Solo To Have a Home

[Alea Davenport]

The 11th of Fall, in the year 512

Alea was having a bizarre feeling of deja vu. It seemed around this same time last year she had arrived from Denval to a new city, where her first inclination was to set up a tent and camp out while she explored the place. But somehow, she managed to recall the lessons from the year before, and she knew the winter coming would not be a pleasant one. She had enough money left over from her job in Avanthal to survive for a while, but she would need proper shelter. After asking around and learning what her options were, she decided her best choice would be to speak to Sharai about having a house built.

After arriving at the Petal of the Timid Cougar (a name that did not inspire nearly as much confidence as Alea might have liked), it wasn't hard to find Sharai. Her reputation made her unmistakable, and she could be heard swearing loudly at whatever unfortunate person she had working under her. When Alea found the source of the voice, she waited awkwardly off to the side, hoping the Jamoura would notice her eventually so she wouldn't have to interrupt whatever Sharai was doing.

After several chimes, Sharai finally noticed the unobtrusive girl standing off to the side. "You there! What do you want? Can't you see we're trying to get work done here?"

Alea flinched, and her ire began to rise. She wasn't bothering them, there was no reason to yell at her! But then she rememebred that she had come here to bother the Jamoura, so she figured she might as well get it over with so Sharai could stop looking at Alea like she was a bug that needed squashing. "I was told you're the person to speak to if I wanted to get a house." She spoke as politely as she could manage, a tone she only used when she wanted something from someone she wasn't sure she could bully.

Sharai looked Alea up and down, and snorted, obviously not much impressed. "I take it you have money for a house?"

Alea blushed and looked down. "Er, I heard that there might be a way I could earn a house without paying, well, actual money. You see I... I'm not very good at, er... saving up for something like this, and-"

Sharai cut her off, rolling her eyes. "All right, I get it, yeesh. Yes you can get a house even if you don't haev the Mizas, but unlike what some dorks will tell you, it's not for free. You want your house, you have to help build it. How much you help determines how much less you owe us in cash." Suddenly, there were some loud Jamouran grunts coming from the direction of the house that looked like it was currently under construction. Sharai shouted back with, "Hold on a chime, you," followed by some grunting Alea didn't recognize, but it sounded vulgar, "I'm busy!" Turning back to Alea, she finished quickly, "Well I can't waste any more daylight jibber-jabbering to you. Come to my home after dark, and we can talk more about this house you want built."

As Sharai loped back to work, Alea took a moment to catch her breath. It looked like Sharai would be willing help her, despite her lack of funds, which was a relief. Not that Alea had doubted the rumors, but her light purse had always been a source of insecurity. Now all she had to do was find Sharai's house and wait until dark.

[Alea Davenport]

Alea only had to ask for directions once and get lost twice before she found Sharai's place. Since she did not have much else to do, and it was perhaps only a bell until the dwindling sunlight would make it too hard to see (especially under the forest canopy), she sat herself down and waited, wishing idly that she had her fishing gear and a river nearby, so that she could be productive while she did nothing.

When Sharai arrived, she looked mildly surprised to see Alea sitting outside her house, and then invited Alea inside. After obtaining beverages for both of them, Sharai begain her work. "So, what sort of house are you seeking?" Sharai asked with the practised tone of one who had done this a thousand times before.

Alea responded with a blankly confused look, "Um, a normal one I guess."

With a touch of exasperation, Sharai tried a different question. "What do you want it to look like?"

Alea was becoming even more confused, "Four walls, a door, floor, roof..."

"Oh come on, put some effort into it! Can't you come up with something a little more creative than that?"

Nervously, Alea wracked her brains for something that might count as creativity. "Um... and a chimney?"

Sharai was starting too look angry, but Alea couldn't understand how to stop it until the Jamoura said, "This is your home. It is a part of you. It is your heart, your soul. What does your soul look like?"

Alea thought she would have trouble coming up with an image or description for something as abstract as a soul, but when she thought about it, the answer was obvious. Yuros was her soul. "A stag," she said promptly. Or rather, "Can you make a house shaped like the head of a stag?"

Sharai gazed at Alea with something that an optimist might almost have considered to be something akin to approval. "That's more like it. Now, what else? What about the inside? What sorts of things do you want to have in your home?"

Alea thought about it for a moment as she stated the obvious necessities. "Well, a bed, and space to put things would be good." Then she realized, if this was her house, she could have anything she wanted. Thinking of Yuros, and her horse, Beast, she asked, "Would it be possible to have a sort of miniature stables? Like, just one or two stalls?"

Sharai eyed her dubiously. "It might be possible, but it wouldn't be easy or practical. Such an addition would require a great deal more work, and would have us working well into winter. Besides, getting a horse up and down from the Spires is a lot more effort than it's worth. If you really want stables, we can make it happen, but I wouldn't recommend it."

Alea considered this, and reluctantly had to agree. Beast was find where he was, in the stables below the city, and there really was no reason to bring him up here. Besides, she did not really relish the idea of mucking out his stable every day after all. "All right then, no stables. I suppose that was a silly idea."

She spent a bit more time thinking. What would fit in the shape of a stag's head? Where did she want her sleeping place to be? Where would Yuros fit? "Okay, what about this? Somewhere near the bottom of the house is a main entrance, and the bottom floor is just a big main room. Big enough for a Talderean stag, for example, to stand in comfortably," she began, trying to sound nonchalant as if she wasn't referring to a specific stag, and rather failing. "Then, up a ladder or some stairs or something, there's a smaller floor, which can be where my bed goes. And maybe a smaller entrance for just me to use."

Sharai drew up some rough sketches. I think we can make something like that work. Now, let's discuss details."

[Alea Davenport]

"All right, I think the first question is where you want the entrances to be," Sharai began, getting down to business. "You said one of them near the bottom, but where on the stag's head would that be?"

Alea thought about it for a chime. The mouth perhaps? That didn't seem quite right though; a stag with an open mouth would look silly, and a closed mouth was just a line. unless the door opened down? Like a jaw dropping? It was an interesting idea, but Alea wasn't ready to commit to it. Where then? If the head went far enough down, the entrance could be in the neck, just below the head...

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Yuros' face in her mind. Where on his head would make a good place for a door? "The nose," she said finally. "Noses are a different color from the rest of the face, so it shouldn't look too much like a hole in the face when the door is open." Thinking about the placement of the door had Alea thinking about the placement of the whole house, and even though Sharai hadn't gotten to that part, Alea asked, "Can we make it look like the stag is resting its head on the branch? And that his head is growing out of the trunk of the tree? So he doesn't look disembodied..." Alea wondered briefly if she seemed a little crazy, referring to her house like it was a person, but she remembered what Sharai said about houses and souls, and figured that such things weren't so unusual.

Sharai nodded, continuing to sketch, adding the trunk and branches around the general outline of the stag head, and shading in the nose. "That shouldn't be too difficult. What about the rest of what you wanted? You said you wanted a second floor? How high up in the head were you thinking of putting it? Below the eyes? Above? And while we're on the subject, what did you want to do with the eyes?"

Alea knew she wanted the lower floor to be large and the upper floor to be small, cozy and private, but she hadn't thought about it in terms of where they'd go in a stag's head. Putting the floor above the eyes would give the lower floor the most room, but... "The eyes are windows," she said distractedly, as if that were the obvious bit. And she sort of liked the idea of being able to look out the windows from her high nest. "The windows, the eye windows, will be on the second floor, but low down, like maybe right next to the floor," As she spoke, her eyes were focused on something not there, an image of her future home. Coming back to the present for a moment, she added, "So there's as much room on the lower floor as possible." She decided against telling Sharai about her vision of looking out the windows without even having to get out of her bedroll, thinking that Sharai might find her lazy.

Sharai seemed to either know what Alea was thinking anyway, or maybe she just had the same ideas. "You might want the floor a little lower than that. Even if you want lots of space on the lower floor, you don't want to make the upper floor uncomfortably cramped. Besides, windows won't do much good near the floor. You'd want them at least as high as your bed, if not at eye-level."

Alea hid an embarrassed expression. She had been sleeping on the ground for so long, it just hadn't clicked in her head that she could have a proper bed, nay, a proper bedroom. A stubborn part of her didn't like Sharai telling her what she would want, but fortunately the rest of her realized that Sharai's ideas were actually pretty good. "Yeah, yes, you're right. So, put the floor maybe, three feet below the eyes?" The vision in her mind had abruptly changed. Before it was dark, cave-like, like she was hiding from something. But now it felt light and airy, a sanctuary, where nothing could touch her and she could be free. "And an we position the window-eyes so they let in the most light?"

Sharai nodded and scribbled a note. Alea peered over and thought she could puzzle "south-facing" out of the scribbles. "And if the ears were designed right, they could provide good ventilation in the summer, to keep it from getting too hot, and I bet we could rig a way of blocking them from the inside so you can keep drafts out in the winter without messing up the design."

Sharai had grabbed another sheet of parchment, drawing what looked like possibly the inside of the house. Before she got too carried away with her own ideas (which were all good ideas Alea would never have thought of on her own), Alea added, "And if you make them big enough, I could use one or both of the ears as my secondary exit." As Sharai nodded and scribbled, Alea kept thinking. "What about the fireplace? I think the positioning of that is all that still needs worked out. Oh, and the antlers I suppose. Say, maybe the fireplace's chimney could go out through one of the antlers! And the other set of antlers can be hollow too, to put stuff in, or let my cat have somewhere to play."

Sharai frowned. "It'll take some creativity to make sure rain can't come in through the antlers if you want them to be hollow and open to the outside, but I think we can manage something. After all, stag antlers bend in all kinds of directions." Sharai scribbled and scratched for a few more chimes, and then showed Alea what she had come up with.

Alea looked at the sketches of what her new home would look like. It looked good to her, not that she had a critical eye about these sorts of things. After she gave her approval, Sharai informed her that her team of Jamoura would have to gather the materials themselves, but Alea would be sent for as soon as they were ready to start building, so she could help out and earn her home. Alea tried to feel optimistic, but she had the feeling Sharai would work her hard. She could only hope she would survive the season long enough to appreciate the results.

[Capricious]

Alea Davenport

Award

Skill	XP Earned	Lore Earned
Persuasion	1	• Sharai: Intimidating and Vulgar
Architecture	2	• Alea’s Home: Stag Head
		•I Can Have a Bed? A Real Bed?

Congratulations! You are well on your way to having your own home. I extremely enjoyed how Alea described what she wanted. A Stag head, who would have thunk it! Anyways, you will need to complete three work threads for your housing.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, please send me a PM and we can figure it out.