"Pleasure to meet you, Roland.  I think I may take you up on that when I have two hundred fifty dollars, or if you're willing to gamble on there being a market for scrolls of genuine vellum amongst the moneyed folks inside."

He perks up and puts out the remains of his blunt, smiling wide.

"Oh, I'll take vellum scrolls off you, kinda niche, but I buy and keep lots of niche stuff 'till I find a buyer. Won't even rip you off much. People know the name Roland means that. Weird obscure stuff is just fun, too. Let's see them?"

She can indeed show him a few scrolls!  "Handcrafted, too."

He takes off his gloves and handles them carefully for a minute, feeling them and rolling them open slowly before carefully closing them up again.

"Preem stuff. Seems to be real, adds to your mystery. I'll probably be able to sell these for close to a grand, eventually. Raising real animals is expensive compared to synthetics. But I do take on a lot of opportunity cost and burden of risk doing this kind of stuff, and have to let it go for less in the end. So it's only natural I need to make a profit. How does two forty per sound?"

"Hmm."

She flips open a small - almost a little notebook, made of bronze and wax, and poises herself as if to take notes with the stylus strung onto its frame.

"If I expected this to be the only transaction I wished to undertake with you, or rather the only sort of transaction I wished to undertake, I would begin haggling, at this point.

"However, I would rather -

"Cultivate an ongoing relationship.

"So.  I propose, as an alternative structure -

"The first scroll, I trade you for your services in establishing my access to the city proper.  I assume I'm going to need them; I'm not from around here.

"You retain all profit from that sale.

"The remainder, we split; you are the agent of a recently unemployed corporate supplies middlewoman from somewhere far away, who was a bit caught out by a sudden dissolution of her division.  These scrolls were purchased as a private errand from my now-dead boss, whose tastes trend to the positively archaic, and his death left me with little better to do but sell to the highest bidder."

"I hear what you're saying, but nah. One scroll for a Cinci-standard forged border pass, sure, deal. Acting as a broker for a deal on a bunch of other copies of the same luxe curiosity? I'm not in the big money business, just the day to day, working the streets. It's not gonna be all going to one person. These are living room wall pieces, or office toys, one per head at most. I can't be keeping you looped in on a dozen different deals yet, maybe when we actually do know each other."

She nods.  "Makes sense."

"I wonder if you could get a few heads in a bidding war, if you measured out the scrolls one or two at a time.  Or rather, I imagine one might, and I expect that you've enough savvy to pull it off, so I'm raising the option, because it communicates my goals.  I'm thinking I want to maximize my gains, is the main thing, rather than go for immediate profit.  If I need immediate profit, I can turn some knives around.  ...The nerve of some people, to so ill-treat their tools - but their loss is my gain."

"We'll see what happens. Cinci's big, and everyone's a hustler, folk are mostly too wise to get drawn into that. From my point of view I don't want to spend an extra twenty hours to bump the price by a couple hundred bucks, that's not gonna happen. You'll get the best price I can fetch for a serious but measured effort, if we end up doing things that way."

He looks at the knife for a bit. "You can tell a craftsman by their tools. Once saw a head with stupid numbers of different tools, wrenches a quarter-inch apart in size, all lined up nice and neat and clean on hooks on a wall, looking like they've never actually seen work. Stupider way to show off than a fancy car or expensive augs, those are both actually useful."

He digs out from the big backpack a pair of phone-like devices and a large cylinder, the length of a forearm, but wider around. There's the medical '+' symbol on it. "Gonna need to take biometrics for your border pass. That's a blood prick, handprint, and retinal scan. It will also show me if you're a mutant, and if you are deal's off, I can't get mutants past Tower unless it's real subtle."

She nods.  "I'm certainly willing to trust your expertise on the market."

The comment about telling a craftsman by their tools prompts a sage nod, but no other comment - unlike the 'mutant' one.

"Glad I'm not Beastfolk-kin; that might've been trouble.  ...Actually I'm not sure if they can interbreed with humans, come to think of it.  Regardless - pretty sure I'm just an ordinary human, as far as there's anything ordinary about me.  How's this thing going to check, though?  If you'll humor my curiosity on the subject.  Presumably something to do with the blood sample?"

"Some corp's vat-grown soldiers? Those are usually sterile, yeah. Easier to control that way. It's just a DNA and protein expression assay, nothing fancy like you take for serious medical treatment." He shrugs and pulls out a small tube with a tiny needle at the end. "The one-shot nanites in the medchem kit are commanded into diagnostic mode and then send electrical impulses based on what codons and proteins they encounter in the blood. Encrypted coprocessor chews the math for a bit and turns it into something readable- And more importantly to Tower, consistent enough between checks to make impersonation harder. Though they don't use these kits, they have dedicated devices for it, these are first aid."

"...Wow, that is a lot of words I have never actually heard before, though for what's obviously professional language it's surprisingly understandable."

Her stylus positively zooms across one panel of her diptych as she makes notes, expanding on detectable roots.

"...Beastfolk can definitely breed, though; I've seen Beastfolk kids and they don't come out of vats.  But you're not wrong that they have the - weapon mindset - always thinking about who'd win in a fight.  Don't understand mercy whatsoever.  Or the strength of intellect, necessarily.

"Not that it matters; you won't see them here, I think.  Unless another impossible thing happens, which..."

She seems to be delving deeply into memory, as she holds up a finger for holding a thought.  "I suppose if the one assassin that tried to kill me the once manages to pull off some of the bullshit a different assassin on my employer's payroll is capable of, there might be one, if either of them can follow me here.  It depends.  Wouldn't be trouble for you, though, she'd just be mad at me for what I couldn't avoid doing to her boss.  Though now that I think about it, I wonder if making a walking avalanche scream is a show of strength enough for Beastfolk culture...

"...Doesn't matter; nobody else would know what actually happened when I declared open season on Nerat, took my shot at him, and - if not missed, still failed to land a meaningful hit - so why would they look for me?

"Anyway.

"As long as you don't do anything nefarious with the blood sample, which - well, I'm going to have to trust you a bit on that - I'm okay with giving it, if it's necessary.  And I believe you that it is.  So you stick me with the tube, then?  Anywhere in particular?"

"I can theoretically get uncomfortable levels of detail about your health, or even more theoretically use it to imitate your blood sig. No fantasy shit like curses or whatever. Who the hell would bother engineering something to target your DNA specifically when they can just shoot you, right? Fingertip or arm vein. It doesn't hurt, there's just a little puff of air. You need basic tech literacy or a better backstory, nameless head."

"Unfortunately I come by my backstory honestly.  Good news is, I've never seen blood curses either, eh?  Tech literacy sounds like a wonderful investment, though."

She'll just stick herself, then.

Beep! He does things with the screened devices.

"I don't even know where to start. You grow up with this stuff, most folk."

"Point me to a library and I'm sure I'll pick it up.  I gather that - if there's one primary trick to it, it's harnessing lightning?  I - can hardly think of anything else that that warning symbol could mean, at least.  And the other thing to know would be what DNA is; it seems - rather core to your understanding of life."

"Caveman." Sigh. "Or some kinda long-term psy-op? Memory fuckery? ...Fuck. Palm." There's a flat pad for her to press it on. "And then look into this. Computers read off stupidly long lists of very precise instructions and do math really fast. You can set it up to give them examples of math that looks good and examples that look bad and it makes guesses about how to make it look good, that's a VI, a computer that can sorta learn but still isn't really thinking. Lightning is a form of electricity, which can be used in creative magnetic-fuckery ways and for computers. DNA is the computer-instructions that drive a living thing, except the human is ten times more complicated than the worst chaos-brain VI because evolution's the only one editing the source code and it doesn't leave comments."

"More the former than the latter, I'm rather confident.  Though I'll have you know we didn't live in caves.  Why, we could work iron.  Even make some that was of comparable quality to this knife, here."  She's poking a bit of fun at herself with that line.

Palm, indeed.  She peels off a long blue glove, first.

And then she will gaze into the machine as if she can get it to reveal its secrets by peering hard enough!

"I can hardly imagine the necessary convolutions to get an electrical abacus to show you all of that, in a format you can just read.  It's really quite a wonder.

"And - evolution, is that to do with why you can breed animals?"

"Iron. Right. In small batches by individual people? That's another thing, most manufacturing is by big machines like Serisse makes. Twenty tons of stainless steel alloy at a time. Also, not much easily accessible ore left, it's all recycling these days. Haul in an old cargo container from the badlands to the dump and you can get a couple hundred bucks for it, scrap value. I should fucking think there's no large uncontacted tribes left anywhere on the globe. Even those Tuvalu island guys or whoever got evicted for some CEO's new vacation mansion, I heard. And yeah, that's artificial selection. Evolution is when predators and hunger and shit are doing the breeding."

"Not exactly small batches, but compared to twenty tons, certainly the total production was tiny.  Twenty tons is - grain shipments, not iron.  Iron...If my numbers are right, and I do think they are...

"Mm.  The forges at Lethian's were putting out pretty much all the product we had, at least ever since the last mines got fucked over, but they were more limited by their ability to bring in ore...

"I'd still hazard that the shipments I have particular records of, multiplied by five or so because it's just the one finger of supplies, has the Forge-Bound comparing decently well to one of those.  Albeit only one, for a hundred people's labors just on the processing, let alone at the mines digging it out of the ground.  That was a right mess to make happen; everybody wanted iron, nobody wanted to haul the fucking ore.

"I do think we made what you call steel; it just wasn't by that name.  The properties resemble ones I know well.

"By the way, what's your calendar like?"

"Yeah, mass production really doesn't give a shit compared to handicrafts. I could theoretically hand-assemble a capacitor given the right stuff and an hour but it's better to pick up five for a buck off a street seller, or get them new from Bob's Tools. It's just that a highly profitable factory needs a huge military force hanging around to defend it, or someone would steal shit or blow it up. Nothing just straightforward makes money. If it does, you get shot for it. Still, lots of old abandoned industrial facilities in Cinci's guts. Cheaper to manufacture in China and Africa these days. I even salvage stuff out of them sometimes."

"Yeah, been there, done that, reorganized the mercenary company into a guard force for strategic materials that still somehow didn't catch --

"Mm.  Really ought to take a look into how it took so long for the ongoing theft to come to my attention, let alone Welby's; that's the sort of thing that people should tell other people.

"...Although I'm hardly going to be able to get in touch with them to do it, so, it's rather moot.

"Anyway, being annoyed at my past self's inadequate procedurecraft aside...

"What makes it cheaper to ship a thing off to be manufactured over there in an identical factory?  Seems kind of fake, if you ask me.  You want your final processing steps as close to the destination point as you want your initial processing near the inputs so you're not hauling around waste."

"Do I look like a corpo director of operations or whatever? Stuff does totally get made in Cinci- Everyone in cinci's eating algae and catfish no matter how processed it is, honestly, and they're actually mining the old dump because people used to just throw out perfectly good metal- Maybe it's the poverty. And the Badlands. This used to be the edge of the American midwest, or so I heard. Corn fields as far as the eye could see."

"No, you just sounded like you had some idea of what you were talking about when you said it was cheaper to make things Over There and not here.  Kinda thought you might have an idea why that was.  Still, you aren't an operations manager, so, yeah, fair enough."

And then...the algae and catfish and the Badlands being a new thing.

"...The Badlands were not always like this.  Is that what you are saying."

"Resource wars." He shrugs. "Wasn't any one thing. Global warming and climate change. Sabotage here and there, in dribbles. Land that'd been overfarmed for generations unable to cope with a sudden switch back to 'normal'. The old 'States fell apart, and all the people fighting didn't realize that what they were fighting for was slipping away until it was over. A hundred years ago, maybe even forty, yeah, the Badlands were probably fine. Forests, farms, whatever."

She swears.  Vehemently.

"Let me guess.  If someone fixed it, or looked like they were trying to.  That would be worse than an unguarded factory."