Solo Chalk on a slate

[Adon]

76 Summer 516

Clarification of TermsIn this thread, Pavilion with a capital P refers to a group of people, and pavilion with a small p refers to a tent.

Adon nudged Goldie and his strider ambled a circuit around the Pavilion that had hired him at a measured pace that he and she had worked out together. It was a quicker and easier way to measure the area covered by the Pavilion than padding about with measuring cords. He made a careful note of the time/distance sum on his slate so that he could refer to it later, and then turned to the Ankal. "Tell me what you need," he said, and swung down from Goldie's back so that he could examine interiors if necessary.

"More space, primarily," the man explained, his hands elaborating with wuepa, and adopted orphans, and second wife, "Brightwater has been expanding recently and no longer fits easily in the pavilion we had. But also something sturdier. It tore in a storm, and while it's been mended, the fabric is weaker there than is ideal for winter." Adon nodded as the two wives joined the discussion. The younger one was obviously with child, while the older carried a toddler on her hip. "Tall enough not to need to duck," the older, very tall, wife said with a crooked smile. The younger added hopefully, "A pole sturdy enough to support a backstrap loom would be good, if that's practical..."

Adon nodded, with assurance and reassurance that it was possible, and made careful notes of height and length on his slate, as well as the general area of Endrykas that Brightwater pitched their pavilions in. That would affect which angles got the most buffetting in storms, and while he couldn't prevent cloth from wearing thin and tearing, he could at least try to design something that would be reinforced on the most vulnerable spots. "A pole that tall will be a pain to transport," he warned them, "but if you are willing to deal with that...?" A better architect would have suggested a multi-part pole, but Adon was too used to the single pole design to think of it on the spot.

The toddler peered at him, and then said with the ever-blunt honesty of small children, "You talk funny." Adon was suddenly and acutely aware of his missing fingers and the way that lack accented his signs. Practice enabled his usual outward response - he said simply, "Yes, I know," and went back to his business conversation with the adults. Inwardly, it ached like an old bruise that had been knocked once more, or a weather-ache in his bad leg predicting rain. He asked questions politely but briskly, and wrote down the answers as he got them. Numbers of pavilion members, and ages, and the number of partitions currently desired, began to fill up his slate, along with notes on tent colour - greens and blues - and decoration - water patterns and creatures. The decoration would have to be mostly cloth if he made it, after he created the design and the pavilion approved the design he'd made. He wasn't much of a carver, and anyway, carvings thinned poles and left weaker spots that would be a contradiction to having one strong enough to support one end of a loom.

The toddler continued to stare at Adon with a childish frown as he talked, and the little one's own hands tried to mimic the patterns that Adon's made, or rather failed to make. You couldn't shape a finger that wasn't there, or add a full-finger inflection with only half a finger. He managed, and could make himself understandable to anyone fluent in Pavi, but outsiders and learners struggled with his accent. The toddler probably came under "learner", as his own children had, and that had been the hardest years of all, trying to talk back to them and seeing the lack of understanding in their eyes and posture. He thanked the ankal now, and promised to have a pavilion design for the Pavilion soon. Then he covered the slate to protect against smudging, stowed it in a bag, and swung up onto Goldie's back before the toddler could ask any more awkward questions.

Boxcode by Shimoje

[Adon]

He shifted his weight and squeezed Goldie gently with his calves and Goldie obediently turned away from the Brightwater Pavilion and threaded her way through the Endrykas crowds towards home. Adon let her pick her own path, while his own mind roamed through the options for the pavilion he was planning out. With that many youngsters involved, he ought to plan for easy expansion and adaptation of the pavilion as they grew and wanted their own spaces. That meant moveable partitions, and sides that would open to allow extention later. He drummed the fingers of his complete hand lightly on his knee as he thought, pinning down each need with a finger. He needed to work through the calculations for size and height, that would at the same time minimize the amount of precious wood needed, and still deliver a tent pole sturdy enough to support that backstrap loom. He needed to also run the calculations for dividing the space for current needs and till putting in enough extra ties to hold the felt dividers if and when they needed re-arranging. He needed to design the decorative patterns for both inside and outside. He needed to get a plan drawn up for all the markings and measurements that would be involved to making the actual tent up from his designs - assuming they would be accepted. He needed to go over this year's expected Run and work out where the most likely places to harvest the poles would be.

When he reached his home Pavilion, Adon swung down from Goldie's back, lifted the yvas from her back and gave her a quick rub down before he turned her loose to graze. That done, he fetched parchment and writing tools from his builder's kit, and a scrap of flat board to lean on, and settled near the fire to work through the design. He started with the calculations for width and height, referring back to his notes to get the right figures plugged into the right sums and to the instructions in his kit to get the steps correct. If the pavilion was to be tall enough at the edges for the older wife to stand without stooping, and wide enough for her sleeping partition with workspace beyond it, and still have a roof slope steep enough to shed rain then the centre needed to be.... how tall in the middle? It took a while to work through them, and his hand flickered left and right in the air as if using an invisible abacus to add up the numbers. He wrote down the results on a corner of the slate, examined them, and then carefully went through the steps a second time to check that he had everything right. He compared the two results, and when he saw that they matched, he transferred the final numbers onto the parchment.

With those numbers, he started on a new calculation to work out how much cloth the basic outer walls and roof of the pavilion would require. That took him a while longer, and then longer again as he checked his result. The number of divisions for the current occupant was something the Brightwater ankal had decided, so that only needed to be brought across, but they still needed to be arranged around the edges of the pavilion. He drew a neat and careful top-down outline of the new pavilion's inside and sketched in the divisions, labelling each one as he went with the names of the proposed occupants. More divisions went in labelled for storage and workspace, and side poles to provide extra support for the extra weight of cloth required for the extra height and width.

Boxcode by Shimoje

[Adon]

He worked on the drawing until his hand began to ache from the fine, tightly controlled, movements, then set down the board and tools and flexed his hand. He kneaded the worst aches with his other hand for a moment, until they eased, and then climbed to his feet and limped over to check on the stores of cloth, fibre for felting, and dye. Blue and green dyes were in particularly short supply, and he made a mental note to keep an eye out for dye-cakes in the market and the traders' tents.

Having sorted through the supplies - though not put any to use, as that would have to wait until the time when, or if, his design for the pavilion was accepted - and rested the fine control muscles in his hand long enough for them to stop aching, he took his seat again, gathered his papers and slate to him, and reviewed where he had got to. With the amount of materials finalised, he multiplied the cloth needed with the base price to get his own costs. His sum trailed crookedly across the slate and he confused which numbers he was working with. The result looked ridiculous, and he swore under his breath as he rubbed that patch of slate clean and started again, making sure to get his columns lined up neatly this time. Finally satisfied with the result and that the end price would be profitable enough to make the long task worthwhile, he transferred the price to a more permanent note on the parchment. Doing all of his rough working out on the slate allowed him to make mistakes and try things out without wasting precious and expensive imported parchment on any of the attempts. Once all of his notes for Brightwater Pavilion were safely stored, he wiped the slate clean and began to rough out patterns and designs for decoration.

He started with simple repetitions of natural things: ripples in the water, scales on a fish, teeth in a gaping mouth. Each was quickly sketched on the slate in crude, uneven, almost mis-shapen, lines. Although Adon knew which scrawl represented each thing, he wasn't at all sure that any one else would recognise them. He scowled partly at them, and partly at his own clumsiness, and drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of the slate as he considered which pattern to use. The ripples were the easiest to draw, though the circle in the sketch itself was wobbly. He liked the fish scales though and pondered for a long moment about a tent were fish scale patterns ran down from the pointed peak of the pavilion as though it was the front half of a fish leaping out of the ground. The image drew him, but on further consideration, he decided that a pavilion like that needed someone with better skills to invoke the shape of the fish as well as the pattern of fish scales. He sighed, and filed the image deep in his mind so that he could take it out and admire it another time, then wiped his pattern scrawls off the slate and started over again, this time thinking up water creatures of all kinds.

Boxcode by Shimoje

[Adon]

He shifted his position, and tucked his short leg under him, leaning the slate against his knee for support. Goldie wandered back over, whiffled Adon's hair in greeting, and hung her head down over his shoulder to see what he was doing. She huffed when she saw that it was neither edible nor interesting, and nuzzled him for attention. Adon absently put up a hand and patted his strider on the neck. "No, no horses this time," he told her, his voice amused, even while his fingers appreciated the break in drawing before they quite began to ache and cramp up again. "Just badly drawn water-things. Crayfish, scaled fish, otters... that kind of creature." Goldie accepted the pats as her due and then wandered off again to graze. Adon looked after her for a moment, and then his gaze was drawn to her hoofprints in the dirt and inspiration struck. Otters left tracks too! As did water voles, and ducks, and other water diving creatures! And tracks would be so much easier to draw than an actual creature. He could decorate the tent as if it was the bank of a stream covered in tracks, and not only would it be easier, if he got it right, it could double as a hunting lesson for the children of the Pavilion as they grew up. A slow grin crossed his face as he erased his clumsy attempts to draw the animals themselves and began instead to search his memory for tracks and recreate the shape of them on the slate. He made a note in one corner to find a skilled hunter to check his efforts before he committed the plans to a permanent format, but that was the least of his troubles.

He also noted down his tracks idea and why he thought it would be a good idea for Brightwater Pavilion, before he forgot any of the details. He might also be able to get small carvings done on the side support poles, or images felted into the dividers, of all the creatures that left the tracks on the outside. On the other side of the slate, he drew a side view of the pavilion entrance flap with ripples radiating out from it as though movement through the flap disturbed the water of the Pavilion's name, and a top down view on which he plotted out the arcs and circuits of the different lines of decorative tracks. Otter tracks of a cub circled the base of the tent, with the larger tracks of an adult otter looping up the sides and then back down to join the cub. Tiny water vole tracks ran a straight line up the back, over the centre peak, and down the edges of the entrance flap. He set the paired tracks of a hopping frog in a ring around the top of the pavilion walls, and then considered the remaining space. He didn't want to overdo the decoration, overcrowding the tracks until the lines muddied and the whole thing became a complex and expensive pain to create, but he didn't want to under-do the decoration either and leave it looking only half finished. A pavilion done well was an advertisment for his trade, one that Endrykas passed every day that it was pitched. Conversely, one done badly could lead to him being reduced to nothing more than a tent-maker for wahlaks. He sighed, and shook his head, then added two crossing arcs of webbed feet, one small and sized for a duck, and the other larger, more like a goose. The tracks climbed the side of the pavilion at an angle, around the side of the peak, and down the other side. On the roof, where they crossed, the two sets of tracks formed a leaf shape framing the peak itself. He adjusted the arcs several times until he was satisfied with the shape and size of the frame, shook out an aching hand, and then very carefully began to copy the new plans onto the parchment, beside the plan of the inside of the pavilion.

Boxcode by Shimoje

[Khida]

Adon

Skill	Points
Architecture	+3
Drawing	+4
Horsemanship	+1
Interrogation	+1
Logic	+1
Mathematics	+4
Medicine	+1
Observation	+1
Organization	+4
Planning	+5
Riding	+1
Surveying	+1

• An artist's works are his advertisements
• Architecture, Pavilion: moveable partitions
• Architecture, Pavilion: openable sides for future add-ons
• Architecture, Pavilion: placement of load-bearing poles
• Drawing: avoiding too much complexity
• Drawing: outlining ripples and fish
• Drawing: sketching a pavilion layout
• Drawing: sketching animal tracks
• Horsemanship: a rubdown after riding
• Interrogation: straightforward prompting for information
• Logic: balancing multiple requirements into a common outcome
• Mathematics: adding to determine linear dimensions
• Mathematics: calculating cost of supplies
• Mathematics: calculating pavilion surface area
• Mathematics: double-checking to verify results
• Mathematics: recognizing a patently absurd result
• Medicine: massage to relieve muscle aches
• Observation: evaluating a pavilion and its location
• Organization: keeping notes of client requests
• Organization: labeling parts of a drawn plan
• Organization: lining up related values
• Organization: making note of brainstormed ideas
• Planning: accounting for environment
• Planning: anticipating future growth
• Planning: checking availability of supplies
• Planning: considerations of transportation
• Planning: consult with experts
• Planning: determining required materials
• Planning: getting expectations in advance
• Planning: thinking up multiple use-cases
• Riding: cues to turn and walk
• Surveying: measuring by stride

Notes

This thread is a great showcase of Adon's process in planning and design, and I really appreciate how you got into the details of it. I look forward to seeing him revisit the fish concept sometime.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding this grade. Also, please edit your request to show this thread has been graded.