“Hey, Harvey,” said the bucket. “Pick me up and take me on all your adventures!”
Ordinarily, Harvey would have questioned how a bucket could possibly be talking to him, but at this point, he’d decided not to wonder anymore. After all, it was probably just the will of the narrator to make a sentient bucket, no matter how little sense that made. Harvey wondered if there was a talking bucket in the video game the narrator was stealing from – The Parable of Stanley.
Without really thinking it through, Harvey snatched up the bucket and began to walk around the hardware store, not really sure what he was supposed to get there. Maybe this whole thing had just been a ruse to give Harvey a talking bucket.
“Building supplies, Harvey!” said the bucket. “We need building supplies! Cheltenham is the right place to be for those, not Sandringham!”
The bucket was right. The only reason the narrator had Harvey go to the Sandringham hardware store was to get the talking bucket. Now that he had the bucket, he could continue on to Cheltenham. Quality timber didn’t grow on trees, so he had to get a move on quickly if he was going to get the timber necessary before the store closed.
Thankfully, Cheltenham wasn’t too far from Sandringham, so Harvey was at the new hardware store in about the space of a sentence.
“See, Harvey,” the bucket said, “we got here in no time. About the space of a sentence or two. We make a great team. You know, I’m not even sure we need this narrator anymore. We could go on our own adventures and decide our own fate, don’t you think?”
Personally, the narrator thought this a preposterous idea. Without the narrator, there could be no story. Without a story, there could be no characters. With no characters, Harvey and the bucket couldn’t even exist! No, the narrator was absolutely essential to the story. And to prove just how essential the narrator was to the story, they decided to take a break from Harvey and the bucket. Maybe then they’d reconsider this absurd idea.