Timestamp: Summer 6, 515 AV The night was newly fallen, and unlike upon most others, Talya hadn't been given a true task for the night. As "seeing what needed doing, and what others were doing, and helping them with the doing of said aforementioned tasks," wasn't much of a task, she felt, especially when most people wanted to be left well enough alone, to do things on their own. Maybe it was an adult human thing, or maybe it had to do with the ego, but whatever the case, no one had wanted Talya's assistance with anything, so she was left to her own means. As such, Talya found a quiet corner of the forest, a little ways away from a newly constructed fire, which offered some light of the small, tree-free space she had found. None of the other travelers had claimed it either, so she thought it a safe place to set up her own small portion of the camp for the night. As such, she set her bag down against the nearest tree, and retrieved everything she would need to build her tent, and set it down upon the ground. When she was done, she plucked up two small portions of the support beams- one for each hand. She then put these together, before repeating the process with the others, until she had all she would need to make the frame of a tent. With everything resting on the ground nearby, Talya began to string the framework together. She made a large "X" with what she had, and bound it together with bits of small rope that had come with the tent. With this done, she then laced the canvas over the tent, so that it formed a shape akin to a dome, but also pyramid like. It was basically, some place in-between. From there, she took a wooden peg, and drove it into the ground with all of her strength. With a slightly larger piece of robe, she ran through the hole on the bottom of the northwestern corner of the canvas, and the hole at the top of the peg, before binding them together. She repeated this process with each corner of the tent, until she came out with a stabilized, if not slightly lopsided structure. Seeing as it was fairly dark now, she didn't care, and decided to move on to making her own small fire, just so she would have something nice and warm to sit by, even though she never felt cold. She thought it was something worth doing however, not only for practice, but because it seemed to make her more normal within the eyes of the others, and put them more at ease. Thus, Talya stepped into the thicket of trees, which was loosely illuminated by the moon's milky white light. She looked around the forest floor awhile, moving in slow circles until she found several small twigs she could use as kindling, and then a few larger branches that had been broken off the trees, either by old age or the elements that she could use as a frame for the kindling. General firewood, as it were. She plucked these off the ground one by one, moving around methodically until she felt as though she had gathered enough to produce a fire that would be large enough to keep her warm, but not so large that it would be to close to her tent, or the others, where it could cause a fire, if it didn't set the forest itself alight. Smiling to herself, she headed back to her lopsided tent, and the mass of people of the caravan, and set her firewood down beside her tent, before dry washing her hands and looking around at the ground for the perfect place to build a fire. When she felt as though she had found the perfect spot for her fire, Talya picked up a stick, and drew a circle in the dirt. This, she had learned, would help keep a fire from spreading if it got out of hand. It wasn't a very large circle, maybe two and a half feet at its widest points, or thereabouts. When she was finished, Talya dry washed her hands again, and took a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth. Hopefully, this wouldn't take long to finish, and she could look up at the stars afterward. |