The bartender picks this moment to return, bearing a three-egg omelet with ground beef and slices of slightly overripe avocado, plus some dangerously jagged-looking spiked french fries.  The drink is some fizzing brown substance with whipped cream floating on top and a slice of orange on top of the whipped cream.

"Food an' a drink.  That'll be five bucks.  We take Bitcoin and Ethereum too."

Emily pays in cash, accepting the hit to her medianity.

"Say, you don't know of any work available in town, do you? Or lodgings, for that matter?" she asks the bartender.

Meanwhile she starts in on the omelet. She's giving the fries a wide berth for now. She doesn't want to have to ask the toddler for help.

"Work is hard to find, around these parts, at least the sort of work you look suited for.  Truth is, ever since the factory shut down, our economy has mostly run off drug mules -- sterile donkey-horse hybrids that some fancy biotech kids altered to produce a new form of insulin.  What's wrong with good old insulin like they used to extract from pig pancreas?  I don't know.  Nobody even tries to explain it to me.  And why not?  Because I don't know enough normal biology to understand."

"We've also got the other kind of drug mule, I guess.  Attractive young men and women who get paid in Monero to drive back and forth between here and Los Angeles in fast cars carrying suitcases full of Benadryl.  Nobody even buys it, so far as I know, they're just driving the same Benadryl packs back and forth every trip.  I figure it's got to be a scam, but darned if I can figure out who's getting scammed.  Our kids seem to be actually getting paid."

"Old Joe's farm is always hiring auto mechanics, babysitters, and contortionists, but I don't know if that'll do for you.  It's definitely AND, there, not OR."

"Couples therapist just came through town a month ago, so all our couples are still in pretty good shape."

"And there's some outsiders as say this town could use an accountant, but I've never understood the point of asking where the money went after it's already gone."

"Honestly, I'm not sure we've got a lot of work for you.  You look like a pretty normal person, no offense.  An' we don't get a lot of normal people here, looking for normal jobs and normal lodgings, if you take my meaning."

Emily sifts through this whole download, looking for some part of it that she can use. Biohacked mules... crypto scams... some kind of circus freak halfway house... probably all standard fare for small sleepy towns in the sticks, but not helpful.

She perks up a little at the accounting job, and more when the bartender gets to the end of her spiel. Pretty normal. That's glorious, that's exactly what Emily wants to hear.

"Like 50-60% of American adults, I have basic spreadsheet skills! Where can I find out more about the accounting work?"

And if Emily thinks basic spreadsheet skills are sufficient for accounting, well, that's just a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is itself very normal and common.

"We don't have much truck with spreadsheets here.  Lady Ruchy's firstborn is an oracle, he's never wrong in the end though he's often unclear on timing.  'Bout a decade back he warned us all that any numbers we put into machines might never come back out again once the machine spirits started getting loose.  After that we all went back to pen and paper."

"Truth is, this is a town of hard-headed, practical folk.  Most people here want money, not knowledge about money.  Lookin' at the numbers doesn't make 'em go up.  Offer to count someone's pile of silver for ten coins, and they're gonna latch onto exactly two ideas: one, whatever the number was going to be, it'd be ten coins less; and two, you'd know where they keep their silver."

"That's why it's always outsiders screaming at us about how this town needs an accountant blah blah blah financial catastrophes of unguessable magnitude blah blah blah no seriously we're all going to die.  I say, if things are really that bad, maybe we're all better off never finding out?  I like things in this town the way they are."

"I guess you could turn accountant-inquisitorial?  Go around letting yourself into houses and sneaking through their papers until you find out who's committing accounting sins, and then turning them in for bounties -- we're lawful folk, in these parts, we're always happy to set a fair bounty on any sins even if we didn't know about them before they got inquisited.  But for that you'd need lockpicking skills and general roguery, not just spreadsheet skills."

"The mayor might go for it," says the young lady at the table with her young man, looking up briefly from her cellphone.  "He's always got a hunted look, and maybe that's got something to do with money."

    "Pfah!" says a sour voice, emanating from the old woman who's been casting gimlet gazes around.  "The mayor!  Do you even know who that is, right now?  Bet you a diamond this one doesn't last any longer than the last one."

"Oh, there's an idea.  Hang around a week or two and you can probably become the mayor."

Now that's a thought. A little higher profile than Emily would prefer, all things considered, but it sounds like it's not a long term commitment, and there might be some perks of office that would be helpful. She might have unfettered access - including write access - to the city records, for example.

If they even keep city records? Maybe Lady Ruchy's oracle-firstborn is also down on written records. If that's the case, Emily might need to start over in a different town. Written records are a large part of the point.

"Okay, so... who is the mayor right now? Maybe I should talk to him? If nothing else he might have more ideas about work and lodgings."

Emily smiles. "Y'all are being so helpful, I can't thank you enough," she says politely. Because that is what a normal person says, whether it's true or not.

"Yer welcome.  Anyone here know who the mayor is?"

"Andy Burham as of July 20th," the young lady says without visibly looking anything up on her phone.  "He's probably moved into the 14 Down Street residence by now, it's been two whole weeks."

"Wow, being the mayor comes with a special house in this town?"

This is statistically very unlikely. Only four cities in the United States do this: New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Denver. Some other cities tried it in the past but it didn't stick. It was expensive, it looked bad, and most of the time the new mayor didn't actually want to move into the mansion.

But apparently Emily's information is out of date, because also Prometheus, CA has a mayoral mansion. Or at least a mayoral shack.

Emily does not say any of this out loud. Reciting these facts would not be a very normal thing to do.

"Think a lot of our mayors wouldn't have gone for it if they hadn't needed the housing."

"So, uh, why is there so much turnover in the Mayor's office?" She's hoping it's just a hard job that nobody likes, rather than a series of unexplained fatalities.

"I mean, we're not eating them, if that's what you're asking.  This is a lawful town.  It's more... the same sort of thing that happens to Prime Ministers in these little nations that get five of 'em in a year.  'No confidence', right.  But here it's not a vote of no confidence, nothing formal you could point to, more like... they leave the mayor's office when they realize they lack faith in themselves."

Whatever the heck that means, it doesn't sound lethal! Emily can live with that. Perhaps both literally and figuratively.

Meanwhile, she's been steadily working away at the omelet. It's surprisingly good given the low price, as is the soda float. She still hasn't quite braved the spiky French fries.

She gives a sidelong glance at the toddler to see if her French fry avoidance has been observed.

The toddler has finished off their own french fries, and is now watching Emily's french fries with a wary, steady caution.

Might as well make a friend in this town.

WANNA SHOW ME WHAT TO DO WITH THESE? THEY LOOK MORE DANGEROUS THAN I EXPECTED.

THE UNUSUALLY SHAPED ONES REQUIRE THE MOST CAUTION TO AVOID GETTING KETCHUP ON YOURSELF.  BUT EVEN THE MOST FRENCH-FRY-SHAPED FRENCH FRIES HAVE MANY SURPRISES FOR THE UNWARY.  HAVE YOU EATEN FRENCH FRIES BEFORE?

Does this toddler think she is potentially so weird that she's never eaten French fries? Basically the only Americans who have never had French fries are those so young they haven't started on solid foods yet! Emily is over six months old! Of course she has had French fries before!

OF COURSE I HAVE HAD FRENCH FRIES BEFORE!

UH HUH.  AND DID YOU, BY ANY CHANCE, GET KETCHUP ALL OVER YOURSELF?

This is ridiculous. Emily glares at the toddler. She pointedly chooses a relatively smaller and less ferociously spiky french fry, dips it in ketchup, and carefully inserts the entire object into her mouth at once. She is reasonably confident this is going to work. She is really not as worried about the ketchup as about the spikes. She bites tenderly, in case they turn out to be made out of shards of glass or something.

Does anything terrible happen to her?

Nope!  It tastes however a standard french fry would taste to her, if that fry had a hint of cumin under the ketchup.

The toddler looks pretty impressed with her moves, too.

Emily continues to eat French fries with grim determination and care. She's wearing a white shirt, after all.

When she's plowed through half the fries successfully, her expression softens.

SO. ARE YOU THE ONE I'M SUPPOSED TO CONTACT, OR ARE YOU NOT? I'D POTENTIALLY SHARE THE REST OF THESE FRIES IF YOU'D JUST BE A STRAIGHT SHOOTER ABOUT THIS.

I DON'T KNOW FOR SURE.  SHOULD I GUESS?