The Workings of the Undistinguished

by **Kestral** on June 1st, 2016, 5:54 pm

The Quill's Rest
Summer 3, 516AV

Kestral sat with her head in her hands. It was a quite day at the shop. There were a few strangling writers sitting silently at the tables, not even one had ordered a drink. A cooling cup of Kelp Tea sat next to her elbow. She had taken a few sips in boredom but otherwise left it to its own devices. The scribe herself watched with envy as one lanky black haired young man sat hunched over a piece of parchment, seemingly deep in a story that was flowing from his mind to his paper. Kestral would be doing the same seeing as she had no customers needing a scribe, yet unfortunately the young girl was having a bit of writer's block being stuck in a wooden building all day. Being surrounded by the success of other writers before her did not help but to deepen her disappointment in herself. She grabbed her journal out from under the counter where she currently had it hidden from view and tapped at it with her feathered quill, yearning for some sign of an idea to come burst out of the end like a rainbow from a storm cloud. Yet nothing came so she just sighed, placed the book back out of sight and rested her head in her hands once more.

She was just beginning to stare off into space thinking about the docks. A place she loved to sit by and people watch. She always seemed to gather some inspiration from the water, boats, fishermen. She was rudely jolted out of her mind when the door to the Quill's Rest burst open rather off theme for the quiet thinking place. A young man, looking just a bit older, although much more ragged and out of breath, than Kestral, stumbled in as he juggled what looked like dozens of scrolls tucked inside his enclosed arms. Seeing a customer the scribe straightened up and put on a smile for the man who seemed to ignore her silent greeting as he staggered up to the counter and dropped all the scrolls, a few tumbling onto the ground, in front of her. He bent quickly to retrieve them and then, when he saw Kestral's smiling face, put on a quick greeting grin before quickly telling her his situation.

"I wrote a story, but it's everywhere. I'm a bit of a mess you see. Sorry. Anyway I need it to be put together into a book. Sorry. I've numbered all the pages, but they are kind of everywhere... Sorry. How much would that cost me?" The boy rambled and Kestral just intently listened. She had seen writers like this before and was happy to say that she was a rather neat one compared to others like this.

"It's 5 Gold Mizas a page, sir." She stated simply and began straightening his scrolls into a pile. She bent below the counter and brought back up a large basket which she then filed the papers into. She would have to find the first page somewhere in there once she started. She was very thankful he had numbered them. That was more than most people did anyway.

"Right... Right. Ok, yeah that's fine. Do I pay or now... Or later? I think there are 47 pages. Maybe more... How much is that?" The man put up his fingers and began counting. Kestral did not know the number, math was never her strong point and she knew she would have to do the numbers on paper later but there was no use doing it now.

"You'll pay after I finish copying the pages. There will be a little extra fee for putting them together in a book, 10 Mizas a believe. I will give you a total when you come back. 7 days should be long enough for me to work through this." At least she hoped. "So come back on the 10th. If I am not done by that day I can give you a more direct estimate then."

The man nodded, continuing to bob his head for a few ticks longer than she thought was needed. "Right... Right. Ok. The 10th. That's fine." The man looked around at the shop. "I... I think I'm just going to sit down for a little while. Can I get a tea?" Kestral looked over at her boss who was in charge of the only food item they held. He nodded and turned his back to the man, towards the tea pot. The writer left Kestral then to take the tea from her boss and then picked an empty table near the door, stared straight into the wood grains of the table and sipped his tea absently.

The scribe rolled her eyes, grabbed the basket full of scrolls and retreated to the back room where her writing table waited. On the shelves near her she grabbed a small stack of parchment, a bottle of black ink and a shop owned quill. Kestral never used her own supplies for work related writings. Placing these tools on the writing table she turned to the basket and began to shuffle through the pages, looking at each page number and trying to organize them into numbered order.

This took a good ten bells before she managed to order the 38 pages (the man had over-counted somehow) placed them with the second page up, the first page already in front of her, with a paperweight atop them to keep the papers from going anywhere. She placed the basket under the table and out of her way and she pulled one blank parchment from it's pile and placed it directly to the right of the mans title page, or page 1.

Almost forgetting she paused, then started to scribble on the blank page some numbers. She dipped her quill in the ink and began to write a bunch of 5s on the paper, vertically down the left side of the page, so she could add up the price of all the pages.

Math :

Once she had figured out the price, an even 200gm in fact, she folded that paper up, let it fall into the basket under the table, pulled another fresh blank parchment and began to copy the first page of this man's story

by **Kestral** on June 1st, 2016, 7:33 pm

"The Fisherman's Glory"

The first page contained only the title of the story the man had written and Kestral scoffed under her breath at the name. How commonly cliche, she thought, I wonder, oh wonder, what this story is going to be about, as she imagined some large sea monster and a tiny, usually unnoticed fisherman defeating it in some miraculous way.

No matter though, this was her job and it did raise her self esteem a little to know that she was probably a better writer than her client. The title was in black and situated in the middle of the otherwise blank page, so Kestral copied it onto the other paper. She wrote very slowly and neatly and double and triple checked the words on the original page. She knew what the page said but it was habit, and a good one at that for a scribe, to thoroughly check the spelling of each and every word before writing it. One mistake and the whole page was wasted.

With the title page done, Kestral muttered to herself, "1 down 37 to go" and flipped the original page over starting a stack next to the other originals and also flipped the fresh title page to make a new stack on the table. She pulled the second page out from under the paper weight and quickly read it over. Giggling silently to herself she could feel her pride at herself growing as she read the first part of the first sentence; "Once upon a time in a land far, far away..." Again it was no matter and Kestral turned to her next blank piece of parchment and neatly wrote the first sentence, then the second, third, until after perhaps 15 chimes she had finished the first paragraph made up of 10 sentences.

It was extremely slow work, that of a scribe. They had to be extraordinarily precise and accurate. Like mentioned before, one spelling error, one smudge, one tiny little mistake and she would have to start the entire page over and depending on how far down the page she was when the mistake was made could mean a tremendous amount of time wasted as well. So each word she double checked, each sentence she reread before beginning and reread after finishing. By the time she was done with this story she would know more about it than the author would, guaranteed.

The second page, but first real page in the story, took her around 45 chimes to finish. When done copying she reread it once, then placed it face up on the pile of fresh papers that currently only contained the title page. When she was done with the third page she would flip the second over on its back and place the third one face up on top of the second. By doing this she made sure that each page had a change to dry and there would be no chance of smudging. Realizing this with a shock, she had not let the title page dry before flipping is and she, with a slight panic, turned the first page over and inspected it. Sure enough there was a long smudge on the 'F' of the word "Fisherman's". Kestral frowned deeply at her mistake, rookie mistake and on the very first page! What a way to start out. She crumpled it up angrily and threw it into the basket below the table. She grabbed a fresh page and quickly, but neatly, scribbled the title again, having known it by heart by now, she did not need the original for reference. She then carefully placed the title page, face up, next to its sister page and would flip both of them into one pile once she finished copying the next page.

Her next mistake was a couple bells later, just one bell before she was allowed to go home for the day. This time she was about halfway down the fifth page, the third paragraph in, when she accidentally misspelled 'cooler' as 'coler' in the sentence "The dark, blue ocean water was much cooler than he had expected for summer and flinched a bit in sock at the temperature." She was getting anxious as time drew nearer for her to leave and she cursed at herself as she crumpled the page and threw it again into the basket. That was almost 25 chimes of work wasted... which would mean she would use the entirety for the last hour of work redoing and finish page five.

She was correct in her time estimate and a little less than a bell later she finished she page she was working on and began to pack up the story for storage overnight and go home. She left the cost estimate paper in the bottom of the basket, but took out the two trashed papers and threw them into the designated paper bin across the room where her boss would try to find ways of reusing them later. He always tried to remind her not to crumple the papers up, that made it more difficult to reuse them, but Kestral always seemed to forget in her anger. Then she placed the pile of original, yet to be copied pages, at the bottom of he basket. Stacked the copied papers on top of them, but facing upside down as to not confuse the two stacks, and place the copied pages in a pile on top, perpendicular to the stacks underneath. She then picked the basket up, put it in an empty space on the shelf, returned her supplies to their drawers and headed home for the night, ready to swiftly pick up where she left off the next day.

by **Kestral** on June 2nd, 2016, 12:12 am

Summer 4, 516AV

Kestral returned to work the next morning and began where she left off, on page 6. This was where, Kestral assumed, the real issue of the story began. "Every once in a while the fisherman saw a dark shadow pass quickly under his boat. He thought nothing of it each time, shrugging it off as a school of fish or a quickly passing cloud." The scribe found herself a little bit interested in how the fisherman was going to kill whatever beast the author had thought of, but only because she sure it was going to be just as appalling and unoriginal as the beginning sentence of the story.

Although Kestral did wonder how in the Gods Name the man had managed to stretch his story out into 38 pages. He didn't seem to give any background to his character, at least so far, the readers didn't even know, at this point, what drew the main character to the water in the first place beside it being his common job. If it were her, she thought, she would have told a heart wrenching backstory about the fisherman's love for the sea and how, as a child, his father, now deceased, had taken him fishing many times. Or how inspired by rumors of beautiful sea dwelling women, the fanciful imagination of a young boy brought him to the ocean in search for a fishy love. But enough of her wandering mind, Kestral set back to work copying the novice writers terrible excuse for a piece of art.

The first few pages went off without incident, being refreshed and renewed from last nights sleep. She not only copied the mans work but even managed to take advantage of the man's rather large and messy handwriting to condense the work a page or two overall, or so she estimated. Surely he would be grateful for those extra Mizs saved. By page 9 of his story, and well into midday, the man seemed more rushed in his writing. His lettering was harder to decipher and he often spelled words wrong. She corrected him of course, using common sense to reassure herself that he had not misspelled these on purpose. However on page 11 she missed one and spelled the word as he did, incorrectly. She had to start over again, though luckily for her that page was only a few sentences in and she had therefore only wasted a few chimes redoing it.

A small disaster struck once again near the end of her day of work on page 12. She was nearing the end of the page, five small scattered paragraphs in, when in the middle of the sentence; "The fisherman hung tight to the mast as something under the water smashed against the side of the vessel over and over again." at the work 'smashed' her quill, ironically decided to smash itself and broke, spilling a dark pool of ink all over the page as her writing hand.

Cursing, she carefully folded the dripping page and dropped it in the paper bin across the room before she headed to the bar to wash her hand in a washbasin behind the counter. Her boss looked at her questioningly, but she just shook her head in disgust at herself and her now slightly stained hand. She returned to the back room a chime later, making double sure her hand didn't spread any ink as she touched a page, gathered another new, unbroken, quill and began to rewrite the page she had just almost finished. It took her a good bell to write the page again and she finished feeling defeated and very annoyed. She hated redoing things, one weakness she had in her job, as scribes tended to redo extremely often. Though she was happy with herself overall for the amount of progress she came this day compared to the day before.

She managed to get through a total of 8 pages, up to page 14 by the time she ended her day and went home after packing up. That was two pages better than yesterday and she seemed to have made more mistakes. She had little doubt now that she would be able to finish by the 10th when the author came back in, as well as giving her boss time to bind the pages into a book.

by **Kestral** on June 2nd, 2016, 5:52 pm

Summer 5, 516AV

Day three of 'The Fisherman's Glory' and Kestral was just as excited as ever. She sat, again, this morning and began at the top of page 15, almost halfway through the story. And just as yesterday the morning proved worthwhile as she made few, minor mistakes, all at the beginning of the pages and overall survived till the afternoon with only a bit of time overall wasted. By lunch Kestral was up to page 17. She couldn't be sure, of course, though she thought she might be going a little slower than yesterday. Of course she was already halfway through the story and about halfway through the week, so she didn't complain much, she was right on schedule. Although tomorrow was her day off... Right. She needed to pick up the pace a little.

Trying to speed up her work, though, came with the risk of more accidental mistakes. Silly mistakes such as the one she made early afternoon after quickly dipping her quill in her ink bottle to refill at and then brought the quill back over to the page, where, because she moved it so quickly over the parchment, the quill dripped two tiny splashes of ink onto the words she had already written. It made the ink run and meld so that the words were indistinguishable and meant she would certainly have to redo it. And so she did, resolving that although she didn't want to spend an extra day working this story, it was better than having to rewrite every page because of her rush.

One bell into the afternoon and halfway through her rewrite of the 18th page she was interrupted by her boss who popped into the writing room. "The author of that is here." He said jutting his chin out to point at her work.

"What? I told him to come back on the 10th..." She claimed, confused a little by the authors very early reappearance.

"He doesn't expect it to be done, he says he just wants to check something. You better come out here and talk to him." With that her boss turned on his heel ans strode back off to the counter in the front room.

Kestral sighed, but stood up and put on a smiling customer face and walked out to the front room behind her boss. Sure enough the man from before was standing in the same place she took his scrolls from his when he first entered a few days ago. Except now she looked less disheveled, although he wore a worried look on his face. Kestral immediately put her guard up. Did this man think she was incompetent to do her job? What was he so worried about?

She kept her smile as she greeted the man. "Welcome back, I'm not quite done with your story though... the 10th should be..." She was cut off though as the man raised his hand.

"No..no that's fine. I actually wanted to look at the title page. Sorry. If you dont mind."

"Oh. Of course, sir. It is your work. Just give me one moment." Puzzled again Kestral headed to the back to fetch the title page. Why would he want to look at the one page that required the least work? Grabbing it from the bottom of the down-facing finished pile she returned back to the man and laid the parchment down neatly on the counter in front of him.

The man looked at it for a about 1 tick before he looked back up at Kestral. "Right. Actually, sorry, but if you could redo this..."

Feeling her frustration bubble, Kestral managed to ask "Is there something wrong?"

"No, no. Sorry it is actually completely my fault. I have found someone who is willing to do some cover art on this page and in order for him to do that the title must be at the top of the page." He explained, pointing to the parchment, moving his finger from where the title was now to where he wished it to be. "And actually, sorry, it you could write it in calligraphy, make it a little more fancy that would be nice as well."

Understanding now Kestral's frustration died down. Cover art was very interesting, the scribe just hoped the talent of the artist he had picked out marveled his own writing skill. She nodded in agreement with the man before saying, "Ok that is fine. Anything else? I still estimate the 10th for my finish date."

The author expressed no other concerns and left Kestral alone with her work again. Moving the title to a different spot on the page was nothing, however wanting it in calligraphy was another issue entirely. Kestral knew before she even started that she would have to ask the boss to write it for her, as Kestral did not know any calligraphy, but she decided she wanted to try just because.

by **Kestral** on June 4th, 2016, 3:56 pm

She settled back on her writing desk in the back and pulled out a fresh piece of parchment to start the title page again. Pausing, though, she put the paper back and went to rummage around in the used paper bin. She pulled out a mostly blank piece of parchment that was also relatively unwrinkled, and sat back down again. Taking out the quill and dipping it in ink she posed it suspended over the paper in front of her, thinking hard about how to start this. She had seen her boss do it numerous times before but she had never attempted it herself. For a moment she thought about giving this up, she was wasting scribing time anyway. But no, she shook her head to herself, she wanted to try and she was sure she could finish the story by the due date at this point.

The first word was simple, "The" how hard could that be. Thinking to herself back on other calligraphy titles she had seen, in the many books she had read. She knew the T started at the top horizontal line. It began with a loop that went down, back up and then almost straight over, curving a bit in a flourish at the end. The bottom stemmed from the middle point of the top part and went almost straight down, ending in another flourish to the left and upwards a bit.

She thought for another moment, hesitating. Then put her quill to the paper. She knew she would have to write quickly or else the ink would run and blotch. So she curved the loop and painted the straight top quickly, deciding not to judge her work now and started on the bottom. Once again she went quickly down and looped it a little back up to the left. Stopping as she had finished the first letter she looked down. It looked completely awful. The horizontal top of the T's loop was not correctly proportioned and the parts where the line should be thicker or thinner were just warped and not pretty. The vertical line of the bottom of the T was not as sleek as she would have wished. It seemed she had hesitated some during this part and the line wriggled a bit. The flourish at the end was much too long and went back up almost halfway up the stem, when it was only supposed to be a fraction of the height.

She sighed at herself but refused to give up. She wanted to write the title at least once before she gave it to her boss to correctly draw. The issue with calligraphy is that it wasn't simply writing, it was an art, like painting or drawing, kind of both in one actually. Kestral was never much of an artist in the visual arts. She was a writer. But seeing as she wanted to write books and stories one day and spent almost her entire life with a quill and ink, she wanted to know how to make her work pretty, intriguing, formal.

She began on the H which was next in the word. This one would be lowercase, and so she hoped less loopy and weird. She remembered that the H began at the bottom and went slightly slanted upward and finished in a loop that went up and then back down connecting to the stem again. The hump of the lowercase H started from a little below the middle of the stem, went up to curve the hump and back down with a little flourish at the end to connect to the next letter, in this case the E at the end of the word.

Since both the H and the E had to connect Kestral knew she would have to do both at the same time. She quickly reviewed what the E should look like in her mind. The E didn't actually connect to the H without lifting the quill. Instead it started at the end of the little loop that formed the top of the lowercase E. It then looped over and down to the left, curving up at the end to go forward to connect with the next letter if there was one. There wasn't one of course in this word though.

She began without hesitation this time, willing herself not to worry about it. She would butcher it no matter what, she knew. And she did. Once again her straight lines where riddled with tiny curves of nervousness and her lines were too thick where they should have been thin. She clearly didn't know how she was supposed to be holding the quill in order to draw the thickness correctly. Where the lowercase E looped at the top, the lines were so thick and close to each other the empty space inside the loop was barely visible, it just looked like a blob of ink.

Sighing again she worked throughout the rest of the title. "Fisherman's Glory" was the rest of the title and she failed just as miserably. She forgot what a capital G was supposed to look like, as well as how many humps a lowercase M had compared to an N and what a lowercase Y looked like. She just improvised and it turned out awful and practically unreadable. But overall she seemed pretty okay with her work. It wasn't even close to something she would write in an actual piece of work, but for her first try, although extremely terrible and she was sure only she knew what it said, she was proud that she tried at all.

Having wasted a good half a bell on this she got up and brought a fresh piece of parchment and quill dipped in ink to her boss. She told him the name and the location of the title and he drew it up on the counter right there in about 10 ticks. He handed the wet paper back to her and continued on with his day. The simple scribe was amazed at how quickly and beautifully he had managed that.

So went back to her writing table, placing the title page face up so it could dry before putting it back on the bottom of the finished pile and continued with the story where she left off.

by **Kestral** on June 6th, 2016, 2:27 am

Back to the 18th page of the man's story she began copying once more. Luckily for her she didn't mess up a second time on this page and managed to finish and go onto the 19th page. She had perhaps three more bells of work before she was able to go home and wanted to have copied up to the 23rd page by that point. So thought that was plausible as long as she didn't have anymore distractions.

She continued on with her work pretty uneventfully, finishing the 19th page, then the 20th without even a slight indecent. On the 21st page, about a bell and a half before closing, she misspelled a word in her haste, however it was only a few sentences into the page so she was able to redo it without much hassle.

The story was reaching a small climax at this point. The fisherman had identified the monster that was attacking his boat, a 'Manalim' or so he called it. Kestral wasn't sure if the creature existed in Mizahar or not, although the scribe doubted the writer had enough imagination to create such an animal himself, so perhaps it did exist somewhere in the Suvan Sea. After rocking the fisherman's boat about so much with its long tail, the boat had almost capsized and the poor fisher was working hard to throw the water back overboard. The fish kept attacking and at one point breached the water showing its long body and extremely sharp teeth. All the fisherman wanted, or so he would say, was for the thing to leave him alone. It probably didn't help that he kept shooting harpoons at the thing, missing horribly.

Although Kestral still detested the authors writing style and talent, she was a little interested in the sea monster itself. She was very interested in the fact that its long powerful body was capable of knocking over a small boat, or severely rocking a larger one. Or that is was described as having 'razor sharp' teeth (very original comparison, Kestral thought) that could rip into wood and flesh, as the fisherman saw when a large barrel of his catch went overboard. She wondered if the author would go into more detail before the fisherman was inevitably eaten by this thing... Though she stopped at that thought. The title of the story was "The Fisherman's Glory" obviously he wouldn't die and he would kill the fish somehow, even though he was completely unskilled and unprepared for such a fight. but Kestral just shrugged, he'd learn soon enough when no one liked his writing.

She finished the 21st page, started working on the 22nd, where the fisherman had fallen overboard, but luckily for him he managed to grab onto a stray (awfully convenient) rope dangling off the side of his ship before he was massacred by the animals hunting him. Then began the 23rd page, with about 15 chimes left in the work day. Her boss came in a few chimes later, wondering is she was ready to go home for the night. "Actually, if you dont mind I really want to just finish this page before I go, but it might take a little while. I wouldn't ask you to stay but..."

Her boss thought for a minute then said, "I'll tell ya what, I'll lock the door when I leave, but keep it propped open so that when you close it it locks behind you and you wont be stuck inside and the shop will be safe once you leave. Just try not to stay too late, I'm not paying you overtime."

Kestral grinned at his joke, he knew she was paid by commission, not hours, and thanked him before he headed back out. A few more chimes later she heard him yell out to her from the front that he was leaving, she grunted a response back and continued on with her work. Perhaps 35 chimes after closing she finished the page. packing everything up except the drying parchment she got ready to head out, waiting for the last page to dry so it wouldn't smudge when she put it away. While waiting she thought about the story more, continually wondering how he was stretching this into 38 pages, when it seemed like they were already very close to the end at page 23...

Solo The Workings of the Undistinguished