Spelling Map with a T

That's the point, you don't have a choice.

When the gathering of cartographers had rolled out their carefully crafted seal, and pressed it into the charter of their intent, the mapmakers had known a true joy - for the low low cost of their unuttered barter with the Guild of Sigils and Designs. What was created was a beautiful thing, mirroring the nature of the sigil of Natare, that the mapmakers quickly put to use; each of its cohort coming to the sigil bearer to make official their maps with a press of the sigil and a signing of authenticity.

Time passed, and the cartographers set into this new way, several other seals joining the NGC, each defined with its own purpose, each tying the goals of the makers with that of the mappers, and soon with the Stationers that made the tools the mappers used. It is here that we step in to watch a particular moment in time.

Mappers Lissino and Tevorde had been tasked by the cohort work on a modified version of the city map, one that finds all those that barter independent of the market, a shop map for the modern age. Lissino, an up and coming foliad woman was to meet Tevorde in a little outdoor tea-house, owned by a wrinkled old woman in too many shawls who kept offering Lissino more tea to try. Currently Lissino had local bindings sprawled before her as a delicate gourd that almost seems transparent sits, wafting steam into the air as Forest Gift brews before her, the lichen bobbing gently on the springy table before her.

by TinyMouseA

Lissino takes a sip, Br1n bobbling along on the terminal that's no larger than her steaming gourd, the intelligence playing a gentle recording of one of Lissino's favourite bards. She tucks a braid of teal hair behind an ear moving as she points at two paragraphs on two different bindings, trying to map as much of the city before they have to walk the city or talk to people. Her partner is going to be some social type, she knows this, and if she can get her half of the initial part of this task done - she can leave the rest to the partner and just relax over the next few days with tea and stay away from the pulsing pain in her head should she be asked to participate.

Her brow furrows, Lissino chewing on her bottom lip as her left thumb double joints back at a 'weird' angle as she presses too hard on the greshire surface. Buildings change hands all the time, barter sometimes means a home for a home (trademasters refusing to leave someone homeless, but even that would be on the records that are before her) but there's an actual discrepancy in the bindings - a whole building going missing and something else reappearing in its place. Indeed none of the dimensions of the two buildings have anything in common. She makes a mark on the paperbark sheet she is using as a temporary map, noting the excess in her mind to send to the mulch heap.

Still there is so many points on the map to mark and she curses the powers that hold the mapmaker's sigil that she must do this city, now. Lissino had plans with her beloved, and their mutual friend to see Vertus during the festival - and they had gone without her - this her big break within the NGC despite her reservations on the task. The moss is slowly settling on the bottom of her tea as the recording comes to an end and she is no closer to working out the line of this map than at the beginning when she had grabbed the paperbark and in a fit of reckless frustration scrawled a big spiral on its surface, the ink still wet as she surveyed her angry attempt at the main road of the city. Despite being part of the cohort, Lissino lived in one of the smaller villages on the Natahim.

A shadow falls across the bindings, arriving in a mass of jingling bangles and wooden hoops, bare tusks shining with a deep red stain. As Lissino takes them in, their whole look is whites and reds, so that even the shelf mushrooms that crawl down her shoulders are stained red. And the massive tiered skirt would at least at first glance hint at a view on the feminine - current style putting masc skirts as more body flush within Natare. She looks at her spots within the bindings and then stands, amber eyes meeting those of the jovial Troll before her - Tevorde she assumes.

"Mapmaker Lissino, one could assume." The other mapper greets her, rubbing thick fingers over the tip of a tusk as she surveyed the mass of the table, before lightly catching Lissino's gourd before it makes its journey from table to floor. Lissino watches as boiling hot tea sloshes over the lip, over Tevorde's hand - she does not flinch, indeed cupping the gourd tighter as she brings it up to sit. "Careful, that's a good brew to waste on careless intensity."

Lissino feels her cheeks heat up; analysed, assessed and found tilted. She gathers her notes to herself, suddenly in need of looking in control of herself. "I am, you are both late and early. I almost have the preliminary assessments done and feel that I could efficiently perform a handover of the first stage by around lunch, if you agree to a division of labour." She hooks her thumbs in the stays on her sleeveless coat, adjusting it crooked - as is the local style, and makes the gesture of greeting, two hands crossed, palms up. Everything feels out of place under the scrutiny of the troll woman, from the top of her wax-sealed braids, to her bare feet that seem to gather much more of the limestone dust over her toes than many of the locals do, her need to curl her toes into the ground as she stresses..... something that makes her feel herself but also not THEM.

The wrist wraps feel constricting now as her eyes dare Tevorde to speak, to either accept the greeting or rebut the work division, but not just leave her hanging. She should not have let her beloved pick this outfit, but she had wanted to impress - before the easy job became this mess of bindings and her mind got twisted up in the minute.

"Oh you are just all intensity, all the time. Understood." Tevorde says, pressing on the back of her own thighs and easing herself into the stool opposite where Lissino stands, both of them watching her break from the formal greeting and deflate. The dark-romance troll picks up one of the bindings, scanning it without altering anything, just seeing what her partner in this task is up to. She watches the foliad woman in turn, seeing the effort she has put into this research and knows the obvious holes she is supposed to fill according to the highly strung woman. "I suppose I know what you need of me." She says, even as she notices the browning on Lissino's ears and over the open collarbones of the other mapmaker. Was that a hint of disaster she saw upon her colleague's form?

"So which part of the city am I interviewing first?" Tevorde says with a low languid grin. The Troll woman leans forwards, marking a corner of the spiral on the map with a smaller swirl - "We could start here, with tea and good company."

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