Rain World: Droplets

The Merchant: Gone are the Old Days

The screech of bending scrap metal pierced through the ambience of the derelict factory, rust scraping against rust as the yellow sparks of malfunctioning machines attempt to whirr to life in defiance, only to die down in a helpless sigh. The Merchant pries out the last of the worn steel keeping him from his prize, though his hair turns grey with age, he is by no means frail. He throws the rusted casing towards the side and takes a closer look at the mass of wires and components now exposed to him, a treasure trove for a creature with the mind of a tinkerer such as his own. 

The Merchant expertly rips the wires from their sockets, careful to avoid getting zapped by any stray currents, and ties a bundle of them over his shoulders before returning to his work and examining the rest of the metallic treats in front of him. A number of fried computer chips, rickety hydraulics, cracked metal sheets, dusty fans, clogged filters, snapped coils, all the usual treasures an aspiring merchant can hope to find in a factory such as this. But The Merchant already had a surplus if all these items stocked up, many of which were in better condition as he learned to better differentiate the readily applicable from what was in heavy need of maintenance if a component wished to be more than a gaudy decoration or an unsold ware. Naturally the scavengers would still trade for anything they deem valuable, but this old and hairy slugcat had much more pride in his work than other merchants, and he wished to earn his keep through innovation rather than selling anything and everything he can find. Only quality products were acceptable, which meant that The Merchant was frequently throwing away or repurposing anything that he considered to be trash. Useful components would be made immediate use of, and the scrap would be maintained to the best of his abilities to either someday be made use of or until it becomes too much of a hassel to carry around. With so much of the latter already at his disposal, The Merchant wasn't in the mood to weigh himself down with any more of it, especially when it was of such low overall quality. Instead of bothering with any of it, The Merchant slipped what appeared to be a very thin and short spear, small enough to hold in his hand with a long and sharpened tip that he used now to cut away at the smaller, less useful wires that held many of the damaged parts in place, and after using the same tool to unscrew some of the tiny bolts preventing him from immediately ripping out piece after piece, he got to work pushing and pulling various knowns and unintriguing unknowns out of the way in order to search for the often more intact inner components of most machines.

This find however didn't appear to be a very lucky one, as just like most of what he had scavenged during his stay at this factory, much of what The Merchant could find happened to be scorched or melted together. He knew that live electrical currents were frequently hot to the touch assuming they didn't immediately give him a good shock, so he quickly came to the conclusion that there must've been some problems within the machines themselves that caused either a fire or some other problem long ago, unless these machines were simply overworked to the point of bare functionality. Whatever happened to be the case was of no concern to him though, there was always a reason to carry around extra cables and wires so it wasn't as if it was a completely fruitless harvest, and some larger pieces of scrap metal aren't completely without value either, and there was plenty of that to be found in factories and rundown machines. Scavengers and slugcats alike would pay well for sheets of metal, especially if they belonged to large tribes or colonies, and with the rain becoming less and less frequent and deadly with each passing cycle, all creatures had a new surplus of time allowing them to evolve further than previously allowed. 

One of such evolutions came with The Merchant himself, as well as those who came before, for he is not the first slugcat to take on the task of retrieving various materials from the industrial wastes, nor is he the first to tinker with what they find in an attempt to something never before conceived. This new era was a renaissance for all wildlife, one where the majority of the world's experimenters have vanished, crushed under the weight of their own tools, allowing both flora and fauna to be their own experimenters, and their own test subjects.