The walk to the inn was relatively uneventful. Annie had to fend off a few more people but before long they ended up in front of the inn.

Shadow was irritated that she had failed to figure out which of the buildings it was before they started heading towards the door. It was taller than most of the other buildings that were around, but it was hardly alone in its height. There were other buildings that were even taller. Well, one building. She had been betting on that one but they turned away before they ever reached it. Despite her mild annoyance, she was extremely excited about the fact she was about to go inside a building!

She started bouncing on her paws again. She’d been doing that a lot today.

Annie pushed open the door (It moved so easily! She wondered how that worked. Another question added to the list...) and stepped inside. Shadow followed right behind her, quickly moving back into the heeling position after making it through the hole the door left behind.

She stared around. It really was like a built cave. She took her time admiring everything. There was furniture in here, and people were using it. She didn’t know what any of it was called yet, but she could see its usefulness. She had theories about some of them. There was one thing people were using to sit on. She was pretty sure that one was called a chair. They'd been mentioned in a few stories she'd heard from her companions, and people sat on them. The other familiar one was called a table, which she learned about in the same manner.

She wasn't certain she was right though. For example, there was a taller table that the lady Annie was talking to was behind, but it looked different from the other tables in the room. By her current definition of a table (the thing you put stuff on to be able to reach it better if you were a human) the thing the lady was behind qualified, but the differences made her think it might be called something else.

She figured she'd know soon enough.

So many questions!

Annie was discussing how much it would cost to stay here with the lady behind the tall table.

Shadow had gotten a brief rundown on money and coinage. Basically, you could do stuff for—or give things to—people, and they would give you these very pretty coins. Once you had the coins, you could use them to get other people to do things for you—or to give you stuff. The coins were handy because everyone wanted them, where maybe not everyone would value the things you could do or the stuff you could give them.

It was still kind of confusing because as far as she could tell the reason everyone wanted the coins, was because everyone wanted the coins. They were valued because you could trade with them (they were also pretty, but apparently that mattered less.)

How did that system even get started? She had way too much stuff to ask already. That was at the back of the list.

Speaking (well, thinking) of her list, the number of things she wanted to ask was getting pretty large at this point. She took some time to organize all the questions and new objects she’d made note of into categories. Hopefully, the answers she received were relevant to more than one thing. It'd also make it easier to bring up everything that was relevant to a given topic. She hoped. She was kind of unsure how to categorize some of the things she'd seen.

She decided to count them all up as she re-arranged them. Numbers was one of her favorite things that Annie had taught her about. Right now, she only knew how to count and add, but there were apparently many more things that could be done with them!

They were already handy for things like this.

! That’s a lot! … it’s going to take a while to write all this out.

Perhaps she could draw pictures or point? Describing all this with letters would be like torture. She would need to use quite a few words she didn’t know how to spell yet.

Well, it’ll be a good excuse to help fill out my spelling list more.

She went through it in her head for a bit. There were still so many that she knew the speech sounds for but not the letters. She always needed to sound those out, and she got it wrong more often than not.