Lying low. That was the plan. Simple. Elegant. Required minimal effort. Just stay inside the dusty confines of Bob's Bits & Bobs, become one with the junk, and wait for the storm of Gregor's heroic hyperbole to blow over. Like waiting out a particularly loud, irritating thunderstorm filled with flying pigs and ten-foot-tall goblins.
It almost worked. For a while.
The sounds of Gregor's storytelling faded as evening drew in. The market crowds dispersed. Oakhaven settled into its usual nocturnal rhythm – the distant howl of something vaguely canine, the occasional drunken shouting from The Soggy Bottom tavern, the incessant chirping of insects that seemed genetically engineered for maximum annoyance.
Inside the shop, relative peace reigned. I successfully avoided confronting Gregor. Avoided making eye contact with passing villagers who might have started viewing me with newfound awe (or possibly suspicion, depending on which parts of Gregor's tales they latched onto). Avoided Elara, who was presumably still diligently mapping moss by moonlight, possibly assigning astrological significance to different lichen varieties.
I even managed, through sheer willpower and intense focus on the probabilistic void where misplaced currency tends to accumulate, to 'find' three silver pieces and a handful of copper that had apparently slipped down behind a loose floorboard sometime in the distant past. Not the full five silver needed for the Dragon's Leaf, but a start. Progress towards caffeine independence. A minor victory against the universe's apparent anti-tea agenda.
Maybe things were looking up? Maybe Oakhaven's capacity for generating fresh annoyance had finally been exhausted for the day? Maybe I could actually enjoy a few hours of undisturbed contemplation about dust mote trajectories?
Foolish optimism. A rookie mistake I should have known better than to make after eons of observing sentient life. The universe, particularly this low-resolution corner of it, abhorred a vacuum of irritation. It always found something.
It started subtly. A low hum. Not the cheerful humming of an entropy-disturbing apprentice. A deeper, more resonant hum. Barely audible at first. Like faulty electrical wiring. Except Oakhaven didn't have electrical wiring. It barely had coherent plumbing.
The hum grew. Slowly. Insidiously. Vibrating through the floorboards. Making the dusty pottery on the shelves rattle gently. It wasn't loud, but it was pervasive. Getting under the skin. Scraping along the nerves.
And it felt... familiar.
Then came the lights. Faint flickers, visible through the grimy shop window, emanating from the general direction of... oh no. Not again.
The old root cellar.
The one near the edge of the village. The one previously home to noisy rats and phosphorescent fungus. The one whose 'eerie echoes' I had supposedly silenced with a 'sigh of ancient wisdom' (read: minor acoustic frequency dampening).
Apparently, my 'fix' hadn't been permanent. Or perhaps the local belief in its mystical significance had somehow recharged whatever mundane phenomenon was actually causing the disturbance. Belief could be a surprisingly potent force in dimensions with lax reality enforcement protocols. Sometimes, if enough people believed a root cellar was haunted, it started acting the part, purely out of spiteful compliance.
The humming intensified. The flickering lights became more pronounced, casting strange, dancing shadows across the nearby cottages.
Then came the panic.
Shouted voices. Doors slamming. A general hubbub rising from the village square. Figures running, silhouetted against the flickering cellar-light.
"It's back!"
"The haunting! Worse than before!"
"Did Bob's enchantment wear off?"
"Someone fetch the Guardian!"
Guardian. Right. That was me. Guardian of Dimly Lit Junk Piles and Reluctant Acoustic Adjustments.
They were coming. Of course, they were coming. Because when things went bump in the night (or hummed and flickered eerily from a hole in the ground), who else were they going to bother? The turnip farmer? The lute torturer? Gregor the Gregarious, purveyor of secondhand heroism? No. They were coming for the grumpy hermit who accidentally stopped the noise last time.
My first instinct: Barricade the door. Pretend to be inanimate. Hope they gave up and resorted to pitchforks and prayer circles, neither of which would likely affect rats or fungus.
Too late. Heavy pounding rattled the flimsy door. Accompanied by frantic shouting.
"Bob! Guardian Bob! Open up! The cellar! It's awake!"
It was Grumbleson's voice, naturally. Laced with genuine terror this time. Not the manufactured panic of council incompetence, but the raw fear of peasants confronting perceived supernatural phenomena.
Resignation washed over me, cold and bitter like stale tea. There was no escaping this. Ignoring it would only fuel more speculation, more heroic narratives from Gregor ("Bob communed with the spirits from afar!"), and probably result in them breaking down my door, requiring more repairs and unwanted interaction.
Minimum Effort Path: Go there. Identify the mundane cause (again). Apply a slightly more robust mundane fix (if possible). Endure the inevitable misinterpretations. Retreat.
With a sigh that contained the condensed weariness of ages, I unbolted the door. Grumbleson nearly fell in, eyes wide, face pale in the flickering light filtering from the direction of the cellar. He was flanked by a handful of other villagers clutching makeshift weapons – pitchforks, rusty axes, a particularly large frying pan. The Oakhaven rapid response anti-supernatural brigade. Pathetic. Terrified.
"Bob! Thank the stars!" Grumbleson gasped. "You felt it? The disturbance? The... the resonance!"
Resonance. The word I'd probably used myself when internally critiquing the cellar's acoustics. Had someone overheard? Or was it just another case of convergent stupidity?
"Heard humming," I admitted flatly. "Saw lights."
"It's the entity!" whimpered a villager holding the frying pan like a shield. "Come back for vengeance! Angered by the silence!"
Angered by silence. Right. Because spectral entities famously hate quiet environments. More likely angered by the return of the rats, or a particularly vigorous bloom of glow-in-the-dark mould.
"We need you, Guardian," Grumbleson pleaded. "Your power! Your wisdom! Last time, you silenced it with but a sigh! Do it again! Banish it!"
They genuinely believed I had banished a ghost by sighing. The threshold for 'proof of magic' in this village was practically subterranean.
Arguing was pointless. Explaining fungal bioluminescence and resonant frequencies would be interpreted as arcane technobabble, further proof of my powers. The path of least resistance involved playing along, minimally.
"Fine," I grunted. "Let's look."
The villagers practically parted before me like the Red Sea before Moses, albeit with more trembling and nervous clutching of farming implements. They followed at a safe distance as I shuffled towards the cellar entrance, the humming growing louder, the flickering lights casting grotesque shadows.
The cellar entrance yawned, darker than the surrounding night, save for the pulsing, greenish light within. The hum vibrated in my teeth. Definitely stronger than last time.
"Careful, Guardian!" Grumbleson squeaked from behind me.
I ignored him. Stepped down the rough stone steps into the cellar. The air was damp, earthy, smelling strongly of disturbed soil and... ozone? That was new. Ozone usually indicated electrical discharge or specific chemical reactions. Not typically associated with rats or fungus.
The source of the light wasn't just the patches of fungus this time. Tendrils of faint, greenish energy seemed to be arcing between... something... in the centre of the cellar. The humming emanated from there.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom. In the centre wasn't just disturbed earth. Someone had dug. Recently. And placed something there. A collection of smooth, dark stones arranged in a specific, repeating pattern. Geometric. Almost… familiar.
The energy arced between the stones, pulsing in rhythm with the hum. The phosphorescent fungus seemed agitated, glowing brighter in response to the energy field. The rats? Nowhere to be seen. Probably had more sense than the villagers and evacuated when the weird energy field manifested.
This wasn't rats. This wasn't fungus (not just fungus). This was… deliberate. Someone had created this phenomenon. Those stones. That pattern. It tickled a memory fragment from the vast archives I tried to keep suppressed. Ley line geometry? Harmonic resonance focusing? Primitive attempts at tapping background energy fields?
Why would someone do this? Who knew enough to even try something like this in Oakhaven? Widow Meadowsweet, maybe? Unlikely to be this… energetic. Gregor? No, his talents lay in fabrication, not actual manipulation.
Then, the image flashed in my mind. The creepy, gnome-like creature. Observing me. Pointing at the dust from the sign repair. Nodding. The creature that seemed interested in… things others overlooked. Like maybe patterns of energy? Or nodes of weak reality?
Was this its doing? An experiment? A calling card? A way to test my reaction?
The humming intensified, making the stones vibrate visibly. The air crackled. This wasn't just ambient background field tapping; this felt unstable. Like a poorly built capacitor about to discharge catastrophically. If this blew, it could… well, probably wouldn't level the village, the energy levels were too low for that. But it could cause localized reality distortions. Strange weather. Unpleasant psychic phenomena. Mass hysteria (more than usual, anyway). And definitely attract the wrong kind of attention, cosmically speaking.
This required more than acoustic dampening. This required shutting it down. Carefully.
"Guardian?" Grumbleson called tremulously from the entrance. "What is it? Is it angry?"
"It's… unstable," I called back, choosing my words carefully. "Needs to be… calmed."
I focused. Not on the humming or the lights, but on the pattern of the stones. It was amateurish. Flawed. Creating dissonant harmonics that were stressing the local spacetime fabric (in a very minor, pathetic way, but still). The fool who built this didn't understand resonance buffering.
Subtle adjustments. Minimal energy expenditure. Focus on disrupting the flawed symmetry. Introduce chaotic nodes into the harmonic pattern. Encourage energy bleed-off into harmless background radiation rather than resonant amplification. It was like detuning a badly strung instrument using focused reality tweaks.
The humming faltered. The arcing energy flickered, sputtered. The light dimmed. The ozone smell faded. The stones settled back into being just… stones. The agitated fungus calmed down, its glow returning to a faint, ambient level.
Silence descended. A deep, profound silence, no longer tinged with ominous humming.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. Primitive energy manipulation. Annoying. Potentially hazardous. Definitely requires follow-up (like figuring out who the gnome-thing was and why it was playing with reality capacitors in my designated retirement zone).
"It… it stopped!" Grumbleson exclaimed from the entrance, awe replacing fear in his voice.
"Just… settled down," I grunted, turning to leave the now merely damp and fungal cellar.
I climbed the steps back into the night air. The villagers stared at me, faces illuminated by torchlight (someone had thought to bring torches, a minor miracle of preparedness), expressions a mixture of relief and profound reverence.
"You did it, Guardian!" shouted the frying-pan wielder. "You calmed the spirit!"
"Incredible!" whispered another. "Not even a sigh this time! Just… silent power!"
Gregor the Gregarious, who had apparently materialized at the back of the crowd, was already taking mental notes, his eyes gleaming. I could practically hear the gears turning, fabricating a new chapter: "Bob confronts the Resonant Horror! Calms the raging energy vortex with naught but a steely gaze and silent command!"
Wearily, I pushed through the throng of awestruck villagers. Ignored their questions, their thanks, their offers of dubious protection (the frying pan again). Shuffled back towards my shop.
The creepy gnome-thing. The energy field. This wasn't just random annoyance anymore. Someone, or something, was actively doing things. Things that intersected with my presence here. Things that required intervention.
My retirement was officially cancelled. Replaced by… involuntary paranormal investigation and cleanup duty in a dimension running on superstition and bad engineering.
And I was still out of tea. This was shaping up to be a truly abysmal eternity.