Argul couldn’t just dismiss the coming trouble with the church and military like that of course and still worried, but that didn’t stop her from crafting. For the time being she couldn’t really do anything about it after all, or rather most solutions that came to mind were not to her liking.
She also didn’t want to speak further about it with her daughter as long as Luna and Mia were present. Luna didn’t know about her and Alyra yet and Argul would prefer it if she didn’t have to trouble her little foster niece’s mind with problems like that. The talk with Alyra had been more of a mask to find out if it could wait till the others were asleep.
With her mind occupied, Argul began to gather all the stuff she needed to create her little present. Admittedly, that wasn’t much as she only really had the five planks, some sandpaper and a few outdoor knives of varying size for the carving.
She then sat down at a table as far away from the others in the common room so the sounds wouldn’t bother them too much. With her cleanse spell, cleaning wasn’t a concern, so she didn’t have to work outside, which she very much preferred at the moment.
Now, the first thing Argul wanted to get done was widening the holes in the planks and somehow this already stumped her. She knew from experience that she wasn’t good at woodwork or any ‘practical’ work really and now she somehow had to create a perfect circle with a 4 cm diameter. There was simply no way she could do that with sandpaper, even with her heightened stats and she wouldn’t settle for anything less, so she had to improvise.
The reason she was crafting the birthday present by hand was first and foremost that she had noticed that working on something slowly infused the target with intent. If she magiced the target into existence however, that didn’t happen.
As such, at least in her opinion, that made hand crafted things that much more heartfelt than the magic solution, not that the magic would be easy for normal people. For her it would be somewhat easy though, at the very least she would think about it as easy considering all the things she wanted to create in the future.
What all that didn’t prohibit was to use magic to make the crafting a little bit easier, creating tools for example. In her case that meant she began to grow a small stone pillar that would fit through the hole in the planks from the floor. Then she took one of the planks and speared it on the stone.
The next step was a little bit more complicated than that and she had to put her mind to the task. The goal was to sand away at the hole until it was big enough.
She began to force the stone to start rotating while also growing more on the section where she held the wood. The process took so much mana that she had to start to supply her avatar actively with mana from her domain to continue, increasing the strain on her mind further.
For the next few seconds the room was filled by the sound of stone grinding away at wood and the occasional loud crack, when the strain in the stone became too much. Stone was not meant to be moved like that, so it wasn’t too surprising that it protested.
Still, every crack made Argul wince internally. All her sitting away from the others didn’t matter like this, though she wouldn’t stop. They would have to put up with it for a few minutes until she had done all the holes.
Not these holes, the other ones!
Her wild thoughts aside, she took the plank of the stone pillar and inspected her work. Argul could tell that the diameter of the hole was pretty much 4 cm, only an insignificant amount shorter. Bless the weirdly accurate spatial perception she had as a mana core. Other than that her hole - she snorted at the maturity of her mind - was a bit off center, so this would be the perfect piece to test out her carving and she would have to look out not to repeat the same mistake with the other planks. All in all though, she was pretty satisfied with her first try.
Argul cleansed all the saw dust absentmindedly and put the wooden board on the table next to her, grabbing the second one to widen its hole too.
Goodness, something definitely wasn’t right with her today. She just couldn’t help her thoughts wandering off in the wrong direction each time. It wasn’t that she was really horny though, she hadn’t been in a long time, but she just felt like being childish.
She was just about to spear her second victim on the stone pole when Mia’s excited voice startled her out of her questionable hornyness.
“Woah, aunt! There is so much mana around! What are you doing?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m just-”
Argul blinked and noticed that Mia was right. There was a hell of a lot of mana around her, quite a few levels above the density levels it should be. By her guess they were somewhere around level 7 at the moment, though she wasn’t entirely sure.
She looked down at the stone pillar that had been wildly rotating and cracking a few seconds earlier and, yea, she could see how forcing stone to move rapidly while also preventing it from simply shattering would take a sea of mana.
Argul hadn’t kept an eye on how much mana she used. With the amount that spawned inside of her domain she had pretty much limitless resources and didn’t need to worry after all. Reconsidering now however, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the best idea to pump out enough mana to transform the inn into a lighthouse that screamed ‘I’m here’ when annoying people were searching for her.
Well, now there was no undoing it anymore so she might as well continue. Since her problems were coming to her anyway, what was a day earlier?
If they even had the time to spare for her today that is.
“I’m making a present for Alyra’s birthday.” She said to her niece and continued her work.
Mia watched her for a few minutes, scrutinizing the runes Argul used for her work, but eventually gave up dejectedly. “I can’t understand them.”
Aww, so cute!
Argul smiled and ruffled the little girl’s hair affectionately. “It’s alright if you don’t right now. I don’t expect any human to be able to do, well, that.”
She gestured towards the runes and took the second to last plank to work on. “You just have to get a bit stronger, just a few full levels and you will be able to use my 3-dimensional runes, albeit only just.”
Mia listened intently before she took a chair and sat down next to Argul to watch her work. She might not understand the whole rune, but small parts were well within her limit.
“You know, it’s only two more months until my daughter’s birthday, so if you want to make something handmade it might be good to start now. You could make her a shal for example.” Argul suggested.
She in no way expected the girl to get or make a present and neither did Alyra. Argul herself wasn’t much of a gift giver. Something about the way she had received them had always made them feel fake, less genuine, as if they were gifted because of social obligation and not for her.
For her, presents had often been a burden instead of something to be happy about, which was probably why she could count the gifts she had given others on both her hands. Mia just somehow striked her as the type of girl that was genuine about stuff like that, so she thought it would be nice of her to tell her the date, roughly that is.
Mia looked thoughtful for a moment before she nodded with a smile. “Hmm, that’s a good idea. I will be right back!”
And with that she ran off, probably to get her wool and knitting tools, leaving Argul to continue her own work.
It took Mia multiple trips to get all her different colored wools and tools. As such Argul had finished her hole widening - she should really call it something else - by the time her niece was settled down again.
She would have to round the edges and corners next, before she would start carving the patterns. Instead of beginning immediately with that though, Argul took a break to help Mia with a few of her problems, such as Alyra’s favorite colors besides silver and what she should crotchet in the first place.
It took the two of them nearly half an hour, mainly because Mia didn’t want to go with Argul’s suggestion of a shal, but she didn’t mind. She wasn’t in a rush, having made sure that she would have all the time she needed without having to pressure herself needlessly. In the end they settled for a red hat with a white bobble. Mia also wanted the hat to say ‘Happy Birthday’, which was cute, but Argul had no idea how one would go about that.
After that the two started to work on their respective projects next to each other, making Alyra secretly regret not being able to take a picture of the scene. It would have been perfect for a photo album, one she would definitely not use to embarrass Mia or her mother in the future.
Ignorant of her own daughter’s treacherous thoughts, Argul proceeded to smooth the five planks with her sandpaper. The task was considerably easier than widening the sockets, a much better word than hole, and she didn’t mess up as before. It was repetitive and boring work though, especially because she had to sand away quite a bit of material at the top of the plank.
Sanding the edges turned out to take a few hours, quite a bit longer than she had anticipated and she was endlessly grateful when she was done. Her mind just kept wandering with nothing to do and that meant she got a lot of ideas she wanted to try out, but couldn’t without stopping her work. Thankfully she hadn’t stopped though, because starting again would have been that much harder for her.
With the planks edges rounded and smoothed the only thing left to do for Argul was carving the pattern and symbols, which was arguably the hardest part of her work.
Before she did that though, she took a break and helped Luna to make lunch, leftover soup from yesterday. Most of their meals were soup by now as the result of modern supply chains being nonexistent on Erod.
After lunch Argul quickly got back to work, wanting to see how she would do. Starting with the runic pattern, she had to awkwardly scratch the lines and forms into the wood before she could actually use the edge of her knife to carve them deeper. She would have to sand them too later, probably by wrapping the paper around a ruler. There had to be a proper method to do what she was attempting, sure, but she didn’t know and lizard villagers hadn’t conveniently shown her until now either so she had to figure things out as she went.
The pattern was made up of two forms, the base symbols she used to form her magic runes in the end. The first was a mostly straight line, though they could have a sharp curve, that was meant to transport mana between the different symbols of her spells.
The second was a small empty circle that ‘compressed’ mana. She called it compressing but it was more collecting mana that had left the rune before it suffused into the surroundings. This single symbol saved the most mana in all her spells.
The form of the symbols themselves wasn’t that important. What really made the mana move was the intent Argul used to make the symbols. What they did help with however, was to recreate the spell, because she could easily associate the intent to the form.
Carving the pattern was a real struggle for Argul, not because she lacked in strength, on the contrary, she got the impression that she had too much of it, but because she couldn’t get the forms she wanted right. Again and again she cut further into the wood than she wanted, leaving ugly scratches that marked her mistakes.
Argul continued to mutilate the first plank though, that she wasn’t good at this didn’t come as a surprise after all.
For the next two hours or so she trained her carving skill, the system had rewarded her with it after the first hour, and she progressed enough that she didn’t make too severe mistakes. She wasn’t perfect yet of course, far from it, but she could hide most of her mistakes by sanding them away. Argul did deem the two planks she sacrificed for her progress worth it though.
During these two hours things seemed to have started outside too. Someone had walked up and down the street a few times, shouting for people to stay inside of their homes for their own safety and after that there had been a few commotions. She had ignored most of it in favor of her work though.
The next thing Argul tried out was carving the camera lens. It was a bit more difficult than doing the lines because she wanted it to be 3 dimensional, like a relief. She quickly got a hang of it, or at least hang enough of it that it was acceptable, though and proceeded to her last problem, the hands.
Hands! What in the world had she thought, adding the bane of all budding artists to her design?!
Argul might be able to do the rest, but not hands. She wasn’t even sure if she could draw hands given two months of training, not even speaking of carving, which was a whole dimension deeper, literally. Getting only five planks was very optimistic of her all things considered, more a lack of good judgment really.
Despite those thoughts though, Argul got to work with a smile, creating the ugliest hands ever seen by human kind. She had wanted to live this life differently than the last and give less of a shit, not that she was particularly good at that.
With that in mind however, having only 5 planks might be a blessing for her. So what if the hands looked a little bit ugly in the end?
She had given it her all. She had worked on it with a smile with her daughter in mind. The squiggly hands would be her mark, the sign that the gift was genuine.
Argul hummed to herself and stabbed the knife in the wood, slowly scratching what one might identify as a hand into the fourth plank. She would finish crafting today and focus on the enchanting for the next week or so.
Argul couldn’t just dismiss the coming trouble with the church and military like that of course and still worried, but that didn’t stop her from crafting. For the time being she couldn’t really do anything about it after all, or rather most solutions that came to mind were not to her liking.
She also didn’t want to speak further about it with her daughter as long as Luna and Mia were present. Luna didn’t know about her and Alyra yet and Argul would prefer it if she didn’t have to trouble her little foster niece’s mind with problems like that. The talk with Alyra had been more of a mask to find out if it could wait till the others were asleep.
With her mind occupied, Argul began to gather all the stuff she needed to create her little present. Admittedly, that wasn’t much as she only really had the five planks, some sandpaper and a few outdoor knives of varying size for the carving.
She then sat down at a table as far away from the others in the common room so the sounds wouldn’t bother them too much. With her cleanse spell, cleaning wasn’t a concern, so she didn’t have to work outside, which she very much preferred at the moment.
Now, the first thing Argul wanted to get done was widening the holes in the planks and somehow this already stumped her. She knew from experience that she wasn’t good at woodwork or any ‘practical’ work really and now she somehow had to create a perfect circle with a 4 cm diameter. There was simply no way she could do that with sandpaper, even with her heightened stats and she wouldn’t settle for anything less, so she had to improvise.
The reason she was crafting the birthday present by hand was first and foremost that she had noticed that working on something slowly infused the target with intent. If she magiced the target into existence however, that didn’t happen.
As such, at least in her opinion, that made hand crafted things that much more heartfelt than the magic solution, not that the magic would be easy for normal people. For her it would be somewhat easy though, at the very least she would think about it as easy considering all the things she wanted to create in the future.
What all that didn’t prohibit was to use magic to make the crafting a little bit easier, creating tools for example. In her case that meant she began to grow a small stone pillar that would fit through the hole in the planks from the floor. Then she took one of the planks and speared it on the stone.
The next step was a little bit more complicated than that and she had to put her mind to the task. The goal was to sand away at the hole until it was big enough.
She began to force the stone to start rotating while also growing more on the section where she held the wood. The process took so much mana that she had to start to supply her avatar actively with mana from her domain to continue, increasing the strain on her mind further.
For the next few seconds the room was filled by the sound of stone grinding away at wood and the occasional loud crack, when the strain in the stone became too much. Stone was not meant to be moved like that, so it wasn’t too surprising that it protested.
Still, every crack made Argul wince internally. All her sitting away from the others didn’t matter like this, though she wouldn’t stop. They would have to put up with it for a few minutes until she had done all the holes.
Not these holes, the other ones!
Her wild thoughts aside, she took the plank of the stone pillar and inspected her work. Argul could tell that the diameter of the hole was pretty much 4 cm, only an insignificant amount shorter. Bless the weirdly accurate spatial perception she had as a mana core. Other than that her hole - she snorted at the maturity of her mind - was a bit off center, so this would be the perfect piece to test out her carving and she would have to look out not to repeat the same mistake with the other planks. All in all though, she was pretty satisfied with her first try.
Argul cleansed all the saw dust absentmindedly and put the wooden board on the table next to her, grabbing the second one to widen its hole too.
Goodness, something definitely wasn’t right with her today. She just couldn’t help her thoughts wandering off in the wrong direction each time. It wasn’t that she was really horny though, she hadn’t been in a long time, but she just felt like being childish.
She was just about to spear her second victim on the stone pole when Mia’s excited voice startled her out of her questionable hornyness.
“Woah, aunt! There is so much mana around! What are you doing?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m just-”
Argul blinked and noticed that Mia was right. There was a hell of a lot of mana around her, quite a few levels above the density levels it should be. By her guess they were somewhere around level 7 at the moment, though she wasn’t entirely sure.
She looked down at the stone pillar that had been wildly rotating and cracking a few seconds earlier and, yea, she could see how forcing stone to move rapidly while also preventing it from simply shattering would take a sea of mana.
Argul hadn’t kept an eye on how much mana she used. With the amount that spawned inside of her domain she had pretty much limitless resources and didn’t need to worry after all. Reconsidering now however, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the best idea to pump out enough mana to transform the inn into a lighthouse that screamed ‘I’m here’ when annoying people were searching for her.
Well, now there was no undoing it anymore so she might as well continue. Since her problems were coming to her anyway, what was a day earlier?
If they even had the time to spare for her today that is.
“I’m making a present for Alyra’s birthday.” She said to her niece and continued her work.
Mia watched her for a few minutes, scrutinizing the runes Argul used for her work, but eventually gave up dejectedly. “I can’t understand them.”
Aww, so cute!
Argul smiled and ruffled the little girl’s hair affectionately. “It’s alright if you don’t right now. I don’t expect any human to be able to do, well, that.”
She gestured towards the runes and took the second to last plank to work on. “You just have to get a bit stronger, just a few full levels and you will be able to use my 3-dimensional runes, albeit only just.”
Mia listened intently before she took a chair and sat down next to Argul to watch her work. She might not understand the whole rune, but small parts were well within her limit.
“You know, it’s only two more months until my daughter’s birthday, so if you want to make something handmade it might be good to start now. You could make her a shal for example.” Argul suggested.
She in no way expected the girl to get or make a present and neither did Alyra. Argul herself wasn’t much of a gift giver. Something about the way she had received them had always made them feel fake, less genuine, as if they were gifted because of social obligation and not for her.
For her, presents had often been a burden instead of something to be happy about, which was probably why she could count the gifts she had given others on both her hands. Mia just somehow striked her as the type of girl that was genuine about stuff like that, so she thought it would be nice of her to tell her the date, roughly that is.
Mia looked thoughtful for a moment before she nodded with a smile. “Hmm, that’s a good idea. I will be right back!”
And with that she ran off, probably to get her wool and knitting tools, leaving Argul to continue her own work.
It took Mia multiple trips to get all her different colored wools and tools. As such Argul had finished her hole widening - she should really call it something else - by the time her niece was settled down again.
She would have to round the edges and corners next, before she would start carving the patterns. Instead of beginning immediately with that though, Argul took a break to help Mia with a few of her problems, such as Alyra’s favorite colors besides silver and what she should crotchet in the first place.
It took the two of them nearly half an hour, mainly because Mia didn’t want to go with Argul’s suggestion of a shal, but she didn’t mind. She wasn’t in a rush, having made sure that she would have all the time she needed without having to pressure herself needlessly. In the end they settled for a red hat with a white bobble. Mia also wanted the hat to say ‘Happy Birthday’, which was cute, but Argul had no idea how one would go about that.
After that the two started to work on their respective projects next to each other, making Alyra secretly regret not being able to take a picture of the scene. It would have been perfect for a photo album, one she would definitely not use to embarrass Mia or her mother in the future.
Ignorant of her own daughter’s treacherous thoughts, Argul proceeded to smooth the five planks with her sandpaper. The task was considerably easier than widening the sockets, a much better word than hole, and she didn’t mess up as before. It was repetitive and boring work though, especially because she had to sand away quite a bit of material at the top of the plank.
Sanding the edges turned out to take a few hours, quite a bit longer than she had anticipated and she was endlessly grateful when she was done. Her mind just kept wandering with nothing to do and that meant she got a lot of ideas she wanted to try out, but couldn’t without stopping her work. Thankfully she hadn’t stopped though, because starting again would have been that much harder for her.
With the planks edges rounded and smoothed the only thing left to do for Argul was carving the pattern and symbols, which was arguably the hardest part of her work.
Before she did that though, she took a break and helped Luna to make lunch, leftover soup from yesterday. Most of their meals were soup by now as the result of modern supply chains being nonexistent on Erod.
After lunch Argul quickly got back to work, wanting to see how she would do. Starting with the runic pattern, she had to awkwardly scratch the lines and forms into the wood before she could actually use the edge of her knife to carve them deeper. She would have to sand them too later, probably by wrapping the paper around a ruler. There had to be a proper method to do what she was attempting, sure, but she didn’t know and lizard villagers hadn’t conveniently shown her until now either so she had to figure things out as she went.
The pattern was made up of two forms, the base symbols she used to form her magic runes in the end. The first was a mostly straight line, though they could have a sharp curve, that was meant to transport mana between the different symbols of her spells.
The second was a small empty circle that ‘compressed’ mana. She called it compressing but it was more collecting mana that had left the rune before it suffused into the surroundings. This single symbol saved the most mana in all her spells.
The form of the symbols themselves wasn’t that important. What really made the mana move was the intent Argul used to make the symbols. What they did help with however, was to recreate the spell, because she could easily associate the intent to the form.
Carving the pattern was a real struggle for Argul, not because she lacked in strength, on the contrary, she got the impression that she had too much of it, but because she couldn’t get the forms she wanted right. Again and again she cut further into the wood than she wanted, leaving ugly scratches that marked her mistakes.
Argul continued to mutilate the first plank though, that she wasn’t good at this didn’t come as a surprise after all.
For the next two hours or so she trained her carving skill, the system had rewarded her with it after the first hour, and she progressed enough that she didn’t make too severe mistakes. She wasn’t perfect yet of course, far from it, but she could hide most of her mistakes by sanding them away. Argul did deem the two planks she sacrificed for her progress worth it though.
During these two hours things seemed to have started outside too. Someone had walked up and down the street a few times, shouting for people to stay inside of their homes for their own safety and after that there had been a few commotions. She had ignored most of it in favor of her work though.
The next thing Argul tried out was carving the camera lens. It was a bit more difficult than doing the lines because she wanted it to be 3 dimensional, like a relief. She quickly got a hang of it, or at least hang enough of it that it was acceptable, though and proceeded to her last problem, the hands.
Hands! What in the world had she thought, adding the bane of all budding artists to her design?!
Argul might be able to do the rest, but not hands. She wasn’t even sure if she could draw hands given two months of training, not even speaking of carving, which was a whole dimension deeper, literally. Getting only five planks was very optimistic of her all things considered, more a lack of good judgment really.
Despite those thoughts though, Argul got to work with a smile, creating the ugliest hands ever seen by human kind. She had wanted to live this life differently than the last and give less of a shit, not that she was particularly good at that.
With that in mind however, having only 5 planks might be a blessing for her. So what if the hands looked a little bit ugly in the end?
She had given it her all. She had worked on it with a smile with her daughter in mind. The squiggly hands would be her mark, the sign that the gift was genuine.
Argul hummed to herself and stabbed the knife in the wood, slowly scratching what one might identify as a hand into the fourth plank. She would finish crafting today and focus on the enchanting for the next week or so.
