"Now, this outpost is special."

Aethe had adjusted to the weird pulper faster than most of the rest of the team. Something about his general oddness worked with her general quietness in a way Marco didn't quite understand. In any case, she tended to listen to him a little closer than the others, even during what had turned out to be a full hour rant on the quality of pulp being a function of the quality of the pulper, not the wood.

"How so?" Aethe looked at the outpost, which seemed to be a decent enough collection of buildings. The island the outpost was built on was little better than several acres, with large floating warehouse barges tethered to it here and there. It was odd-looking, but that had to take a bit of a qualified backseat to other definitions when almost every town this far out from the center of an inner sea was there for one or two specialized reasons. "It looks different, but not that different."

"It's the governance," Kuzai said. "Everything on this island is free, so long as it's nothing you are carrying off with you in the way you'd take a rope or an armored hull. Food, lodging, even some limited supplies if you are low. You can't even pay for them if you want to. It's the law of this place."

"Why?" Riv said. "You'd think they'd want all the money the outer sea people bring in."

"They do!" Kuzia laughed. "That's why they don't play small ball, charging people for eggs and meat and that sort of thing. Everyone pays taxes, the taxes pay for the food and very good cooks, the cooks attract the business, and then when someone pays enough for a new mast to buy an island like this six times over, everyone wins big."

"Are we that rich?" Marco said. "Outer sea people, I mean. I feel like we are broke."

"You might be, but frankly you all are weird in a way I haven't quite pinned down yet. Do you have, and I mean this politely, a junk box? Something that isn't quite garbage and you don't throw away, but otherwise is rubbish you can't use. Do you have something like that?"

"Ah. The think-later box," Elisa said. "Yes. It's all scraps of metal and weird weapons nobody could use. Things we stole from monsters like… This is just an example, Sea Elephant tusks from the Sea Elephant graveyard."

"It really is all garbage, though," Marco said.

“You think it is. In an outer sea sense, it probably is. Let me ask you this, though. When was the last time you visited an inner sea?” Kuzia asked.

“Months,” Marco said. “Months and months. Why?”

“Because you might have lost your perspective on what an inner sea is actually like. Bring along your junk. We’ll let the traders make their choices on what’s good or bad.”

None of the architecture of the outpost was particularly interesting. There were lots of buildings, but the biggest seemed to top out at the size of the outpost’s small inn and tavern. The stands set up here and there were similarly boring, mostly seeming to be aimed at barter. The group moved away from the docks slowly, taking it all in. Friendly enough waves came from hands at all angles to them, but the actual owners of the hands kept a respectful distance.

Against what, to Marco, seemed to be long odds, Kuzai was absolutely right about the food situation. The moment they stopped in the relative center of the settlement, a tiny woman with a pad of paper found them immediately.

“Hungry? Thirsty?” she asked. “Of course you are. You strike me as in the mood for fried pork, and we have plenty of it today. And fruit juice. Someone brought in a load of some kind of mystery fruit from the outer sea. Don’t worry, our chef has a good identify skill. The fruit’s pretty good and safe.”

The woman made notes on her notebook based on nothing, as far as Marco could tell. She didn’t wait for any replies, at least, and just kept talking as the group looked down at her.

“Benches are over there. Give me five minutes. I’ll let Sampson know you are here so he can help you find whatever else you need.”

The little woman scuttled off, seemingly unbothered by the one-sided nature of the entire interaction. Marco raised his eyebrows at Kuzai, who just laughed and waved them toward the benches.

“I told you. Things like food and lodging are subsidized here. That woman gets paid for successfully seeing to some of your needs while you are here.”

“How does she even know if we are really hungry, though?” Marco pretended that his stomach hadn’t lurched at the thought of fresh, non-fish, non-egg protein in his belly. He wanted that very much, even if he wasn’t going to admit it. “Does she have a skill?”

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“Who knows? Maybe. But when was the last time you got off a ship and didn’t check out the local food within an hour? Everyone does. Unless you were sick, it was a safe bet.”

The woman was as good as her word. Better, even. She came back in five minutes clad in heavy, heat-resistant gloves, holding a huge iron bowl full of sizzling, breaded pork. She slapped it down on the table, then ran to get what looked to be a fresh salad, drinks, and bread.

“Where do you get all this?” Elisa asked. “I don’t see much free soil.”

“One of the people staying here is a Greenhouser,

” the little woman said. “That barge is hers. She makes more produce than we can actually use and trades the excess. Make sure and see her before you leave. People always forget to talk to the greenhouse, and that’s a mistake.”

“Why?” Aethe asked. “She’s important?”

The tiny woman continued on as if she hadn’t been addressed. “So that’s food covered. The innkeeper has been alerted to your arrival, there are plenty of rooms, and he’ll have baths ready for when you want them. He said to sell enough to buy soap if you want special soap. You want the special soap, believe me. Sampson should be through momentarily, so just hang on for that. Otherwise, enjoy your stay at the outpost.”

The woman’s focus was at once terrible and admirable. She was so wrapped up in things like telling them when Sampson would get there that she didn’t seem to notice that a large, probably-Sampson man had actually arrived during her speech. The new, silent addition to the conversation waited patiently as the woman finished her job, then stepped up to the table.

In the meantime, half the food had disappeared. All of it was remarkably good, and between Kuzai’s bottomless stomach, Riv’s need for excessive calories, and the entire crew’s variety-starved appetites, thousands of calories had fallen to them in one short burst.

“Yeah, he’s a pretty good cook. Sorry about Clora, by the way. Nothing anyone can do will get her to actually listen,” probably-Sampson said.

“She’s fine.” Aethe shifted a bite of food to the side of her mouth as she replied, making room for talking. “She brought us food and you. That’s her job, right?”

“Yes, and she does it very quickly. She used to be some kind of administrator on Main Island, I think. Paid by the successful resolution of an issue, she says, so she learned to get interactions done with as soon as possible.”

Sampson pulled out a stool from under the end of the wooden table and sat. He wasn’t a tall person, but he was as thick as a barn and strong-looking. Marco immediately pegged him as some sort of working class, something like Riv’s Sturdy. He wondered how he had ended up in a communications role, considering that he looked as if he could lift a ship clean out of the water.

“So what brings you? Besides Kuzai, I mean. Kuzai, you aren’t dead yet?”

“Me? Not yet,” Kuzai said. “Close, though. I was just about out of supplies when these people found me.”

“Sounds like you. And you four let him trick you into bringing him to the closest food, eh? Pretty typical for him, I have to warn you.”

“It’s not like that. We are on a system task,” Marco said. “We have to take a break in the inner seas. This is the first day of several.”

“Well, we’ll get you fed, cleaned, and rested. Not a bad way to start things. Besides that, what do you need?”

“No idea.” Riv had dropped the box of junk on the ground, and Marco kicked it now. It jangled as metal, bone, and jewel bashed against each other in the interior of the wooden crate. “We wanted to offload this, if we could.”

“No problem. There are a couple of ways we could go about that.” Sampson nodded towards the nearest cluster of stands. “The old way is that you just wander around and get a price for each piece. You negotiate yourself, get what you can, and take the time you need. There’s no hurry and nobody here is particularly busy right now, so you could.”

“And the new way?”

“Just hand me the box and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes having sold everything that it is possible to sell.”

“That does sound nice.” Riv stretched his legs. “I sort of want to spend an hour finishing off this pork. Can we get more pork?”

“You can’t avoid getting more pork. Clora is somewhere yelling at our chef to make more as we speak, I’d wager.”

“What’s it cost?” Elisa said. “If we do it your new way. There’s always a tradeoff, right?”

“Yes, of course, but not in the way you think. It’s mostly just a matter of trust. Trust costs something. It has a value. I would probably make you more credits than you’d make yourself, but you’d have to trust me to actually follow through on my promises.”

“Oh, is that it?” Riv kicked the box, which slid across the ground to Sampson, coming to a rest a foot from his feet. “Just do it then. The only thing is we don’t know what a credit is.”

“Neither do I,” Kuzai said. “That’s new, I think.”

“Oh, yes. We had to switch to that because of a shortage of gold pieces. You know how that goes.”

“I do. Big purchases take a lot of gold.”

“Right. So we issue credits. You spend what you can while you are here, and we can cash you out for gold pieces at the end of your visit, equivalent to what the pieces would have brought. During busy times, it takes care of our hard currency problems, and you don’t have to carry around a big sack of gold in the meantime.”

“Good for us,” Marco said. “I’m the captain, I approve.”

“That was easy, then.” Sampson stood. “Any particular reason why? I’d like to know for the next time I give this talk. It’s usually a lot harder than this.”

“You mentioned baths,” Marco said and then looked over at the female-side of his crew. “To them.”

Sampson looked at Elisa and Aethe, who were both still working on finishing their lunches. Something in their eyes, some sort of arcane bath-lust, made the large man subtly shudder.

“Got it. I’ll decide if I want to play with that particular kind of fire when the time to make my next pitch comes around, I suppose. I’ll be back. Nice to meet you all, and good to see you again, Kuzai. Should I send Wencel over?”

“Not quite yet. I’m sure he’ll find me soon enough, and a bath sounds pretty good to me too.”