(This is a thread from Mizahar's fantasy role play forum. Why don't you register today? This message is not shown when you are logged in. Come roleplay with us, it's fun!)
Considered one of the most mysterious cities in Mizahar, Alvadas is called The City of Illusions. It is the home of Ionu and the notorious Inverted. This city sits on one of the main crossroads through The Region of Kalea.
The gate opened on its own. Kuvarakh took this as a good sign. Of course, it was possible that one of the more malicious wings of the mansion was luring him to some ghastly fate, but intuition told him otherwise. It stood to reason that the lawn, as well as the boundary features, would be an extension of The Greenhouse. After all, the shed containing all the lawn care and outdoor maintenance tools was built on the same outbuilding foundation as The Greenhouse. And Kuvarakh had always been on good terms with The Greenhouse.
"Aceren", the name he gave to the sentience inhabiting the main central portion of the Mansion had attested to the greenhouse's good nature right from the beginning. So Kuvarakh decided it was sensible to cultivate this relationship further. The initial cleanup from the prior year had maintained itself, leaving only the scrap metal and broken panes of glass for him to remove. This, along with a focus on mowing and edging, watering and weeding, and trimming or replacing the landscaping hedges and flowering shrubs brought a sense of homecoming to his visits to the elaborate glass and metal frame structure.
Kuvarakh had repeatedly stated a willingness to imbue the many panes of glass with color. He did not know if speaking aloud was something The Greenhouse understood, so one day he simply brought a few colored panes and began replacing the normal clear ones. Almost immediately, the floor had creaked as if a heavy presence had entered the building. The ventilation screens had shut, except for one which closed to the point of allowing just a whistling flow of air, which dropped slowly to a sad drone. As Kuvarakh removed the colored panes, the room had brightened again, but seemed to fall short of the sunny warmth he had experienced before. He wondered if the colored glass had some sort of detrimental effect on the plants within.
Then it had dawned on him, there were no plants within. There had always been a pure, clean emptiness he found pleasantly uncluttered. But now there was an anxious anticipation, that was starting to feel like impatience, growing in his mind when he entered the building. A distant memory of his wife's hopeful brooding before she got pregnant had come unexpectedly to his mind. He connected the mental dots and realized that though the lawn was all well and good, The Greenhouse wanted plants within its walls, to nurture and embrace.
A few days later he had come to the property with a cart, loaded with an hundred mizas' worth of floral bounty of all kinds. As he approached, the doors of The Greenhouse threw themselves open. Kuvarakh did not know much about the best placement, but The Greenhouse had used its same tendency to gave warning creaks and dimming sunlight, or renewed brightness and a sudden influx of springtime birdsong sounds to guide him. By the time he finished, it was late night and the sense of contentment was such that he spent that night sitting in a lawn chair just outside The Greenhouse's doorway looking up at a beautiful star scape above. The sighing breeze through the many new leaves inside gave a rich consonance that bordered on musical.
x
Last edited by Kuvarakh on February 27th, 2014, 2:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
And it still did to this day whenever Kuvarakh spent time relaxing by The Greenhouse. This was never something he did when first arriving, though. He had been coming off and on now for a year or more, usually in the evenings to accommodate his obligations at Alchemmia Alchae. The summer had been a difficult season to make progress. The lawn was quite large and with his visits usually being every two or three days, by the time he finished the lawn, something that took more than a single visit, it was very nearly time to start again.
The off days were spent with a carpenter he was learning a bit of craft from, in exchange for giving free alchemical treatments to portions of the man's lumber stock. Some of the time was used up getting assessments of what types of wood had been used on the samples Kuvarakh brought in. He was hesitant to invite the man to work on the house. He felt he needed to establish his own relationship with the structural entity before bringing in another.
So he looked through the mansion, "Aceren's" portion of it anyway, taking notes of damage, assessing what was simple enough for him to do alone, obtaining samples to know what sort of wood to purchase for repairs and performing what amounted to "triage" to designate sections that needed full replacement. "Aceren" assured Kuvarakh that new wood brought in and worked into the retained structure would quickly be absorbed into the same sentience. There would be no dead zones.
Kuvarakh found that he didn't need to water the plants in The Greenhouse that often, but that the sweet old girl nonetheless radiated delight when he did. He occasionally brought additional plants to replace ones that he then moved into the mansion, being sure to place them near windows. These trips necessitated throwing the drapes open.
Clouds of dust billowed forth with this effort and Kuvarakh realized he needed to have them cleaned. The problem was that many had been worn to distressing condition, and such designs were going to be difficult or impossible to replace. There were only enough in good condition to provide for maybe two of the six ground floor rooms that needed such rich draperies.
Kuvarakh was pondering which rooms he would use them in and what sort of colors and designs he could get to outfit the others, when "Aceren" appeared, in an attitude of unexpected servility. He explained that Andre Towers had been quite enamored of those drapes, but that he himself would like to start "clean", as it were.
Kuvarakh got the hint. Aceren did not really care for them. In truth, neither did Kuvarakh, though he would have been more than willing to replace them with exact duplicates to appease the mansion. Aceren gave him a direct look and stated plainly that it was time for Kuvarakh to understand that HE was the new master of this mansion now. That it was not fitting for him to dress it up as he thought Mr. Towers would have wanted. He was to make his own mark on it now.
The image relaxed into a grin and admitted that he hoped Kuvarakh would seek his counsel so as not to get drapes that were no better than what Mr. Towers had chosen. He explained that by the time the old mage had 'awakened' the mansion, it was already decorated in the manner He'd wanted, and the mansion had not felt it to be its place to voice complaint. But now they were partners and could surely come to respectful agreements on what colors and materials should prevail.
Kuvarakh assured Aceren that it was only his belief that he was no expert on proper interior design and decor that led him to want to defer to others' tastes. They both laughed and Aceren assured him there was no hurry, that he would develop an eye for such things soon enough. It was something you could only truly learn with experience.
It didn't take any great eye for fashion to see where wood surfaces that were NOT in need of repair still needed dusting. Or where decorative brass fittings needed polishing. Kuvarakh expected at first to find silver in need of de-tarnishing as well, but he recalled Aceren's mention of how past invaders had sought to exploit the mansion for its secrets and sought Mr. Towers' hidden treasures. He supposed that this meant there would not be much silver in the mansion, or at least that it would be hidden. He felt this was for the best.
He felt confident that The Greenhouse was content for the time being. He had brought several indoor plants from there into the mansion. He had pulled down the drapes. It was time for Aceren to understand that he was a man who enjoyed a well-lit room. This also served to give the plants more sunlight, which could only make The Greenhouse happy. He didn't know what degree of communication each separate section of the manor had with each other, but he hoped that plants brought from the friendly greenhouse to other areas of the estate might soften the animosity he had been told to expect from certain wings and extensions.
The drapes he'd agreed upon with The Mansion were on order. They would probably be another fifteen or twenty days. The cold weather outside DID penetrate the building a bit more without drapes in the windows, but it was not to any more of an uncomfortable degree than the building had already been enduring due to the fireplace being unusable. Kuvarakh had gotten the flue unstuck, so a fire could be built there now. But there was an additional problem with the chimney.
The leaking roof Aceren had mentioned when Kuvarakh had first accepted his Architectrix duty was at its worst where the flashing that sealed the wood and tar paper was around the bricks of the chimney. Moisture had reduced the stability of the brickwork to such a degree that Kuvarakh feared that building a fire might collapse the whole thing due to heat, expansion and steam. Once he discovered this problem he resolved to repair it first among all actual repairs he performed.
But this meant lessons in masonry as well. He had already purchased the bricks and had them on hand for when he was ready to begin. But there was a lot more to it than simply knowing how to mix mortar and being able to eyeball a straight line of bricks. There was the setting up of a scaffold to lift the bricks and hod up to the roof, there was the ability to discern where the water damage ended and there was the actual demolishing of the brickwork to be replaced. He had gotten a promise from a mason in town to provide him with samples of what to look for. Again, it came at the inevitable cost of free alchemy, but this was only fair. These services would be done after hours, and Kuvarakh knew that both Aceren and The Greenhouse would understand the decreasing of his visitation time for such a purpose.
After another day spent polishing and removing heaps of debris from collapsed furnishings, decorations and lesser structural features. Kuvarakh leaned back in a chair and relaxed. He was pleased to find Aceren appreciating a set of sculptures Kuvarakh had brought in from town to set in some symmetrically placed niches in a few rooms.
They had special meaning for Kuvarakh. It was not the subject matter, though he had chosen some classic busts and art. It was that he'd imbued them alchemically with the deep, smokey obsidian look that he'd created for his tribute sculptures to his own Order of Transcendence. Not only was it a gorgeously smooth and deep blend of rich, dark wood, polished stone and glass, he had spent several stages of activations to make swirls of color rise and swim across the surface when touched. This had been done with the carefully planned combinations of colored orbs that Ionu had inundated the town with for a season last year, the imbuing of a reactive nature to attract through static charges and placing both these properties in the sculpture.
He had made two of these sculptures, but one had turned out to be the home of the stone-eating bugs that had almost killed him. That sculpture had been destroyed in the disaster, but the pieces still retained the beautiful quality he'd imbued the original with. It gave him tremendous satisfaction to think that the agony and terror he'd endured had provided such a glorious upside. He could think of nothing that he could bring into this home that was truly of such a personal nature.
x
Last edited by Kuvarakh on February 27th, 2014, 1:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
A different, more immediate need had presented itself while he'd made the effort to reach the attic. The spring-powered, retracting, fold-down steps to the attic had nearly fallen to pieces the first time he'd pulled the cord. The metal parts were still in good repair. It was the wood that had rotted. The springs now held too much tension for the diminished solidity of the wood to overcome.
Some of these metal components still held the ends of the decoratively molded and treated planks that were intended to serve as both structure and support for the apparatus. But the dry rot had resulted in the planks breaking up when the strain of the springs was exerted upon them. Other places the bolts had simply ripped through the softened wood. Kuvarakh was about to rip the debris out of the components where the plank ends had held, but realized he needed intact pieces to see how they had been cut if he was going to replace them correctly.
So instead he pulled the pins, washers and bolts out of the spring brackets and shook the pieces out. He fit the ends together again as tightly as possible and traced the shapes of the ends on a piece of parchment, measuring them on both sides. The measurements made it obvious that the same angle of cuts were made at both ends, which in turn was evidence that the same angles of cuts would be found on the planks fitting into the opposite sides of the spring components.
Measurements of those pieces bore this out. Kuvarakh took his tracings to his carpenter friend, who gladly cut pieces to the measured specs and angles. Kuvarakh was amazed to see the pivoting bracket that secured the wood while the man made the cut at the angle he desired. He called it a miter-box and Kuvarakh was impressed at how simple it made a task that would otherwise be reliant on a practiced eye and a steady hand, neither of which he currently possessed.
He asked if he could make a couple of the cuts after watching the man make two of them. He was about to begin when the man advised him not to measure from the very end of the wood, but rather to allow an inch or two of waste on the end. If he tried to cut right at the end, the effort would make either the wood or the saw slip and the cut would be sloppy. It was best to give the blade wood on both sides, so the cut would be held straight.
Kuvarah did not question the wisdom by trying it out the other way first. He accepted that the man knew what he was talking about. The cost of an extra inch to ensure a good straight cut was nothing compared to the cost of throwing away the whole piece due to a messy, unstable end cut. When he went to make the second cut, the man asked him with an odd look if he 'was sure he wanted to do that.'
Kuvarakh paused, confused. He looked at the plank, knowing he had measure and marked the wood. Then it caught his eye that the angle of the wood at the far end, where he had already cut, was reversed. Instead of a long, thin parallelogram, the cut would have resulted in a useless piece, where the the angle was the opposite of what it needed to be to accommodate its purpose. "Measure twice, cut once." The man said, in an attitude of an instructor teaching a class.
As Kuvarakh continued cutting the pieces he needed, He heard the man make this remark more than once. And while it was not always directly applicable to the task, it always applied in a sense of taking time to be sure that what you were about to do was going to be correct. Not to hurry, and risk making mistakes. He saw the man practice his own words repeatedly as he cut the inset slots for the steps to fit into the risers for him. This was a much touchier task and the man chose to do this part himself.
When he was sure of his measurements and cuts, he made to leave. The carpenter asked him if he wasn't going to sand the rough spots down and stain the wood. "Is this a tree house you're building, or something for adults to live in? When they pull this thing down, they don't want to be afraid to touch it for fear of splinters."
He guided Kuvarakh to some sanding tools, some of them mere blocks with the abrasive surface fitted to the flat surface, others with the rough surface fitted to the insides of angle-cut blocks, for doing corners. It took the Nuit quite some time, but the man was willing to let him have the wood for cost, since he'd done a few of the hard jobs himself.
"What about stain?" the carpenter asked him.
Kuvrakh responded with a highly intelligent sounding "Huh?" The man chuckled and explained the need for the treatment, not only to seal the wood against the effects of aging, but also to make it look good when it was pulled down. Kuvarakh was unsure at first which look he should try to match, since the attic was not the same as the story below it, but realized it should match latter style, since it would be extending down into that area when in use. He decided that all he'd need is a sample of the interior wood panels and he could alchemize the same treatment into his newly cut and sanded pieces.
So he went to Alchemmia Alchae with the pieces next, rather than back to the mansion.
x
Last edited by Kuvarakh on February 27th, 2014, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He had some of the original pieces there. He chopped one of the larger pieces up until he had a piece with no stain on it. He used this is a filter against a fount that was one of the pieces that still had stain. This was to remove the aged, dry and rotted aspects while retaining the stain. But first he assembled the three sections he needed, gluing and sliding the steps into the risers where the cut-outs accommodated. He let the glue dry and released the clamps. The ensuing activations were quickly finished and he had the three sections of sturdy, cut, stained wood he needed.
He was exceptionally eager to get back this time. More than ever before. He had done plenty of cleaning and a bounty of lawn work and gardening. He had arranged for new draperies and brought in sculpted art and kept an eye out for tapestries, but this was his first actual "repair" job. This had a special significance for him. He found himself making the unconscious effort to inhale just so he could whistle as he approached the mansion.
He carried the sections up to the attic pull-down door and set out the folding spring- braces. It was easy enough to assemble the thing, but when he went to connect it to the door, he realized it was heavy and that he should not have assembled the entire thing before attaching the first piece to the pull-down door. He'd never be able to reattach the unwieldy thing to the jam in the ceiling.
He sighed good-naturedly, chalking it up as a learning experience and took it back apart. This time, he first attached one of the wider sections to the door. It was easy to tell which one it was, since it was the only section that had one end cut without being mitered. The one thinner section was the middle extension and fit inside the part attached to the door, the other wider section being the part that set upon the floor when the two sets of folding spring-braces locked in place.
When he attached the other two extensions, he spent a good half bell just opening, unfolding, climbing, descending and closing the door, over and over. Finally though, he climbed up and stayed in the attic long enough to look around. This was no bare-stud and exposed joist attic, with dusty insulation exposed in vast bare patches. This was a finished room in and of itself, with paneling, a mirror, paintings and gabled windows. But the brickwork extending through the bulk of one wall defined the site of the biggest leak in the roof. There would undoubtedly be another just like it in the West Wing. But Aceren had advised him not to enter that part of the mansion yet.
He nodded in determination. Once he got some advice about masonry, this would be the next project; now that he could get to it.
Archetectix: Bonding Before Introducing Guests A Home’s Upkeep is Never Done Carpentry: Measure Twice, Cut Once Carpentry: Leave Room for Error Carpentry: Sanding Down Splinters Carpentry: Transport First, Assemble Second The Greenhouse: Doesn’t Like Colored Glass
Note: Don’t forget to remove the plant cost from your ledger
Check :
If there are any concerns with my grading please feel free to toss me a PM. I am more than happy to explain my reasons or reevaluate them if you feel I've been unfair.
