Setting the Mob

-->

The tea shop sat at ground level, just under the shadow of the four hundred story Io Half Moon Business Complex, a colossal hollowed dome of steel and plexcet that loomed over most of downtown Zhangmuz. From where they sat it looked like an exquisitely carved glacier adorned with cloud sized gargoyles, sprawling battle scenes, and Escherian geometric shapes in which figures could be seen moving through the lower levels like motes of smartdust. From other districts it appeared as a massive tidal wave, a glass hand, an iridescent beetle carapace, or, apropos its namesake, the mottled surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon complete with a projection of its sulfuric plasma torus that arched over the entire city's diameter and upward into the tropopause.