Summer 2 124
Sjal sat at a table with the stone that she'd been working for quite some time on yet never seemed to make much progress on. She'd been trying to make something halfway decent with sculpting for the better part of a week but was still terrible. She'd started to blame her hands. It was easier to blame things she couldn't control, instead of her lack artistic talent which was purely due to her lack of motivation to train it. She was trying to work on herself and expand her skillset to include crafts, but it was difficult. It was easy to motivate herself when she had a goal in mind, but often she couldn't think of what to do for a project.
Currently, her excitement was hard to contain as she quickly broke apart the soapstone because she wasn't aiming for finesse in her current creation. She kept moving downward for a few seconds until she sensed she was getting close to the base of the carving. It was merely an intuition she occasionally had while working on a carving and it was by no means a sophisticated sense. She worked with similar blocks of soapstone a lot because she had become so accustomed to seeing them that she had already internalized them.
Because she was becoming aware of the dimensions she was working in, during moments such as these she experienced a tingling sensation that prompted her to check her proximity to the base. Not too bad, about three fingers away. With this sculpture, she could afford to approach the base more closely. She really wanted to get as close as she could. She reasoned that if she highlighted the empty space beneath the small legs, it would look more intriguing.
"Am I doing this right?" asked Lumina who was sitting next to Sjal. She had papers spread out on the table that all had writings on them.
"You're getting there. Flip the pages over and try again." Lumina had backed out of the initiation but she still wanted to learn a little bit about sculpting for her own research. Something about wanting to know what Sjal was capable of if they were going to be working together. Sjal knew she ought to be practicing other things but for the time being she wanted to work on sculpting. She could wait until Lumina was used to the area before she started asking for more lessons. She didn't want to be like her father who always drove her too hard.
"I swear I'm not usually this bad at drawing. I just feel so incompetent," Lumina said as she laid her head on the table.
"Because you're new at it. You're not going to get it on your first day," Sjal said with a sigh. "I'm not even good at drawing the designs for the things I want to sculpt. You can see just how bad I am"
"Can't I move onto drawing another design" Lumina pressed. "Not now, but maybe later in the day?"
"Sure, I could draw you a bunch of them for you to practice, it wouldn't hurt… but if you actually want to learn how to draw them from memory you need to remember every little detail." At that, Sjal stood up to stretch and grabbed her bag of projectiles.
"When I get back, I expect all those pages to be filled," she said with a smile as Lumina groaned.
Sjal enjoyed sculpting but it made her fingers tired and her posture usually made her other muscles ache too. The mercenaries she worked with wasn't big on buying ergonomic furniture, which was understandable. She needed to go out and do something to get her blood flowing and she'd taken an interest in throwing her weaponry.
She took aim at a cactus wren (a bird) that perched on one of the numerous cacti that lined the edge of the outpost. She threw her kunai at it but it saw the movement and fluttered away. It was an expected reaction so Sjal threw another kunai at it mid-flight. It was a quick little thing and sped off to the next cactus where it landed and looked at Sjal cautiously.
"I'm going to get you today," the girl said to it as she fetched her projectiles. She'd yet to hit a flying target and moving targets in general still gave her trouble. Hitting a bird that could zip by in an instant was much more difficult than hitting a bandit who could only move a few feet at most by the time the weapon got to them.
She threw the first kunai then threw the second one once more. This time she tried to aim where she anticipated the bird would go instead of where it was. It was an improvement, but the bird still zipped away and then it was gone. Sjal had to look around until she found another bird, some variety of quail. It was a little larger than the last so when she threw her kunai she clipped a feather before it flew off.
Target practice continued for about a half hour before Sjal managed to land a hit on a bird. She'd gotten used to its flight speed which allowed her second kunai to hit it dead on. "That's enough of that," she said as she wiped the blood off her weapon and tucked it away.
When she got back to Lumina, the girl was sleeping. She'd finished drawing the designs on all the pages which impressed the teacher. Sjal was surprised at how dedicated and studious the girl was, a likely side effect of having experience working for a scholar in an academic environment. Sjal liked to think that she had drive, but repetitive book work always bored her.
She started chiseling the stone again, holding her chisel hand with her pinky out to check where she was on the block. She worked the chisel deeper, knocking out large chunks of soapstone until she had carved herself a small niche from the center. She continued to trace her path by touch from that point on, working her way out until she was only a few fingers from the block's right edge. She then went through the same motions on the opposite side. It was a blunt pointed chisel.
Since it was primarily intended to break apart the parts of the sculpture that would not be included in the finished product, there was little way to control the force it produced. She used that tool to great effect because she needed to clear out a lot of space underneath the table. She hammered it in firmly as she chipped her way to the design, which, with enough concentration, she could almost feel on her fingertips.
The others in the tent busied themselves with the array of recreational pursuits, which for most was playing cards or doing some light exercise. Sjal was hardly the loudest of the bunch, the sound of the chisel rattling against soapstone was usually drowned out.
She ought to have woken Lumina up but she wanted to focus on finishing this right now. Since she had eliminated the majority of the empty space beneath the table, she had to use a chisel with a flat blade that was narrower than the one she had previously used. She tried to recall the bevel she had felt so many times before as she pressed it up against the edge of her table, but it was hard to ignore the ideas that her creativity had awakened in her.
"Is it morning?" asked Lumina as she woke up on her own.
"No, but it's getting to be time to turn in," Sjal said, "they'll call lights out and then I need to sleep."
"Oh. What about me?"
"I assume you need to sleep in one of the spare beds. When I spoke to leadership they said they'll allow you to stay for a while but you need to leave with the next supply run. If you really wanted to learn from me you probably need to sign up and make a request to be work out here with me." Sjal didn't think it was her responsibility to make sure this all worked out. If Lumina wanted to learn then she needed to put in the administrative effort.
"Can I try drawing another design now?" Lumina asked as she remembered her earlier request.
"Sure, go for it," Sjal said, "Try this one."
Lumina furrowed her brow and drew it but messed up horribly. "Great."
"It's going to take you a long time, but the good news is that once you get the feeling down, your progress should be quite rapid. I can teach you the things I know easily enough and what they do. The hardest part of my journey was not knowing how to start. I still don't know what I'm doing, not really. You won't have that issue, I hope."
Lumina frowned as more attempts failed. She wanted to draw some more but the call for lights out came and the candles were soon extinguished. "We'll continue tomorrow," she said as she collected her things and went to lay down.
