[West Wing] One Foot In Front of The Other (Solo)

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Center of scholarly knowledge and shipwrighting, Zeltiva is a port city unlike any other in Mizahar. [Lore]

[West Wing] One Foot In Front of The Other (Solo)

Postby Trente on May 14th, 2012, 12:43 am

512 Spring 37

Trente silently sat in his dormitory room, his supplies stacked obsessively neatly upon the desk next to him. To the right was his stack of Association papers, with the financial paperwork in one stack, organized alphabetically, and chronically, one two different copies, then the registrar beside it, along with the personal notes on each individual he had had contact with. To the left of the large desk was his course work. His finished essay on the surviving history of pre-valterian performing arts, notably pre-valterian operas lay covered in black sheets to maintain the hand writing he had struggled endlessly to perfect. Beside that was the heft notes he had taken on his primarily self directed summoning class, which earlier in the season he had doubted the effectiveness of, however had resigned to the truth that it was in fact educational when the first exam he had prepared for himself came back with a near perfect score. He was maintaining the information quite well, especially in comparison to those less dedicated of the class. And lastly, set neatly out in front of him, side by side, were the extenious notes scrawled lazily in his more crude hand writing. Notes on his cartography class.

He was pushing himself to understand sextants, ship travel and more advanced calculations, however he was not an academic man by trade, and the life of a scholar was still somewhat of a struggle for him, especially with the pressures of the association firmly upon him. Luckily for him, his professor had expected no more from him than he could deliver, aside from his own desperate grasps at advanced cartography he was charged with a simple map of the east wing. The season before he had completed his detailed map of the west wing, a map which saved his life come the storm. And now, he was to finish the main portion of the school. The West Wing would prove to be a much easier endevuer, considering he was allowed axess to the large majority of the rooms, unlike the East Wing which he was forced to fudge with the maps in the library, a hit to Trente's pride. Still, the West Wing was not without it's challenges. Much of it had fallen, and so the project would have to be belayed even more than he already had as the walls got reconstituted, some torn down to be rebuild stronger, a painstaking project as the artisans strove to copy to perfection the aesthetic pre-valterian structure the building was constructed with. Still, he could at least begin.

Next to the papers he set his shoe, yes his shoe. With the Vernier he had borrowed from a former student he measured the length to precision, sliding the finely crafted wooden jaws of the contraption open, allowing it to swallow the base of his shoe completely, then carefully drawing the moving parts inward again till the snugly held their prey within them. Ten units and sixty nine subunits. He had been foolish and wished for some even number, no luck. He jotted the numbers down upon the roll of scrap vellum he had smuggled from the libraries scrap. On the front were failed copies of text, on the back was his domain. Labeling the number, he withdrew his shoe, and slipped it back upon his foot. Wiggling his toes he pulled his chair back in and looked upon the formula for map construction he had used the season prior.

He sighed, this was going to absorb much of his time this season, and this bothered him. Even more so he would look a fool while he did it. Still, cartography was far form painless. Both to ones mind and pride. He still preferred it over the painful lectures of his Performing Art's Professor.

Gathing up his supplies he left his room, making sure the windows were drawn shut, to no breeze would disturb his papers, and the shutters latched so that the already faded fabrics of his home did not loose more of their luster. Then, he latched his door shut and worked his way down stairs, across the beautiful spring grass and into the quickly improving mezzanine of the universities entrance hall.

With him he brought a light weight hand held wooden board, at the apex of the board was another cut wooden piece, with a tightly wound spring set upon the hinge which stuck it to the main piece, this created a clamp down on the crude paper's he had stuck in between to keep notes on. Using the paper he had saved from the flyers he had distributed earlier than season, slipped securely to the board he held allowed him to switch to a rough charcoal wrapped in wax paper, instead of the wet and cumbersome pen and inkwell he used back in his room, or in class. A trick he learned after a few inken mishaps while working on his last map.

He would begin with an abstraction, by far the quickest portion of the actual data gathering process. He walked along the main hallway and took don rough noted upon his page. He did his best to eye each hall, and each room to create lines that boxed in the general layout of the East Wing. The picture itself was clumsy and had no prethought to it. And, before the entire wing had been jotted down, in curved and clumsy lines of an unpracticed hand the image found an abrupt end at the edge of the page. Trente decided it was good enough for the time, that he would continue on the back when he had finished the work on the first portion of the wing.

Returning to the hallways in which he had began his haphazard approximations he stood a moment upon the opening into the main hall, where the image upon his page had begun. He looked about, observing the flow of students through the hall and waited for a short burst of students from a near by releasing classroom to hurry by before he pressed his heel firmly against the pillar, denoting the north side of the hallway's threshold. Then, balancing carefully, board in one hand, charcoal and measuring stick in the other, he put toe to heel, careful to walk straight along the threshold of the hallway. All the whole he counted how many steps the small journey took, and when he found himself with less than a single step remaining he jotted down the number of steps he had taken upon the correlating line on his rough estimation of the West Wing, then knelt down, keeping hit foot firmly in place, and precisely measured the remaining distance, then adding the number aside the first, careful to slope his six precisely so as it didn't bleed into a zero. A mistake which he had found himself making far too many times in the past.

The process continues for hours, along each line of the hallways, and then bleeding into the off shooting rooms. Each time he stumbled, or lost his footing he walked back to the beginning of the line and began again, in some cases loosing entire minutes to the process. When a number which did not precisely correlate to another which he felt should be symmetrical would have to be redone, sometimes two or three times to make sure, sometimes sending him back to measurement's he had previously decided upon the accuracy of. His balance saved him from more mistakes than his impatience did. The process all in all could have likely gone much quicker had an expert attempted it. In truth, an expert would have likely just fudged it all, and moved on to more impressive and necessary mappings. However, Trente's thorough nature, and stubborn pride would not allow even the smallest of mistakes, none that he was aware of in any case.

When his body finally grew stiff, his stomach grumbling, and head began to firmly request rest and water he allowed himself a break for food and company in the cafeteria before returning to his room. He had only managed a small amount of the East Wing, and he knew many attempts would need to be made before he would reach the end of his project, not to mention the special requests he would need to gain admittance to specific offices and room, and the challenge of the tower once it was reestablished.

Still, he pulled up his chair, and tucked the charcoal pencil back into the draw he had drawn it from earlier, and switched back to his pen and ink. The vellum before him again he began converting all of his steps into ten units and sixty nine subunits each. Half the process needing to be redone once he realized the first attempt was done with ten units and ninty six (instead of sixty nine) subunits each. Aside from the mistake the process was drawn out. Trente had not attended any but the very most rudimentary of elementary schooling, and this left him clumsy even with multiplication, resulting in a drawn out process of consecutive additions, and notes on more common multiplications, the decimals giving a distinct challenge all throughout the additions, and completely foiling any attempt at true multiplication.

Still with time the numbers of each abstracted line seemed to fit with one another, and he gave a triumphant smile to the paper beneath him. He wanted to slip out of his clothes, and into his inviting bed. However, the sun was still in it's slow descent, and dinner would be there for the having soon enough, and so he decided upon pushing harder. He decided to make a copy of the numbers, and crude map upon his sheets and sheets of crap vellum. More precisely this time, and with a straight edge he drew his lines, and had to admit to himself that the map was looking much more professional as he began adding in the copies numbers. It would be a long process, but, in time, the map would be complete and very much resemble he halls he transversed every day.
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Trente
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[West Wing] One Foot In Front of The Other (Solo)

Postby Cascade on May 17th, 2012, 1:50 pm

Adventurer's Loot
Image

Trente's Loot :
Trente

Skill XP Reward
Mathematics +2
Cartography +3
Acrobatics +1
Drawing +2
Organization +1

Lore:
Graphing With A Shoe
Graphing the East Wing's Layout
East Wing's General Layout
Working Thoroughly and Stubbornly

Notes:
The Acrobatics XP is for all the balancing.
I like Mr. Shoe. He's an excellent NPC. :) Hahaha. Anyway, there was quite a number of typos which is unlike the previous solo of Trente's that I graded. Despite that fact though, it was still good. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to PM me!
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