"PSST! HEY, FRIEND! Yeah, you with the green scales! Buy me!"

I looked around.

I was browsing one of the myriad jumble sales that beckoned to me, not in the Bazaar, where the voice was probably that of the innocent-looking Deveel vendor behind the table, but on market day in the town square, in a dimension called Ittschalk. I'd stopped off on a tour of the provinces just for the hell of it, where the people were covered by masses of long, wavy hair like Rastafarians and the wide-open skies were greenish.

For the first time in years I wasn't dependent on anyone else for a ride to the next dimension — thanks to a gift from a friend. I was enjoying the novelty of being able to travel in my own company, staying as long as I pleased, where I pleased. If I felt like having a weeklong drunk in Pookipsie with the Pookas, I could do it. If I discovered the annual Broaching of the Casks festival in Harv was a bust, I could book out of there without having to wait around for a magician to give me a boost. liberty was more of a kick than any champagne I'd ever drunk.

The Prounvip Annual Village Fair was a forest of tents set up in a wide-open square, amid the few scattered buildings on the dusty prairie plain. An oom-pa-pa band was tuning up under a conical, blue tent in the middle of the clearing. The savory smell of frying sausages and bubbling pots of spicy chili drew my nose's attention to the stringy-haired cooks laboring over pit stoves under an adjacent pavilion. Kids were having their long locks plaited into tiny dreads and tipped off with colored beads by nimble-fingered hairdressers, or sprayed in undulating patterns with glitter that their mothers were undoubtedly hoping would wash out easily later on.

Off to one side the hairy denizens were trying their luck at shying coconuts, trying to hit inflated colored bladders with darts, or attempting to knock down a pyramid of amphorae with a stuffed cloth ball.