I sleep all night and I work all day

Caprica D'Angelo · 01-28-2012, 07:25 PM

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WC:+8 Don't worry about matching the length. Mine will be shorter from now on, just an accidental ramble here..

It had taken some time, but it had eventually been necessity that drove Caprica to make up her suitably capricious mind as to what craft she planned to focus on as her Abigor rank indicated she should. For months she had dabbled, flitting from one thing to the next: cooking, brewing, beadwork, leatherwork, jewellery, tanning... but nothing had caught her interest enough to warrant spending more time on it and losing out on hours to pour into other fields of expertise.

Then a clue had been nudged her way, with the advent of the Thackary Village project and the need to put her constructive skills to the test - although she hadn't ended up really building anything, due to the simple need to dig fence post holes and knock in the posts as well. This task had occupied all her free time while the enigmatic Rakeeb was absent, and then when his spell of - whatever it had been, a strange disappearance after Matteo left - was over, it was her turn to take leave from the lands and travel to pick up her new mare from Aniwaya... and when she had returned, the project was completed, and she'd been distracted by her new equestrian duties from poking around inside the village buildings and realising that here was a useful place she could turn her hand to crafting furnishings and decorations and so forth.

The one thing Caprica had spent most time doing was working on her jewellery making, for it was the best thing she had to trade with, and she found both her nimble fingers and her acute sense of good taste were both stretched and put to good use. Still, she couldn't quite justify becoming a jeweller by trade. It was a little too impractical, and she was happy to leave it as a hobby. Besides, she was running out of room to store everything. Her deer skull which guarded the cavern entrance was so festooned with hanging strings of beads, teeth, bone carvings, varnished pebbles and plaited cords that the antlers were no longer visible. Her floor was starting to resemble a plate of spaghetti, and now and then when she misstepped she found reason to yell and curse through seeing a delicate object crush beneath her clumsy foot.

So, then, this was the necessity which had driven her to finally make a decision. She needed space, more room to keep everything and a much better designed den - no, a studio - where she could work and keep all of her squirrelled away trinkets and knick-knacks. She needed shelves, boxes, cupboards... she needed to learn to build, to form and fit wood and treat it so it would not rot or stain. The possibilities here were endless - she could eventually learn enough to make an entire building, she thought with a great sense of anticipation. But she had to start somewhere, and she reckoned that shelves were the simplest thing. After poring over slate with chalk for what felt like hours, she had a design, which was tucked away neatly in her head - no carrying required. Simple enough, just wooden posts nailed into H shaped frames, and planks laid across. The hardest thing would be splitting a tree into posts and planks, but this was exactly what she knew she must learn in order to progress. If she just went and scavenged some ready-human-made ones, what would she gain from the process? Nothing whatsoever.

Caprica made her way down the foothills of the Anatheman mountain riding her bay horse, who was wearing a leather collar and few other bits of harness ready to be tied to whatever timber she managed to retrieve. The tall wolf was dressed in sleeveless overalls that were baggy (even on her! they must have been owned by a simply enormous human), with a fierce-looking axe belted to her waist - she'd found it by the fire in the common room and for one delightful moment thought it was the Viking's, but the smaller tool wasn't a patch on that weapon - and a yellow builder's hard hat sitting jauntily on her head, discovered in the rubble of an old construction site. Caprica rode through the trees of the forest that tinged the foothills of Anathema, full of cheery optimism for her new project and determination to find the most perfect tree possible for her first project. The stately horse glided patiently from tree to tree, her rider passing over the more common species until she found a beautifully straight and not-too-large cherry tree. She knew she should be starting with pine, really. The wood would be softer and more manageable. But she wanted to have shelves she could be sure to load up - they would need to take some capacity, she knew full well - and not have them buckle or warp on her. Cherry was hard, and a gorgeous dark red colour. Tying the horse a little way off so she wouldn't be accidentally hit by any falling wood, Caprica approached the young tree, eyeing it balefully like a combatant. She squared her paws, lifted the axe and swung hard. After a few swings, she had a good notch and was beginning to get into her stride. One particularly Herculean swing sank the axe-head deep into the wood, maybe too deep or maybe the tree shifted a little from its position, for suddenly the gap seemed to close tightly around the tool and no matter how she tugged, the dusky woman could not extract the axe from the tree's heartwood grasp. "C'mon, c'mon," she growled, using her legs as leverage, but to no avail.

Image courtesy of Ant Jackson@Flickr; Table by the Mentors!

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