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Samora in Starship's Mage
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"Thanks for visiting Diego's Ring," the guard says somewhat rotely. "Don't come back without a reservation."

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"I won't!" Off she scoots. Wheeee flying out of combat! Keeping her eyes out for red crosses and also anything and everything else, because alien planet! She pauses a few rungs along and does a Detect Magic out of curiosity.

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Nothing within 60 ft of her is magic, it's all mundane. As she looks around with the spell, she can see where she was, a nearly half-mile across cylindrical building, lying on its side in...what looks like it was once a lakebed on the...floor...wall? Does she remember which way was up when she came out of the hub?

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Not having a down is pretty weird! Also it's so impressive that all of that stuff is working without magic! She remembers which way she had been thinking of as up but that's maybe less important than she's used to. She keeps going the way she had been going.

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Some of the larger empty zero-g streets have moving cables with grab handles on them, others are paralleled by pairs tube shafts, or there's always just bouncing along from handrail to handrail along kilometers of streetscape like Spiderman.

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If she wasn't so worried about what had become of her party she would be having an amazing time right now. Even with the worry, she's having a pretty great one; either they're here or they're back in Otari or they're somewhere else, and if she can get to either them or their corpses they'll all be alright in a week or two tops. The only scenarios that would be really bad would be if Phrenk was dead somewhere it took her more than nine days to get to, or if Marshall had finally discovered something he could die of, or if they took so long to get back to Golarion that Belcorra attacked Absalom first. But there's no sense borrowing trouble when she knows what her plan is for the rest of the day. Whooooosh. She keeps her speed to something reasonable based on the speeds she can see other people going; if she ran into a wall at a hundred feet per round she'd be fine, but if she ran into someone else at a hundred feet per round that would be bad.

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One thing that stands out, after adapting to the floating and the metal and glass used like wood or stone, is there's writing everywhere. Practically everything is labeled, whether a fixed sign on a shop or building or spinning-gravity factory or simply where two floatway streets meet or some kind of (apparently non-magical?) glowing panels displaying words or video. Unfortunately, none of any of the text is anything Samora can read at the moment. Still, the circular end of the cylinder is a defined enough direction if she makes a wrong turn even as the floatway streets wind around buildings and markets. As she's about to turn one corner, she has to stop to push off from the frame around a stall where chefs are cooking noodles and stir fries on a floor covered in runes. As one of them flips the stir-fry in a giant pan, it flips out into space...and then comes back down.

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Huh. Is anything in that area magic?

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There's a magical aura surrounding the kitchen area of the stirfry stall, just inside the float-up counter and inside the outer grab-bar-cage wall Samora was about to push off of. It rises like a heat shimmer in waves about ten feet tall from the runes on what the stall's runes are apparently working very hard to define for the whole kitchen is the "floor". No one in the stall seems to be magic themselves, though.

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Oooh, foreign magic. It's not quite like any school of magic she's seen before, but if she had to pick one she'd say evocation. How busy does the stall look? She doesn't have local money to buy anything from them, but maybe the caster is there and will talk shop for free--or, if wizards here are like the ones back home, maybe they'll need to be paid to stop.

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The stall has a few customers, but it doesn't seem swamped at the moment.

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Then she'll bounce over there and loiter appreciatively until everyone who's actually doing business is out of the way.

"Hello! I'm not in line, I'm from somewhere unreasonably foreign and I was admiring your gravity magic. Are those runes [lanthanides]* or do you use something else?"

*Often translated "spellsilver"

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"Radioactives?" The older man behind the counter, standing on the floor while Samora floats on her side of the counter grimaces. "No, just normal silver inlays. That's trouble enough in an Unarcana system. My son, he is a Mage by Right, and he serves on a jumpship that visits regularly. He's a good boy, he recharges them when he visits." The man grins. "You a Mage? You recharge my runes, you eat for free!"

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People, she thinks approvingly, are the same everywhere. "I'm afraid not; just a curious traveller. What's an Unarcana system?"

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"Ahhh, you must be from far off," the man says. "Unarcana systems like Snap here forbid Mages in some way. Mars comes and finds the Mages by Right on Flytrap like anywhere else and takes them elsewhere to train. But Flytrap's government doesn't care as much what happens here on Junkertown as long as nothing comes in system. More likely to have trouble from Legatans than Trappers!"

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"Yeah, I'm from Golarion, I doubt you've even heard of it. I'm glad you can legally have the gravity thing, it's neat."

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The man smiles. "It's Junkertown, legal is what you get away with, eh? The patrol for this area likes my noodles."

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Ah, bother, she'd been hoping it wasn't that. "Are there kinds of magic here that aren't done by mages? Are those allowed?"

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"Ah, you find a way to make magic without Mages, next you'll be making thrust without rockets, right?" The man nudges his line cook, who chuckles and deftly recovers to avoid spilling the contents of the wok he was tossing. "Runic artifacts, but those mostly need charging, and they come from Mages."

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"I see; thank you. I shouldn't take up more of your time; am I still on the right course for Medical if I keep going that way?"


 

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Finding Medical takes stopping for directions a few times as the buildings close in on the floatways as Samora heads towards the docks. Finally, she finds it in another cylindrical building, the entrance lobby in the center marked by several signs in more writing and a large red cross. There's several different sets of double-doors like the lift earlier at four different orientations on the back wall, each labeled with big illegible signs in one of four different colors each, but in the center there's an area with a few zero-gravity cubicles next to a passage deeper into the hub. One of the cubicles is occupied by somebody watching people as they come through the entrance. Somebody in some kind of armor with a sword and shield definitely trips the scale for "somebody looking lost and in need of directions" and so the person calls out to Samora as she enters.

"Are you trying to find an appointment, or are you looking for the emergency room?"

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"Not exactly either--I got stranded here by accident and separated from my friends, and I'm hoping they'll think to look for me here. If they don't arrive by tomorrow morning I'll go looking for them. Also, I have some magic that isn't the usual kind and it's useful for healing injuries, but apparently that's a legal gray area so I'm not sure if I should offer."

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The hospital's information desk clerk blinks at her for a moment, then looks Samora over for a moment. Whatever she's looking for she doesn't seem to find...but armor and a glowing shield d stand out. "OK. Umm...this is a no loitering area for anyone who's not a patient or seeing patients," she says, pointing at one of a dozen gibberish signs on the wall around the area. "Do you...want directions to the Protectorate Liaison office?"

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"That would be good; I can speak this language but not read it." Temples nearly always let you loiter but she doesn't know how healing here works.

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"Are you having vision problems impairing your reading?" the clerk asks.

Total: 103
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