Emily, driving a Ford F-150, pulls up to the Prometheus Bed and Breakfast as directed by the signposts.

Although she is a rare incoming visitor, that's the only unusual thing about her. "Emily" was the most common name for girls in 1996; "Smith" the most common surname. Ford F-150s account for around 5% of all cars on US roads. Emily has $67 in her wallet, just like the median American.

She's wondering if the Bed and Breakfast might be able to serve her a coffee. 66% of Americans drink coffee daily.

The Bed and Breakfast itself?  No.  It's either not sentient, or is sentient but can't move, or is concealing its unnatural abilities.

The dopey-looking elderly man at the front desk of the Bed and Breakfast says that he'll sell her a coffee for a dollar.

Yes. While having only $66 in her wallet makes her very slightly less ordinary, drinking coffee makes up for it. It's a good trade. At some point she'll do something ordinary to get the dollar back.

She buys the coffee and then comments on the weather. As one does.

Meanwhile, she's looking around, taking in as much information as she can about Prometheus. Even the smallest details might help, but she's especially interested in observing people.

Well, if she wants people, she might need to try the Diner.  This is the Bed and Breakfast.  Any people here are still in bed, or maybe already became breakfast.

There's a corkboard full of notices.  The Food Mart got a new food shipment yesterday.  A band composed of three teenage girls will be playing every night at the Diner until further notice.  The gun show is passing through in three days.  Some woman wants an adventurous man to kill the "big-ass rats in my basement" in exchange for $20 or "a favor", no small-arms fire allowed.  Martha wants her daughter married off and is doubling the standing bounty.  Bob got loose again, please call this number if you see Bob.  If any Jewish men are passing through please be at the following location each Sabbath morning at 9:05am sharp.

Most of the notices are for men, and don't seem to pertain to Emily. Probably it would be weird to offer to kill the big-ass rats and then only ask one dollar for it.

"Who's Bob, why is it news that he got loose, how do I recognize him, and is he dangerous?"

"Oh, that's Sally's boy.  Don't worry, he's very friendly!  You'll know 'im if you see 'im, he's always wearing those ears.  I wouldn't go looking for 'im, though, the reward's nothing to write home about and he'll probably just get loose again a week later."

Emily nods in thanks, then pulls out a scrap of paper and a pen from her purse and scrawls her own notice.

"WORK WANTED: Regular office or retail job. Will show up most of the time and do a decent job. All offers considered." She writes her cell number and tacks the notice to the board.

She tips her non-existent hat at the dopey man and heads over to check out the Diner. Anything notable along the way?

There's what looks like a really, really small church.  You could fit maybe twelve people in there if they didn't try to sit down.  It's got a cross on top and a billboard with letters that currently spell out, "THE FEAR OF GOD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM, NOT THE END".

A lady rides past on an e-bike, primly sitting sidesaddle on the seat since there's no need for the foot-pedals.

A man is pushing a carriage with two toddlers, trudging very very slowly down the sidewalk of the town's main and possibly only street.

The Diner could fit in a lot more people than the tiny church!  Maybe this town's true god is the feasting, the devouring of flesh.

The three girls from the band poster are in one corner sharing a stack of pancakes, neatly diving each pancake into thirds as they take it off the stack.

An old lady sips from a vast glass stein of what looks like beer, casting a gimlet gaze in one direction or another.  It settles briefly on the protagonist and squints before moving on.

A young man and an equally young woman are dressed as for a date, seated side by side, and both typing into their phones.

A toddler sits at a table, alone, carefully eating french fries one at a time with ketchup.  Neither the table nor their face has become messy yet.

A menu offers pancakes, hamburgers, fries, sausages, fried fish, and chicken masala.  A drinks menu lists mocktails and you can have a shot of pure vodka added to any of them for an extra dollar.  There's also a prominent option for "FOOD AND DRINK $5".

Is there a bartender or a waitress or anyone like that?

There's EXTRA bartender.  She's got a scar closing her right eye, wears a leather apron over a green T-shirt, and looks like she could take all three band girls plus the toddler singlehandedly.

She's polishing a mug behind the cash register, and every now and then casts a look at the old lady sipping her beer.

Aha! This may be the right person to talk to. The dopey guy at the Bed and Breakfast sure wasn't.

Emily approaches the bartender. "What's good for lunch? I'm happy to order whatever's most popular."

"Think I'm supposed to say the most popular menu item is whichever one has the highest profit margin, but darned if I can remember that from day to day when the supply prices are always changing.  French fries are the most commonly bought item, in the sense that most other plates come with french fries.  But are they popular?  Would people voluntarily pay for french fries if they weren't included with so many orders?"

"I have to say, usually when newcomers drop by they aren't asking such deep questions."

Well, that's Emily's cue to ask fewer deep questions!

"I'd like some french fries, please." Her stomach rumbles. "And, uh, the sausages too. Unless fries are included with the sausages. Then just the sausages, and the fries that come with them."

She should stop talking, it's getting weird.

"Oh, wait, do I need to order a drink also for it to be FOOD AND DRINK? If so then I'd also like the... No Tequila Mockingbird?"

"Oh, the food and drink version is when you're willing to take whatever we give you.  If you specifically want sausage, fries, and a No Tequila Mockingbird that'll be eight dollars, unless you want a shot of vodka added in which case it's nine dollars."

"We also take silver if you've got it."

Did Emily seem like she was trying to be specific about what she wanted? She was explicitly trying to be non-specific!

"Let me try the FOOD AND DRINK then!"

Surely there's nothing at all weird about the FOOD AND DRINK, nor about ordering it.

"Food and a drink coming right up!  That'll be five dollars payable on delivery."  She bustles off through a curtain behind the counter.

Meanwhile Emily will nonchalantly observe the other patrons of the Diner, trying to decide which one looks the most promising, in case the bartender is not the one after all. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right one.

The toddler is a contender.

Gimlet Gaze lady could go either way. Sometimes the squinty ones are just busybodies.

The toddler returns her gaze evenly, showing no fear, and quite deliberately puts ketchup on another french fry before eating it.

If that's an ordinary toddler, she can afford to break character a little bit. Might as well give it a try.

She focuses fiercely at the toddler.

ARE YOU THE ONE? she thinks loudly.

WHAT DO I GET IF I SAY YES?

DON'T BE COY. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO HELP ME. OR SO I WAS TOLD.

I CAN HELP YOU EAT FRENCH FRIES.

DO YOU THINK I'M GOING TO NEED HELP WITH THAT? I REALLY THOUGHT THAT PART WAS GOING TO GO OKAY.

SOME FRENCH FRIES ARE MORE VICIOUS THAN OTHERS.  BUT I AM MIGHTIER THAN THEY.

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?

Sigh. It was never going to be that easy, apparently.

NO. YOU WOULD KNOW.

BUT IF YOU'RE NOT MY CONTACT, WHY ARE YOU TELEPATHIC?

The toddler looks startled and then hastily turns their attention back to their fries without saying anything more by telepathy.

Around then the three pancake-eating girls have finished off their pancake stack and gotten up, moving as one, to approach Emily.

"Hey."

"That was a pretty intense french-fry eating contest."

"You want to be the opening act when our band plays here tonight?"

Being the opening act for a band is an extremely statistically unlikely thing to do! Probably less than 0.1% of Americans have ever done it!

"Oh, thank you so much, that's really kind, I couldn't possibly..." Emily's polite refusals overlap like the tiles on a terra cotta roof.

"Do you draw much of a crowd? Who all comes to your shows?"

"We're vacuously the most popular music show in town!  But I wouldn't say we draw the same crowds as a hot-dog eating contest.  That's why I'm wondering if intense french-fry eating as an opening act could be our next step."

     "We'd pay you, of course.  Like... one Bitcoin?"

  "Oh my god Jann, no.  One hundredth of a Bitcoin."

     "One hundredth of a Bitcoin?!  That's, what, one session with a sex worker?"

  "And normal people, if you ask them whether they'd rather get into a french-fry eating contest with a toddler, or have sex with a stranger, would prefer the french-fry eating contest.  So it shouldn't pay more."

      "...Really?  You think that's what a survey of normal people would say?"

"Normal women, you two.  It's a whole gender thing for normal people.  Normal men are prouder, so they'd be more scared of losing a french-fry eating contest to a toddler."

Being an opening act for a band just for funsies would be contraindicated, but a hundredth of a Bitcoin is a lot of money. Normal people say "yes" when they're offered a lot of money to do easy things.

She gestures at the toddler. "Is that the rate for each of us or would we have to split it?"

"Can toddlers receive Bitcoin?  I don't think they can do the public-private key math until they're older, right?"

   "They're usually pretty happy to work for french fries, in my experience?  Like they can't do the supply-demand price-equilibrating math either."

Emily looks at the toddler. Just because the toddler is not her contact does not mean she wants to be exploitive.

WHAT'S YOUR PRICE? YOU REALLY HAPPY JUST BEING PAID IN FRIES?

THEY SAY I'M TOO YOUNG TO OPEN A BANK ACCOUNT.  FRIES ARE TASTIER THAN MONEY ANYWAY.

"All right. The kid and I are in. What time do I need to be back here for the show? And also, can you point me in the direction of the Mayor's house?"

"Do you usually take it upon yourself to speak for toddlers who --"

      "Shhh.  Great to have you both!  We sing at 7:30p sharp, so it should work fine if you get here by 7:15p blunt.  If you're late you'll just have to eat french fries faster."

   "And the Mayor's house is thataway, exactly 317.4 meters from you."  One of the three women points her finger helpfully.

Should she walk or drive? She's young and fit and healthy, but who cares? The important thing is, what would a normal person do?

Urban planners use about a quarter of a mile, or around 400 meters, as the walk/drive threshold. Actual Americans vary in their behavior depending on the weather, the presence of sidewalks, and the possible need to haul giant Costco-sized packs of hundreds of Frozen BBQ Chicken Drumettes home with them. In this case, it's sunny, there's a sidewalk, and Emily does not anticipate doing major shopping on the trip.

She'll walk.

She gives a jaunty wave-salute to the denizens of the diner and sets off in the indicated direction.

The directions were very much given as the wizard teleports!  However in this case 14 Down St is not at all far off from Main St, the street distance is not far from the helicopter distance, and if Emily reasons out from first principles how a strictly median American would try to follow those directions she will end up at the mayoral residence. It's on a street of other American houses, big old homes built back when people still expected to have and raise families, except that this home has been recently repainted and turned by eager civic-minded souls of Prometheus into a ~mayor's~ ~residence~.

Well, there's no doubt that this is the right place!

Emily marches right up to the front door and rings the bell.

It makes a sound like "GLONG-GLONG-NOOOM", with the final tone fading slowly away like a slowly released organ key-press.

A few moments later there's a loud metallic crash, like somebody accidentally dropping a bowling ball into exposed heavy machinery, followed by a thump-thump-thump sound as of somebody falling down the stairs.

And finally the door is flung open.

"What is it?" he says, in a roughened, almost barking voice.

"Hi! My name is Emily and I'm new in town. I heard that you could use some help?"

It seems to take him a moment to process this.

"Are you by any chance... normal?" he says, in the tones of a man who has many times had this hope raised, and dashed into despair, and is now offering up the very last sparks of light in his soul to see how cruel the universe means to be to him and if it is really worth him playing the whole game at all.

"I mean... yeah? I think so? I sure try to be!" Emily kills the nervous laugh rising up in her throat before it takes flight. "Um. Yes."

"Okay, that was, and I mean this in deepest sincere unirony, a very normal response, for which I am grateful."

"What... kind of help did someone tell you I could use."

"You know what, they didn't really say? They just said you looked..."

Hunted.

"... stressed."

"Are you good at... organizing things.  Things that may, perhaps, not want to be organized."

"Oh, sure! My stuff never wants to be organized! That's why I keep thinking about getting some storage containers for it, or maybe renting a storage unit! I have loads of experience with things that do not want to be organized!"

This part of Emily's story is not particularly going to hold up, if anyone looks too closely. She does not, in fact, have a home with the allegedly American median 300,000 objects in it. She's not even sure that would be the correct number of objects to have, as the evidence backing that number is pretty thin.

But probably no one from Prometheus is going to go and check. People are mostly pretty preoccupied with their own problems.

"Do you have some... things... you need help with?"

"Suppose, hypothetically, that almost every resident of this town was trying to pay their taxes in a different form of goods or services, and that the number of such goods like grams of silver or Ethereum that had a known price in dollars was maybe, like, one-third of all the people paying taxes, and then suppose it had become a source of drama that some people in town were accusing others of not paying enough taxes."

"Why don't you just... only accept U.S. dollars?"

Emily is sure there will be some kind of bizarre "reason" but she can't guess what it will be.

"I think the third of townspeople who did that would be pretty disturbed if I told them they had to pay three times as much in order to make up for not accepting payments from two-thirds of residents!  Anyway, it was made very clear to me that it's not the mayor's job to make the rules, only to execute the rules.  Three branches of government and all that."

"Look, that's not even the real problem here, I was speaking hypothetically in order to get a sense of what sort of things you're offering to help with.  For that matter, why are you offering to help with them?"

"Like, I said, I'm new in town, and I need work!"

"If you want to make a new policy that only U.S. dollars will be accepted for tax payments, I could be the person who sits behind the desk when they come to city hall to complain about it, and then I could do nothing!"

"But also maybe you have some other job in mind? Because that one didn't really sound like things not being organized, so much?"

"Oh, wow, a job.  You were new in town and asked if there was work, and somebody told you the mayor might have a job for you.  That makes so much sense, from your viewpoint.  I have been mayor for way too long if that has stopped being my first thought about why a normal person would ask that.  US dollars are always tight around here, but I've got enough to pay you a secretary-level salary while I figure out how to move a suitcase full of Benadryl."

"I won't totally say that you can come in, because, you know, but if you can just come into the residence, you know, uh, that might be in your own interests. Definitely not asking you for any favors."  He steps aside from the door to make way.

"How long have you been mayor, exactly?"

Emily does not actually understand any of the mayor's waffling about whether coming in the door is, like, an is, or maybe an ought? But his body language is clear, so she steps inside.

"Since July 20th... I'm not actually sure what day it is for me now.  There's like three different ladies in town who paid their taxes by saying 'have a nice day' at me, and when I was like 'what' they were like 'time is money'."  He starts to turn toward a flight of stairs, then stops and looks back at her.  "What all can you do, exactly?"

"Oh, I'm good at lots of things. I can drive a car, change a lightbulb, assemble flat-pack furniture, calculate the tip on a check, use apps on a phone... also I can collaborate with peers and navigate social norms!"