One Copy, Two Copy (Schon, please)

[Thomas Cosa]

12th of Summer, 512 AV

"No."

"I'm sorry?"

"No."

"Laria, you've got to help me with these copies," Thomas whined, the master apprentice clumsily holding a pile of folded designs, three golems behind him holding more, "You will. Udle's helping Cid with a design --,"

"Udle? UDLE?" The eypharian finally looking up from her work, her expression a mixture of disgust and confusion, "That, that...blue eyed chupra was asked to help before me? I am twice the worker he is, literally!" She hissed, motioning at the extra pair of hands, "And the better gadgeteer, but you know this, everyone does. I'm better, but everyone should be better than chupra scum -- even you!"

"Look, I don't care. Someone's got to help me with this, and you're available. I need to get this done by the end of the week!" Thomas shoved his pile onto one of the golems beside him, "I need time on my own to do my projects, Laria. You don't and --."

"What are you thinking? What do you say? No, I don't help you now. Get the newer apprentices to do this," She pointed at four different apprentices, "Any one of them will do! You shouldn't even be worried about these things, go, GO do your own projects," She waved off Thomas with a finger turning back to her work.

"I have to do all of these copies! OR at least monitor them, unless you or Ulde would watch them. But Cid keep on picking both of you up," Thomas grumbled, "Look, just come help me -- watch the apprentices for a while, tell me which ones need help or need to be excused from the apprenticeship. Let's go," he began motioning towards some free desks, the golem beginning to lumber towards the empty spaces.

"No. You have the moon child for a slave now, yes? Ask him to monitor your work. Not me. I'm important," She barked, trailing off with something about benshira trash.

Thomas turned around, mentally promising himself to never give the eypahrian a recommendation of any kind. He was the master apprentice, not her. She would learn to treat him better, or her gods protect her should Thomas gain any power.

An eypharian slave would sell nicely outside the Citadel.

Thomas sighed, wiping the anger from his face as he led the golems towards the desk; he sat down, motioning the golems to lay the scrolls on the table as he bent towards Stranger.

"Find Schon, and bring him here. Tell him we have work.."

[Schon]

12th of Summer, 512 AV

*Follow*

*Follow*

*Follow*

Something buzzed. One eye opened slowly, then the other and together they lazily searched for the source of the noise. Slowly Schon remembered where he was, and sat upright with haste. He had fallen asleep again in the Great Library, and all his work, notes and books -that he had spent the past day locating as the Golems weren't crafted to respond to pulsers- was gone. Books shelved back to their original place, papers sent the Gods knew where and his supplies struned about the table.

*Follow*

*Follow*

"Clemency, please Stranger. You have my attention," he said slowly. The tiny golem whorled about for a few chimes before, without warning, it took off towards the door. A door Schon did not like passing through, well that was incorrect, he liked walking into the library not out. Beyond them the Citadel proper lay and with it a myriad of wrongs he'd rather not see. He stood pensive long enough for the buzzing of Stranger's voice to grow loud again and hurried back into the Great Library.

*Follow*

Wordlessly he stood and walked out, soon enough Stranger whorled ahead and Schon followed as he was meant to.

The air outside the Library smelled wrong; like blood or rot, or terror or death. Like all of them commingled into some kind of bastardized abomination that clung to the back of the throat. Schon swallowed, trying to clear the taste but it remained. As the pair passed this door or that, odd distorted sounds muffled in large part, reached Schon. And his eyes slid briefly in over the closed doors...and his lips would move in silent apology.

Soon enough they arrived.

"Master Cosa, you have need of me?"

[Thomas Cosa]

Unrolling one of the smaller scrolls, Thomas groaned.

"Follower Golem."

Thomas had expected, or perhaps even hoped, that the leaning pile of designs would consist of far more complicated blueprints of war golems, or even, if he would be so lucky, a humanoid blueprint. It had been a pipe dream of course; those types of blueprints weren't exactly handed out to the apprentices to copy. Simpler designs, however, were given out in spades.

He sighed, pushing it off to the side. If anything, Thomas could at least trust the lower apprentices to manage a correct copy of a follower golem; most, if not all apprentices had to copy it at least a dozen times within their first season staying in the Citadel. If ever Lab 15 had an initiation, it was copying blueprints for follower golems.

Stretching another parchment open, Thomas let out another groan. Another Follower Golem.

"And no one is available, of course," he wined, more loudly then he originally attended. Perhaps it would simply be better if he just simply trusted the new apprentices, he mused, face souring at the prospect. Having built his own reputation with the masters up from nothing, the animator was very careful with his delegated responsibilities. Thomas wasn't about to let some newbie idiot mess up his standing with an incorrect copy of a follower.

And if Laria was too busy to help, and Ulru too busy helping Cid, well, all the more work for Thomas. And perhaps, all the more recognition. If he was lucky.

Placing some small iron bits on the corners of the designs, Thomas stretched the blueprints flat across his desk. Opening one of the many drawers, Thomas pulled some parchment and quills and ink.

"DESTINATION REACHED. SCHON REQUESTED. SCHON ARRIVED."

"Schon! Yes, please," Thomas motioned to a desk opposite his own, grabbing some designs and shoving them into the slave's arms -- open or not. "You'll understand, of course, I can't really trust any of the newer apprentices with copying, or anything, really," He pushed the lethefeal into the seat, putting an extra vile of ink and a couple of quills on the desk, already looking for some extra parchment in the many drawers.

"Where were you anyway?" he asked, still searching the desk drawers, "I had expected Stranger to find you relatively quickly, honestly," Thomas continued, shrugging absent-mindedly; deciding the desk had no extra parchment and giving the slave all of his own -- Thomas made a much better supervisor, after all. And Schon would need to learn to copy if he ever hoped to make it to apprentice after all.

[Schon]

The paper crinkled the way paper will when moved as Thomas shoved the designs into Schon's arms. There were a lot of them, so much so Schon had to use two had in order to not drop the stack of papers.

The top one had a rough sketch of a follower golem on it, the sketch itself lacked any metric or detailed instructions -as if obviously there was only one way to construct a follower golem. The poor draft could have been born of either ignorance of basic math or the slapdash manner in which things were copied and copied again, with each generation accumulating error after error.

"Reading...in the Great Library, again. Sorry." he said softly.

Schon sat at the desk opposite Thomas' and laid out the first design. He took a cue from the desk across from him and arranged a new paper, cream colored and clean, with iron bits on the edges to secure it in place.

"Do you want the more glaring mistakes corrected or merely copied as is?" he said without looking up. His voice had a tinge of sarcasm, that he was unable to quell. Already he had a quill in hand, its tip wet with the bitter black ink that Sahova seemed to prefer. The quill, while functional was well past its prime so to compensate Schon tilted it to use only one edge of the nib.

He wasted no time and began the process of producing copies of the blueprint. And while it was not a perfect replica of the original, Schon almost without thinking embedded the most obvious details that had been badly written in longhand into the cope in innocuous ways.

Deleted were the instructions on measurement, replaced neatly with a very fine mesh background, implying aspect ratio. Replaced were the many tangled arrows that flowed haphazardly from the main picture and instead he placed the extremities near their mechanical location and oriented so that the view point was homogeneous across the entire design.

As he worked on, what had to be the most unimaginative follower design, he noticed how unlike Follower it was or how unlike Follower was to the standardized blueprint.

"Master Cosa, did you design Follower yourself?" he asked. Follower was no masterpiece but it was clearly, and Schon had the blueprints in front of him to prove it, an intuitive and efficient model for a follower type golem. But those thoughts he kept to himself. "May I ask why these golems don't employ jewel settings or I guess why yours does, Master Cosa?"

[Thomas Cosa]

"The Library?" Thomas echoed, remembering Schon was one of the few slaves would could read, "That's fine, I suppose," he shrugged, decidedly uninterested in the few bells Schon could claim for himself. The Great Library was a seemingly neverending fountain of pre-valterrian knowledge, even considering the entire Library itself was stubbornly written in Nader-canoch, the nuits obviously wishing to keep whatever secrets they wrote to themselves alone.

"So, you read Nader-canoch as well?" he asked, although his tone phrased it more as a statement. It was obvious, unless Schon was lying, that the slave could read Nader-canoch as well; Hai, Schon could probably read and speak the ancient tongue as well. "Everything that needs to be corrected, should be corrected. This is going to the Masters, after all," Thomas added, watching as Schon began his work.

Schon carefully gridded the blank parchment -- forgetting completely the carefully labeled measurements, and ignoring the arrows, instead placing them closer to the mechincal locations, the picture, admitedly, most more cleaner than before.

"No, and I wouldn't know," he lied, deciding the copies were more important than his own theories about who had built Follower. Besides, he trusted Schon to copy, not to keep his confidence.

"And what about these changes?" Thomas asked, pointing to the blaring difference between the two, the original and the copy, "Why?"