Pierre turned out to have more sense than his master, bringing Mug a tray full of bread and something that I hoped was giant boiled crab legs. Sure, I had never seen a black hairy crab before, but surely in this fantasy world I found myself in, it was possible, right? Mug had no such misgivings about the food and happily slurped the meat and munched the bread.
We had been taken to what seemed like a guest room. It was tiny, with a small mattress and desk and chair combo as the only furniture. The room was lit by lanterns; no mana-powered lights for Pauvert, unfortunately. In fact, the room was rather plain. Not impoverished, but not what I thought of as the house of a rich noble.
In fact, the whole house was like that. No real ornamentation, paintings, or statues. It was dusty, threadbare, and empty. There was no fleet of servants like at the royal castle, just one dusty old Pierre moving painfully slow. Pauvert had said that the troubles with silk harvesting were recent, but I wondered if that was the truth. Surely one bad year wouldn’t ruin landed gentry, especially since Pauvert was apparently important enough to have the king’s personal spirit lent out to assist. The math was not quite adding up.
Once Mug finished eating, he promptly crawled into the tiny bed and fell asleep, his snores nearly shaking the bedposts and dislodging dust. I don’t think that tiny frame making all that noise would ever stop amazing me. Although, I also didn’t think Mug would stay small for long. With every day we spent together, it became harder to pretend he was really a goblin. I hadn’t confronted him on it yet, but we needed to have a heart-to-steel conversation soon.
Mug’s slumber left me alone with my thoughts. Not for the first time, I lamented not being able to sleep. It was dreadfully boring being the only one awake with no video games or manga to occupy my time. Instead, I experimented with Telekinesis 1 to pass the time.
I first levitated a pen on the desk, then an Alchemical Recycled apple, before moving onto the lantern and ending with the desk itself. It seemed that the mana usage scaled with weight; the pen took hardly any mana at all to move, while the desk took a whopping fifty. My range seemed to be around ten feet or so, which was useful but not broken like I had hoped. I made a promise to myself to use Telekinesis as often as possible. I wanted it to level ASAP, seeing as I didn’t have hands.
After an hour or so of tossing and catching an apple to myself, I realized that I was well and truly bored. More bored than I had been so far. So bored that I was feeling something I hadn’t felt since the night I first learned to walk; I was feeling bold. I was also annoyed and feeling rebellious. Pauvert was the perfect amount of annoying to make me want to get some form of petty revenge, even if it didn’t really hurt him. Snooping around his stuff would kill time and let me feel like I was getting one over on him at the same time. I considered that it was probably unwise to be sneaking around my patron’s home; then I realized that it didn’t matter if I didn’t get caught.
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I Polymorphed to my mobile form, but added cotton rags to the bottom of my legs to silence the noise of my movement. Using Telekinesis to open the door, I began to creep in the darkness. I found myself in a long, narrow hallway. There were doors to either side, though most were open, showing rooms like the one we found ourselves in. At the end of the hall was one particularly ornate door; probably Pauvert’s room. I opted to go the opposite way, back downstairs. I had noticed what looked like a library or study while we walked up the stairs, and that seemed like a good target to start.
Creeping down the creaking stairs, I made it into the library, creating a lantern with Alchemical Recycling and levitating it above myself. There were large windows on the front of the house, but the twin moons were hidden by the clouds, and no light came in. The study was clean compared to the rest of the house; no dust, and with a large, comfortable couch underneath a sconce for reading. There was also a huge, wooden desk and matching chair. It was nice, like the kind a medieval CEO would have.
I made my way over to the desk, not really knowing what I was looking for. Sure, I would probably eat a few history books later if I spotted any on the walls, but something told me I needed to investigate. In my head, I heard Stelheim chuckling while saying, "Oh, very good Detective!" which almost made me stop out of general spite. Realizing how stupid I was being, I was just getting ready to return upstairs on account of how risky the whole endeavor was when I noticed a small trashcan tucked under the desk. A stack of papers overflowed from the trashcan, each with different, very official-looking seals and stamps.
Time slowed as I considered my next move. Surely it was better to just assume Pauvert was a busy man who had a lot of official paperwork and duties and contacts, and to cut my losses and go back upstairs until morning. Or… maybe, since I was a trashcan, it was my divine duty, or maybe even my right, to act as a receptacle for all trash? Like some Ur-trashcan, the trash of every other trashcan was also my trash, right? And it couldn’t be considered snooping to perform my function, could it? Maybe it was even less important sounding than that—a trashcan was full, so I would empty it. That made sense. Didn’t it?
It didn’t, but while I debated with myself, I also activated Telekinesis and dumped the whole wad into my opening. I didn’t devour, but I did use Appraisal 3 to read each paper individually.
They were… bills. Bills, invoices, and receipts. But mostly bills—overdue bills at that. Final notices, warnings, threats of repossession, foreclosure, and garnishment. Holy crap, Pauvert was flat broke! Judging by the letters, this had been going on for more than one season. This had to be years of debt collected into one trashcan.
The receipts were also interesting. I noticed there were lots of bills and notices from a recurring source. It had no name, but the seal on their letters looked like a tree with a hand reaching from the center holding onto a lightning bolt. There was also a receipt for something called an "Adaptive Guardian" from a company that had the seal of an eye wreathed in flame over a sword. It seems these two were the most expensive of Pauvert’s recent purchases, and the most persistent in trying to collect.
My curiosity satisfied, I replaced the letters and made my way back upstairs. Another layer to this mystery, but of course Pauvert’s financial troubles were his own, so there was no reason to worry about it too much. The only thing him being broke could affect was my finalized paycheck, but even then I’m sure there was some way for me to come out ahead on that.
For now, all I could do was sneak back into my room and wait for the morning.
