Dexter Tinker Arc 1
The Tinker's Trouble
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Sleigh Ride Squeaky Bells Decorator Menu Mixup Hall of Records Panic
Chapter 5 - Hall of Records Panic
Hall of Records - November 2022
The Hall of Records was meant to be quiet—orderly, efficient, and protected from the usual commotion of Santa’s Village. It was the kind of place where even the snowflakes outside seemed to fall more gently. Inside, the lights glowed in steady pulses from golden-glass sconces, and the marble floors muffled every footstep with a charm designed by Whistle Nick himself.
Every elf who worked there wore slippers instead of boots. No clacking heels. No jingling accessories. Even the magical parchment knew to unroll itself silently. This was a sanctuary of data, lists, names, and the rhythmic hum of enchantments older than the North Star.
Which is exactly why it was such a surprise when, one sunny September morning, Dexter Tinker showed up.
He wasn’t on the schedule. He wasn’t even assigned to Records. But he’d overheard Bernard say, “The seasonal rush is coming early this year,” and decided to help out—uninvited.
His opportunity came the moment Mrs. Hollypine, the chief archivist, stepped away for a cocoa break.
“Too much peppermint,” she muttered to herself, tapping her mug and summoning a tiny cinnamon stick from midair. “Just a pinch’ll fix it.”
The room she left behind was quiet as a whisper. Scrolls floated gently above their racks. The letter-writing machine—a squat, enchanted contraption with brass fittings and a nervous habit of whirring at irregular intervals—sat blinking with a red “OUT OF PAPER” light.
“Easy fix!” Dexter chirped as he popped through the doorway like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box. He wore his workshop overalls and a cheerful grin, and his hair had been accidentally slicked into horns by a recent experiment with candy-cane conditioner.
“Santa will be so proud.”
He rummaged through the nearest supply cabinet, whistling a tune that changed key halfway through. His hand landed on a wrapped ream of ivory paper. It shimmered faintly, like moonlight on snow.
“Fresh!” he declared, tearing it open and feeding it into the machine with a satisfied clunk. What he didn’t notice was the faint glitter along the edges—a telltale sign that he’d picked up illusion-paper, used only for magical handwriting practice. Unless sealed with inkfixer, any words written on it would vanish within minutes.
With the machine purring happily and printing test loops in bright purple ink, Dexter skipped out of the room, humming “O Tannenbaum” and admiring a shiny new paperclip he’d found on the floor. He clipped it to his ear for no reason whatsoever.
An hour later, the first signs of trouble appeared.
“Where did my letter go?” asked an elfling near the public writing station. “I just wrote it, and now it’s blank!”
“Mine too!” said another. A young human visitor from Dromstad waved her page in the air. “I swear I saw sparkles when I signed it!”
Soon the room filled with worried voices, fluttering pages, and the quiet hiss of the magical mailbox sighing in confusion. One poor intern watched helplessly as a stack of disappearing letters vanished before his eyes, turning blank and blowing away like dry leaves.
Meanwhile, Dexter—unaware of the paper crisis he’d unleashed—wandered into the sleighmail sorting room, where two dozen messenger elves were preparing outbound deliveries.
“Looks busy!” Dexter called, startling Wink, a slim red-clad elf no taller than a foot, who had been balancing three stacked mail satchels on his head.
“Actually, we’ve got it—” began a sorting elf, but Dexter had already picked up a satchel marked in golden ink:
TO: SANTA – NORTH POLE DIRECT.
“These envelopes are all mixed up,” he muttered, flipping through the stack. “Blue ones, green ones, peppermint-scented ones… Who sorts by date anymore? Let’s try something better.”
Despite protests from the clerks, he dumped the contents into a large reindeer-feed scoop and began reorganizing the entire bag by color. Blue envelopes to one side. Green ones stacked like shingles. Pink envelopes arranged in a heart shape for no particular reason.
“It’s more visually cheerful,” Dexter explained. “And Santa’s a visual learner.”
Wink hovered nervously near the door. “You sure you’re cleared for this?”
“Of course I’m cleared!” Dexter said. “Cleared with enthusiasm!”
By the end of the afternoon, Santa’s letters were scattered across half the Village. One ended up at the Rootbeer Bottling Plant and got accidentally used to label a shipment of spicy ginger soda. Two dozen were delivered to Kathy’s Candy Shop, where she read one aloud and immediately made plans for a “Build-Your-Own Licorice Castle” promotion.
Seventeen letters were discovered in the Reindeer Stables, stacked beside a hay bale and tied up with a piece of festive string. They were addressed in crayon.
Rudy Winters, head reindeer trainer and longtime elf-skeptic, snorted when he saw them.
“What do I look like, the Toy Commissioner?” he grumbled, flipping one letter upside-down and squinting. “I don’t even do dolls.”
He tried to ignore them, but after the third time a stable elf asked if he’d seen a delivery for Santa, he lost his patience. Clutching the satchel in one hoof and kicking the door open with the other, Rudy stormed toward the Hall of Records.
His nostrils flared. His bell collar jangled menacingly.
“Whose idea was this?”
The answer came soon enough.
Back in the master listroom—a vaulted chamber at the very heart of the archives, where scrolls hung from enchanted racks and glowed faintly by classification—Dexter was hard at work “reorganizing” the Naughty and Nice list.
He had overheard Santa say, just the day before, “We might need to update the list format before December,” and took it as a personal invitation.
“This section’s too cluttered,” he muttered, elbow-deep in parchment curls. “Let’s combine all the Jacobs into one scroll. Saves space.”
The scrolls shimmered as he touched them, magically reclassifying. They zipped into the air, twirled, and rearranged themselves into new categories that only Dexter understood.
A glowing scroll floated down to him. He held it up triumphantly:
PENDING REVIEW.
“Perfect catch-all,” he declared. “Nobody likes a binary system.”
That’s when the doors burst open.
Bernard stomped in first, coat flapping. Rudy Winters followed, tail swishing dangerously. Behind them came Mrs. Hollypine, her peppermint mug now empty and trembling slightly in her hand, and three junior scroll clerks trying to keep the archive shelves from reorganizing themselves into alphabetical chaos.
“DEXTER TINKER!” Bernard’s voice echoed off the high, scroll-lined walls. “What… have… you… done?”
“I was just helping!” Dexter said, still holding his quill and now balancing on one foot atop a pile of semi-sorted scrolls. “Santa said the list needed an update, and I thought—”
“You created a ‘Possibly Naughty’ category,” Bernard said flatly. He snatched a scroll from midair. “With twenty thousand names.”
“Well, just in case!” Dexter offered.
“Names are vanishing!” cried Mrs. Hollypine, holding up a stack of illusion-paper letters. “Entire batches of correspondence are blank! Do you know how many letters came through this morning?!”
“Uh… lots?”
“Four hundred and thirty-seven,” she hissed. “And every single one vanished into glitter because you used training paper!”
Bernard turned. “You also sorted Santa’s private mail by color?”
“I thought it’d brighten his day!”
“I found a lavender envelope addressed to ‘King Santa of Reindeerland,’” Rudy muttered. “It smelled like bubblegum and fish sticks.”
Dexter scratched his head. “That doesn’t sound like my system... unless it was one of the scented ones from the Dromstad batch. Or maybe the glitter samples from the Crafting Lab—”
“Stop talking,” said Bernard, rubbing his temples.
It took the rest of the day and most of the night to restore order.
The illusion-paper was removed, the mail was re-sorted (and then re-re-sorted when someone realized color sorting did follow a logic, just not a helpful one). Rudy personally delivered the reindeer-stable letters back to the proper satchels—grumbling all the while—and Mrs. Hollypine canceled her evening cocoa and launched a full audit of the listroom.
Dexter, meanwhile, was reassigned—yet again. This time to Sleigh Bell Polishing – Level One.
A humble post. No paper. No scrolls. No enchanted machinery. Just rows of little brass bells, a polishing cloth, and a checklist with only two items:
- Make them shine
- Do not rearrange by tone
He didn’t seem to mind.
“I’ve always liked bells,” he said cheerfully, giving one a twirl. “Nice ring to it.”
He paused.
“Wait… what if we categorized them by pitch? That way, we could—”
From across the room, Bernard’s voice thundered: “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!”
Dexter grinned and returned to polishing—at least for now.
And far away, in the upper alcove of the archives, Penny Tootle watched it all unfold from behind a tall column of scrolls, shaking her head.
“Someone’s going to need to keep an eye on that one,” she murmured. “Before he alphabetizes Santa’s beard oil.”
She made a note in her tiny leather-bound planner:
Observe Dexter Tinker. High chaos potential. Surprisingly creative. No access to scroll magic.
Then, smiling faintly, she disappeared into the shadows—quiet as the Hall itself.