One With the Earth (Solo)

[Maya Frostfawn]

Timestamp: Summer 3, 523 AV Today, Maya decided that she wished to expand upon idea she had been working on and developing over the past few days. She wanted to work on what she was referring to as "natural camouflague," or a disguise crafted entirely from things found around her. Camouflague designed to help her blend in with the natural world, crafted from the natural world, which would seriously help with her budget, which could definitely use a lot of work right about now. For this particular exercise, she decided that she wished to work with a mixture of dust and dirt, which was rather plentiful in the area. She could mix both with water to change its density, texture, color, and overall feel and just, see what happened more than anything else. A distant part of her felt excited to get started, but another part of her was worried this would prove a worthless feat, or largely worthless feat. It couldn't be entirely worthless if she learned something, right? So, Maya took her first step by heading outside and gathering a pile of dirt between her hands before dumping it on her table before making another few trips to gather some more before quickly heading back inside and locking the door behind her. She did not want to be disturbed during her work any more than she wanted to run out of supplies before she finished. And the pile of dark, small-grained dirt upon her table looked like it would be enough. Next, she placed her waterskin filled with slightly-murky water beside it and then stripped out of her clothes to widen her canvas. She folded them neatly and set them down on the chair beneath her in an effort to make its uncomfortable nature more comfortable and keep from hurting her delicate form. Maya glanced down at her skin, it was so sickly looking and dry. She supposed that in some ways, that could be a benefit--maybe the dirt would take to it better than healthier skin. Maybe it wouldn't. In any case, the nuit was about to find out. But first, what was she trying to accomplish? She wanted to blend in, to look "natural," but what was the best way to do that? And where should she begin? Perhaps, with the basics? Making herself look grubby? She had already experimented a bit with that in the past, so that seemed like a good place to start, and from there, she could expand to more complicated creations. Perhaps, drawing with the help of her fingers upon her skin, creating textures and designs that would help disguise and camouflague her. Maybe she could create the pattern of dried leaves, or even tree bark, or snake skin or something. She could get really inventive if she was lucky and wanted to and also... developed the skill. Although she doubt she was the worst artist in the world, she definitely had a lot of work to go before she was anywhere near the best. And, without further ado, she sat down on her pile of clothes and scooped a pile of dirt into her right hand. She'd start with the dirt being dry and then add bits of moisture if she couldn't accomplish what she wished. Rather unceremoniously, Maya turned her hand over, and rubbed the dirt into her left wrist. Several grains fell from her skin and tumbled onto the floor, making the messy floor even messier, but she ignored this and continued rubbing until there was nothing left to rub into her wrist and then up the length of her arm toward her elbow. As she worked, she silently wondered if this would help mask her smell from those with sensitive noses, and when she finished rubbing the dirt into her skin, she surveyed her skin. It clearly looked like she had taken the time to rub dirt into it--no surprises there. A sort of dusty, dirty quality marred her once clean but dry skin. She wondered if she could make the grime look more natural by manipulating the streaking pattern she had made with her fingers. To make it seem like grime she'd acquired while working or something as opposed to something she had applied to her skin on purpose. So, she began with the flesh closest to her wrist, winding her fingers in circles around the dusty dirt. Some if it came off on her fingers, some of it remained on her skin and it seemed to her, that you could make out where her fingers had wound round and round to press the dirt into her skin. Maya blinked. What if? She picked a patch of skin below the marks she had just made and began wiggling her fingers back and forth across it, like waves, up and down up and down--the marks it made seemed slightly more natural than the whorls she had created before, but even more dirt had come off on her fingers than before, she thought. Now, what happens if I do this?

[Maya Frostfawn]

Maya pressed her fingers into the edge the skin she had made the wavy lines on and began to wind them in circles. The pattern beneath began to absorb the one on top and she flaked even more dirt off her skin. The sheen of dirt on her flesh was so thin now, she felt it hard to make out, and quickly reached for more dirt which she rubbed over her skin on the patch she was experimenting on. When she felt as though she had enough to work with, she continued moving her fingers through the dirt. Even more came away from her skin and the textures she was making became harder and harder to make out. This led her to believe that she may have to add several layers of dry dirt to her skin and manipulate them each for some time before she achieved the desired effect. This could be time-consuming and not the best method, especially if she wanted to cover a large area. Before she finalized her conclusions, she decided to keep experimenting a bit longer and see what happened. This time, when she made circles in her skin, she moved her fingers around to the right first, and then to the left. This deepened the circles in her skin and wore even more dirt off. Then, she tried varying the size of the circle, drawing her fingers toward the edge of her arm's underside until they nearly fell off the side, before having it dance in the center of her skin, barely moving. This just made it look like she was drawing circles in her skin, so she went back over the skin with the wavy finger pattern. This seemed to make things look a little more natural, but at the same time, it also simply looked like she was drawing on her skin. So, she decided to try other movements--a more jagged wave, like a lightning bolt, which, really didn't seem all that different from the wave, except her nails were more noticeable around the jagged bits. (The indentations in her skin). She tried triangles, squares, rectangles, but that didn't do much to make things seem more natural. So, she decided to see what would happen if she wet the dirt--perhaps the moisture would force the grains to disperse more and this would make the patterns she drew appear more natural. So, she grabbed a small clump of dirt and set it aside from the rest. Then she opened her waterskin, and poured a little bit of water in it. Just enough to dampen it, but not soak it completely through and make it sink into her table and become completely unusable. When she was done, she closed the waterskin and mixed the dirt absently with her fingertips and the water became more easily dispersed. Like before, she began by scooping up some of the dirt and rubbing it unceremoniously into her skin, on top of what she had applied before. Before she began working on a new area to see what happened, she wanted to see what happened when she worked on the same area with different types of dirt. A lot of the grains fell off, same as before, and the moisture seemed to wash some of the grime away too, but at the same time, some of the grains clung to her skin and spread out as she rubbed, creating a darker, less dusty coat on her skin than before. Maya continued rubbing until there was nothing left to rub, at which point, she began with the circle pattern, which just, made more circles. The same with each of the other shapes--squares, rectangles, ovals of varying sizes. It was clear she was simply drawing on her skin. When she tried the waves and the jagged lightning bolts, the grains simply spread out like rides, with the shapes underneath. She tried another coat to see if she had simply run out of dirt and that's why things looked the way they did, but she wound up in the same spot. Maya frowned, maybe she needed to simply use one type of dirt at a time--damp, really wet, or dry. So, she reached for another scoop of the dampened dirt and applied it to an unexperimented on patch of skin. She began to move her fingers in little waves over the dirt, spreading it out after she had pressed as much as she could into her skin. The patterns her fingers made reminded her of winding rivers, but also, kinda the texture of bark, which she felt was something she could work with if she simply tried hard enough to make it look more natural. Yes, that was the direction she decided she would be going in for now, for the rest of this session and perhaps a few others, until she mastered the application.

[Maya Frostfawn]

Maya wanted to begin working with a larger canvas than she had been working with prior, so she decided that she would draw on her legs and perhaps, start on her belly afterword if she ran out of space to work with. She wanted to try making a texture on her skin with the dirt that resembled tree bark. Yes; she would be drawing in the dirt to make... bark. But what did bark look like? It'd been a minute since she'd seen a strong, healthy tree, but from what she recalled of her travels, trees came in all different shapes and sizes. Their bark were different colors--some were white, some were grey, some were various shades of brown and some were a mixture. Some bark was thick, some thin, some somewhere in-between. Some trees bore bark that peeled away from the trunk, some clung to it like a child her mother's leg. Some was knotted and whorled, and some not so much. Some resembled a snake's skin, had diamond patterns, others had simpler banded patterns and a bunch of others she couldn't quite describe. Trees were very, very varied, just like all of the races that roamed the world, so she had a lot of room to work with. But, since she was working with dirt, which was in fact brown, she decided that she'd try to reproduce the bark of a brown-colored tree trunk. Most of the trees of that variety she had seen either had thick bark or bark somewhere in-between, and had either a simple banding pattern that kind of looked like it had been scraped over, or a more diamond-shaped pattern. Today, Maya decides that she'd try and recreate the diamond-shaped pattern and work on other varieties some other time. The first step was to slather herself up with some dirt. So she scooped a bunch of the dry dirt up and began rubbing it into her right thigh. It didn't cover the whole area, so she reached for another batch and applied that as well, before adding another small pile to make sure the entire upper portion of her thigh was covered and also, that the floor got fed again. When she was done applying the dirt with her hands and fingers, her hands were dusty and dirt-crusted and she felt like a child that had just gone out to play or a gardener that couldn't figure out how to keep relatively neat. But it didn't matter, that was to be expected, and her home and Sunberth in general were a mess anyway. The next step was to draw the pattern of the bark on her skin with her fingers. So, she used her right pointer, which she felt was one of the easier fingers to work with, and drew a diamond on her skin. It was roughly an inch and a half high and an inch wide. With uneven, wobbling lines that were thicker in some areas and thinner in others. She pulled her finger away from her skin; you could tell that it was drawn with an unpracticed hand and her ministrations had worked away so much of the dirt, that you could faintly make out the color of her skin underneath it. Maya sighed; this was going to take so much bloody time to master, but she was a nuit with all of the time in the world. So, after surveying her work for another moment, she pressed the tip of her finger back against her skin and drew another diamond connected to her first. Once she had closed it off, she studied her work and realized that it was a bit larger than the first and just as uneven. She also felt like the points were too pointed, too jagged, and it looked unnatural. She felt as though she should soften them a bit, for she felt like such a clear point didn't often exist naturally in nature. She could be mistaken, but at the same time, she felt like that was a thing. So she tried again, drawing another diamond to the right of the last. A line diagonally down and to the right, up and to to the right up and to the left, and a final little line to connect it to the previous. Huh. That one was less jagged and seemed... just as unnatural. Perhaps she had to soften the edges further? Maybe it could be corrected after? She tried drawing her fingertips around the edges in little open half-circles, softening the curves and ridding her leg of even more dirt, although the floor and her finger picked some up. That was too round, she thought, as she pulled her finger away. She needed something somewhere between those two, she felt, and also, lines that weren't quite as thick as those she had been making, which led her to believe that she'd have to draw with the side of her finger as opposed to the flat of her finger. The pad in its entirety.

[Maya Frostfawn]

Maya quickly drew another series of diamonds around the three she had already drawn, connecting them all with a series of lines. She used the side of her finger to draw each of them, and like before, the lines were uneven, although they were consistently more narrow than the original series. And sometimes, they were so thin that they seemed to taper off into nothingness and she had to go back over them in order to make them more distinct. Most of the time, the corners were too jagged, and she went over them again and again, but that simply rubbed away most of the dirt and made the edges an indistinct mess she couldn't exactly use in a disguise. You know, for all of those times she needed to be a tree. She clearly wasn't good at this, but that was why she was practicing. The adults who had been in her life as a child always said, "practice makes perfect," and she had always rolled her eyes in response. Maya tried another few diamonds, this time, they seemed a little more ovular than diamond shaped, she was making the edges too rounded and they were all uneven again. And she was also running out of space on this particular thigh. So, she realized, she would other need to wipe away her work so she could start again, or begin working on the other leg or something. But, she felt that would be foolish, because there was more to the tree bark than the most obvious feature of its pattern. For example, she was working from memory of tree bark with a diamond-backed pattern. But in addition to that obvious shape, were little lines and ridges and deformities within the heart of the diamonds. Tiny, intricate details she had neglected up until this point in her practice, which she would need to master at some point in order to master this disguise. She figured she should begin working on that too, and when she ran out of space, she could begin working on her remaining leg. She knew that these details were smaller than the diamonds themselves, at least, most of the time--there were some exceptions, so she would need to use even less of her finger to draw them, or, use the same technique as previously, but hide or adjust the lines in some way after they had been applied to make them seem smaller and more like the bark in her mind's eye. She decided she'd try to draw gingerly using her least-sharpened nail, so as not to scratch her weak nuit skin. This should allow her to add fine details that she could widen later to meet her needs. So, she began with one of the first diamonds she had drawn, simply scraping some lines up and down, and then some more wiggly ones out of those as though she were drawing vines or maybe a river and its tributaries or something. The lines were all uneven, too thin, and ultimately, they looked out of place within the diamond. Maya tried the next one, creating a series of smaller diamonds within the diamond, all with far too jagged edges. One after the other, overlapping one another, until it was hard to determine where one began and the next ended. That looked weird too, so she tried drawing some random lines and squiggles between them to see what effect that had. Not only did it scrape away a lot of dirt, but it looked... weird. Yeah, definitely not what she was going for. NEXT!

[Maya Frostfawn]

What would happen if she tried drawing whorls? Something in line with the ripples that formed on still water when you threw something into it? Or when you disturbed the surface with the gentle touch of a finger? As though you were testing its temperature before heading in for a refreshing bath? Maya tried it, drawing sort of squiggly, wiggly lines that wound around each other, with misshapen circles at their centers and then more lines around them. A mess. Again, another attempt, squiggly misshapen circle at the center. More wiggly lines around it, framing and accentuating it. More dirt caked beneath her nails, turning them an unpleasant shade of brown, more dirt on the floor. And another mess--was it because the lines were too squiggly? Were they too crooked in bits? Not rounded enough? Maya blinked and studied her work? What on earth was wrong? Clearly, she lacked talent, but everything she was doing didn't even remotely resemble what she was going for. She clenched her teeth, a distant sort of frustration bubbling in her chest as she made yet a third attempt in another one of the diamonds she had drawn on her skin earlier. Nail pressed into skin, winding down toward her knee, and then around in a little, wobbling loop back up toward her stomach and the top of the diamond, and then back down and around to close the loop. So, so wobbly, like a bloody child who hadn't quite figured out their shapes or how to use their hands properly yet. It was distantly embarassing. Maybe she should drop the whorl thing, or practice with more angular shapes and then widen and adjust them? Maya picked another diamond and drew a rough rectangle in its heart. The lines weren't quite straight and it bore the slants of a triangle, but, was the shape of an uneven rectangle. Inwardly, the nuit groaned as she drew more lines around it--ninety degree angles, (or wobbly angles that were close enough), framing it onto the edge of the diamond, some of the lines, ever so conveniently, working their way out of the lines. Maya nibbled on her lower lip as she went back over some of the lines with her finger tip, widening them with lines that didn't perfectly trace, but formed a series of wobbly lines that slightly deviated from the first as they widened them. They didn't look quite right either, but this was only practice, and she felt it was the harsh angular bits that were the real problem. So, she went back over those alone with her nails, softening them into curves over and over until her hand started to grow tired and shake from all of the repitition, which only made the lines wobblier and more uneven. Which in turn, only made her more distantly frustrated. She ignored this however and continued her work by moving onto the next diamond she had drawn in her skin. This time, she began with a more wobbly, wannabe oval at the heart of the diamond and more elongated, winding lines and whorls around it. Some of them came out more jagged than she had intended, and some of them were so shallowly drawn that she had to go back over them a few times to truly make them out. That didn't look quite right. What was she doing wrong? Should she combine some of the different methods? The ovals and the circles to make something that seemed more natural? Because the rectangular drawings certainly seemed out of place. Yes; she would try that, a small oval, with a mixture of circles, ovals, and rounded, open lines moving around it, framing it. First, the oval at the heart--a wobbly mess that looked like the oval had been squeezed at its center, like clay. A few smaller circles in the area around it, that weren't too circular. And then some rounded lines around all of those... wait... you couldn't frame all of those things with the lines, you had to focus on one heart at a time, (the oval or the circle), and then build around that before moving onto the next one, or things wouldn't be facing the right direction, and by things, she meant those lines and whorls. Maya blinked, she supposed this is what happened when you didn't need to sleep anymore...

[Maya Frostfawn]

Maya decided she would make one final attempt to produce the effect she desired before calling it quits for the day; she was tired of bending over her naked body, concentrating like this. She moved onto another diamond, and drew a wobbly oval at its heart. Then a smaller, wobbly oval above it, scraping some dirt beneath her nail as she did so, and then one even smaller, wobbly oval below the first. When she was done, she made an open half-circle to the right of the first oval, one to the left. Paused, moved her finger around to add a few more lines that framed this first, larger oval, and then created a similar pattern around the smaller ovals, so that they were all framed by these half-circle lines. She paused when she was done to survey her work--the circles and the ovals together looked weird and unnatural. And the framing lines, were perhaps, a tad too uneven. She supposed she needed consistency--ovals with more ovals and perhaps a few whorls, and nothing else. She tried this with the next diamond and the one after that, but everything just looked too messy. She supposed she had worked on this mess for too long and simply needed a fresh canvas, so she took the time to apply a fresh batch of dirt to her clean thigh before taking the time to draw another batch of diamonds with the side of her finger. This time, she tried to round the edges of each diamond a little, so the points wouldn't be so pronounced, and although uneven in nature--in both the shape of their lines and their overall size, the nuit supposed they looked a tad more natural than the first batch she had created earlier in the day. She went back over the edges a few times, simply practicing the stroke with her finger as she wiped away more and more dirt from her skin, letting it form small piles on the floor. The edges became marred, blurred, she could barely make out their truth now as she continued to work. It was so sloppy, she could barely make out where one edge began and the next ended. Sheesh, she was making such a mess. Both of her skin and of the floor. But no matter, she was almost done for the day, she knew. She drew another diamond, away from the others, a diagonal line down and to the right, up and to the right, up and to the left, down and to the left to close it. The line ran past, into open space, into the skin she had yet to paint with her fingers. She could fix it later, by attaching another diamond to it, she did that quickly, forming one large diamond with a smaller one protruding from it. Absently, she drew a few wavy lines through the small one--vertical wavy lines. Horizontal ones through the larger one. Although she had all the time in the world to master this, she wished she could do so sooner. Do so right this very moment. Be a tree, be one with nature, be a master of disguise. Be anything she wanted to be. Anything but this nuit, just for a moment... But that wasn't how the world worked. And she had made her choice...

[Morose]

Grade Award! Name: Maya Frostfawn XP Award: Disguise 2 Drawing 5 Logic 1 Observation 1 Lores: Disguise: Using natural elements Disguise: Adding in water to affect color and consistency Disguise: Looking like a grubby Sunbethian Disguise: Should cover up smell as well as appearance Disguise: Attempting to make grime look natural Disguise: Layering Dirt for different effects Trying to draw a tree by memory and failing Drawing: Trying to depict nature Keeping at something despite having trouble Drawing: Making simple shapes and patterns Penalties & Awards: N/A Notes: At a certain point it seemed less disguise making, and more her just drawing on herself, though I did award some disguise when she was actually trying to enhance her disguise. It also didn't really seem to be camouflage, as she wasn't really trying to blend in with anything or conceal something in the environment. Just to be clear if your actually trying to blend into your environment and say hide against a tree, that would be camouflage not disguise- these are two different skills. Good work on the thread!