I don't actually enjoy listening to you talk in a language I don't understand, you know. I'm just very good at daydreaming so I don't get bored.

I don't mind skipping ahead to the head-biting. Or food, whichever happens first. Or if we meet someone who'll talk to me, or some interesting people who aren't humans, or some new kind of animal. I'd like to see those lizard-dogs more clearly. And you promised me something fun tonight. And I want to hunt, we tracked down that snake but it wasn't prey.

You can statue me for a bit, just let me out if anything fun happens. She brushes against Aria's flank to indicate all is well again.

Then Aria will look for somewhere secluded, because she doesn't want to expose any of her abilities to strangers if she doesn't have to. Is there somewhere they could be unobserved without leaving the city, or does she need to cast a spell about it?

There are plenty of run-down buildings and alleys that run between them. Even in the most prosperous parts of the city, there are still places like that. If she just needs to be unobserved for a moment, there are plenty of choices.

Who knows what lurks in alleys or peers at her from a window? She doesn't trust cities because she is, fundamentally, weaker inside them. But this isn't a very secret spell; some paladins have a similar one. 

Two large cats step into an alley and don't come out. An indistinct ripple like a heat-shimmer rises through air and is lost in the downpour.

Normally she'd do this as a hawk, but it keeps raining and while she could deal with that, it would make her stand out in the sky. She gives up on the hawk's eyes and flies as an air elemental, indistinct in the hazy sky.

She wants to see the general layout of the city (rain permitting) and its surroundings, and then she'll try to locate temples, markets, taverns, and other such things of interest to travelers. If she were an unremarkable adventurer teleporting into this large city for the first time, where would she go to buy supplies and unobtrusively ask questions? For that matter, can she see any obvious adventurers?

She passes over a man in blue plate riding some kind of device through the streets, but other than that there are no obvious adventurers.

There is also a lack of shops catering to them — there are restaurants, certainly, and probable taverns. But she doesn't really see anywhere that sells weapons, magic items, or armor. In a city this large and this (previously) prosperous, Golarion would certainly have places like that. Here, the closest she can spot is a shop which sells "guns". People treat them like weapons, and hold them a bit like crossbows, but unless she flies down to take a closer look it's not obvious how they operate.

There are not-obviously-adventurer-specific stores selling all kinds of things — fresh produce, much of it unfamiliar to her, books, many places selling clothing.

There are no temples she recognizes, but there are a few building that stand out to her as probable-temples. A large white building with a tall spire, a rundown building with a star symbol painted on the outside and wood over some of the windows, and a marble-and-glass building that is seeing a good deal more traffic than either of those.

Those three seem promising! She will descend with reasonable stealth into range to look at them with Detect Magic and to overhear any public conversations. Since the marble-and-glass building has the most people, she'll start there. What are the people talking about, what are they doing just inside the doors, and how magic is this place?

Not magic at all! Or at least none that she can detect.

The building looked a lot like a temple from the outside — fancy, visually distinct from its surroundings, lots of symbolism and ornamentation in the carvings — but the people inside are mostly talking about taxes and "car registrations". People walk in through the doors, and make their way to various scattered counters — or further into the building — and talk to attendants there, often bringing out various paper documents and showing them, or arguing about requirements.

There is a big statue of a larger-than-life figure in the atrium, but people don't seem to treat it very worshipfully, instead mostly ignoring it.

Taxes and paperwork: a sure sign of humans who have built cities and come to regret it.

How about the other two places?

The more run-down building has nobody in it, except a tired-looking older gentleman re-arranging some chairs in the largest room. The building with the spire is likewise empty except for a woman writing at a desk.

Both have the feeling of places that are used regularly — little dust, plenty of wear on the carpets — but not right now, for whatever reason.

Annoying. She doesn't have all day. (How long until sunset, by the sun's movements? How long are the days here?)

She reviews her mental repertoire of information-gathering spells - everything she learned and forgot and learned again over the long long years, everything she might try to meditate about that might help her.

Studying nature, the local terrain, general information, et cetera: not useful.

Asking animals. Asking plants. Asking all the birds in the city at once. But the birds are hiding from the rain, and what would she ask them anyway? She could find Bitch's territory that way, the birds would tell her about lizard-dog sightings, but it would take too long and the meeting place could easily be elsewhere.

Finding specific kinds of animals, plants, aberrations, magical phenomena, and so on: not useful unless Bitch's dogs happen to be in dog-lizard shape, and even then it might not work if their transmutation doesn't change their fundamental nature as dogs.

A variety of ways to study places and travel to them that are only of use once she knows where a place is.

Seeing any part of the city (without being a hawk about it): useless unless she happens to see Tattletale, Bug or Angelica, and the former two claimed they would be hard to recognize without their masks.

Finding and seeing through illusions: she doubts the meeting place is disguised by an illusion, rather than just being somewhere she isn't.

Seeing everything along a river: she had the bad luck to land in the only human city in the world that isn't built on a river.

At least two different methods of scrying, but she won't recognize Tattletale's surroundings.

Or she can go back to pick up their trail, which would be admitting defeat a little, and might also lead somewhere Tattletale would rather not have her go.

She'll try talking to people first. It's unlikely to help, without giving away information that would let someone track her, but she has no better ideas.

She can only do that once, though, because she can't change shape many more times and she wants to leave one in reserve. The last two buildings don't have enough people, and the first one has too many annoyed people. Has she seen anywhere central, with relatively many people, who aren't busy hurrying out of the rain or arguing with tax-collectors?

Extrapolating from how far the sun moved, the day here is probably 14 or 15 hours right now, and she has about 5 before sunset.

The rain puts a damper on how many people are out and about at this time without urgent business, but she does spy an enclosed building — probably a market, since it seems to contain many different shops — that has a crowd of people loitering inside. Some of them are sitting around at little tables eating food, or just walking from store front to store front. There is a large skylight, which is actually what drew her attention to this building in particular. Perhaps the other nearby large buildings are also subdivided internally.

Does it rain so much in this city that all their markets are built indoors? ...she appreciates the aesthetics of skylights. If people are going to stay indoors, they should at least see the sky. Oppara isn't big on skylights; they like to flaunt their wealth with high-quality magical lighting (as if it can compare to sunlight), not with giant constructions of glass.

She'll find a place nearby where she can land unobserved and change back to human. And then, an unremarkable-looking adventurer who teleported into the city for the first time will go exploring!

She is wearing tasteful leather armour decorated with leaves and carries a staff, and has the usual adventurer's set of weakly magical equipment - belt, headband, cloak, rings, some pouches hanging at her belt. To someone who can see magic, all of it is will look quite unremarkable unless they are very, very good at spellcraft, or have spent a long time around druids.

When she first enters the building, nobody pays particular attention. But as soon as they do notice her, she quickly becomes the center of attention of the small crowd. A few people flee from her, deeper into the building, casting nervous glances over their shoulders. Others just display a certain amount of tension, turning away from their shopping or hunching over their food.

A young man wearing a leather jacket — with small ornamental spikes on the shoulders, not practical for combat — glances at the other people he had been talking with, and then stalks towards her.

"You a cape?" he asks, trying to sound tough. "Or just a weeb?"

As far as Aria could figure out, Tattletale used the word 'cape' to mean 'powerful people', whether mages or fighters or clerics. It might be an established social rank or caste, the way Taldor has nobles. She's not sure of the implications of claiming to be one, but she doesn't want to explicitly deny being one either - not if that would imply lower prestige.

"I'm an adventurer from a far land visiting this city for the first time," she answers neutrally. "And the second term you used didn't translate. Do you have any business with me?" He clearly isn't wearing a helpful attitude, and she'd rather choose who to talk to.

And then she recasts detect magic. (This needs to be done every few minutes while she's using it, but that's fine; it's not unusual for people to go around recasting detect magic all the time.) Does this man have any magic about him, or any others she can see within sixty feet?

Not in the least — everyone here is completely nonmagical.

Jesse relaxes a little at her answer, but not much.

"Where on Earth are you from that you think it's okay to go walking around in costume if you don't have powers?" he exclaims. "Haven't you heard what the nine think of that?"

The nine what, some kind of local lords or something? Is this one of those places with sumptuary laws, where you can't dress like an adventurer unless you are one? She is one, though, so she doesn't see the problem.

"I am not powerless, nor am I dressed up in a costume; these are my everyday clothes. Who are these 'nine' and what is your relation to them?"

He splutters at her for a moment.

"You know, the Slaughterhouse Nine. The crazy people who go around killing people and torturing anyone who offends them," he replies. "There was that convention in ... California, I think? Where people were dressing up as heroes and villains? And the nine came and made an example of them for suggesting that villains were 'cool' instead of 'terrifying'."

"Is California in this city? Are you afraid they'll show up at any moment because they'll hear a woman dressed a certain way?"

He looks uncertain; he's not really sure where this conversation is going, but dealing with crazy people is hardly ever a good thing, right?

"It's, uh, no. California is on the West coast. We're on the East coast," he explains. "And it's not that they'd, like, definitely show. It's that nobody does it, because they might. And when they do, it's bad news for everyone even vaguely near their target."

He surreptitiously wipes his hands on his jeans.

"So you're telling me that this country has... nine very powerful Evil people, who spend their time hunting down rumours of someone who dressed in a way they don't like, or - who publicly admire Evil, I didn't really get that part... Or maybe have magic to notice when anyone does that, and then they come and murder everyone in the vicinity?" This isn't particularly unbelievable, Chaotic Evil people get up to much weirder stuff than that. "I still don't understand why you think they'd target me. At home I would be perceived as a fairly unremarkable adventurer." Human cultures are endlessly variable and maybe she has the wrong lapel pins or something. If everyone teleporting to Tian Xia had to dress up for it, she likes to think she'd have heard about it, but - probably not if it's new from the last few years and isn't a centuries-old tradition.

"Lady, have you seen anyone else wearing leather armor, that weird jewelry, and carrying a big stick?" he asks, rhetorically glancing around at the other people in the Mall. "You look weird as hell. But yeah — the nine are definitely evil. And it's not admiring evil they object to, really, it was ... trying to say that villains weren't scary. They want everyone to be scared."

Some people were pretending to be Evil, by wearing the local concept of a stereotypically Evil costume (which may or may not involve leather armor), but they also pretended that Evil wasn't scary, so some actually Evil people showed up to kindly explain that, no, they were wrong, real Evil is very scary indeed? That... sort of makes sense, as a story.

"I do not claim Evil cannot be fearsome," she offers. "Are there no local evils that you fear, and if not for the nine across the continent people here would be unafraid to mock Evil?"