Ash 37, 122
In the cutthroat world of specialty shops, everyone did whatever it took to survive. Undercut competitors. Offer unreasonable sales, but back them with hidden fees and later costs. Get customers in off the streets by selling whatever bullshit you had to peddle, then knock down the hopes you'd built up until the transaction would be a profit. And even profitability wasn't a laurel you could rest upon, really. It only ever took one turn of bad luck, one guilder's whimsy at the next auction, and you'd be running in the red just to keep your establishment afloat. No, in the world of competitive small-volume expert products, there were few lines in the sand.
This was the beach, though, so there wasn't much else to draw on.
"So then this rune represents fire, right? No. Wait, sorry, I think this might mean 'blood loss'. But we'll say it's fire for now, okay-”
Seasoned Sunsinger, world-traveling warrior and avid adventurer Imogen Ward stood on the beach, far enough away that the rising tide shouldn't pose any immediate danger, and tried desperately to illustrate her points to the audience. It had taken a few tries! First, she'd attempted to simply walk around and draw the map with her foot, but in practice this meant her footsteps and errant slips rendered the sand illegible. Then she'd wised up a bit and produced her staff... which promptly began burning the sand, rendering an entire section of the beach totally unusable for the purpose of drawing anything. Now, on attempt number three, she had quieted the nova-flame on her weapon to a dull glow, too dim and cool to harm the rocky beach, and was manipulating it at a distance to ensure both that her footprints were not in the picture (literally) and that she could see it from the same angle as her two compatriots.
But it was still quite obvious that Imogen was not a very good artist.
"So there's some sort of wind-snake here, I think. This rune means 'wind', or maybe 'gale', or possibly 'tired', actually.”
It wasn't true that Imogen had never been taught scrivening, but it was incontrovertible that she hadn't learned it. Certainly, she'd never done more than scratch some inactive talismans as a child, which would probably have functioned worse than nothing as protective charms. Although the Ork's mind and arms were quick and precise in battle, her attention wandered easily while trying to draw lines, in sand or on paper.
Nevertheless, she finished scrawling her "map" of Ecith, with "runes" marking her conjectured points of elemental concentrations, and turned to Avamande. This was meant to illustrate her theory, as she'd done with leaves and fruits in the tree with Destyn two days prior. The map was... well, marginally better than using two leaves and a mango, maybe. Her depiction of Northern Ecith, where she had stayed for months and extensively studied maps in preparation for her journey into the deep forests, was passable. Her depiction of the northern mountain ranges and eastern seaboard of the Ataraxian was questionable, and a cartographer might have observed that her marker for Sol'lunarium was about six hundred miles off. Arguably the most important part, the contours of Southern Ecith? Absolute fantasy.
"If you look at this map, I think the notion suggests itself immediately,” Imogen asserted, incorrectly, "There are strong elemental flows on the thirds of the continent surrounding the desert, but they work in totally different ways. Primals to the north, and, um... infusions... to the south. I don't know why either of those things happen, but I do know that it's strange that they both stop as soon as you hit the desert. So that takes us to our next subject...”
Imogen turned to the other thing she'd drawn, an image of a ship. Or, well, a boat. If you squinted, it had a hull and a sail.
"The Duck. A living ship, and Carina says that it's sick. Or cursed, or some combination of the two. She told me that Kyne wants to find a cure for the curse, or sickness, but doesn't actually know for sure what that would entail. So what's the connection between The Duck and this land? We haven't spotted any, right? No mortal settlements for thousands of miles.
We can probably guess that the ship wasn't made in northern Ecith, because the red dragons record everything, and there's no way they would have let that secret die. It's probably not the angry desert city either, because...” Imogen waved vaguely, as if to communicate through gesture alone that obviously people who live in the desert are going to be bad at ship-building. "But none of us has found a single sign of life anywhere around here. I flew the whole way up the coast without seeing a single settlement, which means either the people who live here don't do sailing, or there's nobody here."
"But looking at the elemental activity of Ecith, I think you can see something gone wrong on a continent-level scale.” she still had no guesses for what 'gone wrong' even meant, though, "And I'm wondering if it's the mechanism which causes these elemental anomalies which the ship is really after. So, what do you think?”
In the cutthroat world of specialty shops, everyone did whatever it took to survive. Undercut competitors. Offer unreasonable sales, but back them with hidden fees and later costs. Get customers in off the streets by selling whatever bullshit you had to peddle, then knock down the hopes you'd built up until the transaction would be a profit. And even profitability wasn't a laurel you could rest upon, really. It only ever took one turn of bad luck, one guilder's whimsy at the next auction, and you'd be running in the red just to keep your establishment afloat. No, in the world of competitive small-volume expert products, there were few lines in the sand.
This was the beach, though, so there wasn't much else to draw on.
"So then this rune represents fire, right? No. Wait, sorry, I think this might mean 'blood loss'. But we'll say it's fire for now, okay-”
Seasoned Sunsinger, world-traveling warrior and avid adventurer Imogen Ward stood on the beach, far enough away that the rising tide shouldn't pose any immediate danger, and tried desperately to illustrate her points to the audience. It had taken a few tries! First, she'd attempted to simply walk around and draw the map with her foot, but in practice this meant her footsteps and errant slips rendered the sand illegible. Then she'd wised up a bit and produced her staff... which promptly began burning the sand, rendering an entire section of the beach totally unusable for the purpose of drawing anything. Now, on attempt number three, she had quieted the nova-flame on her weapon to a dull glow, too dim and cool to harm the rocky beach, and was manipulating it at a distance to ensure both that her footprints were not in the picture (literally) and that she could see it from the same angle as her two compatriots.
But it was still quite obvious that Imogen was not a very good artist.
"So there's some sort of wind-snake here, I think. This rune means 'wind', or maybe 'gale', or possibly 'tired', actually.”
It wasn't true that Imogen had never been taught scrivening, but it was incontrovertible that she hadn't learned it. Certainly, she'd never done more than scratch some inactive talismans as a child, which would probably have functioned worse than nothing as protective charms. Although the Ork's mind and arms were quick and precise in battle, her attention wandered easily while trying to draw lines, in sand or on paper.
Nevertheless, she finished scrawling her "map" of Ecith, with "runes" marking her conjectured points of elemental concentrations, and turned to Avamande. This was meant to illustrate her theory, as she'd done with leaves and fruits in the tree with Destyn two days prior. The map was... well, marginally better than using two leaves and a mango, maybe. Her depiction of Northern Ecith, where she had stayed for months and extensively studied maps in preparation for her journey into the deep forests, was passable. Her depiction of the northern mountain ranges and eastern seaboard of the Ataraxian was questionable, and a cartographer might have observed that her marker for Sol'lunarium was about six hundred miles off. Arguably the most important part, the contours of Southern Ecith? Absolute fantasy.
"If you look at this map, I think the notion suggests itself immediately,” Imogen asserted, incorrectly, "There are strong elemental flows on the thirds of the continent surrounding the desert, but they work in totally different ways. Primals to the north, and, um... infusions... to the south. I don't know why either of those things happen, but I do know that it's strange that they both stop as soon as you hit the desert. So that takes us to our next subject...”
Imogen turned to the other thing she'd drawn, an image of a ship. Or, well, a boat. If you squinted, it had a hull and a sail.
"The Duck. A living ship, and Carina says that it's sick. Or cursed, or some combination of the two. She told me that Kyne wants to find a cure for the curse, or sickness, but doesn't actually know for sure what that would entail. So what's the connection between The Duck and this land? We haven't spotted any, right? No mortal settlements for thousands of miles.
We can probably guess that the ship wasn't made in northern Ecith, because the red dragons record everything, and there's no way they would have let that secret die. It's probably not the angry desert city either, because...” Imogen waved vaguely, as if to communicate through gesture alone that obviously people who live in the desert are going to be bad at ship-building. "But none of us has found a single sign of life anywhere around here. I flew the whole way up the coast without seeing a single settlement, which means either the people who live here don't do sailing, or there's nobody here."
"But looking at the elemental activity of Ecith, I think you can see something gone wrong on a continent-level scale.” she still had no guesses for what 'gone wrong' even meant, though, "And I'm wondering if it's the mechanism which causes these elemental anomalies which the ship is really after. So, what do you think?”
