...Okay, that is weird, maybe they're going to need it for something. He steps up how much attention he's paying to the condition of people's clothing and what other things they have with them and whether they have shoes, and also inquires of whoever is in charge of answering questions about the grocery store how exactly people budget here.

Everybody has shoes, except for that seven-year-old; shoes sized for a seven-year-old can be observed dangling by their laces from his mother's basket. Everyone has clothes, and they differ pretty wildly, from normal-looking homemade stuff to things that are suspiciously elaborate color schemes or oddly fine thread or not recognizable materials at all. The older someone is, the less weird their clothes tend to be; the small children are wearing plain but suspiciously-nice things and the teenagers are all over the place. Several kids in the store are carrying toys. Some of the people have electronics like the kinds Vandans Nossëo always have on them, though not all. One person is doing her shopping with a basket on wheels that follows her of its own accord like a heeling dog.

The customer service agent - who appears to be the only employee in the store, except for a chatty guy at the cheese counter - tells them that a lot of people set a budget of something on the order of 100/person/day, but you can manage on less if you're saving up for something, or choose to spend more of your money on food if you just really like fancy cheese or something. There's a second floor of the grocery store and upstairs is all the "modern" "convenience" food, that someone has already mostly prepared and that you do some last step for, like putting it in boiling water, but on the first floor of the grocery store - still thoroughly intimidating - doesn't have any of that. The convenience food is actually cheaper, mostly because it's not going to rot and therefore can be produced and delivered in very large batches, but a lot of homesteaders don't like it.

He inquires as delicately as he can about what people don't like about the convenience food and meanwhile looks for pastry ingredients to make something nice to take back with the basket.

Some people don't like how it tastes, or don't like dealing with the wrappers, or don't have the appliances to heat it up conveniently, or don't like that they can't customize it, or just find it too unfamiliar and want to eat groats and beans and spinach forever, which is fine.

Downstairs has wheat flour! And butter! And eggs! And sugar! It has an incredibly restrained no more than six kinds of each of those!

...He can't figure out what secret doom any of those things are hinting at!

Do they have honey and lentil flour? And what is this sugar thing, he's never heard of sugar before.

They have honey, and lentils, and ground lentils, and and sugar is like honey only it's all the sweetness and none of the other flavors plus it is in salt-looking crystals.

Hmm. No alien salt lookalikes today, that seems confusing. Just a bunch of ingredients for lentil cakes, plus some extra lentils since they'll probably run out of basket foods before they have anything to harvest.

And - how can he get his little siblings an education around here? He's aware he should have asked someone other than the grocery store's customer service agent, it's only, no one quite realized they'd have the slack for that until he got here and started checking how much food they could afford to buy. (He is watching very carefully for signs that actually thinking you have that much slack is a common newbie mistake.)

There is a schoolhouse over that way! They mostly just teach reading and arithmetic, and sometimes it takes the teacher a bit to catch up with a new alphabet; if you learn everything they cover there you can take a longer bus trip to the real school thataway, or get books or computers to use at home.

Tana thanks the grocery store attendant cheerfully and buys groceries and eventually sends Lenu and Valan (no relation to the soldier from Leopard Hill) to the schoolhouse. Their mother brings the basket back over to their neighbors full of lentil cakes.

The neighbors try the lentil cakes and seem to like them all right and the teacher will teach the kids to read and the grocery store continues to be totally capable of feeding them without them having to work a day in their lives but they also have this homestead they can farm at will.

They cut back a little on sowing (they're used to being able to do that on a rolling basis almost all year) on the theory that they actually don't want to commit to quite so much work later and so that they don't have to put the little ones to work if they could otherwise be learning how to navigate Vanda Nossëo. Tana checks the grocery store a few more times and notices that people do sometimes buy the convenience foods, and it wasn't really clear what the terrible fate was that they were being warned against; when he talks it over with the family they agree that someone should try one and see what exactly happens. Tana volunteers but his father insists on being the one to take the risk, and so heads to the store to ask the customer service agent which convenience food is best if you're feeling... adventurous.

"...adventurous like you want weird food or like you want to try a convenience food for the first time?"

"The second one." People here sure do have a lot of different preferences.

The clerk recommends potato chips! Here are some potato chips.

He thanks the clerk and buys the potato chips. He takes them home and eats them with the rest of the family waiting anxiously to see if he drops dead.

He reports that they're very salty but he wouldn't object to eating them again.

When nothing terrible has happened for a week Tana stops by the grocery store for ten bags of potato chips and whatever the cheapest meat is. Maybe it really is just that some people don't like the wrappers.

The cheapest meat is boneless rotisserie chicken!

Elsewhere in the multiverse, someone from Sesat steps off a bus in Shiund, gawks a bit, and finds an information booth.

"Hi there!" says the winged person in the booth; he's grooming his claws with a shiny file.

Oh, cool.

"Hi. What do I do if I think I might want magic?"

"Ooh, what kind do you want?"

"I saw someone just appear out of nowhere and make someone's eye grow back and I want to do that."

"Okay, there's two kinds that can do that, the sorcery spell set and Materian wizardry! The first kind is harder to get because it's really really powerful. The second kind you have to pass a screen but it's not as difficult."

"What kind of screen is it?"

"They need to make sure people with magic aren't going to run around committing crimes with it, and they'll only subsidize your tuition if you're going to do something socially valuable."

"How do they check on that?"