The Retired Abyss Innkeeper-Chapter 69: Adjacent Nothing Has a Usage Policy. It’s Posted Now

Chapter 69: Adjacent Nothing Has a Usage Policy. It’s Posted Now

I noticed the entity at table four had its fog extended toward Torvel.

About halfway. It just hung there. Not retreating. Not advancing either. The fog sat in the air like it had already answered and was waiting for the question to catch up.

Torvel looked at the fog. Then at the entity.

"What form of currency do you hold?" he said.

The entity’s shape wavered a little at the collar and shoulders. The clothes stayed put. Whatever was inside them seemed to briefly disagree with itself about how to be inside them.

The fog extended another inch.

That was still the answer.

I was at the counter checking the cauldron level. The early batch had been running since dawn, and I hadn’t checked the reduction since before the fares. I heard Torvel mention currency, which reminded me of a supplier I used to deal with. He had very strong opinions about barter. Theoretical ones, mostly.

"I had a supplier once," I said, mostly to the cauldron because it wasn’t going to interrupt me, "who believed equivalent value was the whole theory of barter."

I tilted the cauldron slightly to check the far side.

"Which is more or less right. But it leaves something out. He tried to settle a debt with a cartwright using three cords of dried rosemary once."

I adjusted the angle a bit more.

"Same market value as the wheel repair. If you moved it to the right part of the city. The cartwright didn’t need rosemary. Had no use for it. Wasn’t in the spice trade. They spent ten minutes agreeing on value and failing to agree on anything else."

I set the ladle aside.

"The rosemary just sat there between them. The cartwright saying yes, it was worth that. My supplier saying exactly. And neither of them figuring out why nothing was happening."

I straightened up a little.

"What they’d missed was that value has to be useful to the person in front of you. Not equivalent somewhere else. The rosemary could be worth something. It just had to be worth something to him."

I glanced toward the room.

"He sorted it eventually. Paid in coins. Sold the rosemary to someone who actually wanted it."

I looked up properly.

Torvel had gone still watching the fog. His fingers were no longer moving against his coat. He looked at his hand. Then he extended it.

The fog moved to him.

It moved the distance without either of them saying anything about it.

He turned the fog slowly in his palm. Both of his pointy ears angled toward it. About ten degrees. Like he was listening to something only it was saying.

He turned his hand once. Then again.

"A portion of your presence," Torvel said.

One of his associates turned a page.

"That’s an acceptable deposit on first account."

He held it there another moment. Studying it.

Then he put it in his coat.

Small inside pocket. The coat took it without any fuss.

"This is from before the present arrangement," he added. "Better than I expected."

"You’re welcome," the Walker said.

The voice came from somewhere in the middle of the twenty-five. It arrived below hearing and worked its way up. Perfectly timed to when Torvel put the fog away.

Nothing happened for a moment.

The Entity of Note at table six tilted its head slightly. Just a little. The kind of adjustment you make when the second thing doesn’t match the first.

Some of the twenty-five sharpened at the edges. The ones that had been working on their forms became briefly more definite.

A few of the newer ones blurred instead. Just slightly. Then they pulled themselves back together.

The Walker’s "you’re welcome" had landed in all of them and each one took it differently.

Torvel looked at the Walker for exactly one second.

Then he turned to the cart.

Adjacent Nothing.

I could see it between his hands as he held it out. A container. Except the contents were the edge of something that wasn’t there. You could tell it had a surface. The surface was the boundary of an absence.

That was the product.

The entity’s fog closed around it. The space went with the fog.

The entity used it immediately.

Right there at the table. Before Torvel even stepped back. Which I noted as a choice. It pressed its fog into the Adjacent Nothing.

The floor under table four did something.

The boards were still there. Structurally fine. Still doing what floors are supposed to do. But a section of them, about two planks wide, became legible in the wrong direction.

You could look at the floor and see what bordered the absence the entity had just introduced. And what bordered it was the absence looking back. The boards expressed it. The way wood expresses whatever it’s been sitting next to long enough.

"One note on usage," Torvel said.

Same tone as the fare pitches. Informative. Professional. He was looking at the board while he said it, like he was double-checking his own wording.

"Adjacent Nothing is not recommended for deployment in fixed-reality locations."

Bram set his jug down. He looked at the floor.

"The border properties have a tendency to express themselves in whatever surface they contact on first use."

Torvel glanced from the board to the floor.

"So exterior deployment is recommended. Open ground. Away from structures."

The floor was already doing it.

I looked at the floor. Then at Torvel. Then back at the floor.

"That," I said, "would have been more useful before."

"The usage notice is provided post-purchase," Torvel said. "That’s standard practice across all our product lines."

"Post-purchase," I said.

"Correct."

I went to the kitchen.

The bucket was hanging on the hook by the back door. I filled it from the pump. Then I went to the second shelf. The one for specific-use items.

I took down the brown glass bottle.

The woman who made it had been around a long time. She had opinions about floors. Strong ones. She’d based the formula on a theory that surfaces remembered what they’d been exposed to.

It wasn’t a correct theory. Not in any way I’d been able to verify.

But the formula worked. Especially on floors that had been through something.

I brought the bucket and bottle back out. Grabbed the stiff-bristle brush from beside the mop. Then I knelt by the section of floor that was currently adjacent to nothing.

I poured some of the solution into the bucket.

It mixed the way it always did. Sharp smell. Slightly better than lye soap had any business being.

"The woman who made this," I said, working the brush into the boards, "had a theory that surfaces remembered what they’d been exposed to."

I scrubbed along the grain.

"And that cleaning agents needed to address the memory instead of the substance."

I kept working it in.

"That’s not how it works. The mechanism is something else. But the formula she got from the wrong theory produces results the correct theory hasn’t managed."

I paused to wring the brush into the bucket. The water came up gray-brown.

"I tried explaining to her once that she’d reversed causation."

I set the brush back to the boards.

"She said three people had already made that argument. The formula worked every time. She stopped having the conversation."

The floor started coming back.

The boards settled into their usual orientation. The wrongness retreated from the grain first. Then from the edges of the planks.

Like a tide going out.

"Seemed fair," I said. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

I ran the brush along the last edge. It came back clean. I checked the corner. Fine. I wrung out the brush again. Stood up. Looked at the floor for a moment.

My knees were wet.

Behind me, Bram picked his jug back up.

I carried the bucket back to the kitchen. Put the brush where it belonged. Added the bottle to the list of things I needed more of.

The level had dropped. I didn’t like being low on things that fixed problems I didn’t want twice.

Then I went back into the common room.

I looked at the twenty-five. Then the Walker. Then the Entity of Note at table six.

"I need to ask everyone not to use anything from the cart inside," I said.

Warm tone.

"The building is quite present. Things that want to be adjacent to somewhere else tend to say so in the floor."

I glanced down once more. Still holding.

"I have a clause in the guest agreement for personal effects that cause environmental changes. Same principle applies to goods."

I checked the floor again.

It was fine.

"I’ll add a note to the board."

I went to the second chalkboard and wrote it out.

Adjacent Nothing. Underneath.

Exterior use.

One line. I underlined it. Then I put the chalk down.

The room went still for a moment.

The fog at the ceiling didn’t move. The lamp over table three stayed level. Nobody said anything.

The talkative one took a step toward the cart.

Just one step.

That was all at first.

Then two more from across the room. Unhurried.

Then three. Then four.

They moved like a tide that had already made up its mind.

The cart was doing business.

[SYSTEM LOG]

First transaction completed. Payment: portion of entity presence, pre-arrangement origin. Product: Adjacent Nothing, one unit.

Floor incident, table four: adjacency expression, resolved.

Usage notice added to specialty board. Exterior deployment only.

Sub-Walker entities, commerce: multiple, ongoing.