Before Ryan can take more than a few paces past the courier's halted carriage, a nervous local magistrate steps directly into his path near the towering cedar gates. The official is visibly twitchy, clutching a frayed paper ledger with trembling fingers as he demands an immediate, on-the-spot tax audit of the village's entire dried-fish stockpile. The man treats the missing marine inventory with the hysterical urgency of a department head discovering a critical database corruption right before a long weekend, fixing Ryan with a desperate, wide-eyed stare that expects a full reconciliation on the spot.
Ryan lets out a quiet, bone-weary sigh—the exact hollow exhale he usually reserves for an unbudgeted catering discrepancy or an email chain about expired promotional collateral. Shifting the heavy canvas messenger bag higher on his aching shoulder, he reaches inside as if searching for a misplaced invoice, his fingers brushing against his spare plastic pen and the waterlogged run-sheets. With the placid, unimpressed diplomacy of a middle manager trying to close a petty grievance ticket, he offers the flustered official a mild, professional nod.
With the unruffled patience of someone accustomed to justifying phantom office expenses, Ryan calmly suggests that the dried-fish discrepancy is likely just a logistical misallocation that should be properly routed through the regional accounts department rather than held up at a morning checkpoint. He taps the face of his wristwatch out of pure muscle memory, ignoring the useless analog hands as he hopes to wrap up this absurd administrative bottleneck before his hypothetical morning train connection completely vanishes into the fog.