Oakwood [Chek]

Rude man coming. That timely warning enabled Oddinya to smoothly pull her lunch from the countertop in front of her, sliding it into the special hidden warming tray she’d built into her worktable after the first time this particular individual had stolen parts of her lunch. Thankfully he didn’t catch onto the hint left by the empty space on the counter, instead slapping the sealed document down in front of her.

She picked it up delicately, looking at it somewhat skeptically, but regardless she slipped a knife under the seal and popped it open. She scrutinized the signatures for a moment, lifted an eyebrow is disbelief at Q’sis (who was now prowling her workroom – she suspected he was searching for her lunch) and then turned to rummage around in a cabinet – after unlocking it, of course.

Behind her, Oddisk jumped up on the latch concealing the hidden food, spreading herself out prettily and proceeding to pick specks of wood dust off her pale hide, slowly whirling eyes focused on the interloper even as she groomed herself. Odd, meanwhile, pulled a slightly crumpled set of forms out of the cabinet – one was the original write-up of the tanrider’s chair and art order, and the other was a blank, signed copy of the very form the tall man had just turned in to her.

She scrutinized the signatures, noting a few tells – one of those things her master insisted she know – that hinted at the possibility of a forgery, but over all…Odd decided it was close enough. Locking the original away again, she returned to the table to make edits to Q’sis’s copy of the fund grant.

“I’m going to resist the urge to wonder why in the world you find it necessary to have an orgy with multiple men and not just use blankets and the floor, but I am assuming it is something that makes sense to you riders.” Gently, Odd poured a measure of fine-grain sand on the paper, rubbing at the spot with a rubbery spindle of hardened sap until the ink on the paper wore away. Taking a quill she carefully wrote in her changes.

“Stop breaking my cabinets, you insufferable…” Not looking up from her work, though Oddisk hissed lowly at the rider, Odd snagged a knife off her bench and threw it – the blade thudded into the counter behind where Q’sis had just been standing.

If be rude, accurate rude. Aim off. Oddisk critiqued.

“Hush. And you – stop going through everything!” Putting the quill away, she blew gently on the ink, pleased. Now the tanrider’s previous order wasn’t weighing down her marks any longer. “Anyway – you did a good job on this. Free reign on materials, so yes, I know a better weaver – though we do have some other issues to discuss. Bring me those measurements first, though.”

She leaned down to slide the wooden wheels on her worktable into place and rolled it away to the edge of the room, tucking it into a spot between two finished tables and leaving herself a clear area in the center of the room.

“This example of common folk is responsible for your orgy bed, so you’d best maintain politeness ‘lest I rig it to collapse in the midst of your canoodling. What a mood breaker that would be, hm?” Still she took the leather measurements from Q’sis and laid them out on the floor, walking around them and calculating distances in her head, frowning as she realized how much she’d need to get for something of this size.

“Skybroom, hah! You’re just naming the most expensive wood you can, not that which would look best. No taste at all. You’re going to need a hardwood for the frame if you’re going to support this many people, and most of the ones I’m thinking of are nice and dark, with a reddish tint, since I figure you don’t want the one that sets to a ridiculously brilliant purple. But maybe the black…hm. Either way, it’s a matter of taste. With the red woods, either a pale softwood or a nice, small-grained black looks best, but…don’t you dare touch that wher.”

Oddinya lifted another knife from a counter, striding over to put her unintimidating bulk between herself and the tanrider, glaring fiercely while Oddisk hissed behind her, wings mantling open and eyes whirling an alarmed and angry orange, Rude man, no polite. Going to touch no permission! Rude! Rudest! Burlesk less rude!

“I will legitimately stab you, non-fatally for the sake of your poor dragon, if you take one more step or move to touch this wher. And then I will deny this and any future work for you on behalf of my entire craft. It is fully within my prerogative. Do NOT touch the wher.” Odd snarled, reached a hand back to rest against Oddisk’s cheek, the cyan still hissing with indignant fury at the man’s utterly scurrilous intentions.

Break the latch, Oddisk.

The cyan didn’t question her handler’s order to utterly foil Q’sis lunch stealing intentions, even if it meant three candlemarks with a hammer and chisel to break the lock on the drawer back open – Oddisk and Oddinya both were willing to accept a pyrrhic victory just this once. Standing, the tiny cyan caught the latch in her mouth and yanked it in the wrong direction, breaking the wood cleanly and then dropping the broken latch on the floor smugly.

“Now that that is no longer an issue, sit down and let us discuss this bed like reasonable adults, if it is within your capabilities, so you can get out of my workshop.”

Oddinya was off balance for a moment, not expecting him to cave quite that easily – once last glance at the broken latch, confirming that Oddisk was indeed the best wher possible – it was broken off fairly dramatically, but the cyan had broken the latch off, rather than rip it out; she’d be able to retrieve her lunch with little difficulty after Q’sis left.

Half victory unsatisfactory. Oddisk commented, spreading her large, lovely wings and settling back down, baleful gaze focused on the incredibly rude lout impinging on her territory. Coming in here with his tallness and his grabby hands. If this is what she had to deal with, getting her handler to be reasonably polite to people was going to be a trial. If they even deserved the politeness in the first place!

As Q’sis took a seat, Odd’s good eye visibly twitched, and she sucked a calming breath in through her teeth. She’d refrained from maiming irritating clients before, and she could do it again, despite it being such a strong urge.

“At least you show sense sometimes; really, skybroom inlay.” She muttered, ignoring the comment about her cyan – in his backwards way, that could have been a compliment. Striding over to one of the largest cabinets in the room, she swung the door open and looked inside for a long moment. The “cabinet” was in fact a somewhat disguised entrance into Oddinya’s dry storeroom, where planks and blocks of wood rested on racks and shelves.

Tapping a finger on her chin, she considered the room while Q’sis rambled in the background – one thing caught her attention and had her snapping around, “You’d do better than to suggest that bonding to a wher would in any way negatively impact my skill; does a healer loose the ability to stitch flesh when they Impress a dragon? Can a miner no longer find ore with a creat…firelizard on their shoulder? I’m sure you are just as aggravating now as you were before you Impressed; obviously your craft was harassment. I’m pleased to announce your skill has not decayed.”

Her eye twitched again. She really, really was going to end up stabbing a dragonrider today. She decided against dignifying this obsession with her lunch with any sort of response – and she almost didn’t dignify the rest of it with a response either.

“I’m sure you’re the only who enjoys handling long hard shafts of wood; you’ll have to control yourself. Follow.” Odd snatched a glowbasket and stepped into the darkened storeroom, inhaling the soothing smell of wood as she did so. “And don’t touch the statues. They are objects of art I am storing and they do not need to be covered in your massive fingerprints.”

The room was actually larger than her workroom; shelves lined the walls, some obviously too high for Odd to reach without assistance from a ladder; the center of the room was full of floor to ceiling racks, all of them long enough that long planks could rest on them without the risk of bowing – and every single inch of the room was stacked and piled with wood.

The only exception was a row of cloth covered shapes tucked against one wall - the mentioned statues.

“Most Crafters are idiots. Just because you have a companion doesn’t give you the excuse to stop working on your Craft,” Odd grumbled, poking through the ends of one of the rows, counting off by the numbers etched in the wax sealing the ends of the boards, “You Trader then? Good, maybe if you keep coming to me for projects, I’ll start making you haggle for supplies yourself.” The same heavy atmosphere that Q’sis noticed invigorated Oddinya, the weight of centuries of growth waiting for her hands to make them into beautiful objects, always lifted her spirit. She could ignore the irritation that was Q’sis, in this room.

“I’d rather you notice and know to keep your hands off, rather than risk you breaking something in your curiosity, to be honest. Some of the pieces are very old, and very fragile.” Oddisk slunk into the room behind them, brushing against her handler’s shins as she disappeared into the cool darkness of the storage room. Oddinya, other than running a hand absently along the spine and wings of the passing cyan, continued touching numbers as if nothing had happened, eventually joining Q’sis to climb carefully up the shelf he was examining.

A scrabbling in one corner of the room, hidden by Oddinya’s stock, and accompanied by an excess of hissing, distracted her for a moment, but soon it was back to business. “Yes, anything on this shelf and the one behind you should be suitable,” she swung down easily from her perch, “The one you’re looking at there – that’s a bright red-purple in natural light; the ones above it shade to red, the ones below through purple and into a near-black. The other shelf has mostly orange and brown shades – all dense hardwoods, though.”

Oddisk suddenly appeared out of the darkness atop one of the racks, her claws griping the wooden beams lightly, as to not scuff them, the end of a tunnelsnake protruding from her mouth as she crouched, watching them with eyes that glowed with an eerie luminance in the dark room. Almost daintily, she finished her meal by tilting her head upwards and letting the rest of the faintly wriggling snake disappear into her mouth.

Spreading her wings, she leaped off, gliding to her handler and landing against her shoulder with a audible thump, forcing Oddinya to take a step forward to regain her balance – the disadvantage of a rapidly growing wher to a small woman. The cyan caught her claws in the back of Oddinya’s apron and settled, her head resting on her handler’s shoulder, on the blind side.

“Here,” the woodcrafter told Q’sis, handing him the basket of glows, “Look things over, decide which you like.” She walked away to pull some samples of laminates, eyes closed as she corrected for using Oddisk’s vision in the dark room, “And food is food, man. Sustenance and nothing more – no reason to pick favorites.”