**Bowl of Brown**
The brown was a stew served in the taverns and cookshops of King's Landing's poorest districts. It cooked in immense, perpetually simmering cauldrons, forming the staple food for the capital's most destitute. It was composed of vegetables and barley. Low-quality meat of dubious origin (pigeons and rats) was the only source of protein. It was generally served in bowls, with a thick film of grease covering the mixture. And the times he ate it, Tony always expected to go into septic shock. Thank God his immune system had held up so far, but his mental health had not.
Ever since his reincarnation as a random baby in an obscure Essosi village, he knew his life wouldn't be easy. He had endured so much in eleven years that only the memories of his past life, of his extraordinary experiences, had kept him from sinking into despair. He had taken it philosophically, telling himself that if he were truly a genius, high-born or not, he had a duty to climb the ladder, to change the world he lived in. And that started very simply: having a stable income, so he would never have to eat the brown again. His future, and that of this world, depended on it.
A city like King's Landing was a blank slate for any moderately intelligent inventor. Getting rich here was the work of a year, if one had the means. Unfortunately, he did not yet have them. So, he had to fall back on something accessible, something downright unworthy of his genius: rat traps. But he'd be damned if he created a vulgar version. Even if it were made entirely of wood, it would be no less brilliant, and a masterpiece of engineering.
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Night enveloped The Gnats' lean-to like a tattered shroud, the snores of the gang providing a rhythm to the silence like a distant war drum. Tony had secluded himself in his corner, away from the bodies huddled under the patched blanket, his mind boiling with a plan that stank less than the Blackwater but promised more than an eternity of the brown. No luxury here. Just hands and rotten wood. But a genius improvises.
He began with measuring instruments, the crutches needed to transform chaos into precision. No fine metal or etched glass; just pure resourcefulness. With a sharp flint shard—scooped from the dockside mud the day before—he carved a straight oaken slat, stolen from a pallet abandoned near a collapsed warehouse. The ruler was born in an hour: a flat, foot-long plank, marked with fine notches for inches and fractions, aligned by eye against a string stretched between two bent nails hammered into a barrel. For the square, he joined two perpendicular scraps with a binding of dried gut, reinforced by a crude notch. The compass was a masterstroke of improvisation: a forked willow branch, flexible as a whip, with a rusty iron point at one end and a sharpened piece of charcoal at the other, connected by a knotted string to adjust the radius.
"In the old world, I'd have laughed at this. Here? This is gold for a street rat," he sneered.
The tools came next, "borrowed" from the market at dawn, when the merchants were still dozing beneath their stalls. Tony infiltrated with Pip as a diversion—the kid faking a coughing fit to draw the eye—and swiped a dull file from a surly blacksmith, his fingers sliding like a shadow over the workbench. The small handsaw followed, snatched from a carpenter haggling over rotten fish; its uneven teeth already sang with the promise of clean cuts. Lira covered their escape with a sharp gaze, muttering as she pulled them into an alley. "I hope you have a good reason for this, Tony."
Tony stuffed the loot under his cape, his heart beating just enough to remind him he was alive. Stealing to create. Poetic, wasn't it?
The gathering of materials was a methodical hunt under a drizzle that turned Flea Bottom into a glutinous sewer. The Gnats watched him scavenge like a starving crow: flat planks ripped from rotten crates for the solid bases; short logs, found near an abandoned shipyard, for the rotating axles; irregular blocks of oak and yew, picked from the waste of artisans on the hills, to sculpt the cams and counterweights. No perfect shapes here—just raw, gnarled, damp-stained wood. *"Geometric? I'll make it geometric. With sweat and a blade,"* he thought, overwhelmed with euphoria.
A good knife was essential: he filched one from a dozing butcher, its blade thin and keen like a promise of blood, ideal for precise incisions. Finally, the cords: strands of hemp stolen from a distracted rope-maker, braided on the spot for just the right tension—tested by pulling until the fibers sang without breaking, like a taut nerve ready to snap. The primitive bow drill sealed the deal, a tool born of necessity like a deformed but viable child. Tony bent a sturdy hazel branch into a supple arch, like a crude hunting bow, and wrapped a cordolette around it, oiled with fish grease pilfered from the docks. The central spindle, a roughly smoothed log, fit into a flat wooden handle with a conical hole for the drill bit—a flint shard sharpened with his knife. A back-and-forth motion of the bow, and the cord spun the bit into a hungry spiral, piercing the wood without fire or metal. *"Bow drill, Flea Bottom edition. To drill out the secrets others don't see."*
The days melted into solitary labor, Tony cloistered like a hermit in his corner, the knife and file extensions of his own fingers. The sculpting came first: the knife's blade bit into the blocks, tracing pure shapes with the ruler and compass—trapezoids for the sensitive triggers, cubes for the guide rails, sharp triangles for the gear teeth. Each raw block became imposed geometry: a log carved into a perfect cylindrical axle, filed until its surface pivoted without a catch; a gnarled piece hollowed into a trapezoidal cam, its angles checked with the square for a fluid slide. After hours of sweating, the blisters on his hands bled onto the wood, shavings piling up like dirty snow on the floor. The saw cut the contours, the file refined the edges, rounding, chamfering, until the pieces interlocked without force.
It was revisited kumiki—those pure wood Japanese puzzles, with no nails or glue, where each joint guides the next through sheer geometry. But this was no decorative art: it was visceral engineering. A trapezoidal rail received a cubic cam which, under tension, released a triangular counterweight; the gears, carved tooth by tooth from flat discs, interlocked in a cascade to propagate the motion—one click, one turn, and the jaw reset without a sound. The bow drill's cord was used for testing: a bit that drilled a clean hole for an axle, aligned with the compass for an impeccable circle. Perfect tension on the taut strings—not so slack as to fail, not so tight as to break under the grip of a fat, well-fed rat. Each piece, born from his calloused hands, locked the whole together as one: solid, silent, ruthless.
The Gnats, at first indifferent to the drone of the file, soon saw the madness take hold. Jem, the leader with a gaze as heavy as a storm-filled sky, poked his head in on the second evening, arms crossed over his hunger-hollowed chest.
"You carving sticks, bookworm? We need fucking coppers, not kindling."
Tony didn't look up, his knife engraving a precise triangle into a disc. Despite his project, he was still doing his part, and it annoyed him to be constantly disturbed. "Patience, Jem. These 'sticks' are going to eat the rats before they eat us. We'll test it soon."
Jem spat on the ground, slamming the plank that served as a door. "'Soon' is what dead men say around here. If you don't have a Plan B, you're out, I'm warning you." The impatience swelled like a raw wound.
The twins, Pip and Pock, snuck in on the third day, snatching splinters to make twisted toys. "He's muttering numbers and grim phrases, Lira! Like the mad sorcerers they lynch at the Sept."
Lira, the lieutenant with eyes as green as the Blackwater, leaned against the wall that evening, chewing on a piece of hardened leather. "What exactly did you steal to be carving? Jem says you're losing your mind. The street's getting to you, I knew you didn't have the guts or the stamina for it. Show me something that pays, or I'll file your nails down to the bone."
Tony wiped the sweat from his brow, aligning a cam in its rail—a perfect slide, without a millimeter of play. He superbly ignored Lira, who looked as if she'd just eaten a lemon. "Watch and shut up, kid. True genius isn't a spectacle. It's what fits together, piece by piece," he said after a moment.
Flick, the redhead with blackened teeth, was the loudest, his raw laugh exploding on the fourth evening like a fart in a brawl. Tony was tightening a string to calibrate the trigger—just the right tension, like a nocked bow—when the kid burst in, dragging the younger ones behind him. "Hey, gang! The bookworm's carving bones for the rats! Soon we'll have an army of wooden vermin, and we'll be starving to death watching them dance!"
The laughter erupted, stifled by empty stomachs: Jem punched a barrel, sending splinters flying; Lira shook her head with a bitter smirk, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes; the twins giggled before whimpering, huddling against the cold seeping through the planks.
But on the fifth day, when the grey dawn streaked the lean-to with a dirty light, Tony emerged from his den, the prototype nestled against his chest like a talisman. It was a stout box, wide enough to hold a man's hand: a flat base of carved oak, sides interlocked without a single visible nail, and a trapezoidal lid that snapped shut for stealthy access. Inside, the orchestra of gears—round axles pivoting on blade-cut triangular teeth, a cubic cam releasing the jaw under the weight of an bait tied with hemp. Not a toy: a resettable trap, born of sweat and geometry imposed on raw wood, where each joint guided the next in a unique ballet. Silent as a shadow, solid as the sandstone of the Red Keep.
He placed it on the central barrel, under the half-closed eyes of the gang gathered for the morning briefing—Jem rubbing his stubbled chin, Lira tying up her hair, the twins crawling forward, Flick still sneering.
"Alright, show us the miracle," Jem grunted, leaning in with a grimace that said, *I bet this is bullshit*.
Lira crossed her arms, her gaze as piercing as a probe.
Tony placed a moldy crust on the trigger, setting the thread with a measured gesture. "No tricks. Just... physics. Watch."
He simulated the prey: a tap on the thread, and *snap!*—the flat wooden jaw slammed shut like a hungry mouth, trapping the air in a flawless vise. Then the reset: the counterweight slid on its trapezoidal rail, the triangular gears cascaded in a fluid turn, and the trigger returned to its place with a discreet click, ready to bite again. No tell-tale creak, no splintering wood; the joints, carved tooth by tooth, ensured a pure geometric lock, where each raw piece guided the whole effortlessly.
Silence fell like a dull blade on stone. Jem blinked, his scar twisting into a mask of pure disbelief.
"By Aegon's balls... How? It's... it's just wood, for fuck's sake!" He felt the smooth sides, testing a joint with a thick finger—it slid, locked, without a hint of play.
Lira stepped forward, her calloused nails brushing the cubic cam; she pressed, and the mechanism danced under her hand, resetting with a precision that defied her common sense. "You're not human. A shadow demon, or a smith. This... this traps things without us? Without a sound? By the Seven!"
Flick, his mouth hanging open like a beached fish, forgot his sneer; the twins let out a stifled shriek of joy, reaching out to caress the gears as if they were treasure. "We'll make 'em for the den! For the docks! The rats are gonna shit themselves in fear!" they yelled in unison.
Tony crossed his arms, a victorious smirk stretching his chapped lips—the first flash of triumph since the chains of Essos. *"Not so ridiculous, am I? Just me against the world. And the world bends."*
"Ten vermin a night, resets on its own. We empty them, sell them to the pot-shops for their... specialties. Five coppers a handful. And the traps? Two coppers a piece to the innkeeps who are sick of rodents. In a week, we'll be eating real food, not shadows. Jem, your dreams of being a leader? They start here. This is just a small prototype."
Jem nodded, slow as a rolling stone, a new flame in his eyes—raw respect, mixed with a cold calculation. "A what? Fine, who cares for now. You're not such a runt after all. But if the Black Hounds sniff out this jackpot..."
Lira finished his thought, her blade appearing with a fluid motion. "...they'll want to take it from us, or worse, sabotage us. We have to be careful."
From that moment on, the den buzzed with a feverish energy, the kids rushing to help: Pip and Pock stacking fresh wood like zealous apprentices, Flick filing a wobbly gear under Tony's patient gaze, his mockery replaced by silent admiration. Lira, for the first time, offered a nod of approval, her green eyes shining with an alliance forged in carved wood. But deep down, as the sun pierced the dirty clouds to gild the crumbling rooftops, Tony felt the spark grow. This was only the beginning.