It takes awhile. It’s one thing to say you’ll find a transportalizer; it’s another thing to actually do so. That’s one of the downsides of living such a transient lifestyle, you guess.
So perhaps it’s a little unexpected, by the time you start to unload your backpack onto the pad and send things through, one useless junk item priceless heirloom at a time. You never actually get the go-ahead from your contact, nor do you ever actually ask for it.
The first thing you send is a bookend with a bronze finish, which you know to be fake because it definitely doesn’t have a metal’s weight to it. It looks real good though; it’s some variant on a cholerbear, with four arms up to brace the books and two legs planted firmly on the base.
You realize the irony in trading a bookend for a book, but aren’t gonna bring it up yourself.
Just in case that’s not enough, you also send through a decorative plate with only one chip in the side, right through where the grimly painted lowblood and her lusus were about to hand an unknown item to the unknown troll to their left. The paint’s fading and the carvings are worn smooth in places, but you can make out most of the daisy chain of trolls. It’s tasteful, you think, with your limited knowledge of art -- it’s just too bad you don’t have a stand for it.
You throw in a gambling coin, too. Nobody you know uses those because they don’t have any real worth, but some of them have neat symbols and make good conversation pieces. This one has a knife on one side and a shield on the other.
You figure that will probably be enough. You pick your bag up again and retreat to a safe distance to wait for your share in return.