Completed The Key To Waterproof Tarps

[Naadiya]

The Key To Waterproof Tarps 22-28th of Spring 522 AV Afraid that she would encounter anymore of the Suicide Plant in the areas around her home, Naadiya had asked Seladonna to burn away the villainous plants with her reimancy, at the suggestion of Uta. The Verusk had done a great job, and even scorched away all the grassy and once lush ground around the build site leaving black and dusty grey ground where once it had been green. The ashes, Naadiya had learned, would discourage snakes from nearing the area while the building was going on and eventually the grass, ferns and vines would come back. Certain areas, however, Naadiya had thrown river stones over. Smooth white, grey, brown and black pebbles covered the most often treaded paths. While returning several days later to check if her fires had done the job well enough, Seladonna convinced Naadiya to let her or Duncan use magic to pave the paths well enough to blend in with the rest of the settlement. “Trust me, this is not just for you, everyone who will ever have to come here will thank you for it… or rather they will thank me for it.” Seladonna spoke, looking at Naadiya as if she had been silly for not asking in the first place. “That’s a lot of work, how much would you two want in payment?” “I will do it for a new tarp and a tent, but both have to be water sealed. No bright reds or yellows, either, I need these to blend into the jungle when in use.” Naadiya nodded and made an ‘of course’ face, actively not mentioning the fact that she’d recently considered painting the entire outside of her house red and yellow. Uta had gone into detail about how pollinators were drawn to certain colors and the house was already being built surrounded by orange blooms. “Enjoy the bees” had been the only thing Uta replied with when Naadiya tried to convince her the first and only time. Ultimately, Naadiya had opted to forgo the red and yellow paint for now and promised to not use any similarly colored threads for the tent or tarp she would be making for the Verusk woman. Her loom back at the inn was available, Naadiya remembered, as she had not yet started weaving all the necessary mosquito netting that would become the walls of her small greenhouse. Of late, Naadiya would buy larger and larger quantities of yarn from Dawn, which the shop owner was glad to be rid of, knowing she’d only be buying some of it back as finished fabric with Naadiya needing to keep the woven fabrics more and more to furnish her new home. Dawn made a profit from an allergen she wouldn’t even come in contact with and Naadiya saved money not having to purchase textiles for her furnishings. Her selection of greens was varied but she only chose among the isuas threads. Seladonna suffered from no such curse as Dawn, so it would be fine for her, and all the better to survive the wet air and frequent downpours of the Sykan climate. 515

[Naadiya]

She set up the warp threads, filling the available width and careful to tighten them just enough before starting her weave. A collection of shuttles were scattered on the table by her side, every muted or dark green she had in isuas as well as a couple of brown tones that had a greenish tone not too far off from the rest. The stripes she wove melted from one shade of green to another almost like the dip-dyed effect of Dawn’s ombre-colored fabric, but all dark and muddy greens mottling each other. She could imagine a pattern in her mind, animal-like in its nature but even closer to the colors of the jungle than the coat of a jaguar or tiger. Are there green tigers out in the jungle? She’d found out that there were pink and purple goats in some places so why not green tigers and jaguars? A moss green jaguar would be very hard to spot in the jungle, she thought to herself. Naadiya continued with her repetitive motions, sending the shuttle back and forth from side to side, controlling the treadle with her foot on the pedals and occasionally using the comb to tighten and clean up her stripes so that everything lined up as neatly as she could manage. All together it may have taken her close to five days to weave the full tarp and all the length she would need for the tent in the same gradient of greens. By the end of the fifth day and throughout the sixth, Naadiya painted leopard florets all around the textile with some watered down black dye she had bartered for with the Tidewaters. First, she had lain the yards of fabric flat along the Cobbled Pathway closest to the inn, a huge inconvenience for anyone who would walk by. After the second time that someone had to cross the path with a wheelbarrow or some other such wheeled tool, Naadiya folded up the fabric and took it to the beach where she’d have more open space available. When she got there, she unfolded the isuas sheets and noticed the piece she had already started painting on had somehow multiplied the amount of florets it held. [I]The wet dye must have bled through the thin fabric,[I] Naadiya concluded as she examined where the pattern seemed to mirror itself with a lesser, more ethereal copy and then both of them repeated again with even fainter imprints being left behind. If Naadiya’s goal had been symmetry, precision or regularity, this would have a major blunder. But as she looked at the scattered, unusual pattern that had been made, it was almost what she had envisioned anyway. Some of the original leopard florets still marked the fabric, but most of it just seemed uniformed in a print that also lacked any sort of pattern, and all of this appeared as varied levels of sheer, painted above the gradient green stripes. Had there been any other colors, this would have been an abject failure without an argument otherwise, hideous to the eye and hurtful to look at. But the dark and muted tones of green and brown just looked like forest ground artistically interpreted, if the artist lacked skill or talent. 546

[Naadiya]

Naadiya was pleasantly surprised but did not want to try and reproduce the same effect on the other piece of fabric before Seladonna got a look at the print and did not immediately hate it. When she had gotten a hold of the verusk and they’d returned to where the fabric was laid out, Seladonna cocked her head to the side but nodded. “It looks off but also fitting? Sure, I think you can do it to the rest. Do you need help with anything? I was going to go over to Stu and prove to him who really makes the best drinks around here, but I still have time to kill before then.” “I wouldn’t ask, but if you are offering….” “I’m offering, it’s nice out here near the water, we can listen to the sound of the ocean and the wind. I love the sound of wind.” There was a part of Naadiya that yearned to go take a dip in the water, a tiny kernel inside that wanted to be with the sea. But a tether that seemed solidly welded to practicality restrained her more often than not and a swim was not in the cards for her today. “I’m going to need to gather a long of large leaves, like those of a banana tree or anything like that,” she repeated the instructions Tony had given her, to Seladonna and the two gathered a great deal of the fronds and set them in a large pile they pulled from until they had neatly laid out a blanket of leaves and over it, they stretched out the lengths of fabric. Seladonna had been told what to do, so Naadiya went to paint the second length of fabric, folded it up and pressed down with a leaf as protection against the dye, before rolling her eyes at herself and tossing the leaf aside. This dye couldn’t color her hands anymore than the years of pulling fabric out of dye vats had. She left the square of cloth for Seladonna to unfold and started setting up a fire. A few stones were gathered in a circle, and in the center she leaned several sticks against each other almost like a tent, digging them into the sand for stability, and stuffed some dried grass in the middle. It only took a chime to fish out the flint and steel from her bag and after the fifth striking, Naadiya had lit her tinder on fire, she might have blown on it but it was all she could do to keep the wind from blowing the weak flame out before she got it to reach its destination. The fire grew slowly at first, Naadiya used one of the collected fronds to fan it when the wind was not hitting. As it grew she added a few more twigs that looked nice and dry then let it grow on its own as she took hurried steps back to the inn and brought out two cooking pots, a metal spoon and a few iron bars to suspend the pot over the fire. Two of the bars were twins, each one with a tapered end and the other side bearing an outward-pointing crescent. The third bar was bare on both ends. Sticking either of the twins at opposite ends of the campfire, Naadiya tried to secured them as firmly as possible, anchoring them in the sand as she had the sticks, before sliding the third bar through the pot’s handle and placing it in between the other two, cradled in the iron crescents on their ends and with the iron pot hanging down. Its round bottom had four stubby iron legs and they were all just inches away from the higher edges of the flames. 631

[Naadiya]

Using her hands she filled the pot half-way with sand then went back to Seladonna who had arranged all the fabric to be held down at every corner and occasional spots in-between with stones. From her leather backpack, Naadiya pulled out another bag, this one made of plain linen and filled with shavings of beeswax, bought at the mercantile, which she sprinkled over the fabric as evenly as she could eyeball, with the help of Seladonna. They covered up the fabric, now dotted with wax shavings, with more banana leaves until everything was clothed in green. Naadiya gestured for Seladonna to help her remove the hot sand from the fire so they could pour it over the fronds and the other woman looked at her as if asking ‘why’. Once she had clearly explained to Seladonna the process as it had been explained to her by Tony, the Verusk rolled her eyes. “I wish you had given me all the detail in the beginning, this is taking too much time. AND you wanted to keep reheating and pouring how many pot-fulls of hot sand? I have a better way. Let’s just covered it all up with sand, then give me a few chimes.” Doing as the woman suggested, Naadiya scooped dry sand from the surround areas onto the leafy blanket. It was warm, even hot in some areas from baking under the Sykan sun, but not nearly as hot as she would need it to be in order to melt the wax and have it permeate the weave of the fabric. When Seladonna was done, she rooted her feet in the sand and stretched her arms out ahead of her. With deep focused breaths, she gestured out with one arm towards the campfire and the other pointing to the raised mound of sand that contained Naadiya’s fabrics. The flames from the campfire seemed to almost be sucked in towards an invisible flow that pulled into Seladonna but veered away to the sand mound instead. There, it grew but was quickly spread very thin as the mage controlled the element with relative ease. Naadiya watched the display with amazement, a wondrous mastery of fire. What she did not know was the delicacy of what Seladonna did, trying to find the right level of heat to keep the sand scorchingly hot without melting it into glass. Before long, the mound glowed red for a moment but began to fade back down ever so slowly. “If I got it so hot that it ruined the fabric, we can call it even,” the verusk said with an uncertain tone. Naadiya only looked at the mound, still much too hot to prod at, and nodded. “Thank you for the help either way. We can go get a drink while we wait for these to get cool to the touch and then we’ll check how the fabric looks.” They set out a simple perimeter with sticks and stones around the area, in case anyone were to come by, though the raised mound of sand with leaves sticking out from beneath already called out for others to pay attention. 535

[Naadiya]

At the bar, there had been three rounds of drinks. Each round Seladonna and Stu would mix two identical cocktails each. Naadiya would taste and finish one of both contestant’s entries and the loser would have to drink the remaining two drinks that round. Each round Stu was stunned when Naadiya would chose Seladonna’s concoction after a blind tasting every time. He and Naadiya had quite a few drinks and Seladonna walked away from the bar cheering to her own victory. “You know what…” she muttered as she made their way back to the beach by the Protea, “I think I screwed myself over with that game. I barely drank at all! Meanwhile Stu is over there rolling in drunken giggles and he is the damned owner of the bar! I’ll need to work out the kinks to that game. Not much fun playing a drinking game where you never get to drink.” Naadiya stumbled only slightly, but Seladonna seemed perfectly sober as the two searched the sand for one edge of the fabric. When they had it, the two slid it out from the bed of sand and leaves, walking back as they pulled and shook the textile to lose the remaining pools of sand. “I think it looks great,” Seladonna said with more optimism that Naadiya had in just that moment. The sun had shied away and evening was upon them, and unless Seladonna’s eyes were inhumanly sharp, she too would be having difficulty defining details in the dusk. They pulled all the fabric out of the sand and gave the sheets a few shakes in the wind then started folding everything up. Naadiya could not see the fabric too well, but from what she could feel with her fingertips, the cloth had gotten somewhat stiffer and had a little friction against her touch the way a candle might. “I can give these a wash tomorrow and drop them off for you as soon as I get the chance.” Seladonna had agreed but the next day instead of waiting for Naadiya to come to her, the Verusk had come to the Protea once more. “I thought I was going to meet you?” Naadiya asked as Seladonna looked through and approved of the camouflaged-esque qualities of the printed fabric and its water resistant coating. “Don’t worry, I was heading this way anyway and I wanted to give you this in thanks.” She handed a small leather pouch to Naadiya who emptied its contents into her palm. A tiny key of a dark blueish metal sat nestled in the cushions of her hand and she peered at it curiously then looked back up at Seladonna with a funny smile. “Oh a charm, thank you so much, it’s lovely. But I was already doing this to pay you back for clearing the gympie plants, and then you paved the rode to extent to my place. I’m already feeling like I owe you again!” “It’s a housewarming present for your new home when it’s finally built! If you hold the charm with the intent in mind, that key will morph into the shape of whatever lock you need to open. It’s a great way to never be caught locked outside, not that there is much need to lock doors here, but you never know.” “Oh!” Naadiya was looking at the gift with a new look in her eyes, “then it really is even lovelier than I had first thought, thank you truly! I’ll accept it gladly.” She said as she attached the new charm to the golden bracelet on her wrist. 600