At some point in all this, Amy will lean over to Samora and murmur, "It's all right if you don't get anything. She's just enjoying showing it to you." Amy has never really been that into shopping, but Victoria is and that's worth a lot.

Samora doesn't particularly have a use for anything except the books, but she might want a book? She's not supposed to spend Armsmaster's money on random things, but if they have time for her to cast Comprehend Languages and read a lot of titles looking for useful ones that could be neat.

They could also just read her the titles but if she wants to use her power Amy certainly won't stop her.

Most of these books are fiction, it turns out. They have Someone Committed A Crime fiction, Two or More People Fell In Love fiction, What Might Things Be Like In The Future fiction, and What If Powers Worked Differently fiction, among many other categories. Some of the alt-powers ones have dragons on the cover, but as far as anyone knows there are no real dragons except the one who lives in Canada (no one mentions Lung).

The Dallons are sure that Armsmaster didn't mean you weren't supposed to buy anything frivolous, just not anything too expensive, which nothing here is. But, if you want something more useful, how about this Science for Common People section? This one is about simple machines. That one is a history of large city fighting off a pandemic. This one looks like it would probably explain radiation, if that's something you're still curious about. This one is just about how to measure temperatures for some reason?

Well in that case the pandemic one and the radiation one both sound interesting! It's so cool how books are cheap. 

The clerk manages not to boggle at Samora's outfit; she's seen plenty of capes but this is the first time she's sold a book to one.

Having Samora along is weirdly convenient. Amy always feels like people are watching her when she's out in public like this, even if nobody comes up to her and tries anything, but right now she'd be surprised if anyone even knew she was there.

But of course she still has the hood of her coat up. Just in case.

She's being an awfully good sport about all this.

It's not that Samora isn't having fun, exactly, but she's kinda just watching the show, seeing the sights. How can I get her more invested? Victoria wishes they had some "magic items" to show her; she was so excited about shopping for those!

Their next stop is clothes, which Victoria does not think Samora will be as excited about. She'll just have to make do with what she's got.

"All right, now for the clothing stores. We have lots, and I'll show you all the good ones, but first we have to decide what you want your clothes to say about you. Like, right now what your costume says is, I'm ready for trouble! Some bad guys might invade the mall, and if they do I'm going to stop them! And of course we would stop any crimes if we saw them, but we're not expecting any, you see what I mean? We're not patrolling, we're just out having some fun."

Amy snickers. "Can you imagine? Like if Uber and Leet popped up to rob a jewelry store or something?"

"And then the three of us were there?" Victoria cackles, then sobers. "The thing is, probably nothing like that's going to happen. But people don't know that, they see you dressed up and they wonder if there's a cape thing going on. You don't have a secret identity and that's cool, we don't either, but right now I'm Victoria Dallon, not Glory Girl, you see what I mean? And sometimes I'm Victoria the high school student who's here because she has to be, and sometimes I'm Victoria going to a party with my friends, and sometimes I'm Victoria auditing college classes and I want them to take me seriously.

So I guess what I'm asking is, who are you, Samora? And what do you want people to think about you?"

Oops, got a little heavy there at the end. Well, she can pull back if Samora finds it overwhelming, but so far it seems like Samora doesn't overwhelm easily.

No worries, that's a totally reasonable question! And she clearly needs to make some kind of change, because some people are looking at her nervously and she doesn't like it.

 "Hmm. I need to think about that for a minute; back home I've always been aiming for 'ready for trouble' and the culture was such that people found that reassuring. Gotta figure out if there's anything true I can say that doesn't have 'ready for trouble' as the biggest part of it." She looks around contemplatively at the shopping strangers. "Is 'friendly and curious' the right sort of thing? Or 'competent but not dangerous'? Someone you can come to with a problem even if I'm not looking for trouble at any particular time, but also someone you can just talk to."

The problem, she muses, is going to be continuing to wear all her magic items without explaining why. The fact that some of her abilities are removable rather than inherently part of her is a vulnerability she'd rather not disclose. At least she can truthfully claim that the boots and cloak are extremely durable and waterproof, unless that's true of all the boots and cloaks here.

"'Competent but not dangerous' is definitely a thing. We'll give you some outfits like you had a normal office job. And we'll get you some more casual things, like what a person would wear on vacation." Although, does Samora take vacations? Victoria's suddenly unsure; her little hint about wanting clothes for parties seems to have flown over Samora's head completely.

But they're going to run into trouble right away. Victoria Dallon is not too picky about civilian fashion, she doesn't think, but she has firm opinions about which outfits go with low boots (fewer than one might hope) and cloaks or headbands (basically none).

"The belt is fine, the boots I think we can work with, but if you try to put modern clothes under that cloak it's just going to look like you started masking up and forgot what you were doing halfway. Nobody wears cloaks except capes, and usually we go for shorter, lighter styles." Like, does Samora's cloak never get caught on stuff? Admittedly, it hasn't happened today, not even in the revolving door. She never whacks anything with her sheath, either; she just always seems to know where it is, and what's behind her, and adjusts it a bit with one hand on the hilt when she needs to. Anyway. "Same issue with the headband. It's cool, my costume has a little crown on it, but just says cape, you know?"

"Maybe she just wants to be in costume all the time," says Amy. Her voice is suddenly thick with an emotion she doesn't want know how to name.

Oh no, this is so inconvenient. "I definitely don't want to conceal the fact that I have powers. And, uh." Not telling people things is hard. "If I just say that I'm going to keep wearing my boots and cloak and belt and headband for personal reasons I don't want to get into, what kind of problems will that cause?"

"Oh, people will know you have powers. You're going to have fan pages, threads on PHO, the works." Wait, Samora definitely doesn't know what PHO is. She probably doesn't know what the internet is!

...should they try to hide the internet from her? Yeah, that seems kinder. Someone will tell her eventually, but Amy will let Samora live in blissful ignorance for now.

"With the powers you have you'll be famous, is what I mean. People will come up to you in the street, wanting you to heal their husband or mother or whoever, no matter what you're dressed like. If you were worried" it's getting hard to breathe "that that wouldn't happen...you don't have to be."

Victoria glances uneasily at her sister. They have rules about how much healing Panacea does, and when, but not everybody is chill about it and enforcing them is hard for her. She thought they were doing better lately...

"You can definitely wear whatever you want to wear," she says to Samora, "you just to have some way of showing when you're doing cape things versus not, so that you can have some kind of normal life." Her gaze flicks to Amy again, and away. "But Amy's right, you're gonna be famous, so it's OK if it's a little subtle. Like, uh, what about the sword and shield? Maybe it could be that, if you're carrying those you're on cape business, and if you're not you're not? We can edit that onto your fan page."

She has some thoughts on that idea but Amy is having a hard time. "You're probably right that I'm not prepared for being famous on any scale larger than a small town. I've never--I mean, the world has always had more problems than one person can deal with, but it's always been clear which problems were mine to deal with right now and which weren't, and I need to not--try to pick up more than I can carry." Hopefully that was a good balance of "sympathetic without calling attention to Amy's suffering" for this culture. "I appreciate you looking out for me."

She puts a hand on her scabbard, not in a way where she looks like she might draw the sword, just reminding herself it's there. "Not having the sword and shield on during my downtime makes sense. If I put them in my bag, is that sufficient? It's really not that I'm worried I'll get attacked at the mall, just--my dad made me this sword to celebrate my being chosen as a cleric and I haven't been more than ten feet from it since I first saw it." And she apparently needs more time to process being somewhere she can't get letters from home, but that's not happening in the mall either.

Amy is fine. Amy's feelings do not need to be taken into account. Here, she'll prove it. "That's...cool. That he did that."

Oh no, there was exactly one thing that could make Samora homesick and Victoria somehow found it. Abort! Abort! "Hm, if it's like that then how about your shield and armor, instead?" Assuming that suggestion doesn't instantly create another crisis: "How about we talk about it over lunch? I don't know about you guys but I'm starving." They have, it's true, somehow spent literally hours wandering around and looking at things.

"That works, or I'm fine with it being the sword and shield if having them hidden in my bag counts. And lunch sounds great!" This city hasn't just had its everything disrupted by Behemoth and there's clearly loads of food and it looks so exotic and interesting. She gets her sword  and shield into her bag of holding, which may be entertaining to watch for anyone who hasn't seen that before, and angles towards the food court.

"Ohhhh that makes so much more sense!  I thought you were going to put your sword into, I don't know, a backpack.  It seemed like it would be awkward, was all."

"Are those common, where you're from?" At least now she's starting to know what Samora meant by "magic items", way back at the start of this trip.

Anyway, food court! There's a mix of sweet and savory things, including something called a "cinnamon bun" that your guides agree you have to try later if you haven't before. Here is pizza (though Amy says this place has pretty bad pizza and you should get it somewhere else; the guy behind the glass counter seems resigned). Here is food from Thailand, Mexico, and China, which are all pretty far from here. This is sushi, though Victoria wrinkles her nose at it.

Bags of holding are like, the thing adventurers buy when they first get some decent money, yeah. They're awesome. Anyway, food! She will make a note of the recommendation to eat a cinnamon bun (things continue to be so cheap here!) later and avoid the bad pizza. All of the foods from far away look good, so she'll try the Thai food! Fried tofu and coconut rice, please, because neither "tofu" nor "coconut" is translating and that's intriguing.

Coming right up!  The Dallons get some Thai too, in chicken and beef.