Difference between revisions of "Logs:Subtlety"

>---< Tanner Workroom, High Reaches Weyr >-----------------------------------<
  The tanners' section of the craft complex is a series of three modest work
  caverns separated by heavy curtains. The chamber immediately inside the   
  entrance from the complex is dedicated to storage of works-in-progress and
  commissions, with cubbies and pegs lining the wall. Past the first        
  curtain, a more typical workshop presents itself: a tight space congested 
  with tables and stools, racks presenting orderly rows of tools, a large   
  cabinet with labelled drawers for hardware, a bin for scrap leather. The  
  furthest cavern is dedicated to an enormous wooden drum mounted on braces,
  with a heavy handle for rotating the drum in place. A series of drying    
  racks on rollers tuck away neatly when not in use.                        
                                                                            
  Owing to the odorous nature of the craft, each room boasts a              
  wooden-shuttered window cut into the stone wall, in addition to the door  
  in the furthest cavern that allows easy access to the Bowl for outside    
  work when the weather permits. Even so, despite a thorough ventilation    
  system, the shop is permeated by a faintly disagreeable smell.            
 -----------------------------< Active Players >-----------------------------
  Laine        F  17  5'4"  trim, dark hair, grey eyes                    0s 
  Leova        F  44  5'5"  hourglass, rusty hair, amber eyes            45s
 ----------------------------------< Exits >---------------------------------
                                      Out                                   
>------------------------------------------< 7D 4M 37T I10, spring night >---<

This early spring evening, now that the days last longer and light lingers, the tanner's workroom is busier than usual; a few apprentices are making use of the last of the fading light as it slants in through shuttered windows. All the dividing curtains have been tied back, so that the three apprentices can lean through doorways, chatter and joke. Although it looks like Laine has finished her work for the day--she's standing at the cubbies, leaning against the shelving, straps dangling from her lazy hand--she's trading taunts back and forth with the poor sap assigned to turn, turn, turn the handle on the tanning drum aaall the way back in the furthest cavern.

Funny how, even on a lovely day, the door to the outer complex remains closed: half as though the other crafters aren't as keen on the tanners' odors permeating their place, too. There's a knock on that door before it opens, one of the dragonhealers behind it, her short hair still auburn and not yet sun-rusted. "Evening," Leova calls into the extended caverns once the door's shut behind her. "The journeyman in?"

"--only exercise you do is running your mouth, Orry," Laine's laughing. All three apprentices pause, however, when that door swings open; the blond-haired boy kicking his heels on a stool looks up from his work, and that big drum slows for an instant when the pudgy youth manning it loses his rhythm. It's Laine, though, who spins slowly around on her heel to meet the dragonhealer with a nonchalant grin--and maybe she was expecting someone else, but she straightens her posture and clears her throat before she answers, "No. Just us chickens. Can I help you?"

That gets a one-cornered grin, just a flash of it. "Hope so. Realize it's after hours," Leova says, "But. Got word that some worked handle-straps we asked for, for the dragon infirmary, are in. Want to pick those up." This, with an evaluative glance at the cubbies as though items might leap out and make themselves known. "Happen to know how much longer the toolbelt with the holsters is going to take?"

Laine screws up her face, nose wrinkling. It might be in thought, but it just as well just be uncertainty; she turns back again to those cubbies, and hooks her thumbs through her belt as she spends a long moment scanning the stored leather work. "Handle-straps?" Dubious, she chews on her lower lip. The blond boy, propped on his elbows in the second cavern, calls forward their location, and Laine shoots a bright smile over her shoulder at Leova. "'Course. Right here. Dardan finished them today. Toolbelt--that's still getting worked on. Doing the holsters myself," she says, matter-of-factly.

The greenrider's easy with the waiting, her stance square and her shoulders relaxed. "Mm. Don't want to be on a ladder and drop it," she supplies, adding a wave towards the blond when he chips in. It's the last statement that gets a slight lift to her brows. "Are you. How's that going? Learning anything in particular, or is it more the same-ol' and practice?"

She's got to put down the straps in her hand already, but it only takes Laine, standing on tip-toe, and a low grunt as she hops on one foot, to retrieve the handle-straps. "Want 'em bundled, in a bag, or just--" the apprentice casually brandishes the work, though she does look perfunctorily around for something to put them in. "--as is?" Perhaps hoping Leova will opt for as-is, Laine takes a step toward the dragonhealer. There's a pause for 'same-ol'. "Going good. Doing... Decorative, sort of. The aesthetics of it. The art of making it not look like a first-year apprentice made it." A grin: lopsided, as usual.

"Bundled's good. Twine or something through 'em, maybe." Not as-is, then. Leova doesn't move to meet her, not with a possible detour for supplies. Deadpan, "Not that they don't make a good set of bracelets. What year are you, then?" Apprentices, they come and go. Some sooner than others.

"Fifth," Laine laughs outright at the question as she turns, tucks the leatherwork under her arm, rifles through a nearby shelf, and eventually produces a length of twine. "Fifth year. Promise the holsters'll turn out okay. It's yours? The holster-belt-thing?" She adroitly bundles the straps into a neat bunch, and offers it again to Leova.

"Fifth," has an amused sort of emphasis. Leova crosses over to collect the assemblage, with a glance at the still-open windows. This close, it may be apparent that she's breathing shallowly, though at least she hasn't plugged her nose. "Aye. Had one, but S'dre's finally gave up, so I shared." That's distinctly wry. "I'll take your word for it. Seem a lot different, fifth year from fourth?"

If Laine notes that look towards the window, or the short breaths, there's only a hiked, wider smile for it--she's not about to make any apologies for her craft. "Got brothers," she says, instead. "'Sharing' turns to 'borrowing' turns to 'having' pretty quick, sometimes." Leova's question earns a thoughtful glance from Laine, and she scratches her chin. "Yes?" Ambivalent. "More... subtlety." She doesn't say it like it's a good thing.

The greenrider's got a low laugh for that story, for those brothers. For that having. "Won't complain too much, not when I get a fresh one, leastways if it's broken in right. 'Subtlety,' though." The leaher straps rattle loosely as she hooks that thumb into her pocket. "Not your favorite thing?"

"Hey," Laine lifts her hands, palm-up, toward Leova. "We don't do the breaking in. That's up to you. But. Dardan does good work." She drops her hands again, crosses her arms loosely over her chest, thinks. "It's just--I learned all this big stuff, right? And now it's just smaller and smaller stuff. Soon I'll just be in a dark room, tooling the same piece of leather over and over again. Forever."

"Shells," comes with a matching grimace. "One of these days, Turns? You lot will come up with something to save us from that." Someday. Better to listen, for now, to watch the girl. Leova does, quiet. Then, "Mm." Thoughtful. "Can see why that wouldn't suit."

Laine chuckles, low and amsued. "We'd need a lot more apprentices. Whose job would be to wear someone else's leather around. Do jumping jacks in it, or something. They'd be fit, at least," she shoots a laughing look at Leova, then bites her lower lip. Tucks her thumbnail under her teeth as though she's about to chew on it, but doesn't. "No. But. It's what I know." She says it plainly, maybe as though she's said it over and over, before.

She might have chipped something in, the more deadpan for all that infectious humor. But there's the rest. Leova sinks back onto her heels, considering Laine, thoughtful still. "Invested a lot of years already," she says. Plain to plain. Not persuasively, but putting the obvious out there.

Now she does chew that thumbnail, sobered somewhat; she nods, reluctantly. "Yeah. Five turns. That's, like," Laine squints, visibly considering the math, then concludes uncertainly, "Almost a third of the time I've been alive. Basically." Okay, she's not... great at math, either.

"They say it gets better," but again that low voice of Leova's isn't aiming to persuade, just putting that out there too. Will it?

"Tooling leather. In a dark room. Forever." Laine reiterates with a sigh, in case Leova missed it the first time. "Maybe? Maybe it does. Does it? What did you do? Before," this, Laine's free hand gestures broadly. Then, hastily: "If you don't mind me asking, of course."

"Hope so. More choices, anyhow: can even," and this is deadpan too, "take it outside maybe." As though this were somehow risky or dangerous or otherwise utterly forbidden. "Anyhow," Leova says with another of those one-shouldered shrugs. "Worked in the stables, out Tillek way. Helped with the runners as pulled the wagons. Not Beastcraft, just regular help. Won't say it hasn't helped, here."

"We do have a door," Laine acknowledges, grudging as it may be, with a glance flicked back at those two deeper caverns and those two fellow apprentices, who are engaged in a duologue of their own, and that door. She clips at her thumbnail with her teeth, then self-consciously clasps her hands together. "Did you like it? The runner. And wagons. And helping." Her tone suggests, again: if you don't mind me asking.

"I did, aye." Leova, rueful. She'd glanced after Laine's, and now runs a hand through her hair, ruffling it every which way. "If you'd asked me as a young sprout," not that she's ancient now, but when she could have been Laine's mother, close enough. "Wouldn't have seen it, but there's, hm. A rhythm. Rough work just getting in on the edge of it, and then deeper... but that's the human side of things. How much did it matter, out at Tanner, 'being a girl'?"

Echoed thoughfully: "A rhythm." Laine purses her lips, maybe like she's about to say it again, but then shrugs, leisurely and languid. Her grey eyes skim the workshop, lingering on the messy debris left in the wake of her blond-haired colleague. She answers slowly, thick brows furrowing: "Can't answer that, rightly. I am a girl. I'd have to be a boy to know what difference it makes." But: "Helped, growing up with brothers."

"Mm. Imagine it would." Leova lets that next moment settle, but there's a quiet intentness to her amber gaze, and it leads to a slight smile. "Reckon, too, if you can't tell 'nough to speculate, it's a whole lot better than it was during the Pass." The comet pass. "Or maybe Tanner's just that way. Glad it's better." She resettles the straps to her other wrist, counting them with her fingers. No doubt they'll get a more thorough inspection down the road. "Anyhow, good meeting you, Laine. Good luck with your, ah. Little dark room."

Laine is young. She's young, and kind of naive, or shortsighted, in that way that teenagers are, so she sniffs and crosses her arms again and looks away from Leova, down the workshop, at her peers. "Guess so. I wouldn't know." But, for that last, there's a curving little smile and a grateful, if muttered, "Thanks." And, with lifted dark eyebrows, a diffident brush at invisible dust on her sleeve: "I'll get those holsters done up right for you. Should be ready by end of the week."

There's no offense taken, just a half-smile given. Then, "Appreciate it. I'll be back. Or," if the girl wants an excuse to get out, if the journeyman will spare her, "Come find me." That smile tilts up, and then Leova makes her way out with a brisk, easy stride.

Laine turns and busies herself tidying up those cubbies, even if it means just straightening a few pieces, righting something overturned. "I'll find you!" She calls after Leova, maybe after the dragonhealer's already left, although hopefully not out of earshot.