Xenoverse origins / R-046
Petunia PilesOrigin story
Petunia Piles and the Beautiful Empty Enclosure
An Enclosure Waste Collector chasing a spotless inspection destroys a creature’s map of home and must rebuild it in front of the visitors.
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At the Zoo, a clean floor was evidence that someone important was coming. A perfectly clean floor was evidence that someone practical had been excluded from the discussion. Petunia Piles intended to produce the second kind before breakfast.
A spotless enclosure earns Petunia an escaped resident instead of the prize she expected.
She had already polished her shovel. This should have warned her.
You wanted it spotless. Now it hasn't got a spot to stand.
From the dossier
Prologue — The Brass Shovel
The Goblin Council knew Petunia Piles by her brisk footsteps and the noise her cart made over their ceremonial bridge. She knew them by the objects they dropped into it while insisting those objects had never belonged to them. Their relationship was old enough to dispense with greetings.
As Enclosure Waste Collector at the Zoo, Petunia could judge a shift by weight, distance and the number of officials who had discovered a reason to stand elsewhere. She liked work that ended. A full cart became an empty cart; an obstruction became a route. Complaints were irritating because nobody provided a place to tip them.
The Council offered a brass shovel to whichever enclosure passed its new inspection without a single irregularity. The shovel was useless, delicately engraved and sufficiently expensive to be desirable. Petunia pictured it above her doorway. Below it, she pictured herself sitting down before dark.
Her supervisor, a goblin called Kettle, delivered the inspection notice inside a transparent sleeve. “The award includes additional responsibility.”
“Everything includes additional responsibility. At least this comes with brass.”
Kettle pointed toward the stone troll's enclosure. Beyond the bars lay broken tiles, bent branches, dull pebbles and a mound that had occupied the same corner through several changes of management. The troll sat among these objects, tapping one thick finger against a cracked basin.
Its keeper had tied blue string around several piles. Petunia considered the string an attempt to promote rubbish. She had spent too many shifts being told to leave things where they were by people who never had to steer a cart around them.
“Leave the marked pieces,” Kettle said.
“Then the inspection can inspect the string.”
She took the largest cart. Behind her, the tapping stopped.
Act 1
Nothing Out of Place
Act I — Nothing Out of Place
By noon the enclosure looked expensive. Petunia had scraped the paving, cleared the corners and removed the little cairns that complicated every sweep. She laid the blue string neatly on the keeper's stool, a small courtesy she expected to be appreciated.
The troll stood beside the empty corner. It turned once, then again. Its great head moved from the drain to the gate, measuring something Petunia could no longer see.
“There,” she told it. “Room to move.”
It moved through the gate.
There was no dramatic smash. The creature lifted the gate from its sockets with the weary competence of someone removing a cupboard door. It set the ironwork down carefully, walked into the visitor lane and sat on the painted route to the tea kiosk.
Petunia stopped her cart. The troll regarded her with neither anger nor gratitude. Behind it, visitors began forming the automatic queue that any stationary object could generate at the Zoo.
Kettle arrived carrying the inspection sleeve. “Is this part of the presentation?”
“It's an objection.”
“Can you move it?”
“I've already demonstrated that I can.”
The keeper returned from the feed store and examined the clean floor. She was a narrow goblin with a voice that rarely rose because creatures generally heard her the first time. She asked where the stones had gone.
“Disposal yard,” Petunia said. “Sorted by material.”
The keeper closed her eyes. The troll, she explained, arranged familiar objects into a map it could feel through the soles of its feet. The basin marked water. The branches marked shelter. Each pebble located a remembered place. Without that map, the enclosure was a bare patch of paving.
Petunia glanced at her polished shovel. She had not cleaned its home. She had removed the directions.
From the visitor lane came the careful crack of a bench accepting more weight than its designer had imagined.
Act 2
The Route Through Rubbish
Act II — The Route Through Rubbish
The disposal yard had already been tipped into separate heaps. Stone lay with stone, wood with wood, and everything Petunia had called miscellaneous lay under an official who called it potentially reusable. He demanded a requisition before letting her retrieve anything.
She could have blamed the inspection. She could have blamed Kettle. Instead she climbed onto her cart and announced that the incorrect disposal was hers. The official looked disappointed; an admission left him less room to develop the conversation.
The keeper accompanied her, but refused to identify every piece. “You saw the arrangement before you cleared it.”
“I saw a mess.”
“Yes. That was the problem.”
Petunia began with the cracked basin. She found two branches with polished patches where the troll had touched them. The pebbles were harder. She remembered sweeping around a triangular white stone while muttering about her wheel. She found it beneath a broken fountain ornament, then discovered that she remembered several other obstructions with similar precision.
At the enclosure, she put the basin in its former corner. The troll watched from the lane. She arranged the branches and placed the white stone beside the drain.
Nothing happened.
Visitors purchased tea and discussed whether the motionless creature was a special attraction. A Council assessor arrived, recognized Petunia and asked when the demonstration would begin. She made him hold a bucket. He protested that it was empty.
“So is the enclosure. We're establishing a theme.”
She had reconstructed the piles but not the paths between them. The keeper tapped the floor with her heel. Petunia heard the shallow drain answer. She moved the basin until its cracked base carried that sound, then remembered the pattern the troll had tapped before she started work.
She tried it against the cart rail. The troll raised its head.
It was not a summons. It was a question. For once, Petunia waited long enough to hear the reply.
Act 3
A Prize for Irregularity
Act III — A Prize for Irregularity
The troll tapped twice against the visitor bench. Petunia shifted the white stone. One tap. She moved it back, then toward the basin. Three slow taps, followed by a sigh that stirred dust from the kiosk roof.
The inspection party gathered around her. Their robes occupied precisely the spaces she needed. She directed them into a line outside the gate and gave the assessor another bucket to keep him from pointing.
It took the rest of the afternoon. Some placements were wrong in ways she could not understand. A rotten branch needed its hollow side facing the wall. A stone she thought decorative belonged underneath another, hidden from view. She stopped demanding that the arrangement make sense to her before accepting that it mattered.
At last the troll rose. The queue parted without instruction. It entered the enclosure, lowered itself into the reconstructed corner and placed one finger on the basin.
The sound was quiet enough that the visitors missed it. Petunia did not.
The Council assessor inspected the floor. He found irregularities everywhere, including several she had just carried back. The brass shovel went to an enclosure occupied by a painted wooden animal, which management praised for its consistent behaviour.
Petunia received a written rebuke for obstructing the inspection with two buckets. Kettle added a smaller note beneath it: gate recovered, bench repair pending. She hung neither document above her doorway.
The keeper offered to show her how the map changed with the weather. Petunia accepted, then asked for help moving the heavy cart. It was an unceremonious exchange, which made it easier.
Before closing, she chalked a new route around the enclosure. It was slower. She would have to take a second trip. She leaned on her ordinary shovel and resented this without pretending it was somebody else's mistake.
As the last lamp dimmed, the troll pushed a small black stone through the bars.
Petunia had never seen it before. Beneath her boots, somewhere under the service lane, something answered with three patient knocks. She left the stone where she could find it in the morning.
The Zoo’s inconvenient definition of home
Petunia’s work sits between creature care and public display. Familiar objects make an enclosure habitable, while inspection rules reward an empty floor; recovering what she discarded requires attention she once dismissed as delay.