Snowballs!

[Dove Brown]

50 Winter 515

Days of heavy snow meant Dove kept her shovel by the door and dug herself out each morning. Today though, she wasn't just clearing a path out. She'd woken in the night and heard the roof timbers creaking under their load of snow. Now she squinted up through drifting snowflakes at the ever thickening layer of snow on her cottage roof. She stuck her tongue out and caught a snowflake on it, then took a deep, slow, breath, and lifted her ladder upwards. She settled it formly against the edge of the roof, wedged the feet into hardened piles of shovelled snow, and climbed slowly up onto the roof.

The snow sank under even her light weight, and the ladder shifted momentarily, then settled again. She held onto the ladder with one hand and stretched with the other. Her arm swept through the snow and a small section fell with a thwump onto the ground by her door. A thin powdery layer remained on her sleeve, and she felt it begin to melt, and soak its chill through the coarse woven wool of her tunic.

She looked down at the new pile by her door. She was making more work for herself this way, not less, because she'd have to clear the doorway again. If only there was a way to drop it further away from the house. She changed arms and swept the other side a bit harder. A slightly larger amount thwumped into the existing shovelled drifts, right next to the house. Dove sighed and thought about it. Absently, she made a snowball, and rolled it across the roof. It left an indented trail in the snow as it grew, and she sucked in a breath (and a stray snowflake that left her coughing for a moment). Snowballs could be thrown! And hurled, and aimed. She picked up the snowball and tossed it out and down. It arced through the air and landed in a drift away from the cottage walls. Dove grinned to herself and started making more snowballs.

[Dove Brown]

She lined the snowballs up, and eyed the tracks they had left. There was only so much of the roof that she was going to be able to reach from where she stood right now. At least, only so much without risking overbalancing and falling off the ladder and roof combined. That looked like quite a long way, when she glanced down. Even though there were deep snowdrifts to land in, the snow was packed pretty hard. Falling would hurt, at the very least. At the most, she'd hurt herself. Then she'd be stuck there until someone ventured within earshot. In this weather, that might be a while.

She tossed a snowball up in the air a little and caught it again, then hurled it at her chosen snowdrift. It hit, and sent up a puff of white into the snow laden air. She threw asecond and a third, but there was no challenge in it, and boredom meant there was nothing to take her mind off how cold her hands were getting, even with gloves on. She clapped her hands together to knock the snow off, then stuffed them into her armpits while she thought, hoping to warm them up a bit. Maybe if she didn't use her hands to throw them? The snowballs were bigger than her sling bullets, but lighter. It was worth a try.

She scrambled down the ladder, scraped away the pile of snow by her door, and ducked inside. She quickly grabbed her sling and ducked out again. She moved the ladder along a bit, not so far that she couldn't reach the balls, but far enough to reach an untouched patch of roof. She fumbled a snowball into the right part of her sling - the size meant it didn't fit well - swung it round her head and let go. It curved through the air and splattered against the wall opposite her. She traced the arc in the air with her finger. She couldn't tell if her usual bullets did the same, because they flew faster than she could follow with her eyes, but the snowball had continued the curve of the swing onward. Not as tightly, but the curve had been there. Perhaps that was what she needed to take into account to aim better?

[Dove Brown]

She tried slinging another snowball and watched its arc again, then tried to do one spinning the sling at her side. The roof got in the way of that one though, and instead of making a circuit in the air, it smacked into the snow. The snowball fell apart, and a patch of snow slid off the edge of the roof and landed against the wall of the cottage, where it would need shovelling - again. The ladder wavered, then settled back into the remaining snow. Dove held tight to it until she was sure that it wasn't oing to wobble again, then went back to swinging snowballs around her head. She didn't time them all right, which meant there was now a semi random pattern of snow spray across the opposite wall. Still, the roof was a bit clearer, at least the parts she could reach from here.

She climbed down the unsteady ladder, steadying herself and the ladder with her hands on the sides. She hauled it out of its current, expanded drift, carried it along the wall and grounded it in another pile of snow. This time she shook it to make sure it wasn't going to slide. A lump of snow slid down and she shivered as a bit went down inside her collar. "Shyke! You're supposed to stay outside my clothes!" she grumbled at it, feeling coldness and dampness spread across her back as it melted. She resettled the ladder and tested it again, ready to dodge if more snow came down, but it didn't.

[Dove Brown]

She climbed up again, caked snow dropping off her boots once she got off the ground, and eyed the rest of this side of the roof. The lower half showed the track where she'd cleared and partly cleared it, but there was still a lot of snow higher up. She rolled more snowballs, reaching as high as she could, but she was just too short to reach the whole roof without climbing off the ladder and onto the snow. With her history of falling off things - she laughed at herself, shook her head and stayed on the ladder. No way was she going to climb onto sloping slippery snow! She would just have to find some other method of getting at that snow...

While she thought, she put one of the snowballs into her sling and swung it up round her head. She was distracted enough that she missed the right release point and it went in completely the wrong direction. She watched it arc wildly up, over the roof, and down probably into the road, and swallowed hard. Hopefully, she hadn't hit anyone. She listened, but there was no sudden exclamation and no sound of footsteps.

She heaved a sigh of relief, spluttered as she inhaled a snowflake, and tried again. This time she kept her mind on what she was doing, and managed to send the snowball in roughly the right direction. Getting distracted was clearly a bad idea. She slung the other snowballs in rapid succession, feeling the ache growing in her shoulders from the effort, and in the legs from balancing on the ladder at the same time as her top half was moving and twisting. She stretched and shook out her arms, but didn't dare shake out her aching legs - with her luck that would just kick the ladder out from under her.

[Dove Brown]

She contemplated her sling and the reach of her arm for long moment, as cold snow sifted slowly through her layers of wool. The sling sent missiles further and harder than she could through them with just her hand and arm. Some of that was the speed they flew at, but some of that speed was that the sling made her arm longer, which made the circle longer, which in turn gave the missile more momentum and hence more speed. Perhaps she could use that arm lengthening to reach the rest of the snow covered roof? Snowballs just disintegrated when they hit... She slipped a real bullet into her sling and tied it down with the old hair-tie that turned the sling from a missile weapon into a melee weapon.

She tried swinging it in a circle in the snow, but it just hit, jarring her hand, and stopped. The snow hardly budged either. "Ah shyke," she muttered, "if you're going to hit it, do it properly." She let it slip through fingers until it reached the length she wanted, then whipped it back past her legs on the ladder, round beside her, and then down hard into the snow.

It smacked a long line into the snow, much further than she could reach with her hand. She tugged sideways a little, first left, then right, and managed to clear a narrow wedge. She pulled the sling back towards her, shook off a few small clumps of snow, and ran the sling through her hands to check it over. She couldn't find any obvious damage, so she let it drop down beside the edge of the roof, and then swung it back, and round, and down again to make another thin line in the snow slightly to the side of the first line.

[Dove Brown]

She tugged sideways again and managed to smudge the bottom of the two lines together, but that was all. This wasn't working. She'd have to try something else unless she wanted to freeze while she did one thin line at a time. She pulled the sling back, feeling it crack a bit of ice near the ridge of the roof as she did so, and contemplated the remaining snow. She really didn't want to leave it there, especially when more was still coming down. Perhaps it was the ice holding it?

She whipped the meleefied sling sideways to knock the last of the snowballs off and clear space for her next move, then brought it round hard and slammed it in at an angle. The sling hit where she wanted, biting a thin line into the snow at a steep angle that climbed almost up to the ridge. She studied it, then leaned sideways, balancing precariously, and swung her sling again. Her arm was beginning to ache, but she she hit hard. Another line cut through the snow, at a different angle, so that the two lines made a huge triangle in the snow and split it off from the ridge. Or at least that was the idea. She hadn't quite got the angles right and the top hadn't joined up.

She sighed and pulled back the sling to try again, but her pulling seemed to take longer than before. Her eyes widened as she realised that most of that top snow was slowly following the pull, and coming straight at her and the ladder. She started to clamber down, and almost made it, but when she was still a couple of rungs from the ground, the whole pile of snow came slithering down and toppled the ladder and Dove to the equally snow-drifted ground. She lay there for a moment, shivering and blinking back tears, then slowly and painfully began to dig her way out of the new drift.

[Konrad Venger]

Nice job! Your work has pleased The Sloth! Dove XP: Observation - 2 Planning - 1 Weapon: Sling - 3 Endurance - 1 Lore: Planning: Clearing Snow Properly Observation: Learning from Mistakes Sling: Works for Snowballs Click Me! : Awww, poor Dove! You have an unberably cute avy, by the way. It's hard to remember she's meant to be a grown woman, lol! I liked this, the steady and meticulous nature of it, how you observed and learned from your mistakes and limitations, and brought some sling training into it. Just remember: no such thing as "bullets" in Miz. Oh, and please make sure you go back and edit your post in the Request Thread to reflect the fact this one is now done and dusted. PM me with any questions and later 'tater!