The daisy stared at me. Accusingly. Yellowly.
I stared back. Impassively. Grumpily.
This fragile piece of botanical ephemera, offered with baffling sincerity by the girl-child Elara, represented a Problem. Not a goblin-level Problem involving misplaced olfactory worship, but a subtle, insidious Problem involving implied social contracts and the unwelcome tendrils of… niceness.
Niceness was inefficient. Niceness led to entanglement. Niceness was, fundamentally, annoying.
My primary directive – the only directive I currently acknowledged – was Maximum Attainable Inertia. Doing nothing. Being nothing. Preferably somewhere nothing ever happened.
This daisy, however, demanded action. It couldn't just be left wilting on the counter like a forgotten casualty of war. That would be… well, it would probably make Elara sad next time she popped in with another dose of unsolicited cheerfulness. And while her sadness wasn't my direct concern on a multiversal scale, dealing with sad, well-meaning locals ranked high on my List Of Things More Annoying Than Supernovas Disrupting Naptime.
Therefore, the daisy required containment. Preservation. Minimal effort preservation, naturally, but preservation nonetheless.
It needed a vessel. Water. Basic life support for photosynthesizing organisms. A task so mundane it was practically insulting.
I surveyed the curated disaster zone I called my shop. Potential candidates for 'Vase Duty' were scarce.
Option A: The Chipped Mug. Sturdy, readily available. Currently occupied by three very confused-looking woodlice who had presumably mistaken it for luxury apartment living. Evicting them seemed like unnecessary micro-management. Let them enjoy their ceramic delusions of grandeur.
Option B: The Old Inkwell. Cracked, as previously noted. Attempting to contain water within its fractured structure would likely result in a miniature, localized flood event. And then I'd have to deal with damp. Damp led to mould. Mould led to spores. Spores led to complex airborne particulate issues requiring atmospheric filtration adjustments I simply couldn't be bothered to implement on a subconscious level right now. Too much work.
Option C: A Small, Slightly Dented Tin Beaker. Sitting forlornly amongst a pile of bent cutlery. Possibly once used for measuring something. Or perhaps alchemy. Or maybe just holding pencils. Its history was as murky and uninteresting as everything else in this dimension. But crucially, it looked structurally sound enough to hold water without immediate catastrophic failure.
Decision made. Tin beaker it was. Operational cost: Minimal relocation of nearby clutter. Acceptable parameters.
I retrieved the beaker. It felt cool and vaguely sticky. I resisted the urge to analyze the stickiness on a molecular level. Ignorance, in this case, was almost certainly bliss. Or at least, less disgusting.
Next phase: Water acquisition.
The shop's plumbing, as established, was less a system and more a series of semi-connected leaks collaborating towards eventual structural collapse. There was a rusty pump out back, drawing water from a well of questionable potability. The very thought of operating its squealing, protesting mechanism filled me with a level of existential weariness usually reserved for attending galactic council budget meetings.
But the daisy... it waited.
Fine. Minimal excursion. Minimal effort. Maximum complaining (internal, naturally).
I shuffled towards the back door, the floorboards groaning under my borrowed weight like tortured souls. Honestly, the structural integrity of this entire village was suspect. One decent gust of wind, maybe a slightly enthusiastic sneeze, and the whole place could realistically collapse into a pile of poorly-maintained timber and thatch.
The back door creaked open, protesting its disturbance. Outside, the air was... breathable. Mostly oxygen and nitrogen, trace amounts of airborne disappointment and livestock emissions. Standard Aerthos atmosphere.
The pump stood there. A monument to rust and inconvenience.
I grasped the handle. Cold. Unyielding.
With a sigh that could curdle milk across spacetime, I began the arduous process. Up. Down. Squeak. Groan. Protest. More squeaking. Was it deliberately trying to be annoying? Probably. Everything on this planet seemed to possess a low-level, malevolent sentience geared towards maximizing irritation.
Finally, a pathetic trickle of brownish water emerged from the spout. Looked vaguely like disappointment distilled into liquid form. Hopefully, the daisy wasn't fussy about water quality. Given its origins (plucked from the wilds of Oakhaven, likely dodging cow pats and existential despair), it probably had low standards.
I filled the tin beaker. The water sloshed listlessly. Good enough. Minimal viable hydration achieved.
Mission accomplished. Time elapsed: Approximately three minutes. Energy expenditure: Non-trivial. Annoyance level: Elevated.
I shuffled back inside, cradling the beaker like it contained unstable antimatter. One wrong move and I'd have disappointment-water all over the floor. Adding damp to the already considerable list of shop-related grievances.
Back at the counter, I carefully placed the beaker down. Then, with the delicate precision usually reserved for adjusting the orbital paths of rogue comets, I inserted the daisy.
It drooped slightly, seemingly unimpressed by its new accommodation. Ungrateful weed.
But… task complete. Obligation met. The tyranny of the daisy had been temporarily appeased. I could now return to my preferred state of observing dust motes and contemplating the inherent flaws in carbon-based lifeforms.
Except… no. Of course not. Why would the universe grant me even five minutes of uninterrupted inertia?
Footsteps. Heavy ones this time. Accompanied by the faint, unmistakable scent of compost and… indignant poultry?
Farmer Hemlock filled the doorway. A man whose face seemed permanently etched with the lines of agricultural worry and chronic turnip-related disappointment. He clutched a squawking chicken under one arm. Brunhilde, presumably, looking ruffled and deeply offended.
"Bob," Hemlock grunted. Not a friendly greeting. More of an accusation wrapped in a single syllable.
I responded with my signature conversational gambit: silence. Combined with an expression carefully calibrated to suggest I was calculating the precise heat death dynamics of his chicken.
Hemlock stomped inside, Brunhilde letting out a series of protesting squawks that grated on my auditory receptors. "My compost!" he declared, jabbing a dirt-encrusted finger towards the general direction of his property. "It's… it's been desecrated!"
Ah. The unintended consequences of divine sausage revelation. Predictable, really. Primitives rarely handled sudden shifts in olfactory theology well.
"Goblins," I stated, offering the simplest, most convenient explanation.
"Goblins?" Hemlock scoffed, adjusting his grip on the indignant Brunhilde. "Aye, goblins were skulking about! But this… this is different! They're worshipping it, Bob! Worshipping my prize-winning blend of manure and kitchen scraps! Chanting! Making… offerings!"
He shuddered. "Someone found a perfectly good sock near the epicenter! A sock, Bob! As a holy relic! What kind of madness is this?"
A fairly standard kind, actually. I'd seen civilizations worship far stranger things. Sentient teapots. Perfectly spherical rocks. Bureaucratic forms filled out in triplicate. Socks were practically mundane by comparison.
"Odd," I offered, aiming for non-committal neutrality.
"Odd?" Hemlock exploded, startling Brunhilde into another furious clucking fit. "It's chaos! They trampled my prize turnips! They've built some sort of… muddy shrine! And the smell! It's drawing flies from three villages away!"
He glared at me, suspicion narrowing his eyes. "Mayor Grumbleson says things went strange right after you moved in. Says Oakhaven's got… protection, now. Like you put up a lucky charm."
The sheer, unadulterated stupidity of it all was almost breathtaking. Linking my desire for quiet with a compost-centric goblin cult. The logical leaps involved were worthy of a hyper-dimensional acrobat.
"Just run a shop," I repeated, gesturing vaguely at the surrounding junk. My universal denial of involvement.
Hemlock wasn't buying it. Or maybe he was just looking for someone, anyone, to blame for the theological crisis currently unfolding in his backyard.
"Something's not right, Bob," he muttered, scratching his chin. "First the goblins vanish like smoke, now they're praying to pig muck. It ain't natural."
He looked around the shop, his gaze falling on the daisy, now sitting forlornly in its tin beaker prison. His eyes widened slightly.
"That flower," he said slowly. "Picked near my fence line, wasn't it? Where the… the smell seemed to start?"
Oh, for the love of collapsing nebulae. Was he seriously suggesting the daisy was responsible? That this innocuous yellow weed was the focal point for reality-warping olfactory phenomena?
The absurdity circuits in my borrowed brain threatened to overload.
"It's a flower," I said, enunciating each word carefully, as if explaining particle physics to a particularly dense rock. "Given. By Elara."
Hemlock squinted at the daisy. Then back at me. Then at Brunhilde, who squawked agreement, or possibly just protested her continued confinement.
"Right," he said slowly, drawing the word out. He clearly didn't believe me. He probably thought the daisy was some sort of complex arcane focus, disguised as simple flora. Maybe Elara was my unwitting magical delivery agent. The theories primitive minds could concoct were endlessly, depressingly inventive.
He shook his head. "Well, whatever's going on, it's spooking my chickens." He hefted Brunhilde slightly. "And when Brunhilde's spooked, nobody in Oakhaven sleeps easy."
A truly terrifying prospect. Chicken-induced insomnia. The horror.
"Just… keep your… luck… to yourself, Bob," Hemlock muttered, backing out of the shop. "Some of us prefer things predictable. Even if predictable means goblins stealing turnips now and then."
He disappeared, leaving behind the faint aroma of outrage, compost, and terrified poultry.
I looked at the daisy. It seemed to wilt slightly under the weight of baseless accusation.
This was getting out of hand. My attempts at non-intervention were somehow being interpreted as active, albeit bizarrely specific, magical interference. First protective village spirits, now compost-cult instigation via passive-aggressive flower placement.
Maybe wiping all my memories would have been better. Just reverted to primordial ooze somewhere quiet. Less paperwork. Definitely fewer interactions involving chickens and misguided farmers.
The beaker gleamed dully in the gloom. The daisy drooped.
Retirement. Bliss.
Yeah. Right.
I needed more tea. Stronger tea. Tea capable of dissolving existential dread and the lingering scent of goblin devotion. Finding that on Aerthos seemed about as likely as finding intelligent conversation.
Bloody flowers. Bloody farmers. Bloody retirement.