Explore the rest of the nearby stores.

Druuna decided that it would be best to search the whole area first, instead of having to worry about missing something important later on. After sealing up her food pouch, Druuna sat up and began looking into the other stores near the grand markets entrance.

Despite being there for hours, Druuna was still amazed at the scale of the place as she searched for stores that might still have intact items. Many of the stores had been damaged by fire or looting, but Druuna found a few that were intact enough to have useful inventory.

One store Druuna found seemed to have been some sort of clothing stall in the past. Oddly enough, it only seemed to sell underwear, which wouldn’t be very profitable in Druuna’s opinion. She grabbed a couple of extra pairs of underwear and bras while there, knowing that they were very expensive in the city.

Another store Druuna went into was almost completely empty from looting, but what Druuna did find was worth a lot. Underneath an overturned shelf, Druuna found several dozen twelve-packs of batteries, both double A and triple A! Druuna quickly buried the packs at the bottom of her pack, thinking about how many caps she could get for them. Battery powered items like flashlights and radios were worthless without batteries, and the price for a single battery could be up to twelve caps or even more! Druuna could make well over five thousand bottle caps off what she had found so far. But she was still curious. This marketplace was full of echoes from the lost times, and Druuna aimed to hear those echoes and bring them back into the light.

A further search of the entranceway found little more than useless ruins and an odd pond. The pond was oddly enough, made of several steps stone. As far as Druuna could tell, it was an ancient “fountain”. Druuna had read that the people from the lost times worshipped them as good luck, and would give the fountains sacrifices of round pieces of copper and nickel for luck. The fountain had fallen into disrepair and small shoots of grass and other plants had already begun to grow between the cracks of the tile floor around the pool of water.

It was getting dark, so Druuna put down her pack and stripped naked. She took a nice relaxing bath in the cold waters of the pool and felt quite good about how her trip was going so far. The only thing bothering her was a nagging feeling that she couldn’t quite place. It was almost as if she was being watched. Druuna ignored the feeling and walked back to the bookstore she had found. After putting her thong and bra back on, Druuna took out her sleeping bag and went to sleep behind the stores counter, dreaming of what tomorrow might bring.