The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 9: Shelves, Seals, and Spirals

The front room of the house was an absolute mess of half-way built empty displays, scavenged tables, and boxes of stock. Axel was standing amidst the pile of store things, attempting to puzzle out the instructions for setting up the various shelves or racks. At least, he was pretty sure the thing he was currently struggling to put together was a shelf of some sort.

With a jangle of keys in the lock, Morimoto shouldered his way through the door. "How's it—" He walked around the wall that sectioned off the small entryway and stopped short. "Oh. That good, huh?"

Axel snorted, well aware how the room had fallen apart during the course of his attempted set up. By this point quite exasperated, he said simply, "Yes. Help?"

"Naturally," Morimoto replied, wading into the mess without even bothering to put down the box he had carried into the house with him.

Which was just what they needed, really: yet another box to deal with.

In answer to the unasked question, the blacksmith popped open the box and let him sneak a peak. It was an old faded blue cash register, clearly secondhand—or maybe even fifthhand, based on the gentle scuff marks from long use—but it looked to be in working order.

"Figure'd you'd need one of these," he explained, setting the box down by his feet. "But we'll deal with that later. What're you having issues with?"

Handing over the sheet of unhelpful instructions, Axel just shook his head in that way that was both annoyed and too tired to be annoyed. "I can't read."

Morimoto, as he scanned through the list of steps, offhandedly remarked, "You can read, just not everything." Then, with a grin, he added, "Not yet, anyway."

"Why are there so many characters?" Axel groaned to himself, thinking of the positively exhausting number of symbols from various syllabaries—kanji, katakana, hiragana—that he'd need to practice into fluency. To distract himself from that inconvenient truth, he knelt and started sifting through the stack of unmade shelf bits for a specific piece.

Joining him in shoving any unrelated mess to the side—scraps and empty boxes and even the newish old cash register got pushed away—Morimoto began laying out the pieces they would be needing. Some of them, Axel noted, were things he had thought to be completely unrelated. Clearly, getting the older man's help had been the right decision.

(To himself, Axel despaired that he couldn't put a simple shelf together without assistance.)

With help translating each step into something he could understand, the shelf finally began to take form. The shelves themselves had adjustable angles so that the goods on display could be seen and reached easier, but that threw him for a loop when he accidentally attached one end to be significantly steeper that the other.

He briefly wondered just how stupid he must be to still mess up something so simple even with help, but that thought, having apparently been said out loud, just earned him a reprimanding smack from Morimoto.

"Stop that, Axel," the blacksmith chided. "You just set the shelf crooked, it's not like you broke anything."

"For now."

With a displeased look that said he had very much considered another smack, Morimoto flipped a page in the instructions and they turned back to work.

Before they could continue construction, however, there were two sharp knocks at the front door. Axel, who was at that very moment elbow deep in shelf-building, shared a look of confusion and curiosity with his instruction-reading companion. Smacking the crooked shelf panel onto the desired pegs—meaning it was no longer crooked at all—Axel dusted off his hands and straightened back up to standing.