St Nelle

My first visit to Saint Nelle was about four years ago.

 I appeared there on a boat. Newcomers always do, somehow, and nobody seems to remark about it or think it terribly unusual. I suppose people have to get into the city somehow. It's almost like Haibane cocoons--any ship of above a certain size will have someone patrol the empty spaces and unused rooms, looking for newcomers whose arrivals were missed. It's a bloody weird thing to accept as routine.

 
The port sky was overcast but promised sunbursts, and indeed one dazzled me briefly as I stepped off onto the pier. I couldn't help it...I gawked, even a little, as I got off the boat. The tiny connecting bridge from which I departed the boat was old, slick with precipitation, and looked worn. Everything in this city looked worn...not a single brick, or section of concrete, seemed new. My first impressions were of an anachronistic metropolis, perpetually soaked in the humid maritime climate. My eyes focused on the alleyway leading out to a main street, just ahead. I made for it quickly.

People glanced at me as I stepped off, adjusting my hooded cloak somewhat awkwardly (it was slightly too warm--I had woken with it in the passenger section of the boat where I first appeared). I kept moving, and tried not to gawk too much. I have a rule about that, one I formed on my first visit to Vancouver in the waking world--never stare where the locals can see you. It marks you as an outsider...and in some places, as a target. There is plenty to be learned about the lay of the land, the sights and architecture from a distance or out of the corners of one's eye. I followed that rule here--I didn't know the first thing about this place, so I simply took a likely-looking path. I wasn't aware until later that the reason everyone stared was because of my cloak, something apparently all new arrivals have when they show up in St Nelle.

Instead, I followed the street. The air was difficult to place. Sootier than I'm used to, but not actually bad...washed clean by frequent rains. It gets worse in the industrial bouroughs. I walked along a mostly-empty street, surrounded by concrete and brown-brick giants. The architecture was so similar to places I've been in San Francisco, in the older parts of the city--only this style seemed dominant. Having grown up in modern Western metropoli that were mostly built in the last half-century (Portland and Seattle), I wasn't used to this. One gets inaccurate ideas about architecture from steel-glass skyscrapers--this city had the tallest, most interesting brownstone-faced towers I'd ever seen. 

 The street emptied out after a block or two onto the Market. 

 There were throngs of people here--shopping, chatting, proselytizing, and performing. An evangelical preacher was giving his fire and brimstone schpiel with passion and dreadful sincerity. For just a moment, I wondered what kind of place I had gotten myself into--was this city a theocracy? Anything could happen--after all, I didn't know where I was!

 Then I noticed the quiet indifference of the crowd, the way nobody really even acknowledged the man with a fire in his belly and a bible in his hand. I thought back to similar displays in Portland. The preacher was background music. I noticed others--people in all sorts of religious costume, only some of which I recognized. There, people representing a Hindu sect of some sort. These people...Muslim? Surely--the man and several women were reading aloud from books and talking in far more restrained voices than their Christian counterpart. Many others I couldn't even guess at.

All receiving about as much attention from the crowd. Which is to say, approximately somewhere between "mild voyeuristic interest" and "none whatsoever." Encouraged, I continued into the market. Nobody payed me too much attention--I would later learn that most newcomers wind up through here within minutes of entering, because most people hire a guide with the thick, flat coins they find in the robe pocket--St Nelle currency, coins of gold or mixed metal (in denominations of point-five, one, two, and five St Nelle dollars--they're refreshingly similar to Canadian coins, with pretty engravings and a tendency toward multi-color designs on the larger ones). I only discovered mine now, and the rumbling in my tummy reminded me that, wherever I'd come from, I hadn't eaten in a while.

I wound up exploring the food stalls until I found something I could afford. That was the first thing I noticed--about half the fruits and vegetables were exorbitantly expensive...much of it gathered from afar at some cost, I later learned. There aren't regular imports in the city because there's no place outside it to arrange imports from, so everything brought in is collected by the crews of ships that scour the coastlines of this and neighboring continents. Only things which travel well can survive the trip, and while efforts have been made to transplant cultivars here and grow them in greenhouses (St Nelle is somewhat North of the local tropics and has harsh winters; anything that doesn't grow here already is not likely to survive the yearly changes in temperature), it still means that the price of a peach is shocking (about five Saint Nelle Dollars per is not uncommon). 

If you like exploring ethnic and creole cuisine, on the other hand, Saint Nelle is a paradise. I still hadn't really processed how diverse the crowd was when I stumbled upon the stalls that served prepared food--Lunch Row, the locals call it (*everything* has names in St Nelle, no matter how insignificant the entity or prosaic the name--it's just something the people here do). It's not terribly large, but the smells are absolutely enticing. I wound up ordering an unknown dish that reminded me of a twisted cross between Chinese-style chicken dishes and vegetable stew. Someone called it "Curry". If this is what passes for curry here, I thought to myself, I want to leave now. Still, while it wasn't curry, it was good, served over a platter of spongy flat bread that reminded me of the injera in Ethiopian cooking. The spices were new to me, and the bread was made from an unfamiliar flour. I was oddly unfazed about the signs that I might possibly be in another world (and the grain they use to make this bread *is* one I've never seen before, though I'm not sure if that means it doesn't exist on Ea...the Earth I came from. Wherever St Nelle is, it's at most an alternate expression of Earth, and a very close one at that).

After lunch I wandered the market a bit, resisting temptation or the urge to look too closely at any one thing. At length, my path took me out of the bazaar and into the neighboring district, situated at the bottom of a rising hill. A number of shops caught my eye--I wound up inside the one that looked rather like a curio shop, hoping I might at least meet somebody who could tell me about this place. Curio shops cater to tourists, and for better or worse "tourist" is precisely what I was. My hands found the brass knob that opened the door, and I stepped into the moldering old brick building.

It wasn't a curio shop--at least, not  primarily. The place reminded me of a Chinese herbalist on one hand, and a modern Neopagan supply store on the other. The owner was standing behind the dark-stained mahogny counter, simultaneously reading and repairing a book that looked ancient. He looked up when I entered and went into sales mode--but I was able to draw some chitchat out of him by purchasing a little sage and a small scrimshaw charm (a raven carved of lustrous creamy bone, with veins of dark sepia staining the surface). He gave me a map, gratis and told me to visit again sometime,

That, I thought to myself, I will certainly have to do.

 Thus was my first experience with Saint Nelle.