"What [i]is[/i] this place?"

Bella's face has been tensed since landing, as if she were in a permanent state of readiness to wrinkle her nose at some indescribable foulness. But she's smelled foulness before, and this isn't it. She's seen horror in her time. She's felt sweltering heat and humidity crawl down her neck on the Eater of Worlds, she's listened to the desperate songs of the forever-dying machines of Baradissar, seen the fruits of passion and artistry hidden inside the Yakanov, tasted the impossible, obsessive mastery of the bakeries on Salib, smelled the siren song of blood wafting up through the torrential rains on Sahar. This is nothing like any of that. 

It isn't even the proper muteness of the Anemoi, or the stifling aura of Death and Majesty that covered the Tunguska. Everything is at once too loud and too quiet. There are abundant smells in the air but none of them are [i]full[/i]. Bella sniffs as deep as she dares without giving herself away but it's all like trying to pick flowers out of a dried bouquet in another room. The grave goods of ancient humanity were impossibly bright, almost gaudy (if such a thing were possible from such magnificent creatures), and though their foods were wispy and insubstantial from a point of nutrition they were astonishingly complex in flavor.

She is walking out of the fifth identical restaurant now, with a round sandwich stuffed with meats and vegetables that somehow all manage to smell like the same kind of grease and nothing else. Even the bread is made from the same material as the filling for all that her gods-gifted nose could make of it. She takes a bite and frowns. Water. She is eating water that somebody waved a cut of steak over at some point. The potato wedges at the previous place were the same. Somehow. And the little hand pie in the one before that, the exact same sensation and flavor. The shake in the one before that managed to be both lumpy [i]and[/i] watery, but it also tasted like this same vague memory of flavor. Just. What the fuck? How? 

Everywhere she looks is too much and too little at the same time. The bricks and stones are featureless, shoddy slabs with paint that's too bright to have been ancient but too dull to be interesting. There are no frescoes or crumbling monuments or acts of artistry and intention, at least that she can recognize for these things. Everything, every building and every road and every outfit on every person looks and smells and feels (though she is too afraid to do more than brush her fingers across the corner of one restaurant on her way out, for fear of shattering it) like it was spit out of the same factory that made the sandwich in her hands. 

Omn was right about one thing, at least. She couldn't possibly pass as someone from this place for more than a minute or two. And even that only because of the exhausted malaise that seems to have settled on all the people walking down the streets. Dead eyes, listless faces, all turned in every direction except in front of them, looking past the day and into the doom or salvation they must imagine are lurking in the skies above. Or maybe just to the end of the day and collapsing into their equally tired square beds. Not that she can blame them if that's the case.

None of it is their fault. They're trying their best. But fuck. She thought at least the struggle to live a life free of the prison of Biomancy would have yielded [i]some[/i] kind of beauty for her to marvel at. But it hasn't. This place is a shithole. Fuck, this place is [i]the[/i] shithole. There's never been a bad thing she's had to say about any of the places beyond the wonders of Tellus that she'd even be comfortable applying here for fear of insulting all the deathtraps and trash heaps she's stepped over on the way here.

...You know, this would have been the ideal vacation spot to take Dany. Get that wanderlust out of her system in a nice, safe way. Then they'd have rushed home to watch movies and eat toast. Nothing could have worked its way up to being dangerous to her [i]here[/i]. Suddenly Bella has to hide her face in the crook of her elbow, because a grin has taken over her visage and its wholly inappropriate to the moment. She chokes with laughter she refuses to let build enough momentum to break into a full giggle. But gods. Gods. Gods! If she'd only known!

"Think they've got a museum at least?" she asks with a helpless shrug toward Dyssia, "A theater? A garden? A... gift shop? I dunno. I'd settle for a factory tour. I've seen some weird shit but I don't even [i]understand[/i]... this."

She waves the half-eaten sandwich in her hand. Her nose manages to wrinkle after all. Hera help her, why does she have to finish it?