The Rubbery Lumps taste faintly like seafood, the taste mostly dominated by salt and oil. And they're very chewy. Their primary draw seems to be nostalgia.

The newspaper lists wholesale prices. A standard barrelful of Grade A Hours, sealed in wax and notarized by the Windward Company, can be had for 93 Sovereigns this week. She probably wants fewer than a whole barrel.

She could afford a full barrel, and she could likely find a full barrel, but the question is "how big and heavy is a full barrel?" Because if it's as tall as she is, she might have trouble carting it away with her, much less storing it. 

No, she'll need a better approach than solving this with money the blunt-force way. More information will likely solve her problems: the question is how to gain it. 

Victoria Market seems like a good starting point to begin her investigations, speaking of which why are there souls on sale? And what does that even look like?

Souls are billowing semisolid things kept in glass bottles, flowing and glowing softly and occasionally resolving into a face or hand for a moment. They're kept... Slightly out of the way, as a not-very-respectable thing to trade, though not actually disguised like the brothel is. Ordinary colored glass bottles with plain shapes house most of the souls, and the ones in especially ornate bottles are brighter, clearer, more defined, and have interesting colors or patterns. There aren't any signs or such explaining what they're for.

Should she purchase one of the smaller ones to send back to the OTC? Then she can see if this is a case of trade in sentients or not. 

... later. She needs a place scouted for her beacon home, and some Hours in her other hand to add to the pile for analysis. 

Are Hours on sale anywhere in the market?

Hours are on sale in a couple of places! So are Hour-looms, which you apparently feed them into, but those start at a couple hundred Sovereigns. They seem to be specialty enough that asking how to use them correctly could fly without being sucpicious.

Well then. All she needs to do now is find a quiet spot on the edge of town to use her beacon, and then she can send a soul and some Hours back to the OTC. 

... That seems like the kind of risky operation she'd best do at the end of her week, rather than immediately. She can make the trek to the edge of town anytime in the next five days; no sense in going off half-cocked. 

What about Chorister Honey? Supposedly it's good for one's singing voice, yes? That's a simple enough claim that she can test it herself. Where can she buy some, and for how much?

A whole gourd is 120 Sovereigns and looks to be about 2 gallons. A shot glass's worth advertised to be good for an hour or two costs 16 Shillings.

She pays sixteen shillings for a shot-glass-sized portion and takes it away with her. If need be she'll pay for a small bottle in order to have a container for it. 

What other exotic curiosities are on sale?

The bottle is included.

Aside from the Chorister Nectar and geode-like Unrefined Hours, Bronzewood seems to be more than an ordinary wood - it's advertised as extremely durable, and is attractive with smooth dark grain like wood and yet gleaming like, well, bronze. The least expensive Bronzewood item on display is a two-Sovereign jewelry box with a velvet interior.

There are a wide variety of shining gemstones available, both large and finely cut, some of which almost seem to have an inner light, and at what seem like really low prices compared to other worlds. There is a huge variety of stained glass items from the ordinary to the artistic, including lanterns, windows, religious art, and stained-glass telescopes that promise reasonably safe and undistorted views of distant stars.

Thirsting Bombazine is a fabric that seems to drink light, always a deep dark purple or black and becoming thick and heavy the more light it's been exposed to recently. Some of the weapons and munitions for sale seem to have possibly-exotic components to their function, though nothing blatantly obvious there.

There are a variety of samples of Reach flora promising huge food yields for no effort, or an incomparably delicious fruit, with little indication of reliability to those claims - though they are still being bought up. And there are a variety of pickled, caged, and sketched or sculpted exotic creatures. One of the heads on display looks sort of similar to the thing that attacked her in Traitor's Wood.

She'll take the jewellery-box for two sovereigns, she can use it to hold her spare change. The gemstones are worth an additional look; they don't seem entirely natural. Stained glass is not unexpected given the need for it to keep out the starlight, and it's precious enough to be in the fifty-sovereign coin. Thirsting Bombazine is wondrous though impractical, and would sell well elsewhere. As for this world's exotics, all of them are suitably exotic, but she's not going to pick through the market right now. 

She heads back to her room at the inn, and takes out the bottle of Chorister Honey... then puts it back. It wouldn't be ladylike of her to start singing out loud in the middle of the inn. Perhaps there'll be music at one of the bars in the evening, though she frankly has no idea what time it is, owing to the lack of a sun. 

Until then... grocery shopping for the week to go in the inn icebox, and she'll buy herself an entire second set of clothing. 

There are clocks in a fair amount of abundance. They currently read 7:30 - and there is a subtle day/night cycle in the dimming and brightening of the stars that seems to indicate it's night. Lots of places are closed or closing soon. The bars certainly do seem to have music, and there are also concert halls here and there.

Food is available at a few grocery stores that seem to operate for the night shift, but her options for clothes are limited to secondhand stores at this hour. It's not always clear if something is meant as feminine or masculine or androgynously - though they seem accepting of crossdressing and genderfluidity and homosexuality here.

Ah, time's caught up to her. She'll leave clothes and groceries for tomorrow, then. For now, she'll go to the bar, down her bottle of Chorister honey, and join in the singing. 

Chorister Nectar tastes like warmth and light and the sweet and powerful urge to express oneself, however one can. It seems to be a bit intoxicating, in that way. She wants to stand up, sing or dance, to tell a story or write poetry, something expressive!

It infuses one's voice with an ineffable clearness, a depth and timber and resonance. It gives a wider vocal range, and prevents the throat from becoming strained by volume or extended use. And while it does not exactly confer skill, it gives a measure of steadiness, control, that is a potent benefit to an amateur singer.

She can improvise poetry; it comes bubbling up out of her, driven by the honey-muse, and she has the half-remembered tune of a Sigilite drinking song, and a voice like water, wavery and shimmerant and rich. She sings about the beauty and majesty of the High Wilderness with all the conviction of an adventurer who's just met a new frontier. 

The honey rather wrings her out, in fact. She hadn't known she'd wanted this. To be close to people. And if there were some cracked notes and some stumbles where she forgot the tune, that only makes the heartache in her deeper. 

She wants to be able to sing. 

The honey gives her that, and then it takes it away.

The other patrons try to sing along for a bit, but there's not much one can do to match someone who's downed Chorister Honey, especially if they don't know the tune. The improvised band tries their best to accompany her, but they don't know the tune either, and quiet as well. Near-silence except for her voice echoing through the bar, the center of attention for that bare moment... It could feel glorious and perilous.

The second or third time through a few of the better singers pick up along her and flub it even more than she does, softening the metaphorical spotlight. The band learns the beat to keep, accompaniment that doesn't overwhelm. And after - who knows how long? Half an hour? A full hour? - Then, the honey starts to wear off. Her voice becomes more ordinary again, her range shrinks, the bursting urge to sing as loud as she can fades away. It could have gone better. She gets a good amount of smiles and cheering anyway, and a couple of offers to buy her a drink.

The bartender brings her a cup of ice water and says, "Here, drink up. You alright? First time drinking Chorister Honey? Most pace themselves a bit, that was a lot all at once."

She downs the ice water. "Yes. Apologies for my singing, I know I wasn't... exactly..." 

Good, she doesn't say. 

"I should have told someone up front, but... I've always been the reckless type."

She fishes in her pocket for a sovereign shilling and puts it on the bar. "Thank you," she says.

Then she looks around for those who offered to buy her a drink.

"You were fine, miss. This is a bar, not a choir club." He smiles as he takes the shilling.

The closest person who offered a drink is a woman in a blue uniform-style outfit with small scars on the back of her hands. She holds one out to shake.

"That was fun! New songs are always nice."

She shakes Lenora's hand. "And so are new people. I'm Thorn, current 'nym the Runed Wanderer. You?" 

"True, true~ Lenora! Bright-Eyed Gunner. Between ships on account of my old captain deciding to retire. What's a rune, exactly?"

She pulls up her right sleeve to show her tattoo. "These, here. Some people say they bring good luck."

"Oh, neat. It can be hard to tell, you know? Whether certain things help or not. Since there's so much," vague wave, "Stuff. What do you want to drink? I offered you one for the new songs, so you'll get one."

She pushes her sleeve back into place. "I don't drink alcohol, but I'm sure there's something on offer that's to my taste... We can sort it out later, the drink's not the important part anyway." She halfsmiles. "This is actually my first time out in the High Wilderness, so maybe I'll buy you some drinks for a few good sky stories."

"Well, you are in a bar. Mmh. I have stories, sure - which sounds fun? The Uninvited Guests aboard our engine, that time we tricked two pirates into fighting each other, or something about the Blue Kingdom? Anyway, how's that happen? Everywhere that's anywhere is in the High Wilderness these days."

"I'll have something about the Blue Kingdom, I keep hearing the name but I don't know what to believe about it. As for the unfamiliarity... there was an accident I don't care to talk about." 

"Understandable. I understand. So, Blue Kingdom... The Blue Kingdom Transit Relay is right near New Winchester, actually. It just doesn't see much traffic, because of how the Blue Kingdom... Is." She pauses thoughtfully. "There's not nearly as much reason to go there as there is to go to Albion, I mean. They're hostile to anything that's not dead. Officially dead, I mean. Damn, I'm telling this all out of order."

"So, the Blue Kingdom is right near a star. The Sapphir'd King, they call him. So the whole place is blindingly bright and gives you the sense that you're doing something wrong, even as it's sort of - eerily beautiful. As I understand it, whenever people across a huge range of the High Wilderness die, they go to the Blue Kingdom. The whole place is filled with... Shades, disembodied spirits, who have to walk from place to place in the Blue Kingdom and be judged, before going to their final resting place. I saw them, lines literal miles long before that court, hardly moving at all. An elephant-like spirit told me he'd been waiting for an appeal for two hundred seven years!"

She shivers.

"It was really unsettling. They were like moving porcelain versions of themselves, or made of shadow or... Something. Most of them aren't human. I have no damn idea what Captain Ekedis was hoping to accomplish there. Or why we didn't refuse to sail in."