Completed [The Kelp Bar] Sketching Birds

[Opalla]

[36th of Winter 512] The cold was rushing back to her face. The freezing wind had been building up since the sun had risen the day before and was now coming and going like waves on the port. A sudden gust broke the monotonous motion and blew the blazing copper in the air. Sprinkles of salty frost crisped her opal eyes forcing tears down her cheek. The blazing night was reason enough to keep anyone who had a roof to return to clear away from the street but Opalla knew better. With all this outskirts' fresh air she would need to be getting unholily hammered if she was to have any shot at all sleeping. With a smirk she passed down the metal signal and pushed the door. The Kelp Bar would never close doors. No matter how cold it was or how late a customer would come stumbling into the dim lit tavern there would always be a kelp pint waiting, provided he could pay. Opalla didn't like the stench of the rotten seaweed much less the dreadful taste that insisted on clenching to the throat long after the hang over was gone. But she liked the kick, one pint and she would sleep... kelp would have to do. She knew better than to hop right over a chair, see had seen quite a few customers getting more than they had payed for just because they didn't test their sits. She had devised a plan to avoid such situation in case she got drunk, and in a kelp bar there was doubt she would. Chairs broke everyday. Bad quality chairs were bound to break in less than a week, usually they didn't last longer than 3 days. But the good ones, yes some of said rare breed also found their way into this sea-drinking hole from time to time, those that could last a life time of abusive weight stressing down their structures, those that could be passed from generation to generation and were valued by some old families like treasures, those... didn't last much longer. If a chair, or a bench or even a table for that matter didn't break because it was, indeed, of bad quality it would break in a fight. Opalla had seen plenty of that in The Kelp Bar. Zeltiva was rather an ordered city, not Sultros order, but it had a proper structure, law officers, tribunals, a university, flourishing markets and economy but it also had a port. And where there is a port there is bound to be sailors and the thing about sailors is that no matter how tough they may be, they can't hold their drink. They sip down as much of the rich rotten fish liquor as they can pay, then insult someones mother, throw around some, punches break a chair on someones teeth although some times and more often then not the teeth break the chair and not the other way around. Opalla may not be ggod with people but she was always good at observing and learning. But this fighting business made it impossible to track so many new chairs by memory. So Opalla come up with a plan, she'd mark them in the same way Isurian mark their merchandise. Trustworthy ones get a small circle, secure until proven otherwise get a triangle and feeble but restrictedly structurally-speaking intact were marked with a square all the rest were left unmarked. The Isur never loaded unmarked merchandise. The Isurian saying says: "Damaged goods never bare marks to make them apart" outsiders often found odd profound philosophical meanings for such words, but then again outsiders weren't raised by the Isur. Needless to say that there were very few triangles and rarely any circles. There were always a few squares, a bunch here and a bunch there, but that didn't actually warrant any guaranty of safety. Opalla only marked them out of perfectionistic zealous. But even if squares did make for butt support, tonight they were all taken. Those who did not have sinister characters sipping kelp or smoking pipe on the the shade had drunken sailors either singing or passed out drawling their dreams of fortune and more pleasant tides. all untaken sits were unmarked and despite Opalla wished for a long dreamless sleep she did intend to wake up in the next morning. She was tired, exhausted but not suicidal, never suicidal! It was settled then. She would stand. "A pint please!" she asked the bartender. "This is an odd hour for a pretty girl like you to come walking into a bar asking for a drink." commented an old sailor turning on to Opalla. He put down a giant mug splattering drops of kelp all over the wood counter and proceeded "Are you alone or are you meeting someone?" "Leave the girl alone, Billy. She's much too old for yah" intrude the bar tender laying down a pint in front of Opalla. "Bah, suit yourself" blabbered Billy "I was just making a conversation..." He grabbed his mug and went on to find someone else to talk with. "Pay him no mind, dear" said the bartender. She knew Opalla, the red copper hair was hard to miss and those eyes.. Once you saw Opalla's eyes you could not forget them, ever. The bar tender had been beautiful on her time and so she took particular interest in Opalla that remind her of the old days and brought so many good memories back. "You can sit down if you like, I'll bring your pint to you. I won't let any of these lot pick with yah" she continued friendly. "There is no need, it's just this one and then I'll head home. I'll stand" smiled Opalla and the bartender smiled back "So where have you been this last couple of days? Usually you don't spend this much without showing your freckles around." Before Opalla could answer the sound of wood splintering and a back cracking kidnaped the bartender's attention. The alcohol had claimed a new soul, this time the kelp's paladin was a grey beard sailor and the victim a bald tanned skin man. An interesting characteristic of drunken sailors is that it doesn't really matter who started the fight, nor even who's side they were in or if they were in any side at all to begin with. If a fight breaks out it's every sailor for themselves and everybody fights. It's a matter of survival instinct, if you are drunk on a ship and you get bored the best odds you have on surviving is to assume everybody is the boarding enemy. The bartender charged into chaos, it wasn't her first fight and it wouldn't be the last. Opalla tranquillised herself on the fact that the sweet old woman was the only sober one fighting and that gave her the same sort of advantage a seasoned armoured knight has against 3 year old crawlers with leaves instead of swords. Regardless of her eyes watching the fight, the chairs flying around and kelp turning the floor into a slippery trap. Opalla was miles away, if the fight hadn't started she'd have gagged on her kelp. She hadn't thought about it yet. What would she tell people? She couldn't say what happen and where she had been. "No, no, no!" Of course she knew, that's why she knew she wouldn't sleep unless she was helplessly drunk. That was the only reason she had come to the Kelp Bar this late. Facing all that icy wind, freezing her bones. And to think it was such a nice weather just two days ago. The sky had turned a hot orange in the day before as the sun sunk down on the land horizon of Zeltiva. Promise of good weather and less rough winds. Maybe perfect for a walk on the outskirts. "Yes! To the outskirts! And maybe sketch some beetles or bees..." The thought had warmed Opalla's soul so much she barely felt the cold whispers of the swirling air around her hair. And for the rest of the walk from Bohrnn&GoldWoerth to her room at the World's End Grotto she was the happy little girl she had been in Sultros. By the time she had her hanged her jacket on the door it had already occurred to her that she couldn't go out sketching bugs in the middle of the winter. "Well I could, but I wouldn't find any would I now?" she commented to her self, "I'll sketch birds!" Since Opalla had arrived to Zeltiva she had gone out sketching on the outskirts several times, producing several patches of sketches; bees, crickets, beetles, ants, spiders. Opalla loved insects and sketched them in every perspective she could. On each piece there where side notes and details on leg design, proportions, antennae, eyes, wings. The breed didn't matter, nor size, nor colour nor gender. But there weren't two alike. From the moment Opalla sketched an insect she was done with it. There was nothing more she could learn with said insect so after sketching one she'd move to the next one producing a vast battery of studies tremendously focused on insect motion. However on the high mountains of Sultros insects were rare during the ember freezing winters but within the mountain there was only one season and there were always insects. In Zeltiva there were seasons, and effectively there weren't insects so Opalla had learned to adapt to the seasons and gained a new passion. Birds! Sketching birds encompassed a completely different set of techniques, tools and strategies. Opalla had found that birds have the inconvenient property which is flight. The little feathered creatures could not pose for longer than a few seconds! As fast as Opalla could work, she had not mastered the art just yet and half a minute was not long enough to capture all the details she deemed necessary. And that meant pursuit! She meant to had all set up and ready to go by sun rise, before going to bed. Unfortunately for her she came up to this idea after she had collapsed flat out onto the bed. And plans for night preparations during sleep rarely help on the morning. The morning Opalla woke up to was surely and by all definitions a beautiful morning, the best morning she had seen since she had come to Zeltiva. Oddly enough however, it wasn't... morning. Opalla jumped out of bed on that realisation, she had slept through the morning and the sun was already high. She packed her things on a hurry slipped inside her jacket and went out the door. The outskirts awaited her and she was already late. Leaving the city the only road lead through a two hours hike to the Mirahil Pass. Opalla had no intension of venturing so high as in the winter the Bonesnapper was likely to froze any unprepared travellers. Opalla was no stranger to the cold of winter mountains, having lived for the most part of her life in Sultros gave her a good set of cold and snow survival skills but today was about sketching birds on the forest and not battling the cold of winter. So she followed the road to Mirahil Pass, stoping twice to first to sketch a seagull that had land over a rock and then to grab a bite on the bread with berries she had brought with her. Forty minutes later she stopped and looked around. The city below was starting to disappear under a mist vail, which was common in Zeltiva and meant that it was getting colder in the mountains. She turned north and entered the forest. There were some patches of snow here and there on the ground but nothing much, it was easy to keep walking while avoiding it which was good as Opalla had no intension on getting herself wet. Water and the Bonesnapper was a terrible combination for someone trying to sketch as the body would shake violently frustrating any efforts on drawing good lines. It was easy to find birds on the forest especially on the north side as most of the timber workers laboured on the south side, which meant there was less noise and therefore more birds. Yet Opalla kept walking for an hour or so. Birds per se wouldn't cut it, it had to be a new bird one she hadn't sketch before. She finally spotted a Fieldfare. She knew the bird they were common in Kalea. But she had never sketch it before so quietly she landed her bag and gear on the ground and produced her sketching block. Being dextrous and right index-less sketching should have been impossible for her. Yet her protector in Sultros had provided her with her finger and the set of finger tips that came with it. The pen was probably the one Opalla loved the most. With a smooth rotation a pen point squished out of where a nail should be if it was a real finger. Supported by her thumb and middle finger she could use her artificial limb as a writing pen or a chalk drawing pencil. For someone that had never tried it the motion would have felt awkward but for Opalla that was all the only way she had experienced of drawing and hence it felt as natural as anything else. Fieldfare are no easy creature to sketch not in the way Opalla wanted at least with proportions well defined body parts identified. All those spots made it difficult to make out wings from torso and the extra feathers on the lower part of the belly covered the legs making it even harder to have an idea of how large the legs actually were. Opalla would have probably given up if it wasn't for the fact that she knew the bird. "The legs are short and thin, and mostly of the times slightly crooked due to their weight. That's what you get for scavenging the waste of other species" She remembered hearing in Sultros. After she had produced a satisfactory ink Fieldfare the sun had already started to hide behind the peaks that surrounded Mathews Bay and so she moved on further into the forest descending on a circle towards the bay again. She had decided she would be going back through the forest maxing out her time for sketching the little feathered singers. After a while she started hearing a new song, "this bird I don't know" she thought. It was a Brambling, once common in whole of Mizahar the birds were now rare in the post Valterrain Kalea which justified the fact that Opalla had never seen one. She could yet easily sort it out. The little fella was capable of an astonishing high vocalisation and following the sound she was able to find it roughly 60 yards ahead, resting on the taller branch of a small bush. Once again she lowered her pack without a single sound, opened her block and foiled her pen nail out. With Orange, black and white feathers this bird must resemble a tiger, although Opalla had never seen a tiger neither she was confident the colour scheme could not have been misleading. She would need to get this one coloured. The beak and those hollow black eyes were proving to be a hard nut to crack and she was about to give up and start over when suddenly...! When Opalla woke up night had fallen on the forest. Opalla yawn wondering why it was so cool on her room but the pounding pain on her head shook the confusion out of her. Now darkness ruled around her but the memories were coming up fast. Light, dust, rocks, mud, bits of splintered logs and feathers. And noise! Everything else was in chaos, but the blasting noise Opalla heard clearly. So load that she recalled now that as the world fade to black after she had been projected for 5 yards on her back her ears kept hearing a hissing. The memories awoke the pain and instinctively she pulled her left hand out of the ground and touched her left ear. She couldn't clearly make it out amidst the dark but there was no doubt about it it was blood. Hopefully the damage wasn't that huge as she could hear all the broken branches bellow her swishing as she pulled her self out of the bush where she had landed 6 hours before. Despite the darkness Opalla had no trouble observing that the surroundings had suffered some major changes where a tree had been barely 6 yards away from where she was sketching there was now a 4ft deep crater. All the small branches of the surrounding trees had been blown out together with the leafs. Something told Opalla she ought to get going. Always down would lead her straight back to Zeltiva. But she knew the signs. She could understand what happen. "Fallen from the sky on fire, gifts from the gods" had she heard from the Vizerian Scholars saying when she was little. "It could be a moonstone.. Oh.. Let it be a moonstone!" The curiosity had woken up on her a stamina she didn't thought she still had and before she could really think through it she had jumped into the crater. It was muddy and burnt and she knew that her jacket was ruined there was no way to take out so much mud from a wool jacked and the same could be said about tunic. It would never be white again. But in the darkness it was easy to disregard those issues and concentrate on the meteorite. Clothes could wait for the light. But speaking about said meteorite, where was it? She remembered correctly. The Scholars said that it's a stone fallen from the sky that make craters but there was no stone, only mud. The solution presented it self and made Opalla very uneasy. "Why does it always have to come down on mud" she blabbered in protest. But there was no helping it, curiosity triumphs over dirtiness every time. She knelt on the center of the crater and sunk her hands inside the mud. It was still worm but it felt more like glass than like stone "Silky textured?" her right middle finger touched her mechanical index "Metal!" she tightened her grip around the bulk mass and pulled. It was heavy! Smaller than her head and so heavy! She rose her knees into a ducking position and pulled once more. The 61 pound meteor slid off from the mud with a blupp and Opalla fell on her back on the mud. "Well, that's the end of it for you" she muttered to the old jacket. She could careless though. Even in the dim star light and almost totally hidden behind the mud she could recognise the metal. Smiling and kneeling besides the meteor she cleaned the mud out of it's surface. "Gold!" her eyes were glomming eyes were glowing with satisfaction "At least I'll be able to buy a new jacket but it also means that I'll have to carry this down to town." It took her some time to get a hold of her pack. Even to an half Isurian with great night vision sight finding a leader pack covered in mud in the middle of meteor crash scene proved quite harder than she first thought and the rising sun was already reflecting it self on the ocean horizon when she finally got a hold on her pack. She had been looking for over 3 hours picking every single square inch on a radious of 15 yards. It had never occurred that her pack would have been less than a ten ft where she had landed hanging from a tree branch. She emptied the contents, a small broken flask of ink, smashed up food seasoned with ink and a small water skin that she avidly drunk. After fitting the meteorite inside the pack and pulling it on her back the massive weight seemed to had diminished. But 20 minutes later her shoulders were souring and the weight on her back seemed to had quadruplicated. Despite the fact that she was only descending she was completely exhausted and the only thing that kept her moving was the excitement of such a discovery and the fear of being caught carrying such a valuable load, in Zeltiva marauders were rare provided you stayed clear off the East Street. But on the outskirts things could be different. She was travelling on the forest where it would be more difficult to come across anyone. But the meteorite was bound to have made a fuss down in Zeltiva as well and if anybody was to investigate they would find her with no problem as she hadn't tried to hide her tracks, and she couldn't even if she remembered as she knew nothing of hiding tracks. It took her most of the day to cover descending what had taken her less than an hour to climb on the previous day. Opalla knew she was just about to collapse but the scents of the city bellow kept her moving. Her steps lead her directly the World's End Grotto. Half numb she climbed up the stairs that lead to the floor where her room was. With her shoulders souring and cranking she hid her precious discovery under her bed without so much as opening the pack that contained it. She then washed her hands and face slid in her only spear tunic and left the room closing the door on the lock and turning the key. She wasn't sure where she was going, she should bring the gold to Bohrnn & GoldWoerth where she could melt it and ask for Master Ihmyyru on what to do next. But even unknowingly she kept walking and payed no mind to the Serra's inquiries on where she had been all that time. For a long time Opalla had no idea where she was going, she felt nothing just tiredness and excitement. Then she felt something, cold. The night Bonesnapper was more furious than ever, blowing intermittently. She saw the lights shining through the windows of the Kelp Bar. And she knew then where she was going. The fight had stopped and the bartender returned to the bar tending part of the job. "Sorry about that!", she said "So where were we? Oh yes! Where have you been?". Opalla knew that the bartender was her friend, but she was also friendly to everybody and talked way to much. It was part of the job's description after all. "Sketching birds." she answered. "Sketching birds, aye... So, another pint?" offered the bar tender. "No thanks, I think I've got what I came for. Good night!". Opalla left the Kelp Bar walking numbly back to the World's End Grotto. On the next day she wouldn't remember most of the way back to the ramshackle array of stones and blocks where she was staying. But she did remember how sweet it was falling on her bed not feeling anything besides tiredness and exhaustion.

[Cloud]

XP Reward!

From the sky falls your reward!

PC Name: Opalla

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Socialization	+1
Drawing	+1

Lores

•	Lore Earned
•	Marked Chairs
•	Sketching Birds
•	The Brambling Bird (Basic)
•	Falling Gold!

Notes :

This thread had a very intriguing start, but you need to keep in mind to review your written work. There were occasional misspells and grammar errors, and some points were missing needed puncuation. A interesting thread to read though, keep up the work.