The saltsmith had no real capacity to question if such blatant requests for equipment were smart or if they threatened the saltsmith’s very existence.

Their awareness was too low to see all the social faux-pas they were committing – namely creepily stalking the humans – and their altered charisma was dismally low too. This world did not operate upon the same parameters as their old world did.

Charisma did not mean solely charm and sociability. While a high charisma did attract good or bad attention, a low charisma lent itself to being overlooked, to being forgotten or simply dismissed by others.

Babies started at charisma 5 to prevent their caretakers from forgetting to tend to them, but as they grew up into kids, teenagers, adults, a person could drop their charisma lower through certain actions.

It was to a spy or a thief’s benefit to have a low charisma. If people didn’t care to remember them, it made them harder to track and capture.

But, for your regular, everyday person? A low charisma – especially paired with a low awareness – could result in social ineptitude.

Awareness was the ability to perceive the world around you, yes, but it was also the ability to process non-verbal cues and body language, the ability to see a crack slowly forming in a log bridge and decide that maybe you shouldn’t put your entire body weight on it.

Low charisma and low awareness combined to make the saltsmith forget how to be human, how to interact with the world outside of the unblinking, eerie stare that they couldn’t control. Perhaps they knew in the back of their mind that disturbing the people in the settlement was bad, but that thought never occurred before they managed to do another queer thing, only after.

So, the saltsmith left the charcoal-drawn requests out for the carpenter with the hope of better equipment so they could be of more use.

That was the entire crux of the saltsmith’s existence.

They wanted to be used.

How long had they spent upon this soil so far? And not a drop of human interaction to their name. In the weeks of their awakened existence, the saltsmith had come to terms with the idea that they were no longer a person.

It went beyond lacking humanity into lacking personhood.

The belief was one truly held by the saltsmith as they grappled with this new world and the implications of a system in control of everything. It challenged religious concepts that permeated their prior life and directly questioned what humanity meant.

There were teachings to be kind to your fellow man, to love and support your neighbor, but what bearing did those have on a world with magic and dragons?

The underlying message was simple – be kind, be generous, be thankful. Yet, where did the saltsmith lay on the scale of kindness, generosity, and gratitude?

Akin to humans? No. They couldn’t talk, couldn’t relay any emotions. Their face was a metal cast, a death-mask of an eerie smile. How could the saltsmith expect others to see a parade lantern and treat it the same as a child, an elder, a friend?

Then, what about animals? Beasts of labor? Those were tenuous property of people, beasts to be treated well because it was right to do so, especially as they served a purpose and had no understanding of what human cruelty meant.

The saltsmith was not a beast; they understood what was happening, could understand language and interpret complexities.

Then, were they a ghost? Did that fall below beasts on the scale? A grave and the dead interred underneath were to be given honor and respect, yet the saltsmith was both a graverobber and non-living, a shade who resorted to puppeteering around bones.

That was an unkindness, disrespectful and well-worth exile in most communities.

What did that leave for the saltsmith? They remembered mechanical clocks with little people and animals who were paraded out on the hour, dancing and performing their tasks. That felt more accurate to the saltsmith’s station, as demeaning as it may be.

They were a blacksmith in life, so they should be a saltsmith after death.

These contemplations were self-deprecating, certainly, but the saltsmith did not recognize the nature of their own justifications.

These were illogical reasonings of someone trying to find their place in the world. A noblewoman trapped in her household may call herself a songbird in a cage; a blacksmith lacking in humanity would, of course, identify with the hammer more than the hand holding it.

It didn’t hurt to name themselves a tool to be used, but it did put words to a slow-consuming longing that sunk deep into their mind.

The longing for camaraderie was an impossible urge to solve, that was for certain. No skill in this world could make them into a human without destroying who they were currently.

The saltsmith did not wish for a second death.

With transformation of thought came a subtle transformation of need. Perhaps camaraderie was out of their reach, but someone to serve? A person – or place – to dedicate this queer life to?

That was achievable.

And so, the saltsmith requested an anvil, a crucible, a ladle. Ingot forms could be made with sand and resin, and from there everything else would bloom. The lake provided adequate quenching. There was plenty of firewood available, coal from the deep underground.

A new skill from their saltsmith subclass allowed them to maintain temperature within a small range around their body. It affected fires, as far as the saltsmith’s experimentation showed, but the text implied that it could maintain ice and cold as well.

Forming the hammer head was easy once the crucible arrived. Though the saltsmith could have simply requested a hammer, it felt satisfying to cast it with the melted ore and scraps of iron.

What surprised them was that impurities in the metal added to the quality of the tool if, and only if, the saltsmith made it. While they removed as much slag as possible, the system informed them that the hammer produced had enough pyrite content to qualify for a bonus to the production of defensive items.

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Once the hammer was completely finished, it shimmered as if placed into intense heat. The sides developed a cubic quality, as if pyrite crystals were slightly jutting out. Not enough to interfere with work, but a good visual note of this hammer’s special bonus.

The saltsmith spent a while admiring the crystalline growths before turning to their work.

They didn’t fear the clanging attracting the sleeping humans. For what the saltsmith knew, the people in the settlement across the lake had to use torches and magical lights to move about at night.

They would catch a flicker of light rounding the lake before anyone snuck up on them.

So as soon as all their equipment was set up – with trenches dug in the dirt for ingots, a few logs rolled into place as a stand for the anvil and a table for their tools – the saltsmith got to work.

Farrier work required nippers to pinch off the excess hoof, but also hoof knives and picks, and a rasp to clean it all.

The saltsmith requested the rasp as it would be irritatingly difficult to make by hand, as would the nippers until they upgraded their equipment, but a hoof knife and pick? That was a simple task.

They were entirely unaffected by fire and heat, so no tongs were necessary. Though the smith did not curse or use expletives in their daily life – or when they were alive, at least – they complained internally about forgetting to request oil. It was necessary to finish off the products so that they wouldn’t rust.

It would have to wait; it was too risky to steal at the moment.

When they could, the saltsmith spent a few minutes every other hour associating with the horses and the livestock. They limited their access at night so the animals wouldn’t be too upset, but it was necessary for the time being.

They needed the beasts to be less reactive, if they wanted their hooves trimmed and cleaned. Well, they didn’t want the treatment, but it was needed. The saltsmith didn’t know when a farrier would be by this new settlement, and a few of the goats looked like they were overdue.

It was too risky to work during the day, so the saltsmith gathered ores and expanded their map as carefully as possible.

At night, however, they puzzled over how to remove a horse hoofprint from their lantern head without entirely dismantling it and potentially dying.

They had multiple hands wedged inside their own Jack O’ Lantern – trying to hold a rounded piece of metal against the thin shell so they could hammer it – when their awareness 6 alerted them to approaching light.

The 6 apparently meant sixty feet, as the saltsmith barely had anytime to scramble away before the first humans pressed past the thick overgrowth of bushes and conifer trees.

A smoldering fire greeted them; the saltsmith was using the heat to help form their head.

“The fire is low.”

The carpenter was first. Confident, yet with an axe in hand.

The lady with the boar ghost circled the anvil, looking over the stumps used as tables. “The tools are laid out, so it can’t be far.”

“Why would you say that?” The cook asked, approaching the mage slowly, peering as her staff-glow lit up the area.

“Do you leave your knives out in the rain?”

“No?”

“An artisan wouldn’t leave all their tools out to rust, so we barely missed it.”

The saltsmith was hiding around the corner of the cottage’s roof, face mostly obscured by a decade of thatching that was rotted and covered in moss. They watched as the lady with the gold jewelry looked around, not bothering to assess the workstation.

She seemed to glance over the house itself before locking onto the saltsmith’s location. They ducked away and skittered noiselessly to the other side of the roof.

This situation was horrifying. They wanted to help and work with the humans, but it was too soon, far too soon. The idea of ingratiating themselves over time until they were simply a silent part of the settlement was optimal, without having to reveal their true nature.

It was also an impossible goal, one that they would predictably fall short of.

They could hear the mage and the cook circling on the left; the carpenter’s heavy footfalls moved on the right. There was nowhere to go. The saltsmith would be seen soon, and—

The thatching was rotted out from age, and the skittering smith placed a metallic hand on a weak portion. It slipped through. The struggle to remove it loosened other portions of the thatching until the saltsmith was scrambling for purchase.

With a clang, the metal lantern hit the stone floor of the cottage, thatching falling down all around the saltsmith, mostly covering their body. There was a bed nearby, broken but present. They threw their many limbs under it, hoping the thatching would disguise the strangeness.

They had no time to really hide, no time to run, no time to anything. They righted the Jack O’ Lantern before freezing in place. The jester entered with her warhammer held upright.

“Juniper, don’t!” came a frenzied whisper from outside.

“It’s fine!” She said, a circle of magic spreading out around her body, as decorative as it was functional. “I have my ring.”

The jester checked every corner of the one-room house before looking at the ceiling then down to the saltsmith.

“There’s a lantern, and maybe a bed? I dunno, thatching came down hard.”

Juniper poked her warhammer around the pile of rotten straw and moss.

“No one here either, unless they vanished.”

With a sudden movement, Juniper jumped into action, swinging her warhammer around her in precise circles, wide arcs to catch an unseen enemy.

The saltsmith was grateful that they were on the ground.

“Do you think that it just collapsed the roof without falling through?”

“Maybe?” The jester picked up the saltsmith’s head.

They were eternally grateful that all their movement and manipulation of the objects that composed their body resulted in tangible rewards – their [ skill: capture ] was now level 3 with a range of medium. It meant that the saltsmith could let parts of their body reach five or six feet away from their lantern with continuing stamina loss.

She turned and began carrying it over toward the door, shouting outside as she walked. “I’ve got this thing. It’s weird, haven’t seen anything like it! Maybe I’ll ask the mysterious smith if I can keep it.”

The saltsmith silently reassembled its body at the furthest point they could, fighting an invisible rope to stay bound to their head as they moved across the cottage, along the wall and out of sight from the oblivious jester.

The guildmaster’s eyes widened in realization as she watched Juniper pause in the doorframe. The jester inhaled before—

The world returned to nothingness for the saltsmith.

To the others, a quick series of events occurred.

In this short distance from the strange smith, Yianna immediately recognized her own magic residing within its lantern core – a wisp of dragonflame. For weeks, the thing sat in her lair by her gold bath unmoving. She had to have touched it with dragonflame and lit it, at some point.

Which meant that was its soul, its heart.

Yianna had no time to warn Juniper before she blew out the small flame, returning it to darkness. She tucked the lantern under her arm, as a clatter sounded from inside the house, like a bunch of sticks being thrown across the room.

Juniper whirled around, both hands on her warhammer as she dove back into danger. The lantern banged against the ground once more, rolling off to the side.

“Yianna! You need to come see this, there’s—”

“I know,” the guildmaster said, stepping over to the saltsmith’s lantern.

“There’s bones everywhere! But no one in here! Were they summoned?”

“Bones?” Samir asked, confused. “Like animal bones?”

“Arm bones, looks like,” Juniper shouted from inside. There was a rattling noise, as if she kicked the pile. “Two swords.”

The guildmaster looked over the pumpkin lantern with a gentle intrigue, examining the seams and touching the clear hoof mark on the side. This was simply a metal object, although it was marked in the system as an artifact.

“Leave them be and come outside, Juniper.” That was a clearly spoken order, one that had the jester’s interest.

She poked her head back outside before tamping down her curiosity and obeying. “Isn’t it neat? A little weird, like a mask. I wanted to ask the smith if I could have it.”

“What is it?” Samir asked. He was full of questions tonight because he, unlike the others, had never been an adventurer. He had a sword in hand but no idea how to use it.

Every moment of this had been thrilling in an anxiety-inducing way for the cook. Nanazin patted his shoulder before gently using her staff to readjust the sword point away from her face.

Atteberry stood idly by, watching the treeline for any beast-like eyes or a scary face. He didn’t know what to expect from this mystery being, but he sure didn’t want to get snuck up on.

Juniper and Yianna both replied at once.

“A lantern.”

“The smith.”