It had been a hard day, and Alys Brangwin, Motavia's most celebrated hunter, was looking forward to a convivial dinner and a drink or two with friends at the Hunter's Guild bar. Unfortunately, her hopes were dashed almost immediately by a sign reading "Closed for Repairs" hanging next to the swinging doors. Curious despite her disappointment, she walked over and looked inside.
"Hey, Garn," she called to the owner, who was overseeing the efforts of two workers. "Installing new wooden floors, I see."
"Oh, hi, Alys. Yeah, I thought it would give the place a bit more of a touch of class. Stone's easy to clean, but it looks, I don't know, kind of rough and cheap, I guess you could say?"
"Plus it hurts more if somebody gets knocked down or passes out onto stone," Alys noted. "Someone could get seriously injured one of these days cracking his or her skull off the floor."
Just then, they were interrupted by a booming voice from just behind them.
"Whoa, looks like my lucky day. The place is closed, but you're still here, Alys!"
Contrary to what one might think, Joss Howland was not an example of what happens when one suffers too many head injuries, but had always been a bad example for trying to convince people that hunters weren't just big, dumb brutes.
"My luck today seems to be consistent, at least," Alys groused.
"I was hoping to be open for business tonight," Garn said, "but some of the boards were cracked and had to be re-cut. I'm not surprised; when you consider the price of wood on this planet any supply I could afford is going to have a few problems."
"Well, it's not a problem for us," Joss said. "What do you say, Alys? Why don't we take this as an omen and go grab ourselves some dinner, just you and me?"
"I would genuinely prefer to date that palm-spider that's crawling by your foot."
"Wha—?" Joss yelped.
Garn sighed.
"There was a nest of those, too," he said. "It took the better part of an hour to clear them out. A couple got away, though."
Joss yanked his foot away from the inch-wide arachnid. Though not lethal or even seriously debilitating, their poison was nastily painful and notable because in addition to the injury, it also had an intoxicating effect on its victim for the first couple of hours.
(A cynic might observe that a bar owner had good reason to keep them out of his establishment, since they were giving away for free a three-drink buzz.)
Joss, though, had not been a cynic about palm-spiders since the day he'd accidentally stuck his face into a nest of them two years previously. He hopped back out of the way, then raised one huge foot and brought it down like a sledgehammer blow, flattening the rogue spider across the end of one board.
However, since the board had not yet been nailed down, its other end snapped up, the underlying crossbeam acting as a fulcrum, and hit Joss squarely in the face. Any possible teaching moment about the use of a lever to redirect force was lost when the impact of the blow knocked him over and the back of his head hitting the floor finished the job while demonstrating that wood wasn't really all that much softer on a practical basis.
"It's a rare man that can find a way to pass out in a bar that isn't even open," Alys observed.
