Go get some actual money first. While eating now would let you work a bit harder or longer, those bullets will probably be useful later. Best to save them for when you can use them. Afterward, go have a look at this place that's offering a reward for your gun. See if you can recognize the person who is offering it.
Agreed, get more money. Oh, and rip the (sounds Warhol-esque from the description) poster of the revolver off and keep it with you. This is getting interesting.
You leave, and wisps of smoke crawl out with you. The air outside is hot, but it's cooler and clearer than that within, and for a moment you feel light-headed. But it passes, and you step off the stoop with clear vision and only a lingering smell of honey fumes in your nose.
The posters have been on the wall so long they are either stuck fast to it or dangerously loose; the poster with your gun on is one of the former, and it takes a good couple of minutes of gentle easing before it comes away. You hold it up to the light and look at it for a while. The paper is thin as fine muslin, and the sunlight shines straight through, setting the inks ablaze. For a moment, the gun seems to be shimmering before your eyes, half-in and half-out of reality, and you think you hear a sound that you cannot describe―
And then it's gone. You blink, dizzy, and fold the poster up to put in your pocket. Perhaps you inhaled more sporehoney than you thought.
You return your attention to the TR I S E, and join the crowd outside. It's a thin group now – the afternoon is wearing on, and most people have either got work here today or gone to try elsewhere – and you stand out in it. The people around you do talk to each other, and joke and laugh, but there is something desperate under their bravado. The longer they stand here, the less likely they are to eat tonight. Of course, you're taking the same risk, but for some reason you are not afraid.
You are beginning to realise that though you may sometimes be alarmed, there is very little that really scares you. After all, it's not as if you have anything to lose.
It is a long wait until the foreman next appears. The sun is low in the sky and the shadows are lengthening by the time he does – if they are a he; the foreman is corpulent, pear-shaped and has greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail. They could be anything at all.
Whatever they are, they single you out immediately as different from the rest.
“You,” says the foreman, eyes narrowing, finger jabbing. “It's your lucky day.”
You follow them into the shed, and have to fight through a wall of hot, dry air: the building is full of the heat of heavy machinery. It is vast, and darkening now as the sunlight starts to fail. A small army of children are racing around with tapers, making the switch in lighting from skylights to lanterns. But there is enough light for the trains to gleam – the trains, vast segmented things crouched low on their caterpillar tracks like enormous iron cats, their engines still, their great doors slid open like wounds in their sides, and all around them their parasitic crew scurrying, roaring, hefting, tossing. Casks-of-thunder and crates of ore are stacked on trolleys and whisked away through a heady stink of oil to who knows where. Clusters of Magnemite whirl and intermingle near the roof, forming temporary Magneton of three, four, five, even six orbs before splitting apart again. They do something to them to stop the Magneton cohering properly, you recall. It wouldn't do to have the thundertrains' power sources getting absorbed.
“This way,” barks the foreman. You follow them between the Angel of the East and the Dustbiter, weaving adroitly through the morass of labourers surrounding them, and come to a shabby three-carriage train at the far end of the shed. It is called the Nenive, and it has just arrived, by the look of things: the doors to the street beyond stand open beyond it, and its crew are still in the process of opening up the cargo bay. “Volunteer,” the foreman tells someone who you assume is in charge, and waddles off back into the chaos without another word.
You look at the someone, who looks back. He is very short, but looks exceptionally strong. The veins on his arms stand out like wires pushed under his skin.
“A'righ',” he says, without preamble. “Chuck youse sword over there, get youse a trolley and take the casks-o'-thundae to the Lemaigne warehouse.”
You think you know where that is. Various companies have different holding facilities tacked onto the edges of the shed; you remember seeing a sign that might have said Lemaigne on your way here. You nod, and take up a trolley.
The next few hours are hard.
The Lemaigne Bros warehouse is not far – just a few hundred yards away. You find it easily. And casks-of-thunder are not heavy; electricity is weightless, and these casks are cheap, not solidly built. Your strength and stamina are more than up to the task of moving such small burdens such a short distance.
But you did not know that it would hurt.
The casks are badly made; perhaps that explains it. Perhaps it would have happened anyway. Regardless, they make the air around them charged, pregnant with potential like the sky before a storm. You can feel it as a vibration in your bones and your organs, each piece of you quivering individually like a tuning fork struck against a tabletop. It is almost nothing at first – just unpleasant. But after the first few minutes, it becomes an ache, and by the time three hours are past, it is agonising. You are leaning heavily on the empty trolley on the last return trip, barely managing to avoid crashing into anyone or anything, and you can hardly hear the short someone's expressions of thanks through the painful buzzing of your ear bones in your head.
Yet you manage, and within a few minutes of finishing your task the pain has faded to nothing at all. It seems it does not linger long when the casks-of-thunder aren't nearby.
The foreman takes some hunting down, but you eventually corner them between the Desert Serenade and the Swan of Araby, and are pointed in the direction of a thin-lipped individual in a small adjoining office, who gives you a handful of silver dollars. It isn't much, considering what you've done, but casual labourers are cheaper than draught animals here. You were lucky to get this much.
Outside the shed, night has fallen and the lamps have been lit – although there aren't many in areas like this; occasionally, the searing magnesium-lamp headlights of a thundertrain bathes the alley in blinding white, but for the most part, the labouring district is dark. The crowd outside has gone, but a new one is starting to gather. You suppose these must be the workers of the night shift.
The little saloon is still open, and it's busier than ever. You don't, however, have any trouble getting a seat – not with a sword that size. You part with one of your coins and receive a bowl of generically brown stew and a pot of beer. These, you soon discover, are indistinguishable from each other in a blind taste test, except that in one of them the lumps feel like they probably shouldn't be there.
You don't linger over your meal. It fills you, hopefully with something that won't kill you, and you leave, spitting out the taste in the dust. After that, the sporehoney fumes are almost welcome.
Vitric Avenue, you think, is right on the borders of the Copper and Silver Districts – a place dominated by the shops that vend jewellery and trinkets from the more respectable kind of glassworks. You can't imagine what the sort of person who lives there would want with your gun. You're beginning to see why Stone might want it – it is made of stone, after all, and strange stone at that – but a shopkeeper? There must be an explanation, but you can't yet see it.
At any rate, you are glad to leave the docklands. As you head north, the mechanical squalling grows fainter, and the pedestrians grow much fewer. Crossing the deserted market squares, you become aware of a growing sense of peace. The air is cooling. The moon is bright. You are fed and watered. There may be mysteries to be solved, but for a few minutes at least, the world is quiet here.
When you near the central road, you are jerked out of your reverie: the traffic has slackened but not stopped, and there are still carriages and carts rattling to and fro. A few streets further to the north, however, all is quiet again, and you pass very few people on the way through the southern tip of the Copper Districts. There are none at all in the two Silver streets you pass through, and Vitric Avenue, when you reach it, is similarly deserted. Many of the shops, however, still have lights in the windows – electric lights, you notice, thinking of the casks you moved earlier. The low cost of casks-of-thunder makes them cheap to run, but the installation costs, and that of replacement parts if the circuit should break, means that they are restricted to the wealthier sort.
Number 34 is one of those shops that has the lights on. There is a sign in the window that says it is closed, but through the glass you can see a woman in dark blue robes moving around, tidying away the merchandise. Is this Nour Zavarat? You don't think you recognise her, but you aren't sure. You can't seem to get a good look at her face from here.
Note: Scizorstrike, this is sort of Orre, as has been hinted. We're actually far to the east of Orre as it is shown on the map, during a period of Orrene expansion. Also, it's unlikely that any Shadow Pokémon will turn up. I think we're about 140 years too early for that.