Merchant Crab

Balthazar sat in front of one of Druma’s crudely crafted tables with a pensive expression, his right claw holding a cup of lemonade, while his silver pincer idly flipped a golden coin up in the air repeatedly.

The crab sighed. “Why did she have to put so many questions in my head?”

As much as he did not care for the affairs of adventurers and their pointless quests, after his encounter with the mysterious enchantress, new questions were burning a hole into his hard shell.

In his disregard for things that weren’t his pond, money, or pastries, Balthazar had somehow failed to notice nobody else who wasn’t an adventurer ever seemed to move up in levels. And once he finally began really giving it some thought, true concern slowly crept up within him. With shivers of discomfort from just considering it, he found himself having to ask the most horrifying of questions: did all of this mean he was now also an adventurer?

Balthazar downed the rest of his lemonade in one gulp, his mouth and eye stalks shriveling as he swallowed. This was not because of the lemonade being sour, as the crab had filled the cup with at least a dozen spoonfuls of sugar. It was merely a reaction to the thought of technically being an adventurer. A most awful and unacceptable prospect to a proud crab like him.

“I'm not going out there to do anyone's quests, that’s for sure!”

Playing with the coin between his pincers, he considered what little he knew. He had touched a strange scroll. It let him assign points into some arbitrary and simplistic stats, and now he gained levels from doing random things, and learned how to talk, or even read from pressing things with his eyes.

The crab did not know, in fact, much of anything.

“Ah, curses!” Balthazar exclaimed, pinching his coin. “Why is there no instructions manual for this stuff? None of the books I ever get mention anything about this either! If only there was some kind of a… I don’t know, tutor to explain it all!”

Looking down at the coin he was holding, the pensive crab considered whether it would be a wise move to prod other adventurers for answers.

It could mean finding out more about that strange and dysfunctional system, but it could also lead to some unwanted attention. How long could he avoid the subject of how he got it in the first place?

Also, the dead adventurer who was carrying the scroll.

And the dead wizard.

And the selling of their bodies to a necromancer.

There sure were a lot of things in his recent past that would be awkward to explain.

Everyone has done one thing or another they are not particularly proud of, so he figured it might be for the best to just keep the sordid details out.

Another problem was the fact that digging into something he knows nothing about could lead to unforeseen consequences. What if adventurers suddenly turned against him? He could lose his business, his money, and worst of all, access to baked goods. As frustrating as that whole system was, he still did not wish to lose some of the benefits that came from it.

Tired of his own indecision, Balthazar decided to consult with one of his closest and dearest friends.

Flipping his coin in the air one more time, he watched as it landed on the table. Heads and he would try getting more information about it all. Tails and he would shut up and enjoy what he already had in blissful ignorance.

He watched intently as the coin spun on the table surface, for what seemed like an eternity, his breath held in anticipation, until it finally stopped.

Balthazar stared at the side that landed facing up for a moment, realization washing over him.

“I don’t freaking know which side of the coin is supposed to be heads or tails!”

Throwing his pincers up in frustration, the angry crab left the coin on the table and picked up his cup, deciding to fetch another drink.

Picking a large lemon from a nearby basket, Balthazar looked around at his pond. His two assistants had stepped out to move off the side of the road the remains of the broken cart he had recently bought. The place looked so quiet, yet so much more chaotic than what it used to be, thanks to the plethora of junk he had amassed in the past weeks.

The crab slowly walked back to the table, still in deep thought about his recent life choices. As he placed the cup back on the table and prepared to squeeze the lemon over it, Balthazar realized the coin he had just flipped was gone.

Confused, he looked around the table and under it, but no signs of any currency lying around.

“Where in the—”

Suddenly, a sharp sound from nearby caught his attention. A raspy chattering that instantly irritated the crab.

With a quick turn, Balthazar spotted the source of the insufferable noise: a bird.

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Its body was barely larger than the lemon in his pincer, with a long wedge-shaped tail. The feathers were mostly black, with splashes of white on its back and wings. It stared at the crab with mockery in its tiny brown eyes, a shiny gold coin firmly held in its beak.

“No, you did not!” Balthazar exclaimed, disbelief mixing with outrage within him.

Angrily throwing the lemon on the ground and breaking into a mad dash, the crab charged towards the avian thief, pincers out for justice.

Unsurprisingly, the winged creature flew out of the giant crab’s reach and landed atop a shelf on the other side of the table between them.

“Get back here right now!” the irate merchant demanded.

As was to be expected, the bird did not oblige, continuing to side glance at him, coin still held high in its beak, producing a glint as the light of the sun hit it from above.

Flipping the table out of the way with his right pincer, Balthazar rushed at the creature again, but despite his considerable size for a crab, he was not tall enough to reach the top of the shelf. Muttering curses at the bird, he began vigorously shaking the piece of crude furniture with both pincers.

The bird shook side to side, up and down, almost as if dancing with the rhythm of the shaking, but did not fly away.

“Argh! You little…” Balthazar shouted, as he finally toppled the shelf, causing the small thief to flutter away once more, as the structure under it hit the ground with a loud crash.

The crab followed the bird with his eyes and watched as it landed on the floorboards at the end of the bridge connecting to the other side of his trading post.

“I will get you now!”

In yet another predictable turn of obvious events, the crab did not, in fact, get the bird.

Running through the footpath, Balthazar launched himself forward, claws stretched out into an ungraceful dive, but the creature flew up once again, and he landed face first in the dirt, his pincers snapping at nothing but empty air.

“You miserable thing!” he said, as he spat out bits of soil.

The coin snatcher cackled as it landed on a nearby table that stood in front of a few shelves.

Standing up with raging steps, Balthazar noticed a small fruit crate sitting empty on top of a shelf behind the bird.

A devious smile forming on his face, the mad crab slowly reached for a nearby sack and grabbed a turnip. Carefully aiming it with his dexterous silver pincer, he pulled back and flung the root vegetable not at the bird, but at the crate above it.

The creature watched as the thrown turnip flew far above it, and hit the crate perfectly, causing it to fall upside down off the shelf, and land perfectly on the thief, who unsuccessfully attempted to fly away in surprise, letting go of the coin that rolled off the side of the table.

“Thought you were smarter than me, didn’t you?” A smug Balthazar said, as he picked up the rolling coin coming towards him.

He peeked between the side bars of the wooden fruit cage, a small shiny brown eye looking back from the inside, followed by a squawk.

“That’s what you get, you little… whatever you are.”

Pausing for a moment, Balthazar remembered one of the books in the pile he had recently traded with an adventurer.

Looking through a shelf, he found it and pulled it out. A thick volume with a green cover, its front revealing it to be a book on ornithology. Balthazar had found that was the word for the study of birds from another book, a dictionary. He couldn’t recall in what book he had found what the word “dictionary” meant, however.

“Know your enemy, I say,” the crab indeed said, as he began paging through the book, looking at the drawings of birds on each page, trying to find the one that matched his prisoner.

“There!”

Pointing a pincer at one page, he looked back and forth between the drawing and the bird jumping around under the crate, visible through the spaces between the bars.

“Wait, this can’t be right,” Balthazar said, incredulous, as he read the text entry next to the image. “This type of bird is called a… magpie?! Who would name such a despicable thing with the same word as something so delightful as a pie?! That’s an outrage!”

With spite in his expression, Balthazar tossed the book aside. “Stupid bird lovers!”

Peeking between the bars, the magpie cackled once again.

“What are you laughing at, pipsqueak? You think this is funny?” the crab asked, with his arms crossed. “The book says magpies supposedly like to steal shiny things. Well, tough luck for you, my shiny things are not for stealing. You should try getting your shinnies the honest way, by looting them off some dumb dead adventurer, or something. Not from smart and sharp crabs like me.”

The bird continued looking at him with a mocking air, almost as if amused.

“Why are you so…”

With a sudden gut feeling, Balthazar looked across the pond, just in time to spot another magpie flying into his tent.

“The chest!”

Breaking into a frantic sprint, he quickly crossed the bridge towards the tent, despair running through him as he remembered he had left the chest open while gathering the pouches with payments from earlier to throw into it.

Arriving in front of the tent with a skid, the crab found the second bird perched on the side of the chest, quickly pecking between the gold coins.

“Shoo! Get away from there!” Balthazar yelled as he clumsily stepped inside the small cramped space, waving his pincers around and knocking boxes and bags as he moved.

The magpie fluttered and dodged the crab’s strikes as it tried to fly around in the small tent.

With a smack of his silver pincer, Balthazar knocked the other half of the thieving duo out of the tent. After a brief stumble, the creature flew up higher and out of the enraged crab’s reach.

“And stay away from my private chambers, you bastard!” he shouted, waving a clenched pincer at the fleeing feather ball.

Skittering his way back to the other side, Balthazar found the fruit crate flipped over and the other partner in crime gone.

To his surprise, the coin he had dropped in his hurry to protect his treasure chest was still there, untouched.

“Why was the other one digging through the coins, instead of stealing them?” said the intrigued crab. “What the hell did they want?”

The tired and battered merchant wondered for a moment, before concluding he would need to run a count of all his money again. Both to make sure it was all still there, and to help soothe his nerves.

The goblin and the golem arrived through the road entrance, one carrying a small stack of wood, and the other a broken wagon wheel.

“Boss,” said Druma, looking around at the mess of flipped furniture and thrown produce, “what happen?”

“Just… don’t ask questions and help me put everything back in place,” the out of breath crab responded. “I just found out there is at least one type of pie I hate.”