Someone's Going To Fix This

     One particularly dark and stormy night, around two in the morning, Venn was roused from sleep by a frantic hammering on her door. By the time she had finished putting on pants and opened the door, there was no one there. Venn thought this was suspicious because she lived on a small farm which wasn't exactly placed in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, so someone went out of their way to wake her in the asscrack of dawn during a thunderstorm and then disappear. She did discover, however, that there was a soggy lump of cloth on her doorstep. When she brought it inside and unwrapped it, a beautifully elaborate amulet fell out; covered in gold and rubies and with silver filigree inlaid all along the edge. Something about it suggested a great destiny; this was the bauble of a king, or a powerful wizard, or even a legendary hero. Being a practical woman, Venn promptly went back to bed and forgot about it until the next morning, which happened to be market day, so she sold it to a travelling curio collector for enough money to buy a new set of farm tools.

     A month went by.

     Venn was out in the field, hoeing the dirt. Her hoe was almost brand new and felt sturdy and comfortable in her hands. It was much stronger than the one she had had previously, and its edge broke the dirt apart with an efficacy that put its predecessor to shame. Venn paused and wiped the sweat from her forehead. The sun beat down viciously and even her wide brimmed hat was but a small comfort. Venn looked over the field at what she had accomplished, then in the opposite direction to see how much work she still had left to do. The sight prompted a sigh, and she raised the hoe and jabbed it into the dirt.

     The dirt responded with a dull thud and the hoe shuddered in her hands. Figuring it was a rock, she bent down to dig it out with a trowel pulled from her pocket. She shoveled the dirt out of the way, uncovering a patch of burlap. She squinted in the sunlight for a moment and then continued to dig. More and more burlap was revealed as she dug, until she had a long and slender object wrapped in a sack on the ground next to her. She unwrapped the cloth to discover a sword, identical in design to the amulet she had sold, gleaming like a bard's toothy grin. It occurred to Venn that this turn of events was most unusual. She didn't know much about swords, but she was fairly certain they didn't grow out of the ground. The very next day she took a trip into the local town, where she asked the blacksmith about the likelihood of subterranean weaponry and its relation to root vegetables. He replied that he was but a simple blacksmith and therefore the specificities of probability escaped him, but he supposed that in an infinite universe anything was possible, if only mathematically speaking. This satisfied Venn for the most part, who traded him the sword in exchange for some horseshoes and leather straps.

     This time, she made it forty-eight days with no strange occurrences.

     She was in the kitchen of her small home, peeling potatoes and dropping them into a pot full of water. The water boiled merrily, causing the potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables to dance merrily with the exuberant roiling of the surface. Venn whistled a tune while she worked. She had finished her chores early and spent an hour relaxing, reading a book on the finer points of knitting; a hobby with which she held a fascination that only the truly lacking in talent may possess. Nevertheless, Venn was a determined woman and had sworn that someday, somehow, she would knit a sweater that had the kind of proportions that would fit a human being and not, say, some kind of aberration with three shoulders and a head the size of a watermelon.

     There came a rapping at the door, frantic and staccato. Venn considered the fact that this was the second knocking in three months and wondered what she had done to make herself so popular, as she crossed the living room to see who was there.

    When she opened the door she found a tall man in a brown robe on her doorstep. He gripped a staff tightly in his hands in a manner that suggested there was something wrong. An expression of worry was painted across his face, sandwiched between a long gray beard and a hat that, to be perfectly honest, made him look a bit foolish.