Thresholder

The first thing Perry noticed were the trees, which rose up high in the air. They reminded him of the redwoods of the Muir woods, which he’d always visited when his family made the trip to his aunt and uncle’s house near San Francisco. They had twenty-foot diameters and stood three hundred feet tall.

For a moment, just a single second, Perry thought that maybe he was back on Earth, but that thought slipped away as soon as he saw what had been done to the trees. There were ropes around their trunks, high up, with small slips of paper dangling down from threads, and below that, at the height where people could reach, the bark had been carved with a riot of graffiti — the one closest to him had drawings, names, and all sorts of other things covering it. The ropes with papers were some kind of Japanese thing, he thought, but the graffiti was the accumulation of foot traffic and a culture that didn’t care about that kind of thing, in the same way that an inner city wall would accumulate tags until the whole thing was covered.

There was no one around at the moment, in spite of all the evidence of people regularly using this place. It wasn’t a forest, probably couldn’t be given how fresh the slips of paper were. It was a park or a tourist spot or something like that.

Perry had his sword in hand and the drone nestled in the compartment on his back, but he held off on using the drone just then. He felt no small amount of affection for the little thing, which had miraculously survived through five different worlds in spite of its ultra lightweight construction.

“Marchand, how are we doing?” asked Perry. “Radio signals?”

“None, sir,” said Marchand.

“Make a map,” said Perry. “Show me the moment someone shows up.”

“Of course, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry frowned as he watched the map being made with a combination of acoustics and visuals. It would be better with the drone, but the drone might give them away. Perry had spent lots of time thinking about the next world and what sorts of things he might find there, and he was thinking that there might be a case for him to go in quietly, which would mean temporarily ditching the armor and sword. He would need to know what these people wore, how they moved, and integrate himself with them as much as possible. Thankfully the language wouldn’t be a problem thanks to the second sphere.

He wished he still had the glamour that he’d lost back in Teaguewater. It had fallen off him when he’d transformed into a wolf, and not been recovered. It hadn’t been strong enough to make people gloss over the fact that he was wearing full plate armor, but it would have let him slip into a crowd. Given that it was possible to anticipate the portals in a few ways, he wanted to get as far from the entry site as he could.

Perry launched himself into the air and then let the sword carry him higher, getting a better view of the forest and taking him out of view of anyone standing on the ground. Just because Marchand hadn’t heard any radio signals didn’t mean that these people weren’t technologically advanced. In fact, one of the things that Richter had talked about with him when they were discussing aliens was that advanced civilizations might not be bathing the cosmos with radio signals, instead preferring more direct forms of communication, either point-to-point or using wires.

And if these people had magic, then all bets were off the table. They might be able to track him without him having a way of knowing that it was happening. He was picturing wizards with crystal orbs, but something like magic radar was perhaps more likely.

When Perry was three hundred feet up, he landed on a thick tree branch. He had a good view, and could see now that he was at the edges of a city that was situated on the coast. He was in a park, not a forest, but it was a huge one, rivaling Central Park. The buildings beyond were mostly small, none much larger than ten stories, but they sprawled out in a criss-cross of roads that looked more similar to London than to New York. On second thought, the best comparison he could make would be to Paris, with radial roads sprawling out. It was a far cry from Teaguewater, which was choked in smoke, and it was hard to place where it might be in terms of technology just from looking at it from afar.

There were lots of things that would have been out of place in any period on Earth. There were huge pillowy things, each longer than a city block, and after enhancing the image, Perry worked out that they were almost certainly blimps that had been lashed to the ground. It was early morning, which might have accounted for the lack of people down in the well-trafficked park and the blimps that hadn’t yet taken off. When Perry looked at the horizon, he could see one coming in, low on the horizon, though there were far far more ships in the harbor than blimps in the air. Perry had always been a blimp naysayer, and was curious how they had handled the challenges, or what the conditions were like to make them viable. They weren’t in airfields, they were lashed down in the city, among the buildings there, which was even stranger.

Aside from the blimps, there were golden domes, which were of various sizes and dotted around the city. Perry’s mind went to mosques for some reason, but he wasn’t sure that it was actual gold. They also weren’t proper domes, not half-spheres, but instead flattened, and some with small holes at the top.

The people seemed to place an emphasis on greenery and color, with gardens on many rooftops and parks littered throughout the city, the park with redwood knock-offs being the largest and most notable example. From what Perry could see, it was either spring or summer, because many of the plants were in bloom, but it was also possible that he was in a place with perpetually good weather. From the outside readings, it was a chilly morning, but Perry didn’t feel it from inside his armor, and the chill was nothing compared to the extreme conditions of Esperide.

Nothing he had looked at told him much about what the world was actually like. It might have had magic or it might not, and it could have been at pretty much any stage of technological development, especially with magic in the mix. He didn’t see a lot of the cookfires that he’d expect from, say, the equivalent of the ancient Greeks, but that didn’t mean much. The city was on the larger side, with at least a million people by a crude count, but there had been cities that large through most of human history.

After ten minutes or so, he opened the shelfspace and held an arm out for Mette to step onto the branch with him.

“What the hell!” she shouted when she found herself on the branch with him, three hundred feet above the ground. There wasn’t quite enough room for both of them, but he had the sword, and ended up partly floating next to her while she held onto him. He registered only belatedly that ‘hell’ had been translated, which would normally have passed beneath his notice, except that they were going to have to deal with that if she was with him. He didn’t even know if they spoke English or something close to it on this planet.

“Sorry,” said Perry. “I’ve got you.”

Mette held onto him and looked around, eyes wide. He waited, and eventually she spoke.

“I’ve never seen a city before,” she said. “This is … what they’re like?”

“You’ve seen photos and video,” said Perry. “And yeah, all cities share certain aspects in common.” Perry could see the farmlands further out, the docks to one edge of the city, a built up downtown, and an area that looked a little less inviting that he thought might be industrial. There was also a castle, which wasn’t typical for cities, and he made a pledge to give it a wide berth until he knew what power was lurking there.

“It’s different in person,” said Mette. She was looking out at everything, eyes constantly moving. “It just sits there?”

“I’m going to need you at a hundred percent,” said Perry. “There was a signal that preceded us, we know that, so the first step is to get as far away from the starting location as possible while evading the authorities, then covertly gather information, then possibly introduce ourselves to the locals while keeping as much in reserve as possible, depending on local conditions.”

Mette looked at him and then nodded slowly. “You don’t need me for this part.”

“I don’t,” Perry agreed. “I just … wanted to show it to you, the place we’ve come to.”

“Thank you,” she said. She took in a deep breath through her nose. “It smells so strange.”

“Just wait until you have whatever they’ve got for food,” said Perry. He smiled at her, but it was fleeting. “We need to get situated, see what we’re facing. You’re fine in the shelfspace?”

“Not really,” said Mette. “I want to be out there, not introduced to everything from your reports. But … you need to know more, all the things you’ll learn in the first thirty minutes, to keep us safe, right?”

“I need to see what the people look like, if they’re even human, if they share a language with us, if we can blend in,” said Perry. “I’ll take off the armor soon, to make myself less threatening, and if it seems safe, that’s when I’ll bring you out. It’ll be good to have a second mind working the problem with me.”

Mette nodded. “Stay safe. Don’t lose the ring.”

Perry opened the space, and she stepped into it, seeming relieved to be back on solid ground. Once she was in, Perry dropped down from the tree, falling past thick branches until he was halfway down, then flying forward.

He didn’t relish the prospect of ditching the armor, even temporarily, but the power armor stuck out. Getting rid of it wouldn’t help unless he had accurate clothing though, something that would let him pass as just a little odd, if not one of the natives. And all that would be moot if they were blobs of jelly or giant hairy demons or something.

Perry went from tree to tree, staying high up. It didn’t take long for him to find people, and he was relieved to see that they were people, mostly because he’d been thinking about how wide the range of possibilities was. He watched them closely. If they looked up, he would be made in a second, so he moved behind one of the larger branches. He was going to have to practice slipping into the shelfspace at a moment’s notice and looking out through a half-opened hole, but that wasn’t what took precedence at the moment.

Esperide had been a planet colonized by a racially homogenous group of people, all of them relatively tall and mostly blonde, all the same shade of pale. Even after two years there and with all the benefits of enhanced senses, he’d still had some difficulty telling them all apart, sometimes resorting to his keen sense of smell.

The group below, making their way through the woods, wasn’t just racially diverse, not just with their own senses of style that might have owed to cultural diversity, but with a difference of bodies that either meant extensive modifications or a variety of fantasy races. For whatever reason, Perry felt like it was the latter more than the former.

There was a light-skinned girl with long pointed ears and five different necklaces hanging around her neck, giving her more cover than the skimpy bikini top she was wearing. A blue-skinned woman with an extra set of arms had tattoos peeking out beneath a heavy fur coat. There was an orc there, or someone who looked like an orc, big and muscular, green-skinned with tusks, walking beside them and carrying a fancy lantern at his side — unlit. There were six of them, talking amongst themselves about a library, walking with no particular rush. The voices carried, and Perry was thankful that they were speaking English.

There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to their outfits, but one of the things that Perry had learned about clothes in college was that they were never random. Clothing was cultural, sure, but it was also determined by material availability, and some of the cultural stuff was downstream of the material. Someone who was really, really good at this sort of thing could look at this group of people and work backward, figuring out everything there was to know about the world and its history.

To Perry’s eyes, they seemed strangely modern, though it was hard for him to say why exactly that was. The bikini top was certainly suggestive of modernity to Perry, though that might have been his own prejudices speaking. More so it was the melange of people and styles. If pressed, he would have to say that they represented free exchange of peoples, goods, and ideas, especially since they were all together. There were at least eight different types of textiles there, not the kind of thing you’d find among medieval people where everyone wore close to the same thing unless they were nobility. The dyes were vibrant, matching the splashes of color from the city.

He had some renewed confidence that he would be able to slip into the city pretty easily and pass without notice, at least once he was out of the armor. If this random group of six people had this much variety, then there was probably enough variety out there that his own particular brand of oddness would slip right in with theirs, at least at first blush. No one would care if his skin color wasn’t quite like any they had in this world, that he was too tall, too hairy, spoke with an accent, or anything like that. If he dressed oddly, then like modern people on Earth they might chalk that up to their own ignorance or his personal peculiarity.

He’d have to find someone who looked like him first though, just to confirm. It wouldn’t do to walk into a downtown market and have people start screaming about a human showing up. He was pretty sure that one of the women down there was human, a long-limbed woman with dark black skin and a shimmering cloak that covered her from head to toe and almost had to be magic if it wasn’t some kind of gossamer supermaterial.

As Perry contemplated skulking around, he thought better of the idea.

Perry slipped into the shelfspace. He still intended to get moving, but he also wanted to be able to go walking through the park on his own, and for that the armor would have to come off. So far, Marchand had seen nothing too alarming, no signs of battle or approaching evils, no equivalent to a giant mech pointing a huge cannon at them.

“What’s happening?” asked Mette as he appeared next to her.

“I’m taking the armor off,” said Perry. “I’m going to drop down onto the path, pretend to be one of them, and play it by ear.”

“They look like us?” asked Mette. “Speak our language?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Or … close enough, probably. If they yell, I’ll go running. I’m guessing that there’s not much police presence here, in this park.”

“And a park is … like the arboretum?” asked Mette.

Perry stared at her. “You did look through all the files, right? The Gratbook, the video, things like that?”

Mette balled her hands into fists. “I did, but I didn’t look at it like it was vital information, I just wandered around in the files and thought ‘wow, neat, but also totally irrelevant’. I didn’t memorize every single word in there, every concept. Perry, up until an hour ago, I was charged with plotting a path for the Natrix, literally and figuratively. I wasn’t concerning myself with urban design or geography or whatever else.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “That’s fine, I won’t expect much. And even if you had read about it in a book, seeing it in person is different. I don’t know much about these people yet, but this is a port city, and I don’t think that we’re going to have problems blending in, not on first blush.”

He began stripping off his armor, and noticed her eyes on him.

“You’re going unprotected?” she asked. “Is that safe?”

“No, it’s not,” said Perry. “But the armor attracts attention, and besides that, I’ve been in the armor for almost a week straight with all the cat and mouse.” The idiom translated poorly, Perry could feel that as he said it. “We’re blending in, that’s the plan until we have some idea of what this place is. We might stick out, but we’ll stick out in a way that they know how to deal with. We’ll get strange looks, maybe have to answer a few questions, things like that. I’m hoping we’re not expected to carry papers and that they don’t have secret police, but I guess we’ll see. Priority one, from my perspective, is to minimize contact with the authorities for as long as possible. We don’t know whether the other thresholder is here yet, so we want to stay undercover.”

When he’d gotten down to his lower layer, made of the black nanites, he looked over at her. “You can stay here, if you want, or you can come with me.” He looked over her outfit. “I don’t know how that’s going to play, but from the clothes that Jeff so helpfully left us, what you’re wearing is more appropriate.” He thought about the elf in the bikini top and looked at Mette’s functional garb, nothing too much more than a t-shirt and some slacks. It wasn’t closely tailored, but he didn’t think that it would be too out of place. “Did you want to go for a walk?”

Mette stared at him for a moment, then gave him a slow nod.

Perry ended up digging into Jeff’s stash of clothing, most of it apparently taken from the vegan ecumenopolis. Finding something that seemed like it wouldn’t create too many questions was a challenge, but Perry’s experience with the second sphere meant that anything that didn’t fit quite right could be molded into shape with just a bit of energy expenditure. Mette watched him nervously. Perry tried to avoid feeling annoyed by it, but her nervousness was making him nervous.

When they were ready, Perry exited the shelfspace, checked that there was no one around, and descended to the forest floor, on one of the trails. He opened the space back up for Mette, who stepped out gingerly and looked up at the trees.

Nothing had really changed, but they were now nominally undercover, blending in with no one around them.

“Wow,” said Mette. She was staring at the trees. “Nothing moves.”

“Things move,” said Perry. “They just don’t have to move.”

“I somehow didn't realize that trees would get so big,” said Mette. “In the pictures, the movies, they’re smaller.”

“These are exceptional,” said Perry. “Maybe as tall as the tallest on Earth.”

“And those collars on the trees, what’s that?” asked Mette.

“I have no idea,” said Perry. “There’s something similar in Japanese culture, but I don’t remember what it’s about. I would say that here it’s marking them as holy, but we’re in a city park, and there are carvings all over these trees, so it’ll be hard to say.”

“How do we find out the answer?” asked Mette.

“We ask a local or read a book,” said Perry. “Better the latter than the former. It might be one of those things that even the smallest child knows, and we don’t want to stick out too much.”

“So … we find a library?” asked Mette.

“Yes,” said Perry. “Ideally I would exchange some gold for whatever they use for currency. For now, we’ll go for a walk. Don’t look at other people too much, pretend that we walk through this park every week or so, mind your eyeline, but be ready to dive into the shelfspace if we need to run.”

“Okay,” said Mette.

“And keep conversation light, nothing about Esperide or science or anything like that.” Perry took a breath, then started walking down the path. He was on the lookout for signs, which seemed like they would be an absolute requirement in a park of this size in the middle of a city, even if they were just signs telling people to not feed the ducks.

He found what he was looking for before they had gone three hundred feet. Most of the ropes that hung around the trees were white, or at least a yellowed or faded white, with the slips of paper the same color and the markings — not language — in black. This tree’s bark was free from carvings, and its rope was black, with no bits of paper dangling down from it. The plaque in front of it had a raised metal version of the tree on it, worn shiny by many hands touching it, along with a bit of its history written in neat columns beside it.

“It’s a cursed tree,” said Perry, reading fast. Mette was beside him, looking up at the tree. “And it appears that we’re in the Numawood Commons, administered by the Kerry Coast City Symboulion in cooperation with the Numawood Symboulion. So that’s good to know.”

There was a story on the plaque, a short one without any proper narrative beats, claiming that a woman had been nailed to the tree hundreds of years ago and placed a curse on all that would lay their eyes on it. The rope kept the curse at bay, apparently, though Perry couldn’t tell whether this was the quaint sort of mythology that a city would put on a plaque or an actual thing that had happened.

“Magic,” said Mette.

“Maybe,” said Perry.

“Maybe?” she asked.

“Even in a place with magic, we won’t know how much magic there is,” said Perry. “We won’t know what’s magic and what’s superstition. But the genre is probably modernist fantasy, yeah.”

“Genre,” said Mette. “Like … comedy or tragedy?”

“Just a way of conceptualizing things,” said Perry. “If we use the rubric that Jeff was using, then my guess is high magic, low technology, and all the rest we’ll have to figure out later.” He pointed to the plaque. “But this is a sign of central authority, and another marker in favor of this being a modernist civilized place.” He had no real idea when plaques like this had begun to be a thing, but he supposed that information like this must have come about with widespread literacy, though stelae dated to the ancient world. He glanced to the side. “People. Act natural.”

Mette’s version of acting natural was to freeze up like a rabbit backed into a corner by a wolf, but the couple walking down the way only gave them a curt nod of recognition. They were a pair of elves — or at least, tall pale-skinned people with pointy ears. Their conversation was low, and apparently involved high art. Their clothes were more finely tailored than the young people that Perry had seen, with the woman in a short vest that showed off her abs, and the man in a suit, though without a tie. Mette boggled at them in spite of Perry’s instruction, and the man gave her a flicker of his attention, which was just enough to express his annoyance that she was staring.

Neither of the elves seemed to think that Perry or Mette didn’t belong there. Once they had passed, Perry relaxed, his preparations to flee having been for nothing.

“Alright,” said Perry. “That was test number one.”

“Wow,” said Mette. “Their ears!”

“Don’t stare next time,” said Perry. “If we want to stare, we can find a place where it’s acceptable to do so. We’ll get some money, go to a show, or sit in a bar and do some people-watching.”

“People watching,” said Mette. She nodded as she savored the words. It was clearly a new concept for her, and why wouldn’t it be? She had just come from a place where nothing was ever truly new, where she knew everyone, or at least in theory had seen them all before. The Natrix was a small town, and she was a country mouse.

“Let’s go,” said Perry. “If there are plaques on cursed trees, then I have to imagine there are maps somewhere. Hopefully the people that administer the Commons thought that was a good idea.”

It didn’t take them long to find the map, which like the picture of the tree on the plaque, was metal and raised up from the surface. There was a small red enamel pin in it, which Mette touched gently with her finger. The map showed various points of interest, including the ‘cursed’ tree, and Perry traced the quickest way out of the park.

“What did that red mark mean?” asked Mette.

“It’s to show where we are,” said Perry.

“Oh,” said Mette. “How did you know that?”

Perry shrugged. “It’s common, where I’m from. I guess you never had maps like that. They’re everywhere, all over Earth.”

“I guess it makes sense,” said Mette. “It’s obvious in retrospect. Every map I’ve ever worked with had a legend to it that showed which way was which.”

“You saw the compass rose?” asked Perry as they walked. “Now that was something that I think shows common heritage with Earth, unless it’s some very specific form of convergent evolution. Having a marking that gives you orientation isn’t astonishing, but the fact that it’s four directions and pointing up, and that up is north, that’s more than just coincidence.”

They were rounding a bend when a group of orcs came across them. They were wearing a common uniform, but it was just a collection of jogging clothes rather than a soldier’s outfit, and from the symbols, Perry thought they were probably from a local school rather than military. Again, they were paid no mind except that the group got to the left side of the path and ran past single-file while Mette stared.

“You really need to stop staring,” Perry said once they were past. His heart had started beating a bit faster at the sight of so many orcs. He had killed them by the hundreds in Seraphinus, several worlds away, though those had been medieval, uncivilized, slavers and pillagers. He’d been ready to kill these men too, but they were unarmed and unarmored. Still, it had set him on edge.

“Sorry,” said Mette. “Let’s find a place where I can stare.”

“This way,” said Perry.

The park was evidently coming to life as the sun began to rise, and in the fifteen minutes it took them to get to the park’s edge through the carved numawood trees, they saw more than two dozen other people, sometimes alone and other times in small groups. Perry was starting to get a handle on the various races, but in terms of categories there was so little repetition that he was starting to have trouble with making sense of it all. In spite of his warning to her, Mette stared at all of them.

“Elves,” she said. “And orcs. And we’re what, humans? Just humans?”

“Don’t use any of those words until we know what words they use,” said Perry. “Nothing that applied on Seraphinus applies here.”

“What were the blue ones?” asked Mette.

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “They said there are libraries. If those don’t require a card, we can slip into one and take our pick of the books.”

“These would be … paper books?” asked Mette.

“Probably,” said Perry. “I can’t imagine from their textiles that these people are using vellum.”

They saw the city before they were out of the park. The last hill they crested gave them a view down a part of the path that was done with stone paving blocks rather than just packed-down dirt, and beyond that, a giant archway that led into crowded streets — crowded with buildings and people both, everything packed in tight. There were the same splashes of color and greenery that Perry had seen from the air, but there seemed to be more of it, and many of the walls were covered with murals. In a different mood, Perry might have felt that it was an assault on the senses, but he was fresh from a world of utilitarian designs and botanical wastelands.

“Wow,” said Mette. “How many people live here?”

“A million, at least,” said Perry. “Marchand could do a better estimate. I think there’s probably a way to have the earpiece in and open the shelf just wide enough that we can sneak a radio signal in and out, but that will come later. Right now, we’re just two regular citizens fresh from a walk in the park.”

“Okay,” said Mette. “What do we do if people talk to us?”

“Let me do the talking,” said Perry. “I can translate the words that they don’t have equivalents for. Right now, I think we’re trying to find the library. We can tackle everything else later. It’s early in the morning right now, hopefully the library is open today.”

The park had been relatively quiet, with the tall trees blocking a lot of sound, but once they were out on the street, the noise came at them in full force. The city was still waking up, but there were plenty of people all around, along with the sounds of industry and transportation. It wasn’t like any of the cities that Perry had known though, because there weren’t any cars to be seen, and the roads were narrow. He stopped before crossing the street, looking both ways, and saw mostly bicycles and pedestrians, though there was a bus or something similar that he was keen to get a look at to see whether it had an internal combustion engine or something more exotic.

“Where do we go?” asked Mette.

“We do a random walk,” said Perry. “Listen to conversations, read the signs, get our feel for it.”

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was small.

“How are you doing?” asked Perry.

“It’s not what I thought it would be,” said Mette.

“What did you think it would be?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mette. “I thought … when you came to us, we were there right away, bringing you in on everything, parlaying. That’s how I remember it, anyway. There’s no one to greet us here. There’s no one that even knows we exist. We’re just on our own, in the middle of this city, with a million people around us, and … what are we doing here?”

“We’re trying to find the enemy thresholder,” said Perry. “If we can’t find them, then we’re training up and gathering what resources we can to ensure that we have the firepower to face them. Then we’re going to the next world. That’s what a thresholder does.”

“And we’ll find a way back, right?” asked Mette.

“Hopefully,” said Perry. “We’ll find someone with a catalog of the known worlds, someone with a power to pop the skin between the worlds like a balloon, and then not have to worry about the enemy showing up.”

“Okay,” swallowed Mette. She looked around, down the streets to where vendors were setting up for the day. “I didn’t make a huge mistake, did I?”

Perry looked at her. “Are you thinking that you did?”

“No,” said Mette. She didn’t sound very convincing. “No,” she said again, maybe because she knew how uncertain she’d sounded. “Perry, we’re in this together, right?”

“We are,” said Perry. “I’ll see you through it. It can be a lot, at the start.”

They walked down the street, doing as he said, taking it all in and reading the signs, which were almost all in English, though some were in another script composed of little sticks with no curves to speak of. There was not a single bit of modern technology in sight, and most of the buildings were built of stone and wood, not brick or the thin wood and drywall that Perry was most used to seeing. They had metalworking, but not that much of it, and Perry was fairly surprised to see how little advertising there was.

They came to their first ‘library’ not more than two blocks into the city. It had a stone archway over the entrance which said ‘Saint Yves Clothing Library’ and when Perry went in — trying not to hesitate like some kind of tourist — he found that it was a clothing store rather than a place with books. He stared at it, momentarily stunned, and Mette walked into him.

“What’s going on?” she asked in a half whisper.

“It’s fine,” said Perry. “We’re just looking.” He strode forward and pretended that he belonged there.

There was a human woman with dyed blue hair behind a desk reading a book, and she perked up when Perry came near her, then when his eyes went to the racks of clothes, she settled back into her book. She had green ivy tattoos running up her left arm, and Perry thought that she wouldn’t have been terribly out of place in Tacoma.

From what people had been wearing, Perry had expected them to have clothing stores like this. Historically, clothes were one of the most labor intensive products that a person could own. They were darned and repaired for as long as they could possibly be, with care taken to wash and dry them, and it was rare for a person to own all that many outfits. On Earth as he’d left it, they had gone almost as far as possible in the other direction, with cheap shit that fell apart as soon as you looked at it, t-shirts that cost as much as a fancy hamburger and closets filled with the stuff. Perry had owned as much clothing as a medieval king did, because giant machines worked the fields and even bigger machines had replaced the looms.

None of the stuff Perry was seeing looked particularly cheap, which was puzzling given how much of it there was. There also weren’t price tags on anything, at least not that he could see, though there were paper notes attached to them. He looked at one of them, trying to decipher it, but came up with nothing, whatever system was in use opaque to him.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman at the desk.

“I’m just looking,” said Perry, hoping that was a universal way of saying ‘go about your business’.

“Anything you’re looking for?” asked the woman. She’d put her book away and was coming down from behind her desk, which was apparently raised up slightly. His brain hadn’t registered it, but she was quite small, coming up only to the bottom of his ribcage. “Also, if it’s your first time here, I’ll need to get you a card, but I can start filling that out while you browse.”

“Er,” said Perry. “A card for … ?”

She blinked at him. “A card for … whatever you wanted to check out?” She looked from him to Mette. “Sorry, let me back up, welcome to Saint Yves Clothing Library. I’m Tilly, one of the librarians. Can I help you find some clothes?”

Perry’s mind was reeling as he tried to come to grips with this, and he desperately wanted to play it cool and not ask all the stupid questions whose answers would be completely obvious to anyone who was actually from this world.

“What do we need to have to get a card?” asked Perry.

“Name, address, that’s it,” said Tilly with a shrug.

“We’re new in town,” Perry tried. “We don’t have a permanent address yet.”

“Not a problem, I can put it down as not decided yet,” said Tilly. “Other than that, if you need clothes, you can walk out with a bag of them today.” She cocked her head to the side. “You’re … from out of town?”

Perry winced. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. “That obvious?” he asked.

“A bit,” said the librarian with a smile.

“We just want to look like we fit in,” said Perry. “Like locals. Can you show us what’s in style?”

“Of course,” said Tilly with a nod.

“And,” said Mette. “We don’t have a place to stay yet, could you suggest somewhere?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said Tilly with a smile. She reached up and absentmindedly traced the ivy tattoos with the fingers of her other hand. “Though … sorry to ask, but are you looking for free housing or scrip housing?”

“Free, for now,” said Perry. “Though we’re just getting settled, maybe scrip later. We have goods we want to change for scrip, and we’re not sure where to do that either.” He was taking a wild stab there, but she was friendly, and had pegged them as foreigners, which he hoped gave him a little leeway, even if he could in no way answer the question of where they had come from or why.

“I can draw you a map,” said Tilly. “What is a librarian for, if not helping people?”

Thirty minutes later, they left the ‘clothing library’ with a sack full of clothes, two outfits for each of them, along with two local papers and a map of the city with various points of interest marked for them.

“Was that … very easy?” asked Mette.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Let’s go see what free housing looks like, I guess.” He was feeling a little ill at ease, like there had to be a catch. While they had been at the clothing library, he’d kept wanting to ask ‘hey, what’s to stop people from coming in here, giving a fake name, and stealing all the clothes?’, but he supposed that was a question that you could ask about a regular library too. So far as he knew, libraries would just rack up the fines without the weight of law, and most of the libraries near him had done away with late fees.

On the way to the free housing they passed a number of other libraries, which seemed to infest the city like coffee shops infested downtown. Not all of the libraries were as clearly marked as the one they’d gone into, but all shared a standardized symbol that was displayed prominently out front. The city seemed to take the definition of ‘library’ very loosely, and there were libraries for all kinds of things, from kitchenware to clothing and plants to tools. If you needed a hammer, apparently what you did was go down to a tool library and check one out rather than going to a hardware store.

It was all easy, far more than he’d ever thought that it could be. He remembered going into Teaguewater and getting chased by the police just because he was trying to sell a gold coin, and while he had all kinds of things to sell thanks to the shelfspace, it seemed as though he might not need to do that here.

“I need to read the paper, see what I can glean from it,” said Perry.

“Okay,” said Mette. She was still looking around. They’d passed all kinds of places she wanted to go in, including a school that she was certain taught some kind of lantern-based magic. There would certainly be time for that later, once they had some details in place. So far, Perry hadn’t seen anyone he would identify as police, but he really wanted to know who they were and what tools they had at their disposal.

Both papers, the Kerry Coast Times and Kerry Post, had the same story on their frontpage. For the Times, it was ‘Serpent Beheaded!’ and for the Post, it was ‘Liberty Triumphs Again!’, both of them referring to the decapitation of the king of a foreign country, liberating it from the rule of monarchists. This was apparently something that both papers felt was worthy of celebration, and a Temporary Worker’s Symboulion was now in charge, which suggested some ideological alignment even if that wasn’t explicit in either of the papers.

That was enough for Perry to start having some inkling of a backstory for them: they could be one of the refugees that had come to the Kerry Coast City. All they would need is some basic information that they could get from any map, which would let them build up over time. In fact, once they had a room in free housing, Perry could get March out and start collecting all kinds of information, logging dozens of conversations at once in order to tease out some of the intricacies of what was going on. In fact, if they could bug the room of someone who was actually from the now-former Berus Kingdom, that would give them everything they might ever need to know in order to survive actual scrutiny rather than just casual questions from helpful librarians.

The Kerry Post’s version of events gave him pause though. The king’s beheading hadn’t been by revolutionary forces or a coup by the military or anything like that. It had been done by an unidentified male presumed to be a part of the nascent symboulion or at least sympathetic to them, a mystery that no one seemed to think was that important — or maybe it was just a question that it wouldn’t do to dwell on given that there weren’t any answers.

To Perry though, it was the first whiff of the enemy. He had clothes, a place to stay, and some inkling of who he was after.

A smile slowly slid across his face.

“Mette,” he said. “I think we’re going to do okay here.”