Merchant Crab

Ever since he could remember, the crab had despised birds. Annoying, petulant little creatures that had a habit of making lots of noise which disturbed his napping, that would fly by and try to steal his food, and sometimes even have the gall to dirty his home by using it as their fly-by bathroom. He had no love for those feathered menaces, and were it not for them being so fast and able to fly away, he would haven often given them a good snap to show it.

And now, there stood one of them, casually saying they needed to talk.

“Did… did you just speak?” a bewildered Balthazar said.

“Yes, yes, the bird spoke, the crab talks,” the crow responded, rolling his beady eyes. “Honestly, I’d think by now you wouldn’t be so surprised by that sort of stuff anymore.”

Balthazar’s mind raced to make sense of the situation. He did not know what was going on, but his gut told him that nothing good could come from a bird. It also told him he was quite hungry, but that part would have to wait.

Out of habit, he squinted at the crow, trying to get a read on its level and what it might be, until he realized he no longer had his monocle, which had shattered during the dragon’s rampage.

He tried discreetly stepping around the fire pit, but as he attempted his first step, he found that leg rooted in place. He tried another, but the same thing happened. And then another and so on, until he realized all eight of his legs could not move.

“The hell…” the crab said with a grunt, looking down as he tried to move, with no success.

“Yeah… sorry,” the crow said, cocking its head. “Like I said, we need to talk, and knowing you, I figured you might try to do something dumb, or just, you know, walk away while I’m talking. Don’t worry, it’s not permanent.”

“What did you do to me?! Let me go!” Balthazar demanded, raising his voice as he continued trying to walk, but his legs refusing to give way.

He glanced at Blue on the other side of the fire pit, still peacefully sleeping on her pillow.

“Oh, don’t you worry about her,” said the bird, following the crab’s gaze to the drake. “She won’t be interrupting us, either. I made sure of that. Let her have her rest.”

“What the hell do you want from me, bird?” Balthazar spat with anger.

“That, actually.”

The crow hopped down from the edge of the fire pit and approached the toppled chest Balthazar had recovered from his now buried hiding hole.

The dark bird eyed the rolled piece of parchment sticking out of the container and the crab’s eyes widened. “You leave that alone. It’s mine!”

“Oh?” said the crow, giving Balthazar a side glance. “Except it isn’t, right?”

The bird raised one wing, and as if commanded by an invisible force, the scroll rose from the chest and gently floated to its caller, hovering in front of the small creature with a faint glow and a low humming the crab had not witnessed since the day he first found it next to that dead adventurer, so many moons ago.

“You have no idea the amount of trouble this old Scroll of Character Creation has given us,” the crow said. “We’ve been trying to get it back for so long, but could never quite get it the proper way. I’m sure you remember my colleagues. The magpies? Yes, that was a bit of a debacle, I admit. Unfortunately, circumstances forced us into the more direct approach, and well… here I am.”

“Thieves!” Balthazar exclaimed, stretching his pincers out and swinging them wildly as he tried to reach for the bird from his frozen position. “I always knew you birds were bad news!”

The crow frowned. Not a frown of someone who is offended, or even angry, but simply annoyed.

“You do realize most birds aren’t… well, like me, right? They are just regular birds, nothing nefarious about them. This form you see here is just a way to blend in and do our job unnoticed.”

“What do you mean, your job?” asked the crab, his arm flailing gradually slowing down to a full stop.

The bird sighed.

“I guess there was really no need to worry about you finding out too much after all. Look, I’m not here to deliver you answers to every question in the world or anything, but I suppose the least you deserve is a bit of context. It’s the least I can do, given this whole mess you stumbled your way into.”

With a small hop, the crow turned to face the crab.

“Myself and others like me, we’re… caretakers, of sorts. Entities entrusted with the task of keeping this world running smoothly. When something goes haywire, we sort it out. Your little stunts, while they were negligible at first, they clearly have grown out of control, given this whole dragon situation you started.”

“Caretakers? Entrusted? By whom?” Balthazar asked, confusion and a thousand questions spinning around in his shell.

“Look, I told you, I’m not here to give you the answers to things you’re not supposed to know, but I suppose all you need to know is that this,” the crow spread its wings wide open, “this whole thing, this world you live in, has a creator. He created everything you see around us, he created me, he even created you. He made this whole place as a haven for others who came from the same place as him, and shaped it after his favorite things, stories, myths, legends, from his own wishes and dreams. A place he and others like him could live out their best adventures and forget the woes that came before… well, before they found their way here.”

The crow exhaled and deflated as it closed its wings.

“I’m digressing, sorry. You wouldn’t really get it, and this is probably going into details you don’t need to know about. The point is, we all have a role to play. Yes, including you. You were just meant to be a little crab who lived by a pond and did… crab things, I don’t know! The problem is that the… adventurers, as you know them, sometimes go around poking where they shouldn’t and breaking this delicate thing we have going. You following me here?”

The crab blinked a couple of times, but did not answer. He was, in fact, not entirely sure he was following.

“The scroll, Balthazar. The scroll! Locals like you weren’t meant to get their hands… well, pincers, in this case, on something like that. Especially not an old relic like this one. But you did, and then wild things start happening because of it. The effects are unpredictable, but they start worming their way in, like a bug in one of your beloved pies, you know what I mean? And well, first it’s just the odd coincidence, like a giant spider out of season, then some pack wolves where they shouldn’t be…”

Balthazar’s eyes widened. He had always wondered how the things he sometimes would make up while trading with adventurers just happened to turn out to be real. Could he really have somehow caused them? And more importantly in that moment, was he in trouble, if so?

“Well, er, that… uh… that was all—”

“And eventually we get a huge red dragon appearing at a time where they shouldn’t be around. You see the problem here?”

“Hey, wait a minute, that wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make the dragon up, that was the stran—”

“The point, Balthazar,” the crow interrupted, raising its voice, “is that while it was just small, inconsequential things, we would let them slide, try to smooth things over. But dragons are world changing events. Our creator is busy, very busy, and it’s part of our job to make sure he doesn’t have to deal with the menial tasks. Since the discreet approach was clearly not working and things are escalating, we decided to intervene, before this nuisance caught our creator’s attention. So, here I am. I hope you understand none of this is personal. You’re just kind of making a mess we can’t keep ignoring.”

Balthazar stared at the bird, baffled and still trying to process the flow of confusing and cryptic information.

“So you’re blaming me for a bunch of stuff I didn’t even know about, and now… what? What happens next? Are you going to kill me or something?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing so nefarious,” said the crow with a quick dismissive flap of its wing. “We wouldn’t do that. You’ve grown too popular among the adventurers. They’d surely hate to see you gone and would raise a lot of questions. No, we’d prefer to take a more tempered approach. First, let me see what I’m working with here…”

The so-called caretaker made a sharp movement with its wing and the floating scroll unfurled itself in the air, much like it had when Balthazar first used it.

To the crab’s surprise, rather than being blank like it had been ever since that day, the piece of parchment was once again glowing with line upon line of glyphs that the bird perused with great interest.

“Holy hell, this thing is old,” it finally said, after much examination. “Ancient, even. This must be from the first ages. Back when we only had finished adapting the system to a maximum of 15 levels. Can you imagine that? Crazy.”

Balthazar’s confusion only grew by the minute. “Wait, what do you mean?”

“Really, pretty impressive that you even reached that level, with no fighting or exploring, just from bartering alone. What a grind. Hah! This takes me back! The days when we only had three stats. And they barely affected anything back then, compared to now.”

“You… you mean to tell me this whole time I’ve been putting points into Intelligence it was for nothing?”

“I mean… sort of? You were already pretty smart for a crab. The stat was only a very minor multiplier to it, but really, back then, it was basically just used to scale magic. I can’t believe this whole time you didn’t even dabble in spells a little bit. You could have been the first wizard crab in the world!”

The crow double checked something on the scroll before turning to Balthazar again.

“Although you wouldn’t be able to wear a cool wizard hat. Can you believe back then we hadn’t even finished making headgear compatible with non-humanoids yet? Ha! Simpler times.”

Balthazar’s thoughts were spinning in a turmoil. Had all of his progress been a fluke? Had he been part of some kind of cruel joke of destiny? Were crabs supposed to be able to wear hats now?

“No way!” exclaimed the amused crow, scanning through the scroll again. “This is from back when we completely screwed up the Infusing skill. Infusions wouldn’t wear out, it was so broken. Glad we fixed that since then. Although that made it so nobody takes up that skill anymore. Shame.”

Balthazar’s confusion was turning into frustration.

“Hey, bird, I’m sure you’re having lots of fun there, but I’m still standing here, stuck. If you’re going to peck me to death or whatever, just come at me already.”

“Alright, alright, relax,” said the bird. “I told you, nobody’s dying. We’ll just have to make some adjustments to stop your little stunts, lest they grow too big. We really don’t want our creator getting distracted from his mission.”

“Mission? What mission?” Balthazar asked. “What is the point of all this? What’s with all the cloak and dagger, the memory hazing on the adventurers? What are levels for? What happens if someone finally reaches level 100?”

He had reached his tipping point. He had tried ignoring it all, disregard it, tell himself he didn’t care, but he had enough of it all. No matter how much he didn’t want any more trouble from that stupid system, it kept getting in his way, and now he finally wanted to know the truth.

He remembered the enchantress, Ruby, and how right she apparently was. He only wished he could have learned more from her when he had the chance.

“Woah, easy with the questions, bud,” the bird said with a patronizing chuckle that made the crab’s frustration boil even more. “I told you, some things are just not for you to understand. I probably shouldn’t even be telling you as much as I already did, but I figured it can’t hurt. I doubt you’d be able to really do anything problematic, especially after we sort you out here.”

“What the hell do you mean with sorting me out, you—”

The crow waved a wing casually while looking at the scroll and Balthazar’s mouth shut itself, making him unable to speak, no matter how hard he tried to open it.

“Seriously, enough with the chitchat, I got other things to tend to,” the bird said. “We’re going to remove your access to the system, levels, and so on, because clearly a crab can’t be trusted with this kind of ancient backdoor into the world’s system. We will, however, in a gesture of good will, let you keep some of your skills and your intellect, so that you can continue talking, reading, and being a nice attraction for the local adventurers who seem to have grown so fond of you. Isn’t that nice?”

The crab made angry muffled noises through his sealed mouth.

“Yes, of course it is. Now, I promise this won’t hurt at all. Just stand still for a moment.” The smug crow glanced at the crab. “Not that you really have a choice.”

Focusing his dark, beady eyes on the scroll, the crow clapped its wings together and a strange cold feeling washed over Balthazar.

It was not pain, but it still felt uncomfortable, like something quickly draining out of him.

Suddenly, rows of text ran past his vision before rapidly fading away.

[Reassigning selected skills]

[Reinstating attributes]

[Retrieving experience]

[Removing levels]

Balthazar’s eyes widened, and he protested in muffled yells.

It was like he was being robbed and powerless to stop it.

A numbness grew outwards from within him and another line appeared.

[Resetting Upgrades]

The crab wanted to scream in horror, but his sealed mouth denied it to him as he watched his pincers and shell rapidly shedding their iron, silver, and gold finishes, quickly returning to their original form of bland and gray chitin.

Finally, one last line appeared before the system fully disappeared from his vision.

[System shutting down…]

“All done!” the cheerful bird announced as the scroll rolled itself back and fell to the ground, lifeless once again.

The muffled noises had ceased. Balthazar was just staring at the feathered fiend with pure anger in his gaze.

Not just because there was a bird in front of him anymore, but because that creature had taken something away from him. Perhaps something he didn’t always fully appreciate, but something that was his and that he had earned. Stupid or not, those levels, attributes, and skills the system had given him were his to complain about, not for some stinking bird to swoop by and steal.

“Oh, come now,” the manager said with an infuriatingly amused expression. “Don’t look at me like that. This will be for the better, you’ll see. I’ll be going now. My work never ends out there. Don’t worry, the paralysis will wear off in a few seconds. Farewell, Balthazar.”

Without so much as another glance back at the crab, the crow flapped its wings and took flight, snatching the scroll in its claws as it flew up, its midnight plumage quickly vanishing amid the darkness of the night sky.

Just as soon as the sound of its wings faded, the crab fell on his shell, released from whatever was freezing him in place.

He grunted and stood back to his feet slowly, his eye stalks curved in a frowning expression, pointed at the moonless sky above.

“Now you’ve really pissed me off, bird.”