It was hard to imagine a place more different to the tight and shadowed streets of Drek'thelamagne than the open, bright and busy lanes of Chicago.

Before the expedition to Zu-eki, Jarv had lived in the port city of Bohn'Melsomme. It had been a typical Drek'thelamagny city. Labyrinthine road layouts that twisted into illogical knots, either as a defense against invaders, or for the aesthetic appreciation of the inhabitants of the towers, or just due to routine incompetence. Towering buildings of dark stone, which had been made and remade over centuries as renovations were triggered by land disputes, technological developments, technological declines, and random disasters. Good street food. He missed it.

Chicago towered, but the towers were teetering mad stalks of crystal glass. Glass! As if they weren't precarious enough. The buildings stretched up to the sky, it seemed like, crowding in on Jarv like the deadly canyon walls of Rhyme-alon-alos. Just to look up at them was to invite a paralyzing vertigo. Just to conceive of them was to invite panic. A tower of glass was a symbol of inherent instability. A city of them was a symbol of... something.

Like Bohn'Melsomme the streets here were labyrinthine, but it was a labyrinth of tyrannical order. A perfect grid, every intersection the same, every street the same, the buildings all similar enough that they blended into the same endless, undifferentiated memory. Height, and light, and austere wealth.

Like back home, Chicago also had street food, but as Jarv stopped to examine a hotdog vendor's cart, he found himself fearful of its quality.

The overwhelming sense Jarv got from the city was one of oblivious danger. A castle pitched at the edge of an eroding cliff. It wasn't entirely to his disadvantage. A culture whose eyes looked inward and never outward, a society who stood at the top of all it surveyed but made sure not to survey too much, a people who acted only on themselves but couldn't really see themselves. It put them in danger. It made them vulnerable. That was something to be grateful for, but Jarv found the aesthetic of it just a little grubby.

"Hubris... Hubris..." Jarv muttered to himself as he walked along the street. "Oh, gelato?"

Jarv stopped, looking up at a sign above what seemed to be a confectioner's salon.

Sweet Puppy Gelato.

The painting in the shop's window showed orbs of colorful material being enjoyed by smiling people.

Jarv's training hadn't included material on gelato, and since he was getting oriented, it seemed like his professional duty demanded that he investigate.

A bell above the door rang as Jarv pushed through. He grimly noted that even confectioners had better security sense than whoever had set up the facility below the Tickled Pink.

Jarv strolled up to the counter at the rear of the shop, sliding into line behind a woman a little older than him, and waiting his turn.

When he reached the front, a cheerful woman in a dark gray shirt wearing metal lens-frames over her eyes turned to greet him.

"Hi, welcome to Sweet Puppy. What can I get you?"

Jarv looked up and down the counter, staring at the many containers of multi-colored substances. The closest he came to identifying them was that one of the substances seemed to contain nuts.

"I'm actually pretty new to gelato," Jarv said, squinting to try and read the labels.

"Oh my god! I love your accent!" the woman said.

Jarv grimaced. "Thank you."

"Where abouts are you from!" she asked

Several potential answers flittered through Jarv's head. Finally he decided on, "Thunder Bay."

"Oh! I thought you were going to say, like, Britain or something."

"Oh, yeah. I was born in Thunder Bay, but I spent most of my life in Brit'Taineh." The Irritating Land of The Underside of the Groin.

"Oh my gosh," the woman said. "Where abouts?"

Jarv cast his eyes around the shop as he tried to construct an answer. He hadn't expected his backstory to be probed so thorougly by the clerk of a confectionary.

There was only one person waiting behind him in the queue, and a few others sitting around at tables. Nobody was paying attention to him. Did he really need to be making this much effort?

"The North," he said finally, expression fixed.

"Oh my gosh, the North. Wow. I have a cousin up there, in that- North area. Okay, what can I get you?"

"I'm not sure exactly what I want," Jarv said, waving his hand at the counter. "Give me one of what you'd order."

"Oh, of course."

The shopkeeper turned and used a semi-spherical spoon to carve a curving ring of the material from one container, placing it into a cone which looked like it was made of brown cardboard. She repeated the process with a different colored material, then finally with a third.

She handed the loaded cone over to Jarv, saying. "That'll be six dollars."

Jarv reached into his pocket for a paper, and passed it over to her. She opened the drawer built into a device on the counter, revealing much more of the paper currency, then sorted out his change, passing it back over.

"You can keep that," Jarv said, holding his hand up to refuse the currency. He didn't want more of those small papers, less still the coins.

"Are you sure? From a twenty?"

"Actually I have a question."

"Shoot." She said. She dropped the leftover cash into a jar on the counter, then turned to give Jarv her attention.

"I want to improve my home security. Is there anywhere around here I can get something like that? Something that can sense people and make a sound, or even just a bell with a wall hook, or..."

The woman looked around the shop uncertainly. "Well, not here, but do you mean- are you asking directions to an electronics store?"

Jarv hummed a yes. If there was another kind of store that she thought might be applicable, he'd trust her advice.

"Yeah, where is the electronics store?"

The woman started giving directions, hesitantly at first, but then with greater confidence. Jarv pulled out his journal and made a couple of notes at the parts he thought he might forget.

Afterwards he thanked the woman and left, bypassing an angry looking collection of people who'd built up behind him.

Walking away from the shop he reflected on the experience.

The woman in the shop had seemed friendly, but there'd been something off about the interaction. She'd seemed harried, world weary. Being the clerk of a popular cafe was an elevated position, but the woman he'd dealt with didn't seem to be feeling it.

The gelato was sweet, but painfully cold to the tooth. It was a fleeting confection, pretty for a moment, but rapidly melting into an inconvenient mess. The cone crumbled in his hand. Finally he was forced to discard the thing in a container clearly marked for trash.

Jarv wiped his hands on his clothes and started trying to follow the direction to the electronics store.

For all their disorienting strangeness, the regular street pattern simplified navigation. Take a left. Take a right. Two lefts. Three rights. The road names were unimaginative, but they served. Eventually he found himself standing outside some kind of shop with the name Lincoln Electronics, the place the woman at the gelato place had sent him towards.

He stepped inside, the exotic-frog buzz of a device above his head informing him that, yes, more elaborate security devices were to be found in this realm, and tried to take in the contents of the shop.

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He couldn't make heads or tails of it. There were shelves, and counters, but beyond that he was lost. His eyes were left swimming in an ocean of unfamiliar shapes, unable to parse what he was looking at, down to being unsure which things were products, what was furniture, and what items were even separate objects from their neighbors. He felt like he could wander in and begin examining an item, only to find out minutes later that it was the business's trash can.

He checked around for observers –no one had come to investigate the door's alert sound– and slowly rolled up his right sleeve. His fingers caught the eyelid of his guest spirit, and he peeled it up.

The eye darted around, taking a few seconds to focus, but then began methodically moving from bench to bench and shelf to shelf, trickling information back into his consciousness.

He got less than he liked. The spirit's function was to sort and contextualize things he already knew, but he didn't know enough to comprehend this place. As much as they'd briefed him on in Thunder Bay, most of the contents of the store were completely beyond his knowledge.

The crafts here were strange.

The people of Earth had made great use out of exploiting physical laws to an extreme degree.

Lightning had been studied and methods to recreate it from fire and water devised, or so he'd been told at Thunder Bay. They'd mastered light and its many forms, devising ways of creating it, coloring it and harnessing it, using it for distant communication in the way the cities of the Melwhani coast used mirrors and spires to send messages instantly across miles.

Their explosives were fucking spectacular as well, far outclassing even the grand spirit bombs of the Empire, each of which required the death of a great beast to create.

Very few of Earth's devices did anything that was absolutely impossible using the various crafts of Dron'alon, but here they were more readily available, less labor intensive to create, and required substantially fewer living sacrifices.

"Hey there," a man in a grey shirt called to him as he passed at the end of the row of benches. "Give a yell if you need anything."

Jarv quickly closed the eye and rolled his sleeve back down.

"What is all this?" Jarv said, gesturing around the shop as he followed the man back towards the counter.

The man turned as he walked, marking out one wide swathe of the shop after another with his hand.

"Phones, laptops, tabletsq. Gadgets. Toys and TVs in the back."

Jarv caught sight of a name label on the man's shirt. Gabe. He was a tall man, and extremely slim. He was partially bald, though not particularly old, and the bones of his head stood out in sharp relief.

There were more staff deeper into the shop, men and women dressed in the same uniform, wandering around or helping other customers with things. The store wasn't quiet. Its products were popular.

Jarv paused to look at one of the counters Gabe had indicated held phones.

The phones were all small, flat devices, not dissimilar to swollen soul tokens. Some even had images on their faces, abstract swirls of colors, or pictures of natural scenes. Nothing he could easily interpret. They bore little resemblance to the phones he'd trained on in Thunder Bay.

He picked one up, feeling it cool and heavy in his hand. The front was glass, the back waxy plastic. It felt like it would crack if he gripped it too tightly. He put it back down and followed after Gabe.

"Got any security stuff?" Jarv asked.

"Sure. What are you after? Alarms? Lights?"

He led Jarv to the section of the store he'd called gadgets and picked up a cone-shaped container with a reflective interior. The mirror lining reminded Jarv of the cone of a hooded spirit-lamp, and the similarity was borne out a second later when Gabe did something on the rear side and waved his hand in front of it, triggering light to shine out from the front.

"We've got these, solar lamps. Motion activated, with replaceable batteries and an option for mains connection."

Jarv took the lamp from the man, waving his hand in front of it as he considered it. It would potentially be of use outside the base, to make anyone poking around the entrance feel seen, but it would also draw attention, and obscurity was their primary defense right now.

"What about something that makes a noise?" Jarv asked, handing the lamp back. "I've got a door that I don't want people getting through quietly."

"If you're interested, we can put you in touch with a company who'll set you up with a complete security system," Gabe said. "Alarm, remote monitoring, the works."

"I don't want monitoring. If I can't activate it myself, I'll just find a bell or something."

"Ah. I get you," Gabe said, moving to a different shelf and picking up a white box sealed in transparent plastic. He turned and held it out. "Ignore the part that says this is a doorbell. It's got a motion detector, and you can set it up as a door chime. Picks up movement within four meters."

Jarv took it, turning it over in his hands. "How often can it activate? How long does it take to recharge?"

Gabe seemed briefly confounded, before finding his feet again.

"I guess it won't play faster than once a second..."

Jarv looked down at the box. If it were a spirit device, there would always be a cool-off between activations. That was the nature of draurcraftyc artifacts. An expenditure, a recharge, expenditure, recharge. A sufficiently powerful soul token could be drawn on lightly without triggering it to go dormant, but the devices here seemed to operate according to a different paradigm.

"What's the catch?" Jarv asked. "What's the weakness? How does it power itself?"

"It's got a mains adapter, or you can use batteries," Gabe said, grabbing a second packet from a nearby stand. He held it out.

Jarv took the packet, full of metallic cylinders. "Energy vessels?"

Gabe laughed awkwardly. "I guess. They're just batteries."

Incorporating an energy vessel directly into a device was interesting. If a soul token was fed draurferric energy at a high enough pressure, it might shorten the time it took to recharge. But draurcraftic energy was awkward to store and difficult to compress. It would be inefficient to try, and Jarv wasn't much of an engineer besides.

"I'll take it," Jarv said. "But it better work."

"Sure. If it doesn't work out bring it back within three days and we'll give you a replacement or a refund."

Jarv followed Gabe to the counter, listened to the price, and fed an approximately appropriate number of the paper slips into Gabe's cupped hands.

"You're pretty good at this, the service, the electronics," Jarv said as he slipped the white box and energy vessels into his bag.

"Thanks! If you like you can fill out a feedback form?"

Jarv glanced at the stack of printed cards Gabe had indicated but shook his head, dismissing them.

Instead he asked, "You don't own this place, then?"

Gabe laughed. "No. I just work here."

"But they value you? You've got no complaints?"

He laughed again, glancing across the shop floor. He leaned in close, eyes looking to the side.

"Honestly some days I wish I was dead." He leaned back, still wearing a smile that showed his teeth. "Will that be everything?"

Jarv hummed noncomittally. A bank of flashing lights had caught his attention at the back of the room.

He strolled back towards it.

A matrix of false windows stood against the wall in front of him, each opening on an obviously illusory space showing a woman with brown hair and a smart cream-colored outfit.

They all showed the same scene, a strangely flat image, which moved as the woman spoke, the movements mirrored on every flat plane.

The sound was low almost to the point of being imperceptible, but Jarv's hearing picked up on the words below the background hiss of the equipment.

"Illinois billionaire John Sixsmith has been found guilty of tax evasion worth an estimated two billion dollars."

"Department of Justice officials say Sixsmith hid the money using a variety of complicated schemes involving false tax returns and offshore accounts."

"Following the verdict last Saturday John Sixsmith narrowly avoided jail time, but faces fines upwards of three million dollars."

Gabe wandered up and took a position behind him.

"You in the market for a TV?"

Jarv folded his arms, looking at the information distribution devices. They just put everything out there like this? Government business? Financial maneuvering? Convictions? All of it out there in the open.

"You know, I think I am."