When they left the Vocational Registry, Jax led them through streets that quickly emptied. It was a fairly long walk to reach the Professionals' district, back on the west side of the city not too far from the gate where they originally entered. Jax pointed out a few buildings as they passed them, but the thing that really caught Sophia's ear was his explanation for the empty streets.

Almost everyone in the Professional district was Professionals; Called rarely ventured there without a reason. It meant that if a monster settled there, they stayed for a while, but it also meant that monsters usually didn't stop in; there just weren't the people there to attract them. They were underground.

Sophia knew Jax had mentioned that before, but he hadn't previously mentioned that it was actually rude for Called to use the underground ways through the Professional district unless they were injured or traveling with (but not escorting) Professionals and that they'd have to pay to travel that way. It wasn't worth it as far as Jax was concerned.

Shortly after he finished the explanation, they reached Jakari's Warehouse. It had a simple brown sign that said JAKARI'S in white hanging from a pair of hooks under a surprisingly wide roof over the entrance to a building that filled the entire space between the streets. Sophia could easily believe that it was a warehouse.

When they entered, they were met by a young woman who clearly wasn't Jakari, but she was able to get Sophia exactly what she was looking for: a lot of feathers of different types. About half of them were ordinary feathers, or at least as ordinary as feathers from monsters ever were. The other half were at least slightly magical. Most of them came from skyeagles, which meant that the most common Affinities were all wind-related. Oddly enough, Jakari's had several skyeagles with blood-related Affinities, which made them slightly more common than the water ones, just behind lightning.

There was even one bird's worth of feathers with an Affinity that the shopgirl didn't have an identity for but that Sophia was able to recognize: a variant of spatial magic that she'd seen in vehicles back home, rather than containers or even portals. She couldn't put an exact name to it, but distance or travel Affinity seemed like possibilities. She asked about other parts of the birds, especially the strange one, but they weren't kept together once the creatures were dismantled.

Xin'ri bought even more than Sophia did. Most of her purchases were plant life of one sort or another, including quite a bit of wood, but she also picked up more than a little bone and several ingots of different metals. Sophia noticed that skyeagle bone was one of the things she acquired, and some of it seemed to have the same odd spatial resonance as the feathers Sophia found, which meant she'd probably picked up the rest of the bird Sophia asked about.

Jakari's Warehouse seemed to only stock raw materials, not finished goods, so Dav, Amy, Jax, and Taika were limited in what they wanted there. Most of what they picked up was ingredients for meals, and even then Jax cautioned them to limit how much they bought. They'd get most of their food from a Professional cook, so that it would keep and also help with energy, nutrition, and even possibly some minor boosts to stamina and mana regeneration if they chose to pay extra.

Sophia looked forward to that. She liked the taste of mana in her food; it was almost as important as the actual spices. The only problem was that not everyone who cooked with mana-rich food properly adjusted for its taste, and she was far more sensitive to it than an ordinary human. She suspected that she wouldn't have that problem if the cook had Abilities for cooking, though; she certainly didn't have that problem at home.

After the warehouse, the next stop was Ebayne Taarith's shop. To reach it, they had to head in almost exactly the opposite direction from Jakari's; they passed within a couple of blocks of the Vocational Registry building. The streets went from completely deserted to relatively full streets to mostly empty but with a few people out and about. They seemed to be Called out shopping in the Smiths' district, rather than people living their everyday lives.

In the time it took to visit the warehouse and then make it to the Smiths' district, the general mood seemed to have shifted. Sophia guessed that was probably the location; it had still only been a few hours. In the Smiths' district, Sophia didn't see people who were unhappy for no particular reason; instead, most of the people around her watched the space around them from the moment they left a store to the moment they entered the next one, as if there could be a monster attack at any time. No one seemed specifically nervous, but everyone was prepared.

The preparation paid off about a block from the wandsmith's store when a skyeagle descended on a small main trailing behind his group. He didn't see the skyeagle, but another group farther down the street did and managed to shoot it out of the sky with a combination of directed lightning and arrows before it actually reached him.

The group hurried over to the skyeagle, looped some rope around it, and picked it up in a quickly-constructed sling in moments, then hurried into a building a little ways down the street. It was almost as impressive as the speed they had when they killed the skyeagle in the first place.

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"That's a butchery," Jax told the rest of the team. "You can tell by the sign out front; it's painted red. They're common throughout much of Mazehold, far more common than in other cities. Most people take monsters they kill to the first one they find to avoid attracting more monsters. They're lucky; skyeagle can be prepared by almost anyone. Some of the stranger monsters require someone with an upgraded Profession that handles exactly that sort of creature to prepare their bodies to be used. Every butchery has at least one Professional like that."

Jax frowned as he started moving forward again. "Butcheries are run by Professionals and are usually part of the Professional League, though they also have to have permission from the organization in charge of the district they serve to be there. I probably don't have to tell you, but in case I do, don't mess with a butchery. I've seen Called think they can do whatever they want because there are many other butcheries. That's a great way to have to take your stuff to the Registry and still get almost nothing for it or worse."

Sophia heard the warning, but she didn't pay much attention to it. She was going to treat anyone she dealt with properly, so what happened if she didn't wasn't very important. She'd heard something a lot stranger in Jax's description, though. "Why did we take our skyeagle to the Registry if it's more valuable to sell to a butcher? And why were there so many other feathers there?"

"Two reasons," Jax answered easily. "First and most important, that's not what people new to Mazehold would do. We can go to a butchery now because we ought to know about them; Arryn certainly should, and he's clearly taking an interest in our futures. That's going to make things a lot easier for me, because I don't have to hide what I know. It's easy to explain away now."

Sophia nodded. That made sense, even if it wasn't something she'd have thought of.

"Second, all we could really sell at a butchery would be the skyeagle. Sure, we'd get a bit more, but not much; the biggest benefit of using a butchery is that the Professionals there can get more out of a body than you or I can, no matter how good we are at doing things mundanely. They have the tools and the Abilities to do it. It wouldn't have been that much extra since we had to carve up the body and carry it a good distance anyway." Jax paused and glanced around the group as if making certain they were all following his explanation. When he got to Xin'ri, he nodded, as if he was answering an unspoken question.

"That's why people often bring things from the Maze to the Registry; they don't get that much less and it means they don't have to find a butcher that can handle whatever third upgrade monster was worth carrying back." Jax grinned. "Also, the Registry is probably the butchery closest to the Maze. We had to cross half the city because we were coming in from the west, but the Registry's not far from the Mazehold wall, it just happens to be the northern wall. It would have been faster to go around the city, but I didn't want to get that close to the Maze."

Dav moved a little closer to Jax. "How much worse is taking it to the Registry? Should we plan to find another place, or is it worth it for the convenience?"

Jax shrugged. "It depends. The big advantage of going to the Registry is that they'll take almost anything, including artifacts found in the Maze and stuff we gather like the fireflower blooms. Butcheries only take whole animals, but they're about the only place that will take them. If we're working on getting the Wisps and experience to reach the third upgrade, we shouldn't have a problem getting enough flowers to buy whatever we need. We can talk to Aloysius Sweetfire about it, but I don't know him, so I don't know if he only wants specific things or if he can also act as a broker."

As he spoke, Jax turned towards a building that was far smaller than Jakari's Warehouse. It reminded Sophia of a house, but if so it was a large one. If Jakari's Warehouse was the size of a superstore, Ebayne Taarith's shop was closer to the size of a single department. It still had the same overhanging roof with hooks holding a sign, but the sign was pale blue rather than the bold red of a butchery or the deep brown of Jakari's. The sign said they'd arrived at Taarith Wands, which was a good confirmation that they were in the right place.

The door led into a space that was about twenty feet long on each side, far smaller than the apparent size of the building. Three of the walls held hooks that supported individual wooden wands and staffs, each with a small paper label tied to them with string. The fourth wall held a door, but between them and the door was the only large furniture in the room, a work table with a bunch of supplies Sophia didn't immediately recognize beyond knowing that there was paper and wooden dowels and ink of some sort, all magical.

A man sat at the work table. He looked up when the door opened, then set down the knife he was using to carve one of the dowels and stood when they entered. He almost had to be Ebayne Taarith.

Like his mother, Ebayne was dark-skinned and dressed in extremely colorful clothing. His clothing looked more like cotton than silk. It reminded Sophia of a jester's motley with the way almost every piece was a different color, even when it was part of the same outfit, but the hat he wore was not a jester's cap; it was an odd poofy thing with a tassel that hung down on one side.

Unlike his mother, Ebayne had extensive tattoos on his face and neck, mostly in black and gold but with some red as well. They didn't mean anything to Sophia; they didn't form images and they didn't look like runes. They had to have some meaning, but Sophia didn't know what it was. The only thing she could say about them for certain was that they didn't glow with mana, which probably meant they weren't magical.

The only jewelry he wore was a pair of small silver loops in his ears and a tree pendant on a leather strap around his neck. Sophia suspected that the pendant probably had something to do with his work; a thick leather strap made sense if he was using it for something, but not if it was simply for display. The earrings weren't magical, but the pendant was.

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