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 Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2014 8:28 pm
Your job protecting a single little pond in the middle of a forest may seem inconsequential, but that little pond is very important to the island. A single vial is enough to purify a body of water as large as Tuatha'ri Lake. The potent magics contained in that pond must be protected.
But it seems the water level of Silme Pond has been going down lately. Certainly magical water doesn't evaporate, does it? But where has it gone? The large silver-barked tree that your mother, Goddess Artemis planted a few years ago experienced a growth spurt lately. Maybe the roots have broken through the pond? Or maybe someone has discovered the secrets of this hidden little body of water?
It is up to you, Portia, to discover what's happening to the pond, and where the water is going. You must find a way to save the water and prevent the pond from completely draining before the beginning of February, or Telrunya will forever lose those magical waters.
((Your next prompt will come after Portia figures out and executes a plan to save the waters of Silme Pond.))
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Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 3:38 pm
 It disturbs Portia that the water level was fluctuating--it hadn't been unusually dry lately, just unusually cold. Did cold weather make water evaporate, or want to go into the ground? Maybe the magic water was flighty like a bird and wanted to hibernate for the winter.
Still, even the rain, when it came, did nothing to fill the pond back up. If the water evaporated, did that make the remaining water more potent? Magic didn't evaporate, or else the air and the rain would be filled with it too.
But today was the day Portia was going to do something about it. The pond had gotten a solid inch shallower, and this is just unacceptable. Unacceptable. Hopping down from her hut-on-stilts (it's on stilts to keep out evil spirits), Portia begins to circle the pond, crouched on all fours like an animal. She keeps her head low to the ground, eyes darting back and forth, nose sniffing for anything out of the ordinary.
"Onion milk," she swears, frustrated. Nothing looked, smelled, or felt abnormal. She drums her fingers on her chin, hand on her hip.
She'd gone to such great lengths to protect the pond from harm and outsiders. Knowing how special and potent its magic is, she'd taken great care to disguise it as any other forest pond. Its silvery luster had all but been replaced with the same greenish-brown slime that coated the top of every other pond in this forest. On a full moon, though, her disguise is banished and she has to work to build it up again. It's a constant battle between her and nature.
Surely nobody had been stealing her pond's water. She would have noticed. So if it wasn't disappearing from the top...
It's time for a swim.
Shivering in anticipation of what would undoubtedly be very cold water, Portia crouches down by the pond's edge. She pokes a finger at it. Yep. Cold as a dwarf's foot. A mountain dwarf, that is. Not any other kind of dwarf. She takes a deep breath and slithers in all at once.
I wonder if magic water on my eyeballs will make my eyes magic.
She pauses only for a moment to check on her oyster colony. The cold couldn't be making them happy, but none of them seemed to be ailing. She's not sure how they'd wound up in her pond, but there had been a mommy oyster and a daddy oyster and they'd had lots of baby oysters. Who were now also mommy and daddy oysters. Clearly oysters don't have the same reservations about kinship mating as Pae do.
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Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:03 pm
Satisfied that her oysters weren't unduly suffering due to the cold weather, Portia begins a thorough inspection of the pond's depths. Perhaps that was the one thing that separated it most from any ordinary forest pond--it was unusually deep for a pond. She moves along the walls, down to the bottom first, letting air bubble out from her lips to keep from floating back to the top, then feeling along the sides for anything strange as she made her way to the top. Up and down around the pond she went, prodding the mud.
She finds nothing out of the ordinary except for a few neat-looking rocks, which she's tempted to take but decides to leave. They seemed happy down there.
Portia resurfaces with a harrumph. She climbs out of the pond and sits at its edge, her feet dangling in the water. She'd ceased to feel the cold anymore, and she's not sure whether it's a numbness or just another magical property of her pond. Pale skin and hair covered in pond scum and debris, she cups her chin in one hand to think. What could possibly be wrong?
Suddenly it's as if she has tunnel vision. The silver-barked tree her mother had planted all those moons ago had gone from a skinny sapling to something much mightier in a very short amount of time. Nodding knowingly, Portia stands up, not bothering to brush the dirt off her rear and tail, and walks over to it. She taps on the trunk a few times, listening to how it sounded with her ear pressed to the bark.
She knows this is what's been taking her pond's water. She just knows it. But how could she be sure? Pausing for a moment, Portia turns her head toward her pond and closes her eyes. She takes a few deep breaths, inhaling the sweet forest smells of rot and growth. There, she could see it now. A silvery pool in the darkness of her vision. And...oh, she was right! She can see several silver strands branching off from the pond, leading to....this tree!
She opens her eyes and clucks her tongue at the tree. "Naughty tree," she says, as one might gently admonish a child. She pats its trunk affectionately.
Now...how to solve this problem? She couldn't very well get rid of the tree...to do so would be an affront to her mother, and it wasn't the tree's fault, besides. And it was such a pretty tree, silvery like the light of the moon. I wonder if that's Mother's influence, or my pond's... she ponders.
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Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:19 pm
Now that she'd discovered the problem, and now that she'd remembered how to visualize the pond's magics, the task was now how to remedy it. Incidentally, the tree now appeared as a bright silver spot in her vision as well as the pond. I suppose you're in my charge too then, you shrivel-snout.
The roots would likely be too hard to get at from the pond itself, so she heads back into her hut-on-stilts for a shovel. Except, she finds as she searches through her closet, she doesn't have a shovel. All she has is a rake for tending her small patch of herbs behind her house. Well, a rake was certainly better than nothing, although she'd have to be careful not to scrape the tree's delicate roots. At least it would break through the hardened winter ground.
Closing her eyes again, she sees the pond's magic as silver threads drawing up from the pond. It looked like main roots and one smaller one were drawing water from Silme Pond. That would explain its dramatic decrease in water--it didn't have time to refresh itself from the rain.
"Alright, tree," she says, beginning to turn up the soil atop the roots, "You can't have all my water." She rakes up the soil until she finds the first large root itself, and then she begins to scoop away the dirt with her hands. Once the root was maneuverable, she raked another path away from her pond. Let it get its nourishment from another source. On her hands and knees, she carefully moves the root into the new path she'd made. She does the same for the other large root.
Hm, but what was stopping it from just growing back around? Snapping her fingers, Portia zips through the forest, gathering several medium-sized stones. She cleanses them in the pond before tucking them in next to the roots on the pond side. Hopefully this would form a barrier of sorts, and keep the roots growing in the direction she'd chosen. They look sort of like they're in bed...goodnight little rocks! She recovers the whole area with soil again, and brings cupped hands-ful of water from the pond over to give the tree some water. Hopefully it would recover from its trauma.
The little root, she decides, can continue to draw water from the pond. But she'd continue to monitor the water level, so if it ever got too greedy, she'd know.
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Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2014 4:01 pm
[Portia has completed the first part of this Notice.]
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Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:03 pm
Portia has done the compassionate and proper thing to resolve her problem. She is letting the Tree continue receiving nourishment, while protecting the magical waters.
This Tree is very important, and her mother would be proud.
Successfully completing this task has pleased her family, and she has been granted an invitation to Dolandor; mist-shrouded island home of the Pae'il Deity. This invitation is a special privilege, so don't squander it. wink
=======================
A pink, chubby little mellon in a diaper flitted about, poking at Portia. He has a letter to deliver.
Quote: My Dearest Neice,
It is my privilege to personally invite you to my ENGAGEMENT PARTY on February 14, the Day of Love! You may bring a date if you like. There will be dancing, food, a string band and lots of tributes to Me!
Requested Gift:
String of pearls to wear with my wedding dress!
Love Always,
Venus ~
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Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 10:39 pm
Portia casually accepts the invitation from the chubby fairy. "Thank you, dear," she says to it, though she'd never seen it before in her life. She opens it and gives it a look. "A string of pearls?" she wonders aloud. She wonders why her aunt--who must be on Mother's side; anything sent via pink fairy was definitely not from Ma's side--would want a string of pearls for her wedding. Why not something useful, like a vial of her magic water?
Perhaps she didn't know that Portia was entrusted with a pond full of magic water. She looks at her pond, scrunching up her face almost accusingly. Perhaps her aunt didn't need a vial of magic water. She's not really sure the magic would still be potent after traveling such a distance, either.
Hm. She looks at the invitation again. A string of pearls? Where on earth would she get those? "I live in the middle of a forest," she says aloud, perplexed. She paces around the perimeter of the pond as she contemplates. The only place to get a string of pearls would be the City, which was far too crowded and...congested with strange smells and all manner of odd magic for her tastes. No, she'd rather stay here where things were normal. The other option was to forage in the Lake where the Naiads lived, but she isn't exactly equipped for that sort of journey. Besides, she's loath to leave her pond alone even for the time she'd be spending at the wedding, much less on a quest for a wedding present for an aunt she'd never met. She stares at the pond's murky surface, her face scrunched up. Portia doesn't like these kinds of tasks.
Suddenly, it clicks. "My oysters!" she exclaims aloud. She almost dives into the pond in excitement, but hesitates. How did her aunt know about the oyster colony? And, more importantly, if she knew about the pond, why didn't she want some moon water from it instead of some boring old pearls?
Some people are weird, she concludes.
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Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 11:06 pm
It's a few days later, and Portia still hadn't bothered to harvest any pearls from her oysters. But tonight is a full moon. Perhaps, she'd reasoned, pearls harvested when the pond was at its most potent would have special properties.
She exits her hut-on-stilts and walks down to her pond. Looking up at the moon, bright and round, clearly visible through the clearing in the trees, she smiles and waves. "Hello, Mother!" she says cheerfully.
Now, to the task at hand. Bracing herself for another cold, cold experience, Portia slowly lowers herself into the water. She finds it...oddly warm. The water felt not like water at all, but almost like liquid silk covering her body. It's as cozy as a lover's embrace, and for a moment Portia feels that she may never leave. She makes a sound, and it bubbles over her lips towards the surface. She opens her eyes under the water, and notes with some amusement that all of the normal pond-ness to it had been banished. The water was as clear as crystal, all traces of slime or debris gone.
She glides through the water toward the oyster bed, and pries one open. Inside is a beautiful, perfect round pearl. It's silvery-blue in color, though, and not the creamy white that her aunt undoubtedly wanted to match a wedding dress. Hm. She puts it into her mouth for safe-keeping, but immediately spits it back out. Something about this pearl was not right at all.
Portia resurfaces to examine the object, which is most definitely not a pearl, more carefully. Her reaction to it had been so...visceral it was hard to discern why it had felt so wrong. She turns the silver-blue sphere over in her hands. It wasn't hard, like a pearl or other gem. It was...squishy. She squishes it gently in her fingertips. "Well I certainly can't make a necklace out of this," she grumbles.
The thing resembles a frog egg in many ways, so she brings it back down under the surface as she decides to try another oyster. Perhaps this oyster had just filtered a fertilized frog egg and had accidentally gestated it. She nestles the thing between the oysters, and then opens another one, figuring this time she'd at least find a real pearl.
And she's confronted with another odd egg thing.
She huffs a sigh, which sends bubbles swirling toward the surface. She tucks it in with the other one and keeps opening oysters. Again and again she finds these weird spheres. It can't be a coincidence at this point. There appeared to be no real pearls in her oyster bed. She's not sure whether to be puzzled or completely unsurprised.
Out of breath, she rises to the surface. What to do with them? She can't very well make a necklace out of eggs. Besides, that's not what her aunt had asked for. She glances back down at them. Well, she'd see what they hatched into, if anything. Maybe they had real pearls inside them, who knows? Best to leave them be and go back to bed.
Portia hauls herself out of the water and stands shivering in the night air. The memory of the pond's silky, warm embrace tempts her to jump back in and stay the night in it. But how would she sleep without drowning? Portia bites her lip, still sorely tempted. She dips a toe back in, feeling the warmth spread from her foot up into her leg and toward her core. "No," she reminds herself forcefully. She turns around and marches herself back into her hut-on-stilts, the moonlight still gleaming on her skin and hair.
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Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2014 5:38 pm
The same little chubby, pink mellon bumbles his way around the forest until he finds the daughter of Goddess Artemis. He has another folded piece of parchment sealed with pink wax and bearing Venus' crest.
Silently, he bumbles off, but not before taking a sip of the water from the pond. He may have just gotten himself inebriated. *hic*
The letter reads:
Quote: My Dearest Niece Portia,
Deep in Loka Nei forest is a magical Wishing Well. It requires your assistance most immediately. Just a few drops of the water from the pond are all you'll need.
Hurry, please. heart
Love Always,
~Venus~
Included in the note was a tiny little square of parchment with a crudely scribbled map. Obviously the cherub mellon drew it. There are two X's, one in Loka Nei Forest and one in Ithyl Forest. A squiggly line connects the two. A blue wavy line goes through the middle with the word "revar" written on it.
((Mene, please head over to Abhisneha's Notice to aid in her task. She is dealing with Taint so needs some assistance.))
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