Clank, clank, clank, went Astrid's ceremonial armour as she and Mishka made their way through the Beneath, passing over a stone bridge that spanned a pond of slithering, churning oil-like liquid. Overhead the brilliant glow of the Empyrean shone, beams of its pure, newly born light blazing between the curtains of stars and nebulae of the Real. Across from them another formation slowly twisted, its unreal dimensions seeming to shift and change from moment to moment, stairs that went both up and down, bridges that were connected to nothing and several things at once, plants that were made of flesh and grew out of themselves.

  "Can we please stop somewhere that sells clothes?" complained Astrid, dragging Mishka's gaze from the unreal scene. "Also, it's cold!"

  It was cold. They'd been wandering around in the Beneath for at least ten minutes, according to Mishka's unusually accurate timepieces. She suspected the accuracy was because of the excess Empyrean energy within her own soul – power that was the polar opposite of that of the Beneath: negentropy against entropy.

  The abundant energy in her soul was because Baelgoroth, the Straevenox who had tried to feast upon her, had pricked the Eternity Splinter after she hadn't managed to convince him that there was a better way. Her failure still stung like a wound, which she knew would scar and add to the many others, but her more immediate concern was that someone had almost certainly detected the outpouring of raw, unshielded Empyrean energy. She doubted they'd be able to find her from that alone, but they'd know the general area she was in. Which meant that she had to be careful not to draw undue attention to herself.

  Still, what was done was done, she'd just have to be more careful going forward. Move on. Don't look back. Run.

  "Mishka, are you even listening?" said Astrid.

  "Oh, right, clothes," said Mishka, peering around at a few of the cracks in the walls of a room that seemed to be a cross between a doctor's waiting room and an ice-cream salon. "Sure – what about there? It looks like a city."

  She pulled Astrid through the tear, and the creeping icy coldness of the Beneath vanished, replaced by perhaps even more freezing rain and a howling wind.

  "Lovely!" shouted Astrid over the tempest, pulling up her cloak and looking back and forth down the wide, empty street they'd arrived on. Ground-bound auto-carriages were parked here and there along the cracked and uneven asphalted road. There were a few lights on in shops that ran along either side of the street, and a handful in the apartments that sat above those. Lamp-posts flickered, and between the pools of light they and the shopfronts cast, were areas of darkness that Mishka's eyes took a moment to adjust to before revealing boarded up windows and mouldering brickwork.

  An auto-carriage passed by them, moving in the opposite direction, and rang its bell angrily.

  "We should get off the road!" shouted Astrid, taking Mishka's arm.

  It was a bit drier on the side of the street, where the awnings of several shops protected them from the worst of the downpour.

  "Can we try somewhere else!?" shouted Astrid.

  "You don't need to yell," said Mishka, raising her bracelet and summoning up a mana-screen above it, which she began to tap away at.

  "What!?" shouted Astrid.

  "I said, you don't need to yell! My hearing is very good!" shouted Mishka back.

  "What are you doing!?" shouted Astrid.

  "Stop yelling!" said Mishka.

  Astrid made a grumbling noise she probably thought Mishka couldn't hear.

  "What are you doing?" said Astrid, finally speaking in a normal voice.

  "I'm trying to tap into any information network, find a map!" shouted Mishka.

  "Oh, so you get to shout!?" shouted Astrid back.

  "Yes, because otherwise you can't hear me!" said Mishka.

  "What!?" shouted Astrid.

  "Exactly!" shouted Mishka.

  She rolled her eyes and kept on tapping away. There were a few aethertic networks about, although they were rather slow and kept on trying to block her accessing them because she didn't have a 'ASP Key.' Her bracelet circumvented the barriers after a few moments, however, and then she was in.

  It took her magitek device only a few moments to ransack the databases of their information, and the lights overhead flickered and died as some supremely stupid database architecture was interrupted by her information retrieval. A moment after streets were plunged into darkness a map appeared on the screen above her bracelet.

  "Ah ha!" said Mishka, peering at the area around the central dot. "Looks like… I think this is a clothes shop – not far."

  "It's raining!" shouted Astrid. "And what did you do to the lights!?"

  "How do you know it was me?" replied Mishka.

  "Because it's always you!" shouted Astrid.

  "Stop shouting at me," huffed Mishka, swiping the map to the side and bringing up the database systems she'd hacked. A few more taps, and she'd repaired the city's power grid, and the lights all around them flickered back on. "Happy?"

  Astrid wasn't happy, but that wasn't new, and they trooped out through the howling storm. Personally, Mishka quite liked the rain. It made her feel alive, as if it were blowing away all the cobwebs inside. A few more cars passed them as they walked through the dark streets, but other than that, they didn't see a single other soul.

  They came to a major road, and after Mishka nearly got run over they waited a very long time at what Astrid called a 'pedestrian crossing' that seemed to be both devoid of other pedestrians and involved no crossing of the road. Finally, after almost ten minutes, Mishka got bored and retaliated by hacking the traffic control system to make all the auto-carriages in the city stop for ten minutes. This was, apparently, 'very irresponsible,' but personally Mishka thought making a city you couldn't walk around was criminal.

  But then they arrived at the clothes shop. It loomed like a great mesa above them, and a sign that said 'Belview Department Store' shone out into the darkness. It was, perhaps, the most uninspired piece of architecture that Mishka had ever seen – a single large concrete block, a few stories high, and with virtually no windows except at the entrance. There were a few auto-carriages in the massive parking lot outside it, but they didn't see anyone until they made it through the large revolving door and entered a brightly lit foyer.

  "Hello, and welcome to Belview Department Store. Please let any of our friendly staff know if you need assistance. Have a fantastic day," said an alven teenager covered in spots.

  Their tone of voice suggested that it was a sentence they had said so many times it had stopped registering as words, and more a string of meaningless sounds. Like all alves, they had pointy ears and were a bit taller than the average ursulanoid. Their hairstyle was, in Mishka's opinion, a bit weird – sort of like a reddish soft-served ice-cream. They were wearing a bright blue shirt, and seemed to want to be anywhere but there.

  "Oh, right, um," said Astrid. "Do you sell clothes?"

  The alf, whose name-tag said 'Jowel,' looked Astrid over for the first time, almost as if they were surprised by her presence.

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  "Oh, yeah, no sweat… on your right, follow the second path, go past miscellaneous, down the stairs, then, like, turn right past the pet section, then up the stairs and turn left – you, like, can't miss it," they said, gesturing vaguely.

  It sounded like you very much could miss it to Mishka. Who would design a place like that?

  "Great," said Astrid, seemingly not put out, then she paused. "And do you take… Mishka, do you have anymore gold?"

  "Gold? What for?" said Mishka, who was peering at a stand full of chocolatey bars.

  "To pay for things," said Astrid, her voice dripping with exasperation.

  "How do you know they use currency?" said Mishka through a mouthful of sweet chocolate and caramel and honey. "Jowel doesn't seem to care." She nodded at the alf, who was staring into the middle distance.

  "Because there are prices," said Astrid, pointing at the cardboard stand Mishka had found the delicious bars. "And he's a teenager. I doubt they're paying him enough to care."

  "How can you tell?" asked Mishka.

  "If- if he's a teenager?" said Astrid. "Are you really that bad at telling age?"

  "No, well, yes, a bit, but I mean the gender," said Mishka, peering at the spaced-out alf. "I don't know how you do it so easily."

  Astrid rolled her eyes. "Just- just give me a few gold coins."

  Mishka grumbled, and began to rummage in her cloak pockets for a moment, pulling out the 'Sword of Kings,' which she'd surreptitiously picked up because she wanted to have a look at its enchanting, her long length of rope she'd used to explore the Staevenox cruiser, several cans of pudding she'd forgotten about but was now looking forward the eating, and a candle, before finally finding several mismatched gold coins.

  "Whoa, cool – how does that, like, all fit into your pocket?" asked the alf, who seemed to have been stirred back into something approximating life by the display of large objects emerging from a small pocket.

  "Spatial compression charm," said Mishka, shoving the other bits and pieces back in. "So, is gold useful here?"

  "Wicked. Um, yeah, we do, like, have a counter that buys gold," said the alf teenager, peering at the coins before looking back at Mishka's cloak. "Just before the clothes, in the jewellery section."

  "Great," said Mishka, taking them back and then grabbing a few more of the chocolate-honey bars. "Thanks!"

  They moved off into the large, seemingly shopper-less building. There was… junk everywhere, wrapped in bight packaging and interspersed here and there with incredibly loud advertising. Astrid seemed to be totally at home in the shop, but Mishka found it all overwhelming. Was this really how primitives did shopping? It was so… noisy, everything trying to grab and divert her attention towards it all at once.

  And the smells! All plastic and perfume and incense and detergent. Did most aliens really have olfactory senses that poor?

  They reached a section devoted to selling enchanted nicknacks, then moved through a gardening section, until finally they found an area filled with dozens of tanks full of fish and reptiles and small mammals.

  Opposite that was the jewellery section. It was staffed by another employee – the only person they'd seen since Jowel at the door. They were a jolly, middle-aged looking gecken – a lizard-like person who were pretty common throughout Architect seeded worlds.

  Standing at a little over six and a half feet, the gecken towered over both Astrid and Mishka. According to their nametag, they were called 'Razzarl,' and were dressed in the same bright-blue shirt as the younger alf had been, and which clashed violently with their crimson scales. They had a long, sharp snout, jagged bony ridges above their bright green eyes, and a mane of slightly lighter green feathers leading from the crown of their head down the back of their long neck.

  "Hello! Welcome to the Belview Department Store's Jewellery Department!" said Razzarl, clasping their clawed hands in front of them. "My, it sure looks like it's wet out there! Didn't think that we'd have any more customers tonight!"

  "It is," said Astrid, flicking some water from her sodden gauntlets.

  "Hello, my name is Mishka, and I use she/her, and this is Astrid, who also uses she/her – I think, she's actually never told me, so I hope I'm not being rude," said Mishka, introducing herself and holding out a few gold coins. "We'd like to exchange some gold for whatever the local fungible token or currency is, assuming that this place does indeed allocate goods using the commodity form."

  For some reason, Astrid slapped her forehead.

  Razzarl accepted the coins. "Oh, nice to meet you Mishka and Astrid," said Razzarl. "I use she/her as well! Oh my, look at these, these are just marvellous!"

  The friendly and polite gecken woman fussed about, scanning the discs of gold with several magitek devices which seemed even more rudimentary than Astrid's people's.

  "I've never seen coins quite like these," said Razzarl, holding one underneath one of her lamps and peering at it with a jeweller's monocle. "Where did you get them, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "That one? Gallax-3," said Mishka. "I think."

  Razzarl frowned. "Oh, where is that? On the southern continent?"

  "No, roughly eighteen thousand light yea-"

  "Yes, the southern continent," said Astrid loudly, elbowing Mishka in the ribs.

  "Ah, OK, it's just that I've never seen this kind of design before," said Razzarl.

  "What was that for?" said Mishka, who was rubbing her ribs. It hadn't really hurt, Astrid wasn't very strong, but it had been rude.

  "This place clearly doesn't have interstellar transport yet," whispered Astrid. "There are strict rules in the DPSC about interfering with primitive worlds."

  "Are there? Why?" said Mishka.

  "To- to protect them, their cultures," said Astrid. "I mean, it doesn't always happen like that in practice… but it's the law."

  "Huh," said Mishka, scratching one of her bear-like ears, which were still damp.

  "Don't your people have something like that?" asked Astrid.

  "Not really," said Mishka. "We haven't needed planets for a long time, and most Ursulans would never willingly interact with an alien."

  Astrid looked at her askance. "Well… just don't tell people we're not from this planet, OK?"

  Mishka shrugged. "OK."

  "So…" said Razzarl, glancing around and lowering their voice. "My manager wouldn't like me saying this, but I'm sure you could get a lot of money for these at a proper antique shop. A lot more than the gold-content price I can give you."

  "That's OK," said Mishk. "I have plenty more."

  "Well, um, OK," said Razzarl. "If you're sure?"

  "I'm sure," said Mishka.

  "Then, I can give you three thousand and… four Seckles for these."

  "Is that enough to buy new clothes for my friend?" said Mishka.

  Razzarl blinked. "Um, yes," she said. "Lots of clothes, even."

  "Great!" said Mishka.

  Razzarl had to go and get someone else to open some kind of safe, an irritable looking human man, but then she counted out quite a lot of slips of paper that Mishka wasn't entirely sure she believed were actually currency, but which Astrid assured her was fine.

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