She can't sing or dance, but she can compose poetry fast enough to do doggerel with decent meter and rhyme on whatever subject's recent. Subject to her limited knowledge, of course, but she's got a few days of experience now among the crew and can improvise if need be. 

She disembarks with a small wave to one of the crew she half-knows, and nods to the captain. "It was no trouble," she says, accepting her sovereigns. 

Then she sets off into the city, mostly so it looks like she knows where she's going. A few streets later she'll look around and try to orient herself. Is there a currency changer or a jeweller anywhere nearby?

This street seems fairly low-income. There's grocery stores and bars and hardware shops and food stalls and clothes stores and apartment buildings and a pawn shop. There's also a rat sitting in a tiny 'stall' sticking out of a building at eye level, the sign offering watch and toy repairs.

She'll stop in at a grocery and see how things are priced in sovereigns to get a feel for just how much money she's currently carrying. Maybe she'll buy a box of cookies/biscuits while she's here.

A day's worth of food in this grocery store is about a third of a Sovereign, a bit less or more if you want to eat plain biscuits or plenty of cheese and meat. Sovereigns break up into Shillings and Pennies.

Cookies and biscuits: Exist.

Quick calculations: one gold coin is fifty sovereign plus a dangerous expensive service, a locomotive trip of a day or two from Port Avon to here is fifteen sovereign, one sovereign is three days' groceries, so a five-sovereign coin is worth fifteen days' groceries, which is half a month, and she would get ten of those plus a dangerous expensive service for one gold coin, so one gold coin is worth groceries for half a year. 

She definitely overpaid Primrose. But that was somewhat the point. 

She breaks a five-sovereign coin to purchase a small box of cookies, which she tucks in her pack. No doubt this produces a hail of change she can tuck into one of her convenient pockets.

Looks like it's twenty Shillings to the Sovereign and twenty Pennies to the Shilling. There are five-Shilling and five-Penny coins. The little box of cookies is one Shilling four Pennies - or Pence, the alternate plural is interchangeable. Sugar seems expensive.

She takes her hail of change, her cookies, and her new understanding of money back to the railyard, where she looks for an arrivals board or station clerk. She needs to know what fare to London looks like, even if her current feeling is that she'll stay to observe for a while yet. Who knows what strange things the engines might bring in to this place?

There is a newspaper stand, with exactly one paper - the Winchester Gazette - the only paper worth what it's printed on in New Winchester! Objective news of recent developments between the Tacketies and the Stovepipes! Pricing tables for Hours, Bronzewood, Chorister Honey, and Stained Glass for a dozen major ports of call for the last week!

There are no less than four bars, a brothel pretending to be an inn, and two actual inns in sight of the loading yard. There is a rough-dressed man who seems... Off... With a ragged cart and a sign that says "I BUY CRER CURTA EGGS", who smiles a bit blankly at everyone and says 'I buy eggs!' a lot. There is a large warehouse store that sells fuel and shipboard canteen-grade food by the barrel and crate. There is a shuttered building belonging to 'Columbia Lines' which displays a faded notice that all operations in the Reach beyond Port Prosper are suspended 'due to recent developments'.

There are posters proclaiming the causes of both the Tacketies (independence from the bully-tactics of the Establishment) and the Windward Company (law and order, safety from bandits and monsters). New Winchester seems to be a sort of neutral ground, Victory Hall and Company House both being large outposts for the two organizations. There is a sign pointing towards 'Victoria Market - the largest shopping district in the Reach!'

And there is a small station office that has bulletin boards of departure times and destinations, each with a photo of the engine and a brief description of the captain's history and their intended path and their passenger rates and requirements and any noted dangers along the intended path. Travel to Port Prosper looks likely to be about thirty Sovereigns, more for a direct route or a fast and/or reliable captain. The few that advertise travel to London start at fifty.

...Travel to Port Avon is supposed to be ten or twelve.

Foreigner's tax. She's used to it? It's odd, considering that the memories in question aren't exactly hers, but it's not like this kind of thing hasn't happened to her before. 

She's short of Sovereigns to pay for her trip out, but she can look around for somewhere better to sell another gold coin than at the local pawnshop later. For now, information and a place to stay.

She buys a newspaper, and then she heads over to one of the non-brothel inns and sees about a room.

The place obviously caters to sailors wanting a slightly nicer place than their own cabins to spend their shore leave, those between employment on ships, and new arrivals. There is a small reception area, a front desk, a staircase and back hall, and a sign describing amenities. Rooms have a bed, a desk, a gas lamp, and a wardrobe. Nicer rooms also have an armchair, icebox, tea set and stove, ensuite rather than communal restrooms, hot and cold running water, and bath and laundry passes included instead of purchased separately. There is laundry and a sauna and showers and baths on the first floor - the latter two are individual affairs lockable from the inside, not communal. Rooms are rented by the day at 10 or 16 shillings, and by the week for five days' rent. No food served here.

She rents a good room for the week using one of her shiny five-sovereign coins, drops her backpack off in the room, then heads back out to a clothes store. How much will it cost her for a nice long-sleeved shirt in a dark color that will cover her tattoos?

A nice long-sleeved shirt cut for women in current middle-class fashion with comfortable material and shiny buttons runs about ten shillings.

Ten shillings is fine by her, given that she's soon to liquidate some more of her gold. 

She heads back to the inn with her prize, has a shower, changes her shirt, and then goes up to her room to snack on cookies while reading the newspaper.

An urchin-gang tried to deface Victory Hall by throwing rocks at the windows and were soundly thrashed for their trouble. The Windward Company engine Light of Justice was spotted testing out a new model of auto-cannon, with a higher fire rate and more explosive shells. Tacketies boast progress on uniting the small towns of the reach, calling for a Reach Congress in six months, which the Windward Company decries as inflammatory and illegal, and declares that they will ignore any so-called 'Congress'. The Order of St. Peter's Blessed Mercy Hospital calls for donations to help care for the poor and downtrodden, as their stores of medicine and Hours are critically low after treating many poor workers in the accident in Andrew's Engineering last month.

A group of Devils has purchased an office building on Gillier Street, could they be up to something? Opinion column - These newfangled automobiles are expensive and annoying and useless and we should ban them! Prices for Unrefined Hours have shot up after mysterious recent trouble in Albion. Heroic Rattus Faber squeezes through an active engine to save his locomotive, and we interviewed him! A record of recent reported attacks and battles (two dozen attacks by 'monsters' or pirates, two dozen more skirmishes between Tacketies and Stovepipes, most of them draws). A small opinion column declaring that Curators and Scrive-Spinsters are people too so stop hunting them! Old Tom's Well seems to have calmed down slightly.

Well, that's interesting. 

She notes down in her journal:

- What are Hours? Are they what they sound like? What's their use in a hospital? 

- What are Devils like? They certainly have a foul reputation, but then they do on most worlds. Sometimes deservedly. She'll have to investigate for herself. 

- Rattus Faber? That explains the rat doing watch and toy repairs, certainly. Perhaps they'd be a decent place to get a unique perspective.

- What is the Blue Kingdom, and why is it regarded with such fear and distrust? 

- Tacketies vs. Windward Company: which side does OTC want to back as a trading partner?

She cloaks the page with Hidden Page, and snaps the journal closed. First things first: finding somewhere to liquidate more of her coins.

She heads out from her rooms, pockets jingling, and starts scouting the town. She looks for a better-off district where she might find a jeweller or moneychanger.

Victoria Market is a dense, tangled shopping district comprising three twisting streets, with a multitude of busy stores. One can buy furniture, guns, booze, fancy food, insurance, property in the city, safes, "Empyrean Exotics" that mostly consist of simple electric devices, fine clothes, a variety of strange plants and creatures, bottled souls, scientific equipment, and more. There are at least four jewelers and two banks.

Jingling pockets attract the attentions of pickpockets.

She has the habits of a long-established native of Sigil, one of the busiest places on the planes. The pickpockets have made the mistake of confusing a proper blood and a cutter for a common berk. Fortunately, she is inclined gently. A few sharp raps with the hilt of her athame ought to teach that she is not an easy target, and the efficiently-used bare steel ought to discourage the more experienced ones who are watching how the young and stupid fare.

The few pickpockets are no match for her and search for easier targets.

...That person who just passed her may have been a Devil. Golden irises, smelling faintly of sulfur, people getting out of her way. The last thing could just be her fine clothes and the confident way she walks, though.

Hmm. The sulphur smell correlates. But for now, she has other business. She stops in at one of the jewellers', and asks: 

"Excuse me, do you buy gold?" 

They do buy gold! After testing it, of course. What sort is it, used jewelry, ingots, nuggets, coins...?

A gold coin of eccentric make. Here, have a look.

The supervisor puts on white gloves before handling it.

He takes it over to a desk half-hidden away and carefully weighs and measures and otherwise scrutinizes it, and asks what the alloy is, and eventually offers 87 Sovereigns for it.

The 50-Sovereign coin is mostly steel by weight, a bit larger than the one she handed in, and has a piece of red stained glass in the center.

Excellent, local and portable. She puts her money into her pockets, then returns to the inn, where she moves the 50-Sovereign piece into the heel of her boot and puts some of her 5-Sovereign pieces into her luggage. Then it's time to eat. 

She picks one of the dockside bars to get pub food from, looking for both food and stories of the High Wilderness. 

Pub food is available. Stew, beans, bacon and eggs, biscuits and gravy, mashed potatoes, Murgatroyd's Fungal Crackers, fried vegetables, something called Rubbery Lumps that appear to be fried but are otherwise mysterious...

Pub gossip is also available. This crew is back from cold Lustrum and had a run in with Cantankeri. They're not that dangerous in ones or twos, but they're bloody persistent, it was exhausting. That captain raided a pirate vessel and is describing (making up) a ghastly shrine in the foul villain's private quarters. This crew had to pass Old Tom's Well and tells of the icy hurricane-like winds lashing the engine for almost twelve hours before they were clear. That one describes the Candlewind, a spirit or force of nature that acts according to possibly-divine whimsy and is generally a hassle for navigation. This lot speaks of Magdalene's, the great house for the disturbed and unnerved, and how theraputic a few days of treatment there was. Someone else mutters about bloody artists, Titania, built right on top of a huge Chorister Bee hive and too stubborn to move. A tall woman with a movie camera marches in and announces 100 Sovereigns to take her to Hybras- Which seems to be a distant community built among a titanic tangle of fungus.

She'll try the rubbery lumps. Her culinary adventuresomeness has still not been blunted by the "delicacies" of a thousand planes. And besides, they wouldn't sell it as pub food if it was awful or hazardous. Probably. 

She listens carefully, and makes a mental note: Titania. 

Her thoughts turn to investigation. Hours and Devils. Devils are clearly the more dangerous, so let's start with Hours. There were prices for them in the newspaper, yes? Perhaps she can simply purchase some.

After she finishes her meal, she heads back to her room at the inn and reads up on the latest price for Hours.