Balthazar sat in front of one of Druma’s crudely crafted tables with a pensive expression, his right cw holding a cup of lemonade, while his silver pincer idly flipped a golden 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 enter with the mysterious entress, 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 notiobody else who wasn’t an adventurer ever seemed to move up in levels. And once he finally began really giving it some thought, true slowly crept up within him. With shivers of disfort from just sidering it, he found himself having to ask the most horrifying of questions: did all of this mean he was now also an adventurer?

  Balthazar dowhe 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 rea to the thought of teically being an adventurer. A most awful and uable prospect to a proud crab like him.

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

  Pying with the between his pincers, he sidered 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 excimed, ping his . “Why is there no instruanual 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 expin it all!”

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

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

  Also, the dead adventurer who was carrying the scroll.

  And the dead wizard.

  And the selling of their bodies to a neancer.

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

  Everyone has done ohing or ahey are not particurly 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 sequences. 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 bes that came from it.

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

  Flipping his in the air one more time, he watched as it nded oable. 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 ily as the spun oable surface, for what seemed like ay, his breath held in anticipation, until it finally stopped.

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

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

  Throwing his pincers up in frustration, the angry crab left the oable and picked up his cup, deg to fetother drink.

  Pig a rge 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 retly bought. The pce 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 ihought about his ret life choices. As he pced the cup ba the table and prepared to squeeze the lemo, Balthazar realized the he had just flipped was gone.

  fused, he looked around the table and u, 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.

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

  “No, you did not!” Balthazar excimed, disbelief mixing with e 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 read op a shelf oher side of the table between them.

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

  As was to be expected, the bird did not oblige, tinuing to side g him, still held high in its beak, produg 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 siderable 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 dang 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 u hit the ground with a loud crash.

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

  “I will get you now!”

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

  Running through the footpath, Balthazar unched himself forward, cws stretched out into an ungraceful dive, but the creature flew up once again, and he nded 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 snatcher cackled as it nded on a nearby table that stood in front of a few shelves.

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

  A devious smile f on his face, the mad crab slowly reached for a nearby sad grabbed a turnip. Carefully aiming it with his dexterous silver pincer, he pulled bad 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 nd perfectly ohief, who unsuccessfully attempted to fly away in surprise, letting go of the 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 ing 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 retly traded with an adventurer.

  Looking through a shelf, he found it and pulled it out. A thie 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 diary. He couldn’t recall in what book he had found what the word “diary” 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 ohat matched his prisoner.

  “There!”

  Pointing a pi one page, he looked bad forth between the drawing and the bird jumping around uhe crate, visible through the spaces between the bars.

  “Wait, this ’t be right,” Balthazar said, incredulous, as he read the text entry o 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 e!”

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

  Peekiween the bars, the magpie cackled once again.

  “What are you ughing 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 shihe ho way, by looting them off some dumb dead adventurer, or something. Not from smart and sharp crabs like me.”

  The bird tinued looking at him with a mog air, almost as if amused.

  “Why are you so…”

  With a sudden gut feeling, Balthazar looked across the pond, just in time to spot anpie 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 sed bird perched on the side of the chest, quickly peg between the gold s.

  “Shoo! Get away from there!” Balthazar yelled as he clumsily stepped ihe small cramped space, waving his pincers around and knog 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 khe 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 ched pi the fleeiher 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 he had dropped in his hurry to protect his treasure chest was still there, untouched.

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

  The tired and battered mert wondered for a moment, before cluding he would o run a t 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 ba pce,” the out of breath crab responded. “I just found out there is at least oype of pie I hate.”