The silence in the shop wasn't peaceful. It was charged. Tinged with the memory of Borin's penetrating stare and the echo of his parting words. "Try not to perform any more structural enchantments." Delivered dryly, weighted with unspoken suspicion. He was watching. Waiting. Cataloguing.
And I was out of tea. Utterly, completely, tragically out of tea. The last dusty remnants of the Dragon's Leaf were gone, sacrificed in a futile attempt to buffer my sanity against the twin assaults of metaphorical mayors and skeptical blacksmiths. The empty mug sat on the counter, a monument to my failure to secure adequate supplies in this beverage-forsaken dimension.
Contemplating a foray back to the extortionate general goods merchant felt deeply unappealing. Five silver pieces for a half-pouch of stale leaves? It offended my sense of cosmic thrift. My subconscious probability-skimming for loose change only reliably produced coppers, enough for basic annoyances, not imported luxuries. Generating five silver out of thin air (or rather, manipulating probability fields to 'find' it) required a non-trivial energy expenditure, disproportionate to the likely quality of the reward.
Perhaps… water? Just plain water? Hydration without flavour or caffeine? The thought was depressing. Water from the pump tasted vaguely of rust and despair. Water from the bucket tasted faintly of leaves, drowned insects, and atmospheric pollution. Neither option sparked joy. Or even minimal tolerance.
Maybe I just needed... quiet. To sit here, on the wobbly stool, surrounded by dust and decay, and simply exist. Embrace the inertia. Ignore the outside world, the rumours, the suspicions, the impending Harvest Festival idiocy. Let the universe happen elsewhere.
A viable strategy. Low effort. Aligned with primary retirement directives.
To facilitate this state of minimal being, a brief biological necessity beckoned. The privy out back. Another thrilling adventure in Aerthosian sanitation standards. A small price to pay for subsequent uninterrupted contemplation of nothingness.
With a sigh that disturbed dust motes that had likely been resting undisturbed since the previous occupant mysteriously vanished (or possibly just moved to a slightly less dilapidated shed), I shuffled towards the back door. The journey was brief, uneventful. The privy was… functional. In the loosest possible definition of the term. Let's not dwell on the details.
Mission accomplished, I returned, already anticipating the sweet embrace of undisturbed ennui. Pushed open the back door, stepped inside the shop, and froze.
Horror. Pure, undiluted, existential horror.
The shop… was different. Not drastically, not immediately obviously to an untrained eye. But different. Wrong. Disturbed.
Someone was inside. Humming. Humming. A cheerful, off-key tune that scraped along my frayed nerves like rusty nails on slate.
And dusting. With a rag. Purposefully.
Elara.
She hadn't just let herself in (the lock was rudimentary, probably bypassed with a hairpin and misplaced optimism). She had taken it upon herself to… improve things.
"Mr. Bob! You're back!" she chirped, turning from a shelf where she was arranging cracked pottery with terrifying focus. "I thought I'd surprise you! This place just needed a little… organizing!"
Organizing. She called this organizing. My carefully cultivated ecosystem of random entropy, my strategic placement of junk designed to repel casual interest and maximize dusty indifference – she had violated it.
She hadn't thrown anything out, thank the vacant voids. That would have been simpler, perhaps. Easier to repair. No, she had rearranged.
Where once there was a pleasingly chaotic pile of miscellaneous ironmongery, there was now… a graded display. Bent nails arranged by degree of crookedness. Rusty hinges grouped by apparent level of decay. Mysterious lumps of metal sorted by approximate weight category.
The shelf of chipped pottery, previously a testament to gravitational inevitability and butterfingers, was now organized according to what Elara presumably perceived as 'level of sadness'. The truly shattered pieces were clustered together like support group attendees. The merely chipped ones looked on with condescending pity.
Books, formerly stacked haphazardly based on 'when they were last moved', were now sorted by 'dust density', creating unsettling gradients of grey across the shelves.
It was horrifying. It was entropy disturbed by misguided enthusiasm. She hadn't reduced the chaos; she'd merely imposed a different, deeply illogical order onto it. An order based on whimsy, sadness levels, and dust gradients. My beautiful, restful, predictable mess was ruined.
"What," I managed to choke out, the word strangled by disbelief and rising panic, "have you done?"
Elara beamed, apparently mistaking my horror for awed appreciation. "Just tidying! Helping out! I figured, since you're so busy with… you know…" she winked, a gesture that promised further misinterpretations, "...structural enchantments and things, you probably don't have time for basic upkeep! A good apprentice helps their master, right?"
Apprentice? Master? Where did she even get these ideas? Had Gregor the Gregarious added 'Takes on Unwitting Apprentices for Mystical Dusting Rituals' to my fabricated biography?
"This isn't… helpful," I said, forcing the words out. I took a step towards the rearranged ironmongery pile. Picked up a particularly bent spike. Walked across the room. Placed it back in the other corner, where it had resided peacefully for weeks, possibly decades.
"Things," I stated, trying to keep my voice level, trying desperately not to resort to reality-warping tidiness enforcement, "had… specific locations."
Elara watched, her head tilted, eyes shining with mistaken understanding. "Oh! I see! Of course! Specific locations! Based on… subtle energy signatures?"
"Based on where I last dropped them," I corrected curtly, retrieving a 'moderately sad' piece of pottery and placing it back amongst the 'utterly devastated' shards where it belonged.
"Right!" Elara nodded eagerly, completely missing the point. "Dropped objects reveal alignment! Their landing points dictate their optimal energetic resonance within the shop's matrix! It's like… geomancy! But with junk!"
Geomancy. With junk. She was inventing entire schools of crackpot mysticism based on my random clutter.
"It's called 'not caring where things land'," I explained patiently, moving a stack of dusty books from the 'high dust density' zone back to the 'moderate dust density' pile it originated from. "A discipline I have perfected over millennia." Or at least, the last few weeks.
Elara watched my movements with intense concentration. My careful (read: annoyed and increasingly desperate) replacement of items back to their 'original' (read: chaotic and arbitrary) positions was clearly being interpreted as a demonstration. A lesson.
"Wow," she breathed. "Your precision, Mr. Bob! The way you handle each Artifact! You feel its connection to its proper resting place! It's not just tidying, it's… attunement!"
Attunement. To junk. Because I preferred my random mess to her categorized mess. The logic loops were making my head hurt. More than the lack of caffeine.
"Elara," I began, trying a different tack. Directness. Maybe shock therapy? "This is a shop full of useless, broken things. There are no Artifacts. There are no energy flows. There is no geomancy. There is only dust, disappointment, and the slow decay of unwanted objects."
I paused. Let the bleakness sink in. Maybe a dose of harsh reality would penetrate her relentless optimism.
She blinked. Then smiled. A radiant, understanding smile. "I know what you're doing, Mr. Bob."
Oh no.
"You're testing me!" she declared triumphantly. "Downplaying the magic! Pretending it's all mundane! To see if I have true faith! To see if I can perceive the wonder hidden beneath the surface!"
Faith. Wonder. Hidden magic. In a pile of rusty nails.
Defeated. I was utterly, comprehensively defeated. Not by logic, not by force, but by the impenetrable armour of unwavering, enthusiastic, reality-proof delusion. Arguing was futile. Explaining was pointless. Correcting her only reinforced her belief that she was uncovering deeper layers of my cryptic plan.
There was only one option left. Tactical retreat.
"I need… to check something," I mumbled, backing towards the small, damp alcove that served as a sort of storage closet/potential portal to a dimension of pure mildew. "In the back."
"Of course! Important mystical business!" Elara chirped, already turning her attention back to a collection of bottle stoppers she seemed intent on arranging by 'level of corkiness'. "Don't worry, I'll keep 'attuning' out here!"
I slipped into the alcove, pulling the warped door mostly shut behind me. Leaned against the damp wall. The smell of mildew and decay was almost comforting compared to the aura of weaponized positive thinking emanating from the main shop.
She was 'optimizing' my entropy. Imposing her baffling order on my peaceful chaos. And interpreting my horrified reactions as secret mystical lessons.
This couldn't continue. My sanity, already fragile, was cracking under the strain. I needed her out. Preferably permanently. But how? Asking her to leave would just be interpreted as another 'test'. Explaining the truth was clearly impossible.
Maybe… a quest? A task? Something to send her away? Something harmless, pointless, but time-consuming?
Find the legendary Snarkleberry bush, whose berries cure existential angst? (Might need some myself). Catalogue all the chickens in Oakhaven by 'level of indignant clucking'? Polish all the pebbles in Gurgle Creek until they achieved metaphorical enlightenment?
Yes. A pointless task. That was the only way. Buy myself some time. Some peace. Some desperately needed refuge from the relentless onslaught of cheerful, misguided helpfulness.
Now, to devise a task sufficiently mundane yet easily misinterpreted as deeply significant... My headache intensified. This required creativity. A faculty I generally preferred to leave dormant. Retirement was proving far more mentally taxing than managing collapsing realities ever was.