It looks an awful lot like a tacky bar with ads of assorted people in heavy makeup all over its surface. Also, Isabella is getting the impression that witches must not be common patrons, even taking into account their absolute rarity - she'd be an uncommon sight at a pawn shop too but no one would be liable to look at her like so.
Oh well.
"They're making sure their paths go by this table when they walk around," Isabella explains. "You're giving out cash more reliably than anybody else here."
"Well, yeah, but that's not why I'm doing it," he says. "If you're bored, we can leave."
"That's the effect of what you're doing, I didn't mean to say it was the cause," Isabella says. "Why are you doing it, though? Weren't you recently broke?"
"I'm usually broke," he says cheerfully. "Shit like this is why. I don't really care about money unless there's something I want, and right now I've got a place to stay for a while and you're even feeding me, so I can spend all my money on strippers if I wanna."
Far be it from a witch to criticize anyone for not accumulating currency.
"Huh. I don't expect Metis to kick me out, but if she did, I have fallback positions. And less need than a human in wintertime for shelter, at that."
"Yeah," says Kas, "I've done the whole no-home-no-food-no-money thing way too many times to be afraid of it."
"If I were a human and that possibility were significantly on my radar I'd live farther south," snorts Isabella.
"I have a nice cuddly heater with me," says Kas, patting Petaal's coils. Somehow she manages to compose her serpentine features into an expression of immense smugness.
"True enough," laughs Isabella. "I wonder - if humans can simply not settle, why hasn't there been tremendous evolutionary pressure in its favor for exactly that sort of reason? It's useful to have a changing daemon. I suppose it could just utterly fail to be genetic."
"Nope," he says. "Dad was a black wasp, Mom was a peacock. I think they both settled pretty early."
"I never like stinging-bug daemons," says Path. "Spiders are sometimes fine, but never wasps or scorpions or anything like that. They rub me the wrong way."
"Yes, I know, but unless Yambe Akka got the wrong address something usually causes that."
She watches dancers with detached and vague interest.
Path doesn't whisper in her ear about any of them being cute. Although he does strike up a conversation with one of the cats, whose human is undulating nearby for someone whose butterfly daemon would probably not find a cat's attention pleasant.
"On an unrelated note," Isabella says, "I hope you didn't take Metis seriously when she made that remark about - how did she put it - claiming you at daggerpoint?"