One bottle gotten, and plenty more stuff to grab. The experiment had a few vantage points where it was able to spot valuable looking objects that were small enough to grab with telekinesis, and it didn’t have any leads on where its armor might have been taken. As such, it was more inclined to finish looting before trying to recover its equipment; it may even prove possible to trade something for the weaponry needed to take everything back.

Reputation with arms dealers only really mattered if you were planning on sticking around.

A bottle full of ‘death’, made to be thrown, would either be useful to trade or to drink. It hoped that the stuff was spicy, that was always better than the other types of poison. Not that it was easy to get any reasonable amount of the stuff back home, what with it being somewhat antagonistic to life other than themselves, but it had drunk enough of the stuff to have preferences.

Several of the next chunks were just random bits of currency, which it could now have the human hold. It looked like it had miscalculated earlier though, since apparently this particular human didn’t have any pockets either. They were just holding the bottle and the coins, which was exactly as inefficient as holding those things itself. Maybe it shouldn’t be using up precious inventory space with worthless money.

The experiment nods in confirmation with its own thoughts. It would put off the material harvesting until after it had procured some method of holding things for the human, who would therefore be much improved in functionality. Rather than turn around, it decides to just keep going forward to the place they had split up initially; that would allow them to go through the town how a normal human would, unsuspiciously, and buy some sort of bag or new clothes with pockets or whatever was available in this town.

From what it had been able to gather, this was an entirely human population, which imply human-fitted accoutrements available for their entire population. Fortunately, it was fairly humanoid in shape, and could probably get away with having the human get two sets of clothing, one of which it could alter to accommodate any differences in physiology. That wouldn’t take much effort, considering how non-durable cloth tended to be.

There was a reason they mostly used metal for everything.

Getting close to the card shop, which meant it was near the inn, which meant it was near some coinage and a way down that didn’t involve falling off a roof. It could take that kind of gravitic assault easily, but humans tended to actually need their organs in pristine condition. Once inventory space wasn’t at a premium, they might need to look for something to keep the human’s insides inside of it.

“What is that?”

Turning to look at what caught the human’s interest, the experiment sees the giant pile of junk from the last time it was here.

“That’s just a pile of trash, and some cards precariously perched on top of the heap. I didn’t want to even spare the processing power to think about what kind of logic someone would have to go through to think that piling scrap metal onto the roof of a building that isn’t even reinforced until it grew to that height was a good idea, and I still don’t want to do that. I’m doing it anyway now though, since you put the thought into my head.”

“I don’t know why I bothered asking,” the human said, climbing the junk pile.

“Clearly this isn’t a sustainable practice. Once that pile grows to a size that the roof can’t sustain, it’s going to fall through and smash everything below it. Maybe it’s an insurance scheme of some sort? That doesn’t make sense either because it would have to grow over such a long period of time that the premiums would heavily outweigh the value of the payout relative to the damage incurred. There’s no way any insurer is going to rule this as an unavoidable event, considering that every time the pile gets added to is a single separate instance of complete insanity.”

“Wish I still had that armor,” muttered the human, reaching for the cards.

“On the other hand, there’s another possibility that lends itself more credence. If the shop owner isn’t aware of the existence of this hazard, and isn’t creating it themself, it means that the neighbors are putting this junk here. There are a few obvious reasons for that kind of behavior, like getting around dumping laws or simply convenience of not having to dispose of the material properly. That would also explain why it’s a bunch of metal bits. From what I know of the industry, there’s not that much industrial equipment involved in selling children’s trading cards.”

“Got it,” crowed the human triumphantly, precariously perched on a spoked wheel.

“The main mystery left is why there were any cards on the stack at all. If they aren’t garbage tossed there by the shop owner, who put them there, and why? Doubtless there’s some reason for it, they’re in decent condition from what I saw, but I don’t think I have enough information at the moment to lead myself to a reasonable conclusion.”

“Hey, that’s mine!”

A smaller human climbs up onto the roof, and points at the experiment’s human on top of the junk pile.

“Well, with that additional bit of data, I can safely induce that the cards were placed on top of the pile by one of the neighborhood children, in order to hide it because that’s what children do. As such, we should probably just be on our way, grabbing the currency and coming back to collect the remainder of the lootable objects once a slight upgrade in carrying capacity has been purchased.”

“It is not yours,” declared the higher up human, ignoring what the experiment was saying entirely, “I found it, so it’s mine.”

“I’m the one who put it there, you can’t have it!”

“Oh yeah? Well there’s one way to settle this,” the human stated, jumping down from the scrap heap.

“A card gam-” started the smaller newcomer.

“A fight!” announced the original human. All the blood had boiled off of their skin at this point, but the experiment was fairly certain that they held a significant physical advantage over this newcomer, particularly since they didn’t seem to have any experience whatsoever beating things to death.

That assumption proved itself to have merit over the next two minutes as the one-sided beat-down ended without the larger human being hit even once.

“I’m gonna tell on you,” whimpered the smaller one from the ground, several liquids leaking out of it.

“Go ahead,” challenged the victor, “I’m traveling with an immortal beast. Unless your backing is over rank six, don’t even bother.”

Not really wanting to be involved in this, but called out regardless, the experiment gave a slight smile and waved.

Scrambling to its feet, the human screamed and ran back the way it came.