"I could go either way, I think. Assuming I get enough money from the restaurants to rent something, anyway, I do want to spend the night indoors."

"Yeah... I don't really eat at restaurants since we usually have plenty of wild at home but that one smells good?" She points.

"Sure. Let me cast something-" he does, and heads in.

"What's it do?" she asks, following. The restaurant is full of families eating their meals off collective wide bowls that fit into floor depressions.

"Gives me better intuition for talking to people, for a little while. It's a little like the spell that makes someone stronger, but mental instead of physical."

Is there anyone obviously in charge?

There are waiters, all male, dragging the bowls around; whoever they answer to might be back in the kitchen.

He catches one on the way back to the kitchen with an empty bowl to ask.

"Yes, my mate owns the place," says the waiter, "I can tell her you're here if you tell me what you want?"

"I have some magic I think she'll be interested in buying."

"Thought it might be something like that." He scuttles back into the kitchen. His mate emerges a minute later and fixes her eyes on Raafi. "Come in back," she says.

He follows. "So I'm not sure what rumors are going around exactly, but the one that says I can make wild spren meat is true, more or less - it's not quite that simple, but I don't think you'll have any trouble selling it to customers."

The kitchen is beastly hot; spren in various stages of disassembly are being deboned and cut up and roasted and stewed and fried, with smaller parts of the kitchen dedicated to arranging flowers and pickles and powdering dried bugs and simmering sauces to go with it. "What's complicated about it?"

"The magic wears off, after a while. If it's eaten before that it's fine, I've lived on magical food for months sometimes and not had any problem with it. But if I sell it to someone and they try to come back to the leftovers the next day they're going to be disappointed - it lasts a day from when I cast the spell, and then I can refresh it with another spell to last a day after that, and that's all."

"In what form does it show up? Fully butchered, whole, somewhere between the two... And how much."

"I can do it either way, and one casting makes enough food for forty-five people my size for a day - probably about fifty or fifty-five male people, we seem to need about as much food for our size."

"Fifty-five males is something like... two families of eight, depending on how old the daughters are at the time. So, not enough to change the whole business model but enough to run a fun promotion. I think what I want to do is raffle off all-you-can-eat wild for one family, which I can cover with that much meat even if somebody shows up with her five mates and two girls and nine boys or what have you, and take a lot of it in small organs and chops I can sell separately as afters with regular meals if they don't eat it all. Is this an offer for right now or on some routine basis?"

"I'm definitely hoping to sell a spell today! And I'm not going to be around consistently - I get my magic in the first place from traveling, so I can't be - but I expect to be here for at least a few weeks, probably a few months, and stop in sometimes after that. I can also do more than one casting today - I have five, I was planning on stopping in at a few different restaurants to see what kind of interest there was."

"Oh, I can sell five. I serve hundreds of people every day here, and I do sometimes get wild in, though usually I sell it in smaller amounts."

"I do think I want to check out the other restaurants too, see how I want to do things in the long run - it'll probably be the least hard feelings all around if I don't sell anyone more than one casting today, but if you have something specific in mind that'd use two, I could be talked into it."

"I have to hold the raffle pretty quick to get it sold before I close, or even if I keep the staff an hour late. Fast auctions that bid up high, and this might go very high, disappoint second place - she figures she might've won if she'd had another minute to beat the price - and I could surprise whoever she is with a second all-you-can-eat."

"That's a good point. All right. Do you know what you want me to make, or should I come back once you've had a chance to run it?"

"Pek-pek smallness get me a dupe pad -" The nearest waiter grabs her a pad of paper. She writes up an order. "In order of importance, so there's some things on there twice, not sure exactly how much 'enough for so many males for a day' covers."

He takes it and looks it over, nodding. "There's also a question of price - I'm not actually familiar with your money yet, so I don't have a number in mind, but whoever pays best will see more of me later."

"Oh, make me guess, why don't you - this is the first place you came? Hoof's're inflated way too much to be a good benchmark, don't let anyone fool you about that, they only used to be worth that fraction of a spren -"

"He needs cash," Uamok puts in.

"- you're not -"

"- no! He's an alien!"

"- cash on short notice, ugh, and my daughter on a camping trip! Pek-pek what've we got in cash." Pek scrambles to find out. "I can keep more on hand in the future but I can't leave the restaurant at this hour to withdraw or cash scrip," apologizes the restaurateur.

"It's all right, I understand about short notice. I can pick the rest of it up next time I come by to cast for you."