"That does sound much more space-magical." She smiles.

"All right, I can take you to get one of those."

The process is quick and impersonal; Sai Ding pays, and a teleporter flashes briefly into a back room of the store to just barely glance at Samara and drop a computer into her lap. She can't feel the implantation at all.

Yes yes, very efficient, no ceremony to it at all. She's getting used to it.

She does the intro exercises easily enough, has a couple more questions - mostly useful contact info - then thanks Sai Ding for all the help and says goodbye for now.

When she's safely ensconced in her dorm and knows how to summon help Sai Ding will bid her goodbye.

Elsewhere, the shaman Solomon wakes up in a guest room and cleans up and then attempts to navigate 'getting breakfast' and 'getting recommendations for nature-y worlds he could go investigate'.

He can help himself to breakfast in the ship cafeteria! There are replicators, but also for people who for whatever reason have trouble making breakfast decisions, there is a golem serving fresh waffles and bacon and eggs.

He pays enough attention to notice and be fascinated by the replicators, and request roasted veggies and cinnamon porridge and hot tea.

He can have those things! With kind of a dizzying number of sub-options but it is programmed to guess if he looks at five thousand roasted veggie recipes and goes "nope".

He wants 'em crunchy and stir-fried, that's about all the input he has on the matter. Miracles of the star lords indeed.

He gets crunchy stir-fried veggies and cinnamon oatmeal and tea, earl grey, hot.

He will eat it quietly and listen in on conversations around him. Or not, if there aren't many people here. After that he'll go see if that Dwarf, Revna, is available.

Revna is in the office! "Hello! What can I do for you?"

"Hello again. I just realized I didn't ask last night when or how I should follow up about the shamanism class, so I'm asking now. Also, if you could suggest someone I could ask basic questions about how you use money here - very basic, I mean, I don't want to waste your time, I would appreciate it as well."

"I'm expecting to have a list for you to filter in another four to six hours. I can post on the ship chatter that you'd like an intro to money, and somebody'll find you about it sooner or later."

"Okay. I'd like recommendations for convenient by bus nature areas for the class as well, can you 'post' that?"

"Sure thing."

"Well, that's all. Thank you."

He ducks out and... Goes to the lounge to people-watch and space-watch.

After about two minutes an orc bounces up to him. "Hi! You wanted money explained?"

"Hi," he grins back and de-pockets his paycard. "Well, the thing is, to me money is silver, or sometimes gold. Apparently this is also computer money, but darn if I understand how."

"Okay! So, do you know why silver and gold are used as money? Why them and not the leaves off trees, or the stars in the sky?"

"It'd be hard to resolve a dispute about who owns the stars with a man you've never met in another country, yes? And there's simply far too many leaves, anyone could go pick up some - not to mention they crumble. Silver's rare and dense enough to not carry around a mule on your back. I've met people who use shells, cows, cloth, dye, jade, and spices as money."

"So what silver, shells, cows, cloth, dye, jade, and spices all have in common is that you can carry them around - so, silver, not stars - without this making them worse at being the thing they are - so, shells, not live fish - and they're rare - so, jade, not leaves - but not so rare that you can't get ahold of some if you do something valuable - so, cloth, not flawless diamonds the size of your head. Right?"

"Makes sense to me. Of course, you all can get as much silver as you'd like, which rather breaks it. You'd need something to be faked into being scarce enough to be valuable, wouldn't you?"

"Pretty much! You need something - literally anything - that has all those properties, and you can do 'rare' just by promising that you won't make too much and arranging that nobody else can either."

"That's - well, I suppose there are worse ways to do it. The belief makes it real, even if it's objectively unreal. Lovely. My real question is more on the level of 'how do I actually use this card', though." He laughs self-deprecatingly.