Merchant Crab

John had arrived early in the morning for another day of work at the pond, and Balthazar observed him from nearby, a pincer tapping on his chin, wondering what the old man’s secret was.

The crab may not have known much about building things, he had never even put any points into the carpentry skill because he knew they would be a waste without hands and fingers, but even he knew things don’t just pop up into existence and fully formed out of nowhere.

Balthazar felt as though he was missing something, and he was not a crab to let details evade him. His senses were too sharp. He couldn’t let things go over his head. Not a chance he’d ever let something go unnoticed.

Casually dusting off a table near the fence, the merchant kept glancing at the carpenter through the corner of his eye, trying to spot anything unusual, but all the seasoned handyman did appeared perfectly normal.

He’d put his toolbox down on the table, he’d calmly open it, select his required tools, and carry on doing everything without so much as a hint of a rush to him. Yet, how did things always get done so quickly while Balthazar was not around? The question plagued the crab.

For the fifth time that morning, he looked at the carpenter through the Monocle of Examination.

[Level 16 Veteran Carpenter]

And just like each of the other times, the text said the same.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the man, at least that the crab could spot.

“So what is your secret, old guy?” Balthazar muttered to himself, while absentmindedly hovering his feather duster over some statuettes on a shelf, doing nothing to actually clean them.

The woodworker picked a few nails out of the box and moved to the edge of his worktable, a hammer firmly held in his hand. With his smoking pipe in one corner of his mouth, he held three nails between his lips in the other, while his left hand pointed a fourth down on a piece of wood and began hammering it down.

The crab attentively observed as he picked another nail from his lips and repeated the process.

Balthazar wanted to absorb every detail until he could spot something out of the ordinary, even if he understood next to nothing about woodworking.

He did not know exactly what the man was doing, but as far as he could tell, he was hammering those nails pretty well. What that would achieve, however, was beyond the crab’s understanding.

The bell by the entrance rang, startling Balthazar from his pretend dusting.

“Damn it, not now!” he complained to himself, as he tried to continue peeking at John between crates and tables while moving away towards the entrance.

“Good day, sir crab,” an older lady greeted as he reached the front of the trading post.

“Yes, yes, hello. What do you need? I need to get back to my… dusting,” Balthazar said, barely looking at the woman, his gaze still trying to peer through the obstacles between him and the working area.

“Oh my, I did not mean to intrude on your housecleaning,” said the lady with an apologetic smile. “I didn’t know crabs did dusting, but that’s very nice, dear. A clean house is very important.”

“Right, but what about what you came here to trade? Can we get to that?”

“Oh, of course, silly head of mine,” she said, hurriedly opening her purse and digging through it for something. “I need some alchemy herbs. I have a list of their names around here somewhere.”

Balthazar tapped his foot impatiently. Slow clients always seemed to have a way to show up at the worst times, be it when he’s about to close for the day, or while he’s trying to spy on a hired worker.

Not that the latter happened all that often.

“Ah, here we go, found it,” the woman said, pulling a piece of yellowed paper from her purse. “Oh wait, no, that’s not it. This is a receipt for an umbrella I left to repair. I should really go pick that up soon.”

The crab’s eye stalks sagged in desperation.

“I know I put it here this morning,” she continued, while rummaging even deeper into the purse. “Found it! This is the one. Let’s see then, what was it I needed…”

The elderly lady raised her eyebrows as she stared down at the paper and her hand patted around the area between her neck and chest, as if trying to grasp something. “Where did I leave my glasses?”

Balthazar exhaled sharply. “Right there, on top of your head!”

“Oh, goodness! Silly me,” she exclaimed with surprise as her hand went up above her forehead and brought the thick black rim glasses down onto her nose, their thin chain that looped around her neck rattling as she put them on.

The crab looked anxiously to the back of the trading post, torn between his curiosity and his love for making coin.

“I need some…” The woman held the paper further and then closer to herself, struggling to make out the writing on it. “Peppermint leaves. Do you have some of those, dear?”

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“Peppermint, peppermint,” Balthazar repeated, hurrying to one of his shelves and shuffling through its contents. “Yes, here are some. Anything else, lady?”

“Let me see,” she said, looking back at her list. “What about… ginger? I need a bit of that, too.”

“Ginger?” the skeptical merchant said. “I’m pretty sure I don’t have that at the moment, sorry.”

“Oh, bother! Well then, what next… parsley?”

“Pars… Lady, what the hell kind of alchemy are you doing that requires parsley?” the exasperated crab asked.

“And also some… butter?” the confused woman continued, her eyes running down her list. “Oh, goodness gracious! This is my groceries list. I must have picked up the wrong paper before I left earlier.”

Balthazar’s eye twitched as he took a long, deep breath.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” the elderly lady said with an apologetic expression. “This is clearly not a grocery shop. I’ll have to go back and find my other list. So sorry to have wasted your time.”

“No… problem… at all,” the shaking crab muttered, doing his best to contain an outburst of frustration. “Please come again.”

Holding the most forced of smiles, he side-walked away.

As soon as the crab was out of the exiting woman’s sight, he rushed back to the build area which had only been hidden behind a few crates and shelves that whole time.

“I better not get there and find the whole thing already built again!”

As he reached the fence, he found everything looked the same. John was hammering away at some nails, Druma was vigorously sawing logs, while Bouldy picked up larger pieces of wood onto his shoulder to move them.

Everyone looked busy, despite no actual visible progress being made.

“Highly suspicious,” Balthazar whispered.

The more he observed the whole thing, the bigger his suspicions grew that something was not adding up.

Skittering away from the platform, the disbelieving crab decided to try a new test approach. He grabbed his spyglass and climbed up to one of the nearby boulders, settling down in a half hidden position behind the cover of the stone.

“Let’s see what happens when I’m not around,” he said, while looking down the lenses.

Through the spyglass, he watched as the three workers continued on doing the exact same tasks they were doing before.

The human hitting the nails with his hammer. Why he would need so many nailed pieces of wood to build a support beam was something the crab could not answer.

The goblin was sawing away at a log. For all Balthazar knew, the log still looked to be the same one he had been sawing the whole time, with no progress on splitting it actually being made.

And the golem was shouldering yet another trunk to drop in a different area nearby. Weirdly, the two piles of wood did not seem to have changed size no matter how many times the giant rock moved them.

“What the hell is going on here?” the puzzled crab said, bringing the spyglass down from his eye.

Something was clearly amiss there, but he did not understand what. For a moment, he nearly questioned his own sanity, but his ego quickly assured him he was too smart to be going insane, and that was all the crab needed to be convinced.

That left few other options. Either it had to do with the new factor in the equation, John, or something else was the cause of the weird events. And there was only one thing Balthazar always associated with strange things happening: his strange system.

He brought the spyglass up in front of his monocle and peered through it once more.

Scanning through the group, he saw nothing anomalous. Everyone looked and registered the same as before. Not even any strange errors like the system had thrown at him a few times before. It was all normal. At least as normal as a talking crab watching people through a spyglass can be.

A low growl caught Balthazar’s attention from behind.

He looked back at the ground behind the boulder and found Blue standing there, looking up at him with a raised brow.

“What? Weren’t you napping?” he whispered to the drake, despite the others being far enough away to not hear him had he spoken at a normal volume.

The winged creature’s response was to climb the boulder herself, trying to get on the same vantage point as the crab.

“Hey, ouch! Watch it! What are you doing?!” Balthazar said, struggling to remain atop the rock as Blue’s wings bumped against his face.

As she reached his level, she scanned the view in front of them, likely looking for anything interesting.

“Are you happy now? Get down already, you’re not letting me see!” the crab complained.

Clearly unsatisfied yet, the young drake leaned further to look down under the boulder, and then up, determined to figure out what the crab was observing.

“Ow! Watch the tail!” he exclaimed, as one sudden turn of her body knocked Balthazar off the boulder and onto the ground behind it.

“Damn it, blue! Why do you have to be so nosy?!” the irritated crustacean said, propping himself back onto his eight feet and shaking the dirt off his golden shell. “Don’t you know it’s bad manners to be snooping on what others are doing?”

Picking the spyglass off the ground with his ironic claw, Balthazar walked around the boulder and looked over the trading platform.

“No!” he exclaimed in a mix of anger and disbelief.

Across the way, behind the fence and boxes standing between, the crab could see the top of another support beam standing where the trio was working.

“I barely looked away for a few moments! It can’t be!” he argued to himself, as he rushed around the platform.

Balthazar turned the corner and saw the new pillar perfectly placed in the corner, base buried under the ground, supports firmly built at the bottom.

Druma and Bouldy cleaned up the remaining bits of wood around, while John sat down on a nearby stump, readjusting his smoking pipe to a more relaxed position at the front of his mouth.

“There ya are,” he said, seeing the crab. “Perfect timing. We just got done with another beam. Should be able to get started on the roof proper by tomorrow.”

“Perfect timing?!” the upset crab repeated. “There was no ‘timing’ here! How?! How are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” the old man asked in a calm manner, but with an eyebrow raised at the crab’s questions.

“This! One moment there’s nothing built yet, not even in the process of getting it started, and then, just as I go away one moment, I look back the next and the whole thing is completed. No in between phase! Just all done in the blink of an eye! How?!”

“Crab, I don’t know what you’re talking about there,” said the carpenter, leaning forward on the stump, one hand on his knee and the elbow bent outwards. “What I know is that your fellas and I did some long, hard work here and built you a fine pillar for your roof, and instead of being appreciative, you’re running in here babbling on about who knows what.”

“I… but… you didn’t… I was…” Balthazar mumbled.

“You don’t strike me as a bad fella,” John said in a calm manner, “but I think you rile yourself up too much. You need to learn to sit back and take it easy. Especially when the going isn’t easy. Don’t try to control everything, you can’t. Accept some things are outside your control, or your understanding. Take life as it comes. Just the advice of an old man who’s be around for a while, that’s all.”

The crab threw his arms down in defeat. The old man’s wisdom would have been fine under normal circumstances, but those were far from that, at least for Balthazar. Problem was, he seemed to be the only one finding something wrong with what was happening.

Was the carpenter in on it, or just some other unwilling part of whatever was going on? Was it in some way related to whatever was broken with the damnable system? Or was there someone—or something—playing tricks on him?

The crab did not have the answers, and he was finding it harder and harder to just ignore the questions.

He needed answers, and there was only one person he could think of asking.

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