I spent the night at Ryn’s home.
Her room was exactly what I expected.
And somehow still more “Ryn” than I imagined possible.
Everything was clean.
Organized.
Carefully arranged beneath soft blue light coming through the harbor-facing windows.
White linen.
Dark mahogany furniture.
Fresh flowers placed neatly beside stacked documents and perfectly aligned pens.
Even the air smelled like her.
Sea flowers and faint vanilla.
The entire room felt disciplined in a strangely comforting way.
Like the room itself refused to become chaotic.
The next morning, Ryn told me she needed to briefly meet with her parents.
She told me to treat the house as my own while she was away.
At first, I remained in her room.
Then curiosity eventually defeated common sense.
Again.
I wandered through several sections of the manor before eventually reaching the rear wing of the house.
That was where I saw him.
At first glance, I genuinely thought he might be some kind of exhausted noble scholar.
Tall.
Very handsome.
Curly dark hair completely unrestrained by logic.
A monocle resting over one eye.
Dark circles beneath his eyes suggesting sleep had personally offended him years ago.
He wore a blacksmith apron while staring intensely at a wall covered in diagrams.
And he was muttering to himself.
About spoons.
I remember standing there silently for several seconds trying to process the situation.
Then suddenly he looked toward me.
His entire expression brightened immediately.
“Oh?”
“Who might you be?”
I introduced myself awkwardly and explained that I was traveling with Ryn.
His smile somehow became even wider.
“Spathian Carver Roderick,” he announced dramatically.
“Ryn’s older brother.”
Then, without hesitation:
“Would you like to see my workshop?”
Looking back now, following him was probably not the safest decision.
Unfortunately, both curiosity and poor judgment continue to shape my life.
Outside the workshop door hung a wooden sign reading:
The Spoonwright’s Den
That should have warned me.
It did not.
The moment the door opened, I felt as though I had entered the mind of a genius who had been abandoned by reason.
The room was complete chaos.
Organized chaos.
But chaos nonetheless.
Worktables overflowed with gears, brass pipes, tools, glass bottles, springs, metal fragments, and an alarming number of spoons in various states of existence.
Some hung from the ceiling.
Some spun slowly by themselves.
Some appeared partially melted.
One was somehow vibrating inside a locked box.
The walls were covered with diagrams and sketches labeled things like:
THE PERFECT SPOON
SELF-STIRRING SOUP THEORY
AERODYNAMIC PUDDING DELIVERY
I should have left immediately.
Instead, I stayed for nearly two hours.
At some point, I became involved in the experiments.
Deeply involved.
Far more involved than I care to admit.
Spathian spoke exactly the way his workshop looked.
Rapidly.
Passionately.
With terrifying confidence toward ideas that should probably not exist.
And somehow…
I understood him.
Not the spoon theories.
Those were madness.
But the curiosity behind them.
That part I understood perfectly.
Eventually, while we were testing what he described as “precision dessert stabilization technology,” we both heard hurried footsteps approaching from outside the workshop.
The door burst open.
Ryn stood there slightly out of breath.
Clearly prepared for disaster.
Then she froze.
I imagine the scene before her was difficult to process.
I was sitting at the worktable with several metal spoons rolled into my hair like curling tools.
In front of me sat a cup of coffee with a spoon stirring itself in endless circles.
Meanwhile, I was desperately trying to eat pudding using a violently vibrating spoon that jingled against the bowl like an expensive musical instrument having a breakdown.
Spathian stood nearby taking notes with horrifying seriousness.
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“She adapts faster than expected.”
Ryn closed her eyes immediately.
The expression on her face looked less like anger and more like:
I knew this would happen.
“You left her alone with him?” I heard one of the nearby servants whisper behind her.
“Apparently.”
To my surprise, Ryn eventually began laughing.
Not loudly.
But enough that she needed a moment before speaking again.
Then she walked over, grabbed my wrist, and calmly announced:
“We’re leaving before you become identical.”
“I think his automatic soup rotation theory has potential,” I protested while being physically dragged toward the door.
“That sentence alone proves my point.”
As she pulled me outside, Spathian suddenly shouted after us:
“Can I marry your friend?”
Without missing a step, Ryn shouted back:
“Over my dead body!”
I waved enthusiastically toward him while still being dragged away.
“I’ll come back!”
“You’re always welcome in the Den!” he shouted proudly.
Even after leaving, I could still hear strange metallic noises echoing from inside the workshop.
As we walked farther down the rear hallways of the manor, another figure approached from the opposite direction.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Bright smile.
The kind of face painters probably wished existed more often.
I genuinely stopped walking for half a second.
The young man greeted Ryn casually before patting her head several times like she was somehow the younger sibling.
Then continued walking without explanation.
I stared after him in complete confusion.
Then immediately leaned closer toward Ryn.
“Who was that?”
For reasons I still do not fully understand, Ryn suddenly looked deeply offended.
A faint blush appeared across her face.
“That,” she said with visible irritation,
“was my younger brother.”
Then after a pause:
“That kid.”
I remember blinking several times after hearing that.
Mostly because one realization suddenly became impossible to ignore.
The Roderick family was apparently filled with absurdly attractive weird people.
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