One of these is in the city of Thelm Ret, right where Hari-speaking and Lexori-speaking populations border each other, and at first they see mostly beluli and agerah and thwilit.

Then a pair of humans come in, one of them wearing slave bracelets and the other holding his hand and slightly levitating. Between them they're wearing every ring they own.

"I heard you have healing magic," she says.

"On hand we've got a recording of the healing song," says the Dwarf who is dwarfing the place, "one listen is free of charge to get people in the door, but if you need something heavier duty than that I can call someone in with the stronger spells for seventy rings."

"I'd like my free listen and then I'll know if I need something else."

The Dwarf puts on the song. It's very beautiful!

She thinks maybe she can notice a slight difference, or maybe she's imagining it just because she's distracted by something nice.

"I think I need something else," she says afterward.

"That'll be seventy rings," says the Dwarf. "Or the equivalent if you have offworld money -" He points at a price sheet on the wall.

She doesn't catch that but her son does and reads it to her.

"What," she says, "you don't haggle here? That why you write it all down?"

"If you have a specific reason you think justifies a discount, you can tell me," says the Dwarf, "but we don't haggle by default, no."

"How streamlined. Well, seventy rings is fine."

Isava counts out the rings for her and hands them over.

The Dwarf accepts the rings and summons another Dwarf who explains that he has the heavy duty healing spell and can cast it but only at touch range, and offers his hand.

It takes her a moment to find his hand but when she does she touches it.

Boop!

She gasps and laughs and turns to Isava and hugs him.

"It worked?" he asks.

"It worked," she says.

He's silent for a moment, holding her tighter, as if he were afraid now instead of at any point when they were actually in danger. And then after several seconds, "So do I get to shop now?"

"Keep it under a gross of rings."

He lets go so he can examine the price sheet again. "Hmmm."

They have Vanda Nossëo mainline currency and a few other kinds; they have various investment and loan instruments on offer; the shop upstairs has a range of fabric and electronics and books and foods and stuff.

Isava examines the upstairs items. Fabric is boring although the prices are important - oh, wow, the prices on that fabric, that's going to screw up Echan's job and that's not great - but what about the electronics and books and is there anything fun around here?

The electronics include fun things like simple drones and music players and video games (low-text ones that were quick to relocalize into Hari for the handful of words that appear; you can add your name to a list if you want to receive a message when new games are localized). The books are mostly hard copies, though there's also an e-reader you can buy; they are, again, the ones that didn't require a lot of non-machine labor to translate, so they're things like coffee table volumes full of pretty landscape or wildlife photography, kids' books, and pictorial instructions for crafts like origami. There are also novels and short story collections and comic books, but those aren't localized at all; the shopkeeper can do Allspeak installations for 55 rings apiece.

Drones are conceptually cool but redundant for Isava. Music, though. How much music from human-originated traditions written by humans for an intended audience of humans do the music players come with?

...Origami is the kind of thing that would only make sense with a bunch of spare paper but maybe if enough people use e-readers that's what happens.

Isava's priority ordering here is getting a bunch of catchy human music with a strong beat, getting a game to try, and getting a book of landscapes because Echan would like that. He'll get however much of that he can fit into 144 rings.

The music players come with 900 hours of music, though only about half of it is specifically human music; the rest is predominantly Elf and there are samples of other things. All these objects are cheaper than calling in a teleporting healer to boop you, and Isava can get a music player and a game tablet with fifty low-text games and a book of landscapes for 120 rings.

Isava bounces about this and buys all of those things and skips out the store to meet up with Echan, with the objects floating along beside him.

Not long after another human shows up at the same store and asks if questions are free.

"You can ask things at no charge but will be deprioritized if a paying customer enters," replies the Dwarf.

"If I wanted to visit a majority-human polity, what's the closest one from here and how would I do that?"

"The most easily accessible majority human polity is Midgard. You'd buy a bus token from me or one of the other branches or our competitors, and go to the Vanda Nossëo island state, and board any outgoing bus to reach Station One in Edda, and from there you'd take the intraworld line Edda Seven, one stop outbound, and disembark. That'd put you in Sunvalley, a Midgard city. Note that the humans native to Midgard are not modal humans; the info booths at the Sunvalley station can explain the etiquette. If you want modal humans, you need to take Edda Four three stops and get off at Icefalls on Everhome."

"Okay. Where can I find copies of the complete sets of laws that apply in Sunvalley and Icefalls and the intervening bus stations?" There's been a reminder that aliens are alien and will have alien laws displayed prominently on the noticeboard for days now.

"I can sell you a hard copy for ten rings per location or electronic copies with the purchase of an e-reader for one ring apiece."

"What exactly does an e-reader do, is it just a thing for reading multiple books that's not as big as multiple books?"