical plays on a few different street corners.

The books are useful, but the feast is much more interesting. He drifts from one attraction to another, enjoying the food and performances.

Marching bands. Two major variations on the play - one where the Red Saint is a comically bumbling buffoon, and where he's a hero flawed by being too Lawful. 'Dragon' chases. Roast chestnuts. Cheap beer. Expensive tea. Fireworks launched into the canyon, and a locomotive decorated in bright red with huge plywood-and-paper "wings" steaming up and down the way. Kids with wooden swords chasing each other.

The tension between rich and poor hasn't really gone away, though few people seem inclined to do anything about it today. Though there is a small crop of pickpockets and opportunists.

Elsewhere in the city, away from the loud and busy streets and prying eyes, cannon ammunition is being exchanged for good-quality Bronzewood.

Hopefully both the shells and the wood will be put to reasonable use; Raafi can't exactly declare that he wants to ally with someone and then immediately go around undermining their business without even having reason to believe they're in the wrong, plenty of illegal things can be fine in a place so sketchily lawful as to censor the books. He tries not to worry about it too much; that's not hard, this is quite a good festival.

Evening finds him in a bar, slightly drunk, sharing stories of dragons he's known and heard about.

The dragon stories are fun. They talk of their own troubles - of factory-related injuries and long hours in poor conditions. That sewing workshop he landed in the first day here seems to be very much on the good side for factory work. In hushed tones, of crime that goes unnoticed beneath the overseers' gazes, and the unwritten rules and promises of the criminal underworld. Of relationship issues and old friends. Of how silly and frivolous the Bohemians seem. Of old horror-stories of the terrible fates that can befall a person. Eye-stealing Sorrow-Spiders, face-stealing Snuffers, soul-stealing Devils, brain-stealing hats. (The former and the latter probably didn't make it out of the Neath...) Tea called Midnight's Indulgence that makes you obsessed with getting more tea, not in an addiction sort of way but an outright derangement. One man tells a horror-story his first ex entered the realm of dreams via a mirror and turned into something... Else. He broke the mirror when she tried to come back out. People shudder and mutter 'Parabola...'.

And soon enough the bars close and the festival comes to a close. Urchin gangs are picking off unattended leftovers and the occasional dropped small valuable and the city is going to sleep.

The city may be going to sleep, but Raafi's still on his own schedule. He shouldn't stay up long, but - maybe he'll go check on that fence, make sure there isn't anything obviously alarming going on with those shells.

This still seems like a reasonable idea after he clears his head with Lesser Restoration, so he heads over.

The factory hall the fence was operating out of is dark and quiet on the outside. It has a pickable lock, if he has lockpicking skills. Alternately, the huge panel-style windows near the hall's roof aren't latched, as nobody could possibly get up there and down again inside without a ladder, after all.

He knows anything about picking locks but not enough that he wants to try it in the middle of the street while he's still uncoordinated from the beer; he'll fly up and have a look.

The interior of the place has a few large machines and tables and a lot of open space. There's four people, including the fence, uncrating ammunition and repackaging it among things like barrels of enormous seeds or fruit of some kind, crates of clothes or matches or tea, casks of oil or grease, all by the light of a single oil lantern burning dimly. Some of the non-cannon ammo has been set aside near over a dozen guns, a few of which look distressingly homemade. They're not talking much - mostly "where does this one go?" and the like.

That's concerning - not so much the ones being packed up, but the ones set aside; what are they setting up for?

He's probably not going to figure it out from here in the next ten minutes, though, and for all that people here look up less, flying around peeking in windows is still liable to get him in trouble sooner or later. He heads back to the hotel, and in the morning when he stops by the hospital before his healing round, he lets them know that he'll be out of town for a few days and leaves half a dozen healing potions with them with strict instructions that they only be used for imminently life-threatening cases; they're irreplaceable, after all.

And then, after an early breakfast lunch, he heads over to the port.

Captain Abernathy's locomotive is more crowded than it was the other day. Various nooks and crannies have crates stuffed into them, and there's another passenger who took the other open cabin.

Abernathy introduces her - "From the Royal Horologists' Office. You know, one of the clockmakers."

"Ah, small correction. We do not make clocks. We correct them. Thank you again for the opportunity, Captain. Our duties have lapsed in many ports recently."

"Good to meet you. And I'm Raafi, displaced mage from another world. The rumors about my magic are mostly true, at least the ones I've heard."

Blink. "Another world? That sounds alarming. I had missed that part. And I will admit I am a bit concerned about your, ah, god deciding to attempt have influence over the British Empire's citizens."