"Um. Well."

(The guy who was healed slips out, not taking anything else.)

"So one of them is about this, um, drop of water. One day it fell from heaven. And, um, it was very afraid, so it went slinking off downhill, and found other drops of water, and then it was less afraid, and they told it they could all travel together to meet a bunch of other drops of water, and then they all lived in a great country of just drops of water, and they ate fish and seaweed, and then one day the little drop of water was called back home to heaven, but by then it liked the ocean so much it was sad to leave.

"And, um, I know another story about... yesterday... when the sun rose. And then I saw that I had a knife needing its last pass or two of sharpening, so I sharpened it, and then I sent it to the person who wanted it, and then I got paid. And then I looked at my list of commissions I'm doing and thought about what I'd do next. And then, uh, my wife made lunch, and we had bread and butter and lentils and radishes, and, you know, I thought the lentils were very bland and the radishes weren't bland enough but somehow there wasn't a good way to make it even out. And then I started on another project. And then I got frustrated with it and went off and played ur and got a bit drunk and then I went home and spent some time with my wife and then we ate again and we'd run out of lentils but we had more bread and butter and some cheese and finished the radishes, good riddance. And. Uh. Hm."

He looks around, as if maybe he'll get an idea from something in the store. Just one more to go. "Anyway, for my next story, today I decided to buy some spices by telling you stories. Does that count as a story or an anecdote."

"I'll count it as an anecdote." Zanro counts out the three spice packets and hands them over. "I hope they make your next batch of lentils more interesting!"

"I hope so too."

In another town near the border with Iral, meanwhile, a pair of siblings walk into a magic shop. Not that they announce themselves as such, but they look even more closely related than most pairs of random people in Sesat.

"Hi!" chirps the purple-haired lady who's pulling dozens of vacuum-packed lambchops out of a bag that does not seem like it should be able to hold even like three of them. "What can I do for you two today?"

"Hi! We were wondering how people go about becoming purple-haired starfarers with the ability to construct buildings by magic."

"Oh, I was born with purple hair, though I can sell you some dye if you're keen." She fills up the lamb chop bin and starts pulling out chicken. This turns her around enough to reveal that there is an equally purple baby sleeping slung to her back. "To learn magic, if you're in a hurry, you'll want a bus off the planet."

"The hair was metonymy, though it's stunning. Will you tell me more about magic, and buses off the planet, and what those things would cost us?"

Her brother, meanwhile, looks at the goods for sale (and does not try to shoplift).

"There's bus stops going up as they get the land for them bought. A big old thing like a long building with a lot of windows - sometimes just one big window - will pop into place, every five or ten minutes depending on how much people are taking the bus to and from here, and you can get into it and have a seat and it'll pop to Shiund Hub, in Edda, that's where all the buses from this planet are going. Then it depends where you want to go - you specifically want the popping buildings into place one?"

"There are multiple types? I don't know what the types are."

"You can take an aptitude test if you're not picky! They probably have an aptitude test center less than a mile from Shiund but I don't know exactly where, you can ask at an information booth. Anyway, bus tickets between this planet and Shiund are free for now, and if you want to go farther you can use these tokens," she picks up a bin of them and rattles it, "which you can buy for stories and songs same as anything else in the shop. One token'll get you anywhere in the map and home again."

It doesn't... feel right, make narrative sense... it doesn't fit into a story where fairies sell goods that vanish within a day, if they sell promises to take you somewhere later. That's not the kind of thing that should vanish. But neither are the other goods, if the shop is going to stay, if the fairies are going to stay.

"You should get the meat," she tells her brother.

"You're sure?"

"I think so. How long are the bus tokens good for?"

"Oh, forever, even after we stop selling the tokens the ones you have will work till you spend them. And when we stop selling them you buy tickets, and we don't phase that in till we expect most people can afford them and figure out how to buy them."

"Yeah, get the meat, if they came from a story it's a story where they stay." And if they didn't come from a story the meat isn't going to vanish just because it would in some other story that isn't even this one. It could be poisoned. It would be slightly insane to imagine these people would need to poison the meat. "Can I get multiple tokens if my story is interesting enough?"

"Sure, why not."

"This is a story that isn't true as far as I know, but I might be wrong. There was a young widow. She had been married for a year, and had no children, and she lived near a town but not within its walls. Her cousin had children, three of them, and the widow sometimes watched the children, and told them stories.

"One of those was the story of a brave hero who roamed far and wide, seeking out monsters and defeating them, and giving food to orphans. The hero's name was Tena, and he came from somewhere to the north - not Iral, farther than that - and didn't tell people what he had done, lest he never learn whether they treated strangers poorly.

"Eventually, the widow's cousin died, and she sold her husband's empty house and moved in with the children. Then one day a stranger calling himself Tena came traveling from the north and stayed with them. The children were extremely excited and said they knew all about him. The widow said nothing. She also knew something about him; she had watched him come in through town, heard how he spoke, been around him, even smelled how he smelled, and she knew well the signs that he was..." Why did she wedge herself into this, the stories contradict each other about what euphemisms go over well and which are insulting, and now she has to finish this sentence in front of a fairy. "...a traveler from farther than north, and no mere human. So she was kind to him, of course, but said nothing of where she thought he had come from, only told the children how to be polite to their guest.

"Then, a ravenous beast attacked. The children insisted Tena could and would and should defeat it and save the town. Tena, for his part, did not think so. He ran. He was afraid and he did not know these people or have any reason to love them; he would have fought if the beast had attacked his own people, of course; he was no coward. He simply did not care.

"Or so he thought.

"When he had stopped running, he found himself weeping with grief that he had never guessed he might feel. He began to pray to Laen for mercy, for something to have been different, for them not to have died. This wasn't such a stupid thing for him to do as it sounds like, because...

"Once, long before this, Laen boasted that there was nothing he could not destroy. All those who heard his challenge and understood it were welcome to try to bring before him a counterexample. Many men tried. They brought him the hardest stones they could find. Their greatest champions challenged him. They brought him to see a river and a mountain. And Laen crumbled their stones, cursed their champions with weakness or killed them outright, and so on. So it seemed Laen boasted truly. Until one day someone who might have been Tena's grandfather, or great-grandfather, or father, or mother, or could have been any of Tena's people, really, went to challenge Laen.

"And this person told Laen a story. It was a story greater than this one, and one I could not tell you, though some have tried to reconstruct it. It was a story about Laen himself, and it made him laugh, and it made him weep, and it woke in him anger and awe. And then it ended.

"'The moment has already passed,' said Laen. 'I don't see how you even imagined that your story could outlast a mountain.'

"And Tena's kinsman answered, 'you remember it.'

"'I could forget,' said Laen.

"And Tena's kinsman answered, 'I know all there is to know about you, and I could tell you every story you've ever lived. Will you destroy them all? Your recollection and mine and everyone else who has ever known you? Would you be nothing, just to prove me wrong? I'll start with the story of your boast, and then how will you remember you even want to forget?'

"And Laen admitted he was beaten. Which is why he's so much more willing to answer Tena and his kinsfolk's prayers than those of me and my kinsfolk. So Tena, in his grief and confusion, prayed to Laen. And then, when he had run too far to run any further, and wept too much to weep any more, and prayed the most desperate prayer he had ever prayed, he rested, and fell asleep."

Her voice grows quieter now, at least for a while. "He dreamed of the widow. He dreamed of his home. He dreamed that the widow had come to stay with him. In the dream, they were all attacked by a monster, and she told all the children around her to run, and stood to distract the monster.

"Tena woke, then, uneasy and ashamed, and went along on his way. He passed human towns but did not visit them. Eventually, he saw a palace, where there lived a beast, not so different from the beast he had run away from, but a beast capable of speech and intelligent thought. It invited Tena in, and offered him food, and saw that Tena's heart was very heavy, and asked what troubled him.

"'I am troubled because I wish I had protected the people who sheltered me,' said Tena. 'They believed I was a great hero who would do what they needed. They were wrong. I don't know what to do now. Laen has not answered my prayer.'

"And the beast said, 'I have a riddle for you, if you will keep a secret.' And Tena agreed to keep the secret, so the beast said: 'I am a beast and not a man, and so I bow to threats; yet rarely am I threatened, for I am strong; and none know this about me, save you, because you would not tell. No one else knows, because it has never come to pass that someone told me "stop or I will kill you" and I stopped. Neither has anyone gotten revenge on me, for no one I have ever hunted has had a friend who could avenge them. So tell me now: how did you save the people who sheltered you?'

"And Tena thought on this, and then he asked if the beast had weapons of any kind to trade him. And the beast said: 'you could try the maze in my courtyard, and see what you find there.'

"And Tena, whose people are wise in these things, said: 'and if I do that, will I be pleased with the results?'

"And the beast said, 'yes, because you asked, I have already placed a bow and a quiver of arrows in the maze.'

"And Tena asked more questions, then explored the maze, then left, and let it be known that the great hero Tena come out of the north had simply run to find his weapons and would avenge any who had been slain while he was gone.

"The beast Tena had spoken to had the power of understanding, but the one that had attacked the town had not, and all its people were dead. Tena avenged them, and went forth, the hero they had spoken of."

"Ooh, I like that one," says the shopkeeper. She hands over two tokens.

"Well, now I'm tempted to find out if I can get three at once. Probably not without thinking it over first. So, these are for traveling the stars, only I don't know the etiquette in the stars and I don't want to offend anyone."

"Well, what is it you want to do up there?"

"Learn magic and find out what other things I want to do and maybe do more than that."

"Well, you'll probably want an information booth or something, and the information booth people are used to confused travelers. To leave a nice big margin around what'll offend people, don't touch people with yourself or objects, and if you need to ask directions or something try to find someone who isn't busy, and if a door is locked that means you shouldn't go through it, and if there's a queue and you want what they're queuing for, go to the end of it and wait."

"I think I can do that. May I ask why you're collecting stories, by the way?"

"When Vanda Nossëo shows up in a new place, things start changing, really really quickly. In a culture without a really high literacy rate and tendency to write everything down, that can make it quickly really hard to get undistorted information on what the culture's like before we show up. So on low tech places like this one we trade stuff for stories, and then our historians are happier about the situation. It also helps people feel like it's a trade and not charity, some people hate getting charity, and also seems to help with people thinking we're booby trapping the stuff. Plus it gets people talking more and that helps them get used to us more than if we just had, like, a shelf you could take stuff off of."

"We have a really high literacy rate. Even one of our housekeeper's kids can take notes on which houses they clean when."

"Yeah, that's unusual for this tech level. But it doesn't hurt to have more copies of stories, even if they're all also written down somewhere. Historians love that kind of thing."

"I think most of the stories about Laen have been written down but I was putting that one together on the fly out of pieces I'd heard before. I bet someone's written down a story about the beast in the palace before at some point. I don't know, maybe not."