One of the people staffing one of the shops is an angel with reddish-tan wings. (He got bored of the really high-leverage uses for angel powers before they even met the rest of the multiverse.) He has found a regular human-style chair and when not doing restocking or other such chores he sits in it backwards with his chin resting on the top of the backrest.

"Uh, hi, I was told this is where - wow, you really do have wings -"

He grins and extends them a little. "I do! I even know how to make them."

"Is... that one of the things you sell?"

"It's not standard or anything, but I can do it for you. Fair warning, humans tend to get really tired flying - I don't so much because I'm indestructible, which you can also get for yourself but not here and not cheaply."

"Oh... I'll think about it. Uh, anyway, I'm in my mom's clothes and they do not flatter and I hear this is where I go for a new wardrobe."

"Yep! You can pick off that rack and let me know if something's almost right but the wrong size or color."

"Oh, wow." Off they go to investigate the options. "Wow, the stitching on this thing... do you have bags, will I be able to take more than a couple outfits?"

"Yeah, you can have whichever of these designs you want, or any other design as long as things are slow enough for me to recolor one."

"Oh, neato. I'm supposed to... tell you about my childhood or something?"

"Sure, or whatever you want to tell me about. You can even tell me fictional stories if you want. But yeah, you can tell me about your childhood."

"I grew up in Mistyvalley and had a dog. I named it Rishku after the senator. Then the senator turned out to be sleeping with the wives of half the other senators and he couldn't get elected again and my dad made jokes about it every time the dog licked its bits."

He snickers. "Yep, that counts. You want a whole wardrobe, you’ll need a few more."

"Oh, let's see..." Clothes clothes clothes. "For my tenth birthday I invited twenty people and only fourteen of them came and I was so mad that I put a ton of nutmeg in the sorry-you-missed-the-party cookies my mom made me bring the six people who skipped and they had incredibly awful trips and my parents had to pay their parents I think upwards of a month's income."

"Wow." It's amazing how many different ways this incident could not have happened to him or his loved ones, which makes it easy to completely fail to have emotions about it. "Doesn't nutmeg have a pretty strong flavor?"

"Yeah, but they had to eat the cookies to be polite."

"Huh." He is a professional and is not going to say anything judgmental about their culture at all. This is exactly the kind of information he's here to collect.

Clothes clothes. "When I went to sea I was one of the only people on the ship who knew how to swim. I couldn't fathom what the rest of them thought they were doing. But I suppose now that I think about it most situations where a sailor drowns he's probably not going to be saved by keeping afloat another hour, is he."

"...Huh, I've never really thought about what circumstances a sailor would end up drowning in."

"You usually don't fall off the boat! It'd be more important to know how to swim if it was a little rowboat, but a big ship, not so much. Aaaaand - how many more stories do you need at this point -" He hefts the bag of clothes.

He counts items and stories and has an answer for that.

He can have two children's fables, a bawdy rowing song, and the story about the faithless woman who said she'd marry him and was married to someone else and halfway gone with a baby the next time he was in port.

Cool! He wishes this guy a good day and thanks him for the stories.

A family comes in to stock their pantry and get bedding that the middle girl doesn't hate and bar soap because the place came conjured with liquid.

Oh, look, he has all of these items. He can offer limited customization options for soap fragrances and recite the recommendations of people who've tried more of the foods than he has and do quite a lot of troubleshooting about - what exactly needs to be true of bedding for the middle girl to not hate it?

It has to be "smooth" but not "slippery" and "cool" but not "windy".

"...Tell you what, you can feel the fabrics we have" - he points them out - "and if you hate them I’ll look up other options and see if I can make them for you."

She dutifully pets all the fabrics and eventually identifies some modal as appropriate.

He congratulates her on finding something that works.

And what stories will these things be bought for?

The eldest child is attempting to buy their entire shopping trip with an enthusiastic rundown of every theatrical production he has ever been in, as he was apparently the best child actor in his town.

He listens raptly to all of that. He really likes theater but doesn't want to get into a situation where he enthusiastically praises all but one story or something, but it's probably still obvious he really likes these ones.

Once the family notices that the kid has a real head of steam going they circle back for a few more items but when they're heavily laden they will tug him away.

He waves goodbye, grinning.

Around him the new city grows. People come in for mops and buckets and explain that someone threw up on the train, they aren't used to trains. People come in for books on rewiring their electricity. People come in for healing-song music players and sewing machines and countertop dishwashers and little wagons to haul it all away in, and they repay him with personal drama and tall tales and badly remembered serial newspaper fiction and gossip.

He wrinkles his nose a little at stories involving vomit, and mentions that electricity can probably kill you if you're killable and careless, and does not even attempt to call people on their tall tales, and tries very hard not to judge their drama, and provides them books and appliances and cleaning implements and wagons.

He's allowed to work shifts as long as he wants, since he doesn't need sleep, but he can call in for relief if he wants to go do something else for awhile.

Yeah. He could work forever but he can’t stay excited and focused on making sure everyone gets what they’re looking for forever. He’ll let someone fresh handle it while he goes for a walk nearby to see how things are shaping up. (He'd go flying but it seems like a bad idea to be conspicuously literally unapproachable and show off in ways that no one here could reasonably be expected to even try to match.)

There's a big lost-and-found for items dropped or misplaced in the shuffle of the mass exodus. Lots of signs up reminding everyone that disappearance magic is no longer necessary for this long list of applications. A locksmith bustling in to get apartments opened up that aren't admitting people like they're supposed to. A big pack of children swarming around the park.

He notes the location of the lost-and-found in case he finds anything and reads the sign out of idle curiosity.

Children are weird. He's not unfamiliar with them, it's just conceptually weird that some people go through a phase of being miniature weirdos right after their appearance. These ones are in the park and the park is otherwise likely to be the most interesting area so he'll brave the horde.

Their parents are around, sitting on the benches and in the little stone amphitheater someone thought was a good idea to install. (Some of the children are pretending to be putting on a play in the amphitheater.) Some of the trees are labeled "Valian - Edible" and people are tasting them. One girl halfway up such a tree has denuded the whole branch she's sitting on.

Cute. He watches the amphitheater long enough to figure out if the goings-on manage to have a plot or anything.

No, despite the exhortations of one of the more narrative-driven children they have completely different creative directions at play.

Reminds him of a few attempts at neighborhood aesthetic cohesion he's seen.

He takes a guess based on similarity of appearance and apparent attention as to which adults are associated with whichever child has the coolest creative vision and if they don't seem too busy he'll tell them he's noticed the kids are adorable.

The grandma he is addressing beams at him. "Aren't they just! That's my grandson, in the red, and his sister in the yellow."

"Cool! They seem creative."

"They are, they're just full of stories, though half of hers are just bits of the Legend of Hayu mixed up."

"No one’s tried to sell me that one for a dishwasher yet but it’s only a matter of time. Maybe she’ll be the first."

"You don't have the Legend of Hayu? Oh, you should ask for it, it's lovely."

"Thanks!"

"No problem. This planet is so nice, did you help with making it?"

"Nah. They mostly want demons and anyway I'm fed up to here with the kinds of work they'd even have for me. I'm really glad you like it, though! They really paid attention to wind patterns, I've seen some dumb desert placement and some ridiculous kludges to keep their nice Mediterranean climates from getting obnoxious amounts of dust blown in and this place shouldn't have that problem."

"Wow, the things you must think about when you can make a planet!" She shakes her head. "I'm just so glad we have a planet, it was looking like we'd all go down with the last one, and then that we wouldn't all get to that shantytown disaster in time..."

He nods. "Yeah. I'm sorry." He's trying not to have emotions about their problems at them but he gets discernibly choked up about that.

"I never even had to sleep in the shantytown, I'm old, I let everybody else go on ahead in case, you know, but now apparently I get to live forever!"

"I’d say it’s great and I recommend it but technically I haven’t tried it and wouldn’t know if it sucks after the first trillion years."

"Well, if it does, I get to stop! Not you though! Good luck with that!"

He laughs, though it’s not funny at all. Probably a bad idea to get into the weeds about suicidal daeva. "Yeah."

"If I go on a shopping trip I'll tell you the Legend of Hayu."

"Thanks! I’ll look forward to it."