LOTTERY DISCOUNTZ HAD now spent enough time loitering just above the lower reaches of the trading pit to give his owner a loose understanding of how it all worked. He’d been foxed, at first, by the fact that T’Rain was wired for sound. The easiest way to communicate with characters in one’s immediate vicinity was simply to talk. But there was, in addition, an old-school chat interface. You could type little messages, like the Internet pioneers of yore, and they would appear in scrolling windows on the screens of anyone who was listening. It was plainly the case that Marlon and the rest of the da G shou couldn’t live without it. So the next time Csongor focused his attention on the money-trading pit, he experimented with turning on the chat interface. For one thing he’d noticed about the place was that, for a trading pit, it was strangely quiet. It was visually loud, and ridiculously active, but almost no one was speaking.