Before Ryan could even turn away from the frustrated magistrate's lingering shadow, an elderly village elder—stooped, clad in a frayed indigo happi coat, and smelling faintly of dried kelp and ancient paperwork—stepped forward from the crowd. With trembling, parchment-dry hands, the elder pressed an unfamiliar wooden tally stick directly into Ryan's palm. It was a heavy, notched block of seasoned boxwood carved with cryptic accounting marks, thrust upon him with the absolute, uncompromising gravity of an unyielding regional tax registry.
Ryan looked down at the wooden stick, his tired eyes blinking behind strain-heavy lids with the deadpan exhaustion of a marketing coordinator handed an obsolete hardware token right before clocking out. The carved notches and grain tallies bore a chilling, uncanny resemblance to the inventory audit chips and warehouse tracking blocks used by the defunct regional logistics hubs back in Sydney. It was the exact same bureaucratic shakedown, merely whittled out of timber instead of printed on thermal paper.
With a long, bone-weary exhale that disturbed the damp evening air, Ryan carefully slipped the wooden tally stick into his canvas messenger bag right alongside his spare pens and crumpled event run-sheets. He offered the elder a mild, placid nod, silently calculating how many train connections he was going to miss if he had to log this ancient inventory discrepancy before finally catching his evening ride back to Rhodes.