Cynthia makes her way to the B-7 apartment. (She learned about why everything's built super-tall, so living on the second story feels... weird.) This apartment will still be nice, though, right?

The apartment holds a full-sized kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms, each with a queen-size bed, and a study. The study and kitchen overlook a park on the ground floor, and then another taller building is across the way, a full-sized skyscraper with many, many floors. It seems the building she's in is smaller, though, only about ten floors. In the distance, a high-speed rail train passes on an elevated track, carrying passengers along at a dramatic clip. 

The city seems to be set up in a broadly hexagonal grid, with high-rise complexes broken up by parks, each set of a half-dozen hexes joined by a rail station in the center. There are also side roads along the edges of some of the hexes, but it seems most goods and people move by train.

People come and go on the streets below. About three quarters of them seem to be women; silver circlets, braided ponytails, maxi skirts and v-necked blouses seem to be the in fashion. There are a few men in the crowd, but they're often hard to pick out due to the generally feminine and unisex styles of dress. Many people wear bracelets on their left and right wrists with glowing LEDs in them; she can catch the lights winking at even this distance. 

Right, actual, proper skyscrapers feel... right. And the kitchen, it'll be novel to make her own food! The next thing to see are the things right outside, like pools and gardens and people.

The park outside her window has a large pool complex, with people in swim skirts and bikini tops lounging along the sides of a kidney-bean shaped pool. It's midday, and people are lounging on deck chairs and sipping drinks. A game of something sort of like water polo with a ball with built-in LEDs is currently going on in the kidney bean shaped pool, while in a second pool farther back people are swimming laps. One woman is getting a massage with her bikini off, her breasts flat against her lounging-chair; no-one seems to care much. 

Right. She doesn't have a swimsuit, or even really knows where to get one. And there's a garden? But maybe it's less easy to get to, or she might need to go down to get to it.

The garden doesn't seem to be obviously visible from her window. Perhaps it's on the other side of the building. 

She'd want to head down to see people anyway. She's also super curious about what gardens are like, here.

With a few minutes of searching she arrives at the garden, which is an enclosed area settled in with a tall fence to screen the road and anything else exterior to it. 

A plum-blossom tree occupies one corner of the garden; next to it is a medium-sized, one-story building with a sliding paper door. Scattered glass beads are impressed into the paper. A lacquered-wood bridge crosses a small brook that rushes down from a higher elevation, and an ornamental pond filled with lilypads sits in the center of the garden. A hexagonal gazebo stands on an island in the ornamental pond, only acessible by a hop-step path of raised stones through the water; three women are cuddled together on a large bed in the center of the gazebo, simply enjoying each other's company.

The ring around the exterior walls is planted with flowering bushes, predominantly dahlias and roses, and there are enfolding trees, both pines and deciduous ones, perhaps beeches, that crowd out the sights of the city. Women sit on stone benches, contemplating statues that bear much the same air of contemplation.

The garden seems to be a tiny microcosm of its own, suited to stopping and taking a breath from a long day. Though it must take some degree of maintenance, it is not particularly showy; rather it enfolds and isolates, seeming hard to raise one's voice in. Scattered plum blossoms lay on the path, and so too do a few fallen leaves. It is not perfect, but the illusion is rather deep.

What an awesome trick! The women contemplating on the benches seem less accepting of being disturbed than the trio on the bed. She begins making her way to the three women, hoping to get their attention without having to speak up and interrupt them.

The women in the gazebo look over as she crosses the stepping-stone path, and one of them moves aside for her to join them on the bed. 

"Afternoon," she says. "I'm Wasp, and these two are Hawk and Blue." She gives a little wave. She wears a set of tiny wasp wings on a headband in her hair, a bob cut, cosmetic claws on her nails, two steel rings with holes in them and red LEDs glowing on her wrists, and currently seems to be physically secured to the bed by a short chain with a carbiner clipped to one of them. She's holding the hand of Blue, who is also wearing a wrist bracelet in plastic, currently lit in cyan, and the brown-haired Hawk is laying across both her legs and Blue's. 

Blue makes no motion of reaction, instead turning away; Hawk raises a hand, a purple LED glowing at her wrist, and nods to Cynthia. "Afternoon." She wears a matching necklace to Blue's, a small heart with a v cut out of it. 

"You're looking great! I'm incredibly new to everything here, and I was curious about if you could show or tell me some things so I could understand this place better."

"Ah, one of the people from the program? There's been a couple of you around. Ah - I'm not sure where to start. What explanations have you gotten so far?" 

"That I have an ID, money, and a place to stay... little else. Certainly 0 about the people here and what they like and are like!"

"Let me see... Hawk, help me out here, I'm not sure where to start." 

"Alright, alright. The first thing is - everything is clans here. Clans of people working together. Generally a clan is a web of romantic and familial relationships, and they get very intertwined. Most people have about three to four romantic partners and twice that in friends, relations and partners of partners. Not to mention all their various facets - the numbers really start to add up quickly. The way to get ahead is to get involved with a clan and show that you're competent at whatever you're doing, at which point they'll send opportunities your way." Hawk leans her head forward, silver feather earrings dangling from her earlobes. "Having a known enra is a good way to get initial work, but that's something kind of personal that you'd want to figure out on your own - it's not something to do casually."

"Is enra a magic power thing? That's what it really sounds like to me."

"Magic?" Wasp laughs and shakes her head. "No, no magic, sorry. It's just the word for a... passion, a vocation. Something you love to do and do habitually."

"Why the new fancy word?"

"Different emphasis, I think. An enra is a thing your heart does because you're compelled by it. It's..." She fumbles for words. "I don't know how to explain."

"Well... I suspect that's not something I have, then." 

"Do you know where I could get a phone? I had one, where I came from."

"There's a mall one hex down the blue line," Wasp says. "It'll have an electronics store that carries phones."

"And I trust it's in OK walking distance, so I can start just making my way over there?"

"You'd be better off taking the train," Wasp says, "but it's walkable, yes. Just might take you twenty minutes to get there."

"I'll take the train back, I think." Cynthia smiles at Wasp briefly, before beginning on the walk to the store with the phones.

Wasp waves goodbye when she hops back over the stones, and the women go back to their private conversation. 

The through-hex paths meander a little, but after a longish walk through parkland she comes to the exterior of another skyscraper complex. 

Within is a three story mall, with a few different shops for electronics. It seems the foremost phone brands are between a simple-to-set-up and almost unkillably tough basic version optimized for long battery life, and a heavily-customizable phone that's built to slot into a case solution of your choice, offering higher aesthetic and technical control at the cost of reliability. She's told that if she's not a power user the simple to set up phone — a "Peach" — is better for her use cases, but if she intends to use the phone for programming work it's best to do a custom build on an "Integrat."