Closed [Semele Park] Silent Poetry (Kaie)

[Trisa Miroy]

Trisa watched the woman struggle beside her without offering any advice. In her own experience, she found that the best advice one could get came from oneself. The young artist had always been stubborn, and, as such, would always take her own word over the words of others. Even if that meant struggling through a totally impractical process, Trisa was all for it. If that process was nonsensical, then at least she could say she tried and bettered herself for it.

Instead, Trisa allowed Kaie to direct her own experience. As the woman next to her fidgeted with her charcoal, Trisa took her own charcoal and got back to work. At this point, the dusty pile she had created earlier had blown away. Fortunately, this hadn't left too drastic of a mark on the page. Once again she scribbled in a tight circle at the tip of the flower petal. From there, she began to blend the charcoal towards the center of the flower. Once satisfied with this petal, she moved onto the next. Trisa made sure not to blend too far into the center, as she had to draw any detail there yet.

Beside her, Trisa heard the harsh sound of crumpling paper. She kept her head down, though. Even though Kaie didn't appear to be the type of person who was easily embarrassed, Trisa didn't want to risk it. Learning something new was difficult and, from the young artist's experiences, it was easy to fracture the fragile confidence of a novice. As Kaie spoke, Trisa raised her head and was reminded that not very much looked fragile about her company.

"When I first began, I did like to do simple doodles." Trisa shrugged. What could she say to help the woman? Teaching was for the patient and skilled, and Trisa was neither of those things. "Swirls, squares, clouds. I would just try to have a feeling for the charcoal first. I would see what shapes and shades charcoal will make before I would try to draw a thing." The girl watched Kaie's reactions carefully as she tried to gauge whether or not the Myrian understood her advice. "Take the charcoal and press as hard as you can with it." Trisa tapped the upper corner of the page. "Then take the charcoal and press more lightly." From there, Trisa dragged her finger down the page as she said: "More lightly, more lightly, more lightly, and then as lightly as you can do." She raised her hand from the page and deposited it into her own lap. She watched carefully, waiting for either another question or for Kaie to be done with the task.

Tukant Common

[Kaie]

Perhaps she had been expecting too much of herself. An ambitious mind had the tendency to do such things. Since she was young with her sights set on combat prowess, she trained long and hard each day. Every mistake, every failure only fueled her madness toward increasing her skills. Kaie had always been her worst critic. It was silly of her to not consider shortcomings in this new art would not have the same effect. The naive days of harmful ethnocentrism from her first arrival to the barbarian lands were long gone now. Trisa's guidance would not be ignored.

The concept of a "doodle" was brand new to the woman, a detail the tattooed artist must've noted in her gaze when it was voiced. Yet, through later context clues, Kaie decided it must've been random depictions created upon the paper. Something clicked when Trisa implied she lacked a feel for the charcoal. Have a feeling for it..like a sword, Kaie coached herself as her eyes drifted back to the page. She flipped it back over to the side that held her pitiful Akalak rendition, doing her best to smooth it out as she continued to listen. I had to learn the weight of a gladius, hear it sing when it cut through empty air. This charcoal remains strange to me.

The Myrian set out to begin her first attempt under Trisa's simple guidance. Focused, she pressed the charcoal to the page near the top left corner as hard as she could...an instruction the Myrian might've taken too literally. Before she got very far, the charcoal piece snapped in her grasp. Kaie ground her teeth, a voice in her mind talking her down from another tantrum. She forced a smile toward Trisa and slowly placed the smaller of the two halves down on the bench beside her. Then, with the larger one, she set out once more to execute the shading challenge.

Pressing hard into the paper, she began to slowly move the black stick back and forth to fill in the white spots. Before long the upper corner was nearly completely shaded in a rich black color. She relaxed the pressure to create a new section of a lighter shade. By the time she reached the halfway point, there was a healthy range of shading coloring the paper. Of course there was no skill to be awarded to the feat. The shading was shoddy at best without gentle fade from one section to the next, with some bleeding unintentionally into one another. Nonetheless, her first doodle had come to fruition. At least it mostly covered the abomination she'd created on her first attempt.

"That was...soothing," Kaie admitted with surprise characterizing her intonation. The expression of emotion refusing bridle usually occurred for her through a fight, a hunt, or wrapped in the arms of her new bondmate. They were all purely physical outlets, and yet the simple shading exercise had a cathartic power of its own. Kaie's apologetic gaze settled upon the woman beside her briefly, a hand coming up to scratch her forehead and unknowingly leave a black smudge behind. "I realize know what I had interrupted. Do you come here a lot to draw?"