Maria stared blankly at the merchant girl who was trying to pitch what was, once more, literally a lump of coal on a string. As some kind of time manipulating pendulum. That... was not how anything worked. At all. Oh, she could buy that a magical artifact could seem unimpressive, but this was just ridiculous. 'Advancing time by one second'? 'Something bad would happen if the string were to break'? That was one of the most nonsense things she had ever heard. Who even did this? What kind of desperate con artist woke up one morning and thought this was a great plan?

She swung it back and fourth, faster then the seconds past, staring blankly at the tophat-wearing girl. She had a feeling that wasn't going to prove anything, though.

And so, instead of attempting to display how stupid what the girl said was with that method, she carefully took the charcoal, untied the string(it was barely even tied at all, it was like a four-year-old had done it) and laid both pieces of the... 'pendulum' down.

"It's a lump of charcoal and some string. You are trying to sell a lump of charcoal and some string."