Solo Ships and life

[Gris Steele]

Fall, 1, 512 AV

Gris found himself looking over a small stack of papers as he sat in his small cube of an office within the CEB. It was just another day at the office or one would say but Gris was trying to make a name for himself in the city that he just lived in for a few years. Each day felt like a large battle uphill but he knew sooner or later he would make a break and get somewhere besides a tiny little cube in a far off corner of the building.

The paper in his hand was of an order request from the Ravokian Shipyard. Even if someone made an order that order was still sent to the CEB and more to Gris since he was one of the few architects in the city. He dealt with making blue prints that ranged from everything from ships to buildings since the city was known for its ships.

The request was just for a simple rowboat. Nothing really large in detail just that the owner paid enough miza for the order to be done in fourteen days and not the normal twenty-one that it would have taken. Yet this meant Gris would have to make the blueprints and oversee the making and even odds are would help himself to help speed things up since he knew a bit about ship building due to it was something he was working at when he first came to the city.

So without wasting time he placed a large sheet of paper in front of him with a set of writing and drawing tools along with getting a small notebook of formulas that dealt with math in his field to help speed things up.

The boat was going to be 144 inches long with 30 inches wide as a flat bottom round-sided rowboat. It was a very simple design. elegant but still easy to build. It looked more finer than what the money told so he would think the owner would like that idea.

Gris wrote down a set of numbers on the top right part of the sheet for his notes as he started his work. 144 x 30; wood; . Crew: 1, Passengers: 3. It was just small notes that told him what the goal was for his project. Afterwards he started drawing the idea he had inside his head transferring that to the paper.

With a ruler in hand and the pencil he traced a simple light line in the middle of the paper making it curve as it went in the middle point and coming back to a stable line like he first made. He did the same with the left side of the design. This was to be the outer design of the boat as he made more lines inside the larger one. A very close line was formed in the inside matching the same type of lines.

Within the space of the new line he wrote ‘numbers down that would tell the shipbuilders how much wood they would need for this part. He had to know his math and he had to make it clear as he could in case he was not watching the project that the builders knew what to do just by reading the blueprints.


This was to tell them this part of the design was apart of the whole picture in a sense. He then just drew more of the same curves but this time they were wider apart. He did this three more times before stopping that part of the drawing as he kept moving the ruler to keep his lines neat. This was the bottom design so how it would look like from looking at the bottom. He would start the sides of the boat and after that he would start the inner guts per-say. Each design using another sheet of paper with numbers on them to show they go together.

It was slow work to say the least and rather boring to most people. It just dealt with drawing and math but he even had to take it further when it came to more complex things. For both buildings and ships he had to take in account where it would be, how large it would be, how many people would use it daily and what would it be used for. It was a tad easier for ships since he had to always assume the worst in that but when it came to buildings that took more time to plan out and more research on his end. Yet he was just a person behind the scenes that help keep the city running in a sense.

The line on the paper went down vertically and was made into a slight curve as well. On the bottom of it after a few inches he made one long horizontal line and the same vertical line at the end of that with another horizontal as the top.

In the end it was sixteen inches long on the paper, every four inches with the ruler he made vertical lines which ended up being a total of three breaking up the design into four parts.This was going to be showing the side of the ship and each of the four parts were to be sections that would be boards of the ship.

This project was almost done at least for the first step. He still debated to redo the design but for now he was going to keep the plans as they were. He would have to be at the site when it was to be built and to lead them in reading the print due to his designs still were not perfectly clear to read.

On the third sheet of paper Gris wrote down numbers that talked about the math behind the design as he kept flicking his eyes back and forth from the paper to the formulas that he wrote down awhile back ago for his job. The ship was to be 133 x 30. It would have two seats in the middle and the ends would hold a small seat for the driver of sorts which he wrote in the sizes for.

He redid the ship drawings on a smaller scale on the third page. Same line and curves that he made beforehand but this time the spaces were filled with numbers of with a lot of x’s and y’s that talked about in depth the measurements of each part of the boat stood for.

To the common person it would look like another language. Really it was another language in a sense as math was a world of its own. Yet to anyone who understood Mathematics or at least Geometry due to the fact within math you had more than one field of understanding. He knew what the numbers meant and he would be able to tell the people at the docks in case they did not know. Yet even he was still learning math since he had a much longer road in that as it took people lifetimes to understand it all. One of the days when he was off he would study more into it and try to understand it faster.

Yet for now he just kept looking back and forth and writing down the numbers that would tell him what to do. Afterwards he would write down the page numbers of the drawings, the work order name and project along with his hand and place it inside an envelope. Which that would be placed in a box that was listed as To-do and tomorrow he would take it down to the docks himself and get the project started.

Just a normal day in the office he thought to himself.

[Gris Steele]

Another paper came up with a request to review and fix a apartment inside the Tarsin's Boarding House. It would have seem one of the guest damaged a wall while drinking. So Gris now had to waste much of the day in trying to patch this problem up it would seem and not go about his other tasks.

He left his office and flagged down an aide within the building and told her that he needed the blueprints for the boarding house. He was told it would take a bit but she would send the plans to his office. Since it was a simple building Gris knew that each of the rooms would be the same. First he would over look the blueprints and figure out how they should be. Take them with him to the building and look over the problem before fixing it up. He would just oversee someone fix the wall but he had to be around just in case the damage was greater than what the naked eye saw.

The papers were placed on his desk roughly a bell later. Gris just stopped his task of reading a book that dealt with past designs of the city on how it dealt with ships at first then how they were just added on to other parts and how the new architecture designs were different compared to the old due to new techniques and people giving each new idea to the city over time.

He just placed the book down and started looking over the small stack of papers. Each paper was a overview design. The first one was the outside of the building, the next was the inside of the first layer, such as “lobby” and other rooms not meant for guest. The third paper dealt with the poorer rooms, forth was more common, firth was the more fine rooms.

Each only a part of the puzzle that made a building. Within each sheet were numbers and lines that showed how the building was made, who made it with reference numbers on the times and crew that the CEB had elsewhere, and more detailed information Gris saw as he turned the paper to the third page.

The rooms on paper were about the same size with a few small labels on where things would go as an afterthought. All in all very simple design with just four walls and a bit bigger than what a normal Inn would give.

Yet he had to have a understanding before he walked into the room. It was his job to know just like how a fighter would have wanted a good understanding of what he would be up against in combat. Gris was the same but his battlefield dealt with buildings and drawings. It was not the highest paying job or really the most famous but it was a job that had to be doing nonetheless.

With just a simple nod to himself he gathered the papers up along with blank sheets and a few other items that he would need to do his job in the field into a simple bag. The trip to the building took about an half a bell if Gris guessed offhand. Not that long when he had to take the small boats but he did not mind as he knew part of the joy of the city was the travel. At least it was just not stuffed in one large castle.

Once he made it towards the Boarding House he just pushed the main doors open and was greeted like any other passing person.

“Greetings, Welcome to Tarisn’s Boarding House, How may I help you today?”

It really was a normal reflex he thought but he just smiled at the young teenage female. He told her that he was from the CEB to over look the damaged wall before the workers could fix it. Once he did she brought Tarisn himself which they both just shook hands and he showed Gris the room in question.

Gris was not very good at small talk. Either Tarisn understood this or he just did not want to deal with it since he did not say anything besides showing Gris the room. The hole in the wall was just that. A small fist sized hole as if someone punched it. Not very deep at all and Gris was taken back almost that he filed a request in the to CEB and not just patch it himself but he did not bring that up.

Gris was left alone as he pulled out the papers onto the simple bed and started to read them in more detail. He knew how thick the wall was to be. What it was made out of and if anything was inside it. Really it was just normal wood from near the city and the thickness was about six inches, hollow inside until the other wall was done. So just a thin sheet of wood and paint would fix the damage.

It did click in Gris’s head that this was grunt work and he was very low on the totem pole in terms of power. He just gave a mental sigh and would let a worker fix the problem while he oversaw it.

Gris would have done it himself but he was not that great at the choice skills. He knew he would have to improve that but with something like this would he just wait for someone more skilled to handle it.

He knew this but he just had to shake his head as he left. He would just do it himself. It was a poor type room so he knew it did not have to be perfect so it was just right for Gris to handle. Plus if it was such a bad job he would just file the request for a better fix down the road.