Stone and Garden (Nadea)

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock didn't quite catch the woman's snide comment, and simply continued swinging away at the stone. She raised the sledgehammer high and swung in a horizontal angled arc, coming at the stone from the side and connecting iron to rock in blow after blow. With such a thick section of stone to take out here, she'd likely be at this part for hours. Each swing, at best, chipped and scratched the stone, without having much impact. It took repeated strikes before she finally took off a fair sized bit, which she kicked towards the stranger to be added to the pathway. Then the woman asked her a strange question, and Tock finally paused in her work, leaving on the hammer and peering at the woman curiously. "Rouse?" she asked. She wasn't entirely sure if she knew what that word meant. Tock wasn't good with words, nor with book-learning. But she thought it meant something like 'wake up.' "'E ain't gonna be no magic statue," she said, trying to catch her breath from the repeated swinging. "Jus' fer lookin' at, aye? Oy, ya know 'ow 'ard it'd be fer ta put movey-bits on sommat 'is big? Bugger what weighs a couple o' dang tons..." She briefly pondered the possibility of Animating a stone statue like this, but it was too impractical. Not impossible... ANYTHING was possible. But the time and energy it would take would be effort better spent on other things, like her wolf. She resumed pounding at the stone, striking repeatedly as she worked to reduce the shapeless boulder to a more defined work of art.