The tiny wooden gear felt unnervingly smooth in my pocket. A foreign object. A tangible piece of the puzzle I vehemently wished didn't exist. Ignore the moss. Ignore the gear. Ignore the lurking gnome-thing. That was the rational, retirement-focused approach.
Unfortunately, rationality seemed to have taken permanent vacation from this corner of the multiverse. And my own carefully constructed apathy was being eroded by unwanted curiosity and a vestigial sense of 'maybe letting primitive energy experiments run unchecked isn't ideal'. Annoying. Profoundly annoying.
The Dragon's Leaf tea, now tragically consumed, offered no further solace or insight. Just a lingering dusty aftertaste and the grim reality of caffeine withdrawal setting in again. My existence here was rapidly becoming a Sisyphean cycle of acquiring barely adequate tea, enduring waves of stupidity and weirdness, running out of tea, and then being forced back out into the madness to procure more. Rinse, repeat, forever. Or until the heat death of the universe. Whichever came first and was more mercifully final.
What was needed was a distraction. Something utterly mundane to focus on, to drown out the buzzing anxieties about cryptic clues and watchful blacksmiths. Reorganizing the rusty nails again? Contemplating the structural flaws of the opposite wall? Calculating the precise moment the Hero Cushion would spontaneously combust from sheer embroidered inaccuracy?
No. That all involved staying in the shop, stewing in my own recycled annoyance and potentially being cornered by the next villager seeking mystical tech support. A change of scenery was required. Not a pleasant change, obviously. This was Aerthos. Pleasant changes were statistically improbable anomalies, likely involving spontaneously generated kittens made of pure joy, immediately followed by ravenous space badgers.
But different scenery. Different air. Different background noise. Maybe a short, aimless shuffle around the outskirts of the village? Avoid the main square, avoid the tavern, avoid any location where festive futility planning might still be occurring. Just… observe some different weeds. Different crumbling walls. Different chickens pursuing different existential crises.
Decision made. Minimal Effort Excursion initiated. Pulled the door shut (didn't bother locking, the flimsy bolt was more symbolic than functional). Stepped out into the slightly-less-stale air.
Which direction? Not towards the market square (risk of encountering Gregor or needy villagers). Not towards the tavern (risk of residual meeting fumes and terrible ale). Not towards Widow Meadowsweet's shed (risk of accidentally observing pulsing crystal moss and being forced into responsible action).
That left… towards the creek. The direction of the infamous wobbly bridge. The one whose metaphorical strengthening I had inadvertently guided.
Maybe observing the practical results of applied metaphorical engineering would be… educational? A case study in quantifiable stupidity? A cautionary tale I could file away in my mental archives under 'Reasons Sentient Life Is Fundamentally Doomed'? Morbid curiosity, perhaps. Better than dwelling on anomalous gears.
I ambled along the dusty track leading out of the village proper. The sounds of Oakhaven – the hammering, the shouting, the lute-torturing – faded slightly, replaced by the gentle gurgling of Gurgle Creek and the chirping of insects engaging in pointless daytime activities. Almost peaceful. Suspiciously peaceful.
Reached the creek bank. Looked across at the bridge.
And stopped. Dead in my tracks.
Speechless horror wasn't an emotion I experienced often. Mild irritation, profound boredom, cosmic weariness – those were my defaults. But the sight before me… it transcended mere annoyance. It achieved a level of combined structural incompetence and offensively saccharine symbolism that defied all known laws of physics and good taste.
The bridge. My 'metaphorically reinforced' bridge.
They had actually done it. Followed Grumbleson's garbled interpretation of my blunt engineering advice. To the letter. The metaphorical letter.
The deck timbers weren't replaced with thicker planks. Oh no. Instead, nailed crudely across the existing, slightly warped boards were thin, unevenly cut pieces of wood inscribed with burned-in slogans. "Walk with Purpose!" declared one near the entrance. "Unity is Strength!" proclaimed another halfway across. "Mind the Wobble (Metaphorically)!" advised a third, alarmingly close to a visible crack. It looked less like a bridge deck and more like a self-help seminar exploded onto decaying lumber.
The diagonal supports, the crucial cross-bracing meant to resist shear force? Still loose. Still probably attached with rusty nails. But now, draped between them, connecting them with sagging inefficiency, were… ribbons. Brightly coloured ribbons. Red and blue, predominantly. Tied in floppy bows. "Bolted with Loyalty!" Grumbleson had apparently decreed. The ribbons fluttered feebly in the breeze, offering precisely zero structural support but maximum visual clutter. Loyalty, apparently, was flimsy and prone to fading in direct sunlight.
And the piers. The poor, abused vertical supports standing in the creek bed. Had they been reinforced with gabions? With stabilizing rocks? Of course not. Instead, arranged around their bases in precarious, decorative piles were… pebbles. Small, smooth creek pebbles. Lots of them. Patterned, possibly? It was hard to tell, as the creek's current was already actively washing some of them away. These were the 'ancestral memory stones', presumably. Held together by optimism and what looked suspiciously like ordinary mud. Protecting the foundations against the eroding tides of reality with the power of misplaced sentimentality.
It wasn't just wobbly anymore. It looked actively malicious. Like it was daring gravity to do its worst. It was simultaneously less safe than before and deeply, profoundly insulting to the principles of engineering, physics, and basic common sense across the entire multiverse.
I stared. Just stared. My snark processors temporarily overloaded by the sheer magnitude of the applied stupidity.
Then, adding insult to injury, someone decided to use the damned thing. Young Finnian, naturally. Ever the enthusiast, ever the victim of circumstance (often self-inflicted). He approached the bridge from the far side, humming cheerfully, apparently heading back towards the village after some minor (hopefully non-geologically-destabilizing) errand.
He stepped onto the first plank. The "Walk with Purpose!" plank. The entire structure groaned like a dying whale. It didn't just wobble; it swayed. The loyalty ribbons fluttered frantically. A few ancestral memory pebbles dislodged themselves and plopped sadly into the creek.
Finnian faltered. Looked down. Looked around. Saw me standing on the near bank. His face lit up. "Shopkeeper Bob!" he yelled across the swaying chasm. "Look! The bridge! Isn't it grand? So… meaningful!"
Meaningfully dangerous, perhaps.
He took another hesitant step. Onto the "Unity is Strength!" plank. The bridge executed a sort of shimmying motion, like a drunken jellyfish attempting ballet. More pebbles succumbed to the current. Finnian grabbed onto a loyalty ribbon for balance. It promptly detached itself from its nail.
"Whoa!" he yelped, flailing slightly.
I watched, impassively. Part of me, the cold, analytical part, calculated the trajectory required for him to land in the shallowest part of the creek, minimizing injury while maximizing damp humiliation. Another part just felt tired. So very tired.
Then, from the village side, Mayor Grumbleson himself appeared, bustling towards the bridge. "Finnian, my boy! Careful now! Tread upon the path of purpose with a strong heart!" he bellowed, apparently providing verbal encouragement in lieu of actual structural support.
He spotted me. Beamed. Waved enthusiastically. "Guardian Bob! Come to admire our handiwork? Built according to your profound wisdom! Strong in spirit, if a little… expressive in motion!"
Expressive in motion. That was one way to describe 'imminent collapse'.
I didn't wave back. Didn't speak. Just continued to stare at the disastrous confluence of metaphorical interpretation and shoddy construction swaying precariously over Gurgle Creek.
This bridge wasn't just a failure of engineering. It was a monument. A perfect, physical manifestation of everything wrong with this dimension. Its inhabitants' unwavering commitment to ignoring reality in favour of comforting nonsense. Their ability to twist practical advice into harmful absurdity. Their talent for making things actively worse through sheer, determined, well-intentioned stupidity.
Finnian, wisely, seemed to reconsider his crossing. He backed away slowly towards the far bank. Grumbleson, oblivious, beamed proudly at the ribbon-festooned deathtrap.
I turned away. Couldn't watch anymore. It was too painful. Too idiotic. Too… Aerthosian.
My aimless shuffle had brought me face-to-face with the literal consequences of my own reluctant interactions. Every word I spoke, every action I took (or didn't take), seemed destined to be misinterpreted, amplified, and ultimately result in something worse, stupider, or more dangerous than the original problem.
Avoid the bridge. Definitely avoid the bridge. Add it to the growing list of Oakhaven locations requiring active avoidance protocols. Along with Widow Meadowsweet's shed, the root cellar, the festival bonfire site, anywhere Gregor was holding court, anywhere Elara was currently mapping moss, and anywhere Borin might be lurking with anomalous artifacts.
The 'safe' areas of Oakhaven were shrinking rapidly. Soon, the only place left would be my own dusty shop. Which wasn't much of a sanctuary anymore either.
Maybe hitting things with the wobbly hammer was the answer. Starting with the loyalty ribbons. Then the ancestral memory pebbles. Then maybe my own head, just to see if I could reboot into a less irritating reality. Probably not. Knowing my luck, I'd just give myself a metaphorical concussion requiring interpretation by the village elders. Can't win. Truly, utterly, can't win.