Flashback The Other Use for Walnuts

[Dust]

Fall 28, 508 AV dusk The caravan rumbled to a halt in nothing resembling unison, as each of the wagons in the train gradually arrived at the designated camp site. The vehicles were pulled around into a circle for shelter and safety, the horses and oxen unharnessed for the night. Some of the travelers set about making fires and putting things in pots for a warm meal to end the day; others laid out tents, brushed their horses, took up positions as sentries. Dust herself did none of these things. She had been riding in a wagon for the last part of the day; now she hopped down to the ground, one hand keeping her floppy hat secure in its place on her head. She called a cheerful goodbye to the driver, then set off to explore their home of the moment. The sparsely wooded landscape around them was still a novelty to the Kelvic, distinct as it was from the bloodwood forest which was all she'd known prior to this trip. The campsite was a mostly clear space with thicker growth along one side and a scattered few more trees distributed within and around. Most of the trees were unfamiliar; Dust regarded them with mild curiosity. Beneath the wide-reaching boughs of one particularly large specimen, the edges of its leaves just beginning to turn golden, she stubbed her toe on something dark and wrinkled and surprisingly hard. "Ow!" She exclaimed in surprise, then stepped back and leaned down to peer at the object in question. The Kelvic raven studied it from a couple of different angles, then reached out and jabbed it with a finger. The ovoid thing, about the size of the center of her palm, rolled a minute distance. "Huh." She picked it up then, feeling the squishy surface and the hard core underneath. That seemed like something which came apart -- so she promptly set about picking and prying at the outer husk. It had a natural split which gave her somewhere to start, though the hull remained surprisingly difficult to pull off. It smelled faintly of mold and rot, the way things on the forest floor often do; it was clearly overripe. But Dust didn't plan on eating it, anyway. She just wanted to see what was under the outside layer... ...and when she did get down to the hard shell underneath, her hands stained with splotches of dull grayish brown, Dust felt like a gratified but slightly silly little bird. She should have recognized the thing sooner; she'd certainly eaten them before. "Walnuts!"

[Dust]

Dust curled her fingers around the globe, holding it tight as if it were some notable prize. The overripe hull squished slightly beneath her grip, cool and slightly damp as it leaked a bit of liquid. Her interest piqued, she began walking a slow pattern beneath the parent tree's canopy, leaning slightly forward, bright eyes fixed intently upon the ground. The soil was covered by a thick layer of old leaves, uniformly dull brown in hue, crackling underneath each meticulous step. Grasses shading golden with the late season poked sere tufts up through that natural mulch, growing up around occasional dead branches which looked to have fallen seasons or even years before. Dust wasn't interested in any of those things; aside from dodging the branches as needed, she looked only for dark curves, hard oblong shapes. Roundness. Roundness, she glimpsed at the edge of her vision, and did a doubletake back for. A yellowish-green curve peeked out at her from beneath a drift of leaves, and Dust pounced on it as if it might pick itself up and run away from her, crowing with glee. Promptly after, a sharp crack echoed off the hills, its point of origin startlingly close. Dust's glee at her findings was promptly supplanted by a yelp of surprise. Peeking out around a spray of low-hanging leaves, she found a boy standing a little ways beyond, looking just as surprised to see her as she was to see him. He toed at the ground, and chewed at his lip, and finally offered a sheepish smile. "Umm... sorry?"

[Dust]

"That's okay!" Dust promptly replied, shoving the leaves aside and walking out towards him, walnuts gripped together in one hand. "Didn't hurt anything." She glanced back over her shoulder, trying to figure out what had been hit to make that loud noise. It wasn't self-evident. Looking back at the boy, she noticed he held twine in one hand -- a long braided plait which hung down until he grabbed up the far end, a piece of leather situated in its middle. "What's that?" she asked, not immediately putting a name to the contraption. "It's a sling," he supplied helpfully. Glancing up at the boy, Dust noticed how his lips were twitching -- he was trying hard not to laugh. She just grinned. "Here," he went on, noticing the nuts in her hand. "Those're walnuts? Can I have one?" Dust handed one over readily enough. He set it in the leather cup and gestured for her to stand aside a bit -- which she also did promptly. Then he spun the sling around and... let go of one end, she thought, a few moments after the fact. At the time, she noticed more vividly the dark streak flying away to crash into a boulder with another sharp crack. "Oh! I see!" Dust clapped her hands together, inasmuch as she could around the remaining walnut, then spun around and held out her empty hand. "Can I try?" The boy affirmed that yes, indeed she could, and passed the sling over.

[Dust]

Dust examined the braided cord -- both sides of it -- and the piece of leather in the middle. It was worn and a bit stretched, or better yet shaped, to cup an oblong object not too dissimilar from the walnut still in her hand. Accordingly, she slipped the walnut in and let the weighted center drop, cord gradually sliding through her fingers. At the far end, she found that the cords on either side were not actually of equal length: one had a few inches greater length over the other. That posed a bit of a puzzle, as Dust held both between thumb and forefinger; shouldn't they be of the same size? But the Kelvic promptly dismissed that issue with a mental shrug -- it wasn't her device, and if it worked for the boy, the different lengths must not be very important after all. Holding her arm out a bit from her body, she flicked her wrist and whirled the tool through the air, not yet releasing the end. Down, around, up. Around and up. Backwards -- no, that didn't seem very useful. She couldn't at all see where to aim then. Around and up again. The walnut hadn't been much at all to hold in her hand, but as she swung the sling around, Dust thought it made for a pretty satisfying pull at the end of the cord. Confident, Dust squared her feet and sighted on the nicely stationary boulder, twirled the sling in a new loop, and released when it seemed like the missile would fly appropriately forward. And fly forward it did -- walnut, sling, and all.

[Dust]

Dust watched the entire assembly impact the ground some feet short of her target, bouncing up in a surprisingly desultory fashion before coming to rest in the dry grass. A curious, partly muffled sound came from behind her. She turned to find the boy with both hands clapped over his mouth, looking for all the world like he'd stuffed too much food in and was trying to keep it there... ...or struggling heroically not to laugh too loudly at her expense. Either way. For her part, Dust grinned broadly him, not in the least offended by his humor at her mishap. "...Oops," she said deadpan, which had the boy all but keel over as his laughter won out. In the meantime, she bounded forward to reappropriate both weapon and ammunition, tucking the walnut back into its leather cradle. As Dust reflected on what had just happened -- the way she had held both strings together, and so released them together, something started to make sense. "The longer string -- it's for another finger, right?" she mused aloud as she came back over beside the boy. "So you don't do what I just did." "Right," he agreed, more or less recovered from his fit of laughter, his head bobbing in affirmation. "Okay." Dust studied the ends again, pinching the shorter one securely between thumb and forefinger; that was undoubtedly where it belonged. The other one... after due consideration, she folded it first around the base of her middle finger, then decided she didn't like the way that felt. Over the third finger it went instead. She gave the sling one more tentative whirl, testing how it all felt when in motion. Not much different really, which she took as a positive sign. The Kelvic then spun the weapon for real, again releasing at what seemed a likely moment. This time, only the walnut flew forward; the other end of the sling continued to pivot around the end she retained hold of. "I did it!" Cause for celebration, in Dust's mind -- even though all her missile did was dimple the dry earth near the same place as before. It still didn't approach the boulder -- but at least it had gone somewhere.

[Dust]

Now she was out of ammunition. Dust and the boy both ducked back under the walnut tree, each to their own side without need for explicit discussion. They scoured the ground beneath for the small, hard orbs of other fallen nuts, whether green, yellowing, or brown -- whether the nut was ripe was of least concern. Dust herself kicked over leaves and loam, dragged fallen tree limbs aside, and generally made a dusty mess of herself in the search -- but find nuts she did, one by one and sometimes in bunches. When she realized there was no way to add just one more walnut to her overfull hands without dropping some other one, Dust finally called the search quits. She still spilled another five (or so) from her grasp as she made her way back out to the unofficially agreed-upon slinger's position, sporadic little markers of the route she walked. The boy waited for her there, having settled for quantities of nuts he could actually carry; hers cascaded down to join his, making a not-so-little pile on the ground. Dust paused to look at her hands, which had turned almost entirely brown from handling the nuts. She held them up to show the boy, who extended his own walnut-stained hands for comparison. "Huh. Hey," she continued, struck by a sudden thought, "If I stained my hair with this stuff, do you think it'd turn my feathers brown, too?" The boy gave that idea due consideration. "...I don't know. Do you want to find out?" Dust didn't have to think about that one long at all. "...Nah, not today. I want to hit the rock!" she countered, picking up the sling from where they'd left it to mark the throwing position. Snatching a walnut from the pile, she looked over at the boulder, gauging the distance to it. Keeping her eyes on her target, she slipped the nut into the pocket, then whirled the sling up and let go -- -- only to have her missile go whizzing on past the right side of the boulder. "Aww..."

[Dust]

Dust remained far from discouraged in her endeavor, though; she picked up another walnut from the pile and gave the problem some thought, chewing idly on her lower lip as she did so. The missile had gone too far right because her arm was too far right -- well, that was the working explanation, anyway. She could move her whole self over, except that wouldn't actually make her throw better; it didn't seem like the right fix. She looked down at her own feet instead, considering her stance. If she pushed her right foot back, and therefore a little in... her pose would look a lot more like the boy's had that one time, now that she thought about it. She decided she'd try that. The Kelvic edged her right foot back, turning her body on an angle to the boulder but still mostly facing it. As she held her arm out with the sling, she decided this stance felt better, too -- not only in the way it 'pointed' towards her target, but in feeling like the sling was more clear of her own body. That was a bonus. Dust then turned her attention to the rock, sighting on it, picking out a single darker shadow which suggested a little hollow in the surface. She wanted the walnut to hit right there... envisioned the way her arm would come up, she'd let go of the cord, and the walnut would fly out to smash into the rock. It would happen just that way. Then she followed through on her projection, whipping the sling up and letting go. The walnut didn't do quite as she'd projected, missing the chosen shadow by a figurative mile -- but it did strike the boulder with a resounding crack. Any hit, at this stage, qualified as victory. Behind her, the boy applauded, and Dust spun around to grin at him. "It worked! I hit it!" she declared, excited and triumphant. "Did you see? Of course you saw, you're standing right there," the Kelvic answered her own silly question. "That was cool." And her babbling enthusiasm had the boy fighting down laughter again, but she didn't care one whit. "Here," she said, holding the sling out to him. "I want to see how you do it again. Besides, we should take turns." That was only fair. The boy coughed, and swallowed, and accepted the sling, then traded positions with her -- he to the figurative line, she to intently watch from beside and behind. They continued to take turns throughout the evening, generally slinging two or three in a row and then handing off to the other, commiserating with one another's failures and celebrating the successes. Not until it was too dark to see the walnuts on the ground did either of them call quits.

[Paragon]

Dust

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Investigation	2
Wilderness Survival	2
Observation	1
Weapon: Sling	4

Lores

•	Lore Earned
•	Firing a Sling (Basics)
•	Finding Walnuts
•	Sling Firing: Accurate Stance

Legend Becomes Reality

Fun solo, and great detail on the sling use - hence the 4 XP! If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, please send me a PM and we can work from there.