Chapter 29: Chapter 29 – A Toothsome Welcome

Go socialize with someone. This is the easiest possible social context in which to do that, practically the definition of no-consequences; whatever I say, whatever I do, is going to be wiped from the record within half an hour.

I still hesitate and sort of overthink it.

Eventually, a few minutes into the next cycle, Visor dismissed, I walk over to someone sitting on a bench about thirty meters down from us. He’s got a box on his lap; from a distance it looked like it was an extruded single piece of recovered agri-ply but from closer up I can tell that it’s actually some kind of fabric woven with such a tight weave that even from a couple feet away I can still barely tell. He’s got what I thought were big balls of stuffed dough in the box, but I can see that I was wrong about that too. They’re open-faced, sort of, a U-shape of steamed carbohydrates filled with shreds of carrot, lettuce, a few other vegetables I don’t immediately recognize, and meat. The three of them are all of wildly different, strikingly rich colors, and each has a different set of vegetables and meat as filling, along with a different sauce.

If it wasn’t for the fact that there still wasn’t even a hint of any odor, they would seem delicious. As is, there’s an unreality to it, like the man is a hologram, and so is his food.

“Bao.”

“Oh! Um, hi, I’m sorry, what?”

“Bao. These, they are bao.” The man has a deep voice, sort of rumbly. It doesn’t seem unkind or kind, focused or vague, just sort of extremely neutral except for its rumbliness. “I recommend Mohan’s. They say he is not authentic, and his sauces speak to the truth of this claim, but he is still my favorite.” He smiles at me, broad and friendly. There’s something off about his facial expressions, though, and I struggle to stay composed. He doesn’t seem to notice, which is even weirder than any of the rest. “Mohan gives one free to new customers, which is also inauthentic.”

That’s definitely supposed to be a wink. I’m absolutely certain he’s supposed to have just winked at me, and I make myself nod at him and grin. “One free is one very strong argument in favor of having his be the first bao I try. Thank you!”

“When you next pour a libation to Lin to thank Him for your safe travels, mention the name of Hector Csu, yes? A man can always welcome the favor of the Gods.”

“Hector Csu.” I repeat his pronunciation as close as I can, and he seems satisfied. “I’ll do that, then.”

I walk past him to the storefront that he’d pointed to. I have no intention of actually eating anything from here - what would happen if it reset? I didn’t remember offhand how fast things get digested, but there’s a lot of horror in the thought of nutrients already broken down or converted into ATP getting reset, there are so many ways that could go wrong - but it’s a starting point. A shopkeeper who gives a free bao to each new customer is a shopkeeper who’s familiar with new customers, someone who’s a high-value person to ask question of and to sound out what’s going on in the area.

I stop just outside and stand there for a long moment, thinking, looking. If this whole place is what I understand it to be, there’s a bunch of mysteries and tricks and puzzles all wrapped up into one or possibly many meta-mysteries, meta-puzzles. There’s no way to figure out whether any specific thing I’m seeing - or any specific thing I’m not seeing, something notably absent, like maybe the odors - is part of a puzzle, or for that matter part of a meta, so the first thing to do is to vacuum up every observation about every detail. We’ll discard nearly all of it soon enough, but in the meantime…

Convenient. I don’t trust it. This is something familiar to me, something I was doing for fun as a child and which became part of my profession, something at the core of my identity. The pattern-matching and pattern-finding aspects of it are - were, I remind myself again - a genuinely important skill for a wormhole navigator, and so was the ability to recognize when something wasn’t a pattern, the ability to stay out of pareidolia. That wasn’t the only reason, though.

We just plain like this kind of thing. So I don’t trust it, because I don’t trust anything about this Temple or this world to be so nice. Except that I do at this point trust Amber, and I trust Zidanya, and while trusting Amber makes at least a little sense I don’t think I can defend my trust of Zidanya. And I’m at ease right now, because the buzzing in my brain and the joy in my step is familiar and pleasant, and that’s more dangerous than any individual monster I’ve faced so far.

Distracting myself from my whirl of thoughts about how much of a mess I am and how much of a mess I’m in, I glance around, checking for what the other two are doing. Amber’s working her way steadily towards that gigantic unmarked building of white stone, and Zidanya is nowhere to be found; presumably she’s found something interesting and is checking it out herself.

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The storefront is unremarkable. My eyes return to it, and I frown. It’s not just that it’s unremarkable, it’s unremarkable almost to a fault; everything about it is as though someone went through my expectations for a storefront, something I’d almost never seen outside of fictional settings in the first place, and gently blended them all into a sort of incredibly generic average storefront. Inoffensive down to the kerning and font choices on the signs and the name, Mohan’s Bao, just the owner’s name and the type of food, with a stylized example of same on each side of the name and three strips of color, matching the buns I’d seen … Hector, Hector Csu, that was his name, eating.

The door jangles as I step inside. There’s a three-color string of bells lain across the top of the door, and they ring out as I open it enough to cross the threshold. It’s a tiny place, not more than two meters between me and the counter in front of me, a counter that stretches across the two meters of space available. For a moment I think it’s empty, but there’s a shout, and I glance downwards and carefully don’t react in startlement.

“Welcome, welcome! You are new, I know you to be new!” Mohan, I’m betting this is Mohan, practically chortles the words out.

“You know correctly, friend Mohan. I’m a stranger from distant lands.”

I’m about to say something more, though I’m not sure what - just sort of letting my mouth run on ahead of my brain, probably - but Mohan is already pulling something out of the display cases in front of me. There’s three kinds of buns, each with their filling, and there’s a neatly filled out card in front of each of the cases. I run my eyes down the list of ingredients, for inspiration if nothing else; I don’t recognize daikon or coriander, but the rest is familiar. Carrots, lettuce, green onion, garlic, and mustard we had on the Spirit, and peanuts I’d eaten growing up, for all that the ‘ship I’d wound up on didn’t grow them. There were some names that I had a suspicion weren’t single ingredients, and at about that time I realize Mohan’s been saying something and I completely missed it.

“I’m really sorry, Mohan.” I give him my best apologetic smile. “I saw the ingredient cards you have out and just had to read them. I don’t recognize all of what you put in there, though! What’s shiso?”

“Ah! A chef, a cook? My friend! Please, you must tell me.”

“A cook, sometimes. Of stews and soups only, really; more of my time in the kitchen is knife-work while someone else tells me what to chop and how small.” I grin down at him. It’s not a lie, not at all; I can make a mean stew, but I wasn’t the chef, my job was more often than not to chop twenty onions or dice a hundred potatoes, and that wasn’t Chef taking it out on me, that was what most people in the kitchen did, what everyone did their first interval.

“Ah! Well.” He grins back at me. It’s disconcerting. He’s got a disproportionately big mouth, bigger than reasonable all of his facial expressions for someone who’s less than a meter tall. “Shiso, it is a mint. Useful, very useful! Beautiful color, cannot make the proper purple without it.” He leans forward, on his tiptoes on the stool he’s standing on, finger jabbing at the buns in question. “It has the perilla air-hungerer in it, for flavor, but some varieties, they are too wild, and their wildness will make you sick. Must be careful! Here!” He grabs a pair of long, smooth sticks of wood, like tongs that don’t have a joining bit, and uses them to put one of the purple bao into a box that he grabs out of a stack of identical boxes, each just big enough for one bun.

He thrusts the small box into my hands and I take it, feeling the slickness of the woven fibers under my fingers. “Thank you,” I manage to say, a little bit overwhelmed for more than one reason.

“Of course. Go! You will come back if you need more bao. Mohan’s! Best bao. But if you are new, and not hungry - and you are not hungry! Mohan can tell! - you must go about your day, and there are more preparations to be made.” He disappears, and I look around in mixed bemusement and bafflement. There’s a surreal feeling about the encounter, and a new, subtle pressure almost pushing me out the door, and isn’t that interesting.

I summon the Visor, looking around, and hum to myself in fascination. The mana of this area is subtle and almost washed out in color, compared to how it should be. There’s a flow, too; gently, it’s drifting out into the main square, and not being replaced.

I’m done here, I think to myself, and drift out of Mohan’s with my brain going a kilometer a second. Fascinating.

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