ORIGIN

A festival! A festival! Sharp was speeding into Polaris the moment the news broke. A massive celebration where she can trade for shinies? That was something she wanted to get in on!

Of course, "speeding" in the lizard's case meant "spending nearly an hour trying to get over a boulder". But hey, she got there eventually!

Once she found the meeting point deep in Polaris's heart (Foggy and windy, though still tranquil compared to the downdraughts of Pegasus), Sharp scurried to a nice empty spot to start making her booth. It would be big! Fabulous! Covered in shiny things! Hopefully wouldn't fall down after a few minutes! It had to have a nice open area for crafting things, and a little basket for getting her shinies in return. All the nice things a sungazer could want!

First things first though: getting things. She needed twine, sticks, stones, and hopefully a few logs or bones to help pull this project off. After marking her spot with a small pebble, the mottled reptile scurried off into the wilds of the cave to look for something of use. A few minutes of foraging around the crystals and flora later, and Sharp dragged back, one by one, a healthy palette of building materials to use. Perfect!

Alright. Now she had the supplies (praying she doesn't accidentally snap anything), now it was simply setting it all up.

Sharp wasn't all too familiar with the generic "booth" shape some gembound had decided on-- a boxy shape with an overhang, apparently-- and she wasn't too keen on following it. She was going to be creative! Special! Slightly more lizard-friendly in design! So instead her idea went more like this-- a frontal waiting area with soft bedding, a way for them to alert her attention, a short wall to separate the crafting area (and make sure no snoopers stole her marvelous designs), a stand to put finished products on, and a few big sticks in the ground so people could actually see where it was. And that would be it!

First off-- the wall, since that would be an easy feature to make. The sungazer rhythmically grabbed her branches, made sure they were straight, and drove them into the ground in a clear line. She then moved onto the next branch, and then the next side, until she had a nice three-walled box with the entrance facing away from the "street". Sharp prodded the cold, dark wood to make sure it was stable-- it was! After that she just had to pad down the (even cooler, and dustier too) dirt with her tail to make sure it was stable.

She didn't have a roof-- which could be a problem, as any creature larger than a dog could simply look over at what she was doing. The mottled lizard swore she brought a tarp with her, but she guessed not-- all she had were the sticks and stones. Looks like that was something for later, though.

Alright, now it was time to find a tarp.

Sharp poked her head out of the wall, feeling the wind blow across her scales and looking to the other builders nearby. The chances of a perfectly fine pelt lying about were low, and she wasn't going to steal from another gembound, heavens no! It looked like she was just going to have to search for a nice quality vine somewhere in the Core and drag it back.

Another short escapade to the rugged granite hills, another snoop around the cooling mists, and Sharp wrangled out a few lone vines from around glowing crystals. It took a few minutes to drag it back-- most of it spent in quiet contemplation passively listening to the drone of gembound. All she had to do then was wrap it around the poles, weave it together crudely and tighten it up until it formed a nice, natural shade. Crafting area: complete.

Next up was the stand.

This part would be pretty simple. A few rocks stacked on top of each other with a bigger on on top, like a table, so it was visible for those larger than her. She already had the stones (just mundane ones, otherwise she wouldn't risk scratching their brilliant surface), it was just a matter of finding the right balance for them not to topple over. And without damaging her teeth.

Sharp grabbed the first, a marbled pale rock, and placed it just outside of the front wall. Thumped it down with her tail, spat out a bit of dirt that got into her mouth, and moved onto the next one. Pick up, sit down slightly to the right, make sure it's stable. She then moved onto the next layer, and then arduously plonked a large slate atop. That was heavy.

The mottled gembound took a step back and voila: a perfectly fine table!

Simply clearing out the area up front was a boring task, but one needed nonetheless.

It wasn't like there was much there anyways. Just a few strewn pebbles, some weeds, dust, and cold, cold stone. But if she wanted to attract more business she had to look cleaned up! Maybe Sharp could even strew some soft moss around when she was done.

She started from the corner: swiping away at dirt with a lash of her long tail, rolling away the bigger obstacles with a foot, before moving on to the next square. The lizard moved fast-- surprisingly fast, like she was a little roomba spinning around the field. Any onlookers would probably have found the site of her surrounded by a plume of dirt quite humorous, though Sharp didn't seem to notice. She was PASSIONATE about this cleaning.

And once the entire area had been sweeped to the stone, she cheerily grabbed some moss and arranged it into a couple plush waiting seats. Absolutely perfect.

Now second-to-last: a bell. Or alarm. Anything that could alert her if she had a new customer while she was inside her super-secret-crafting-box. Or just spacing out in general. She had a couple of ideas, but none were fully formed. Looks like she was just going to wing it.

Sharp nosed through her remaining materials piled onto the ground-- a few twigs, a leaf, some bones.... bones! She had worked with bones before, and she knew how they clacked together. She could arrange a few ribs into a crosshatched pattern, then leave a little nubby bone at the center that, when dropped, would produce a nice ring. That could work.

And once again, making it was smooth sailing. Sharp dragged together her bones (after a brief interruption when one went fluttering away in the wind) and sat them together, crunching on a small joint until it was smooth and setting it in the dip. She pushed the entire thing to be right next to the stand and hut, hoping that whatever customers she got would understand it's purpose.

A few wind ants scurried past-- ooh, was it snack time? It was snack time. And so the goofy little merchant spent the next dozen minutes with her nose to the ground licking up what bugs she could find.

Sharp was almost done, she could practically see it! After she ensured her stomach was no longer rumbling the sungazer looked her progress over and saw she did pretty-damn-good. No failures! All there was left was planting that big branch in the ground, somehow making it look noticeable, and maybe adding a bit of flair if she had the time.

With a heave of her tiny legs and a flip of her tail, she slowly pushed the log into place and vertically in the air. And then-- thunk! she grabbed it in her teeth and drove it into the dirt-filled stone crack. Finding a way to decorate it was harder; she eventually settled on simply clawing a line onto the bark. A spurn-of-the-moment decision led her to continuing the line down the stone, almost like a boundary line. Finally came a crude, scrawled rendition of a gemstone, with an arrow linking it to a vague sketch of some sort of tool. And finally, she was done.

Not completely, though. She still had to make some premade trinkets. But for now she could rest.

The whole place was set up, she just needed to make trinkets. Toys. Objects.

Sharp ambled her way into the crafting hut with what scraps she had left, already planning to make a few toys to start with. A doll out of twine, a moving mini-cart out of bones (using the same method she did in the past), a pair of stone cymbals. Maybe she could even paint a smiley face on a rock and call it a "pet rock".

Whatever she planned, it ended up not working at all at first. She fumbled with the twigs, misplaced her materials a few times, and whatever she was doing wasn't working right now.

Alright, try two.

Body squat on the floor. Tail flicking with determination. Electric eyes soundly on her materials.

She started with the doll. Grab a line of twigs and twine in her mouth, carefully bunch it together with her fumbling claws, tie it at the end. A definitive head, quadruped body, stiff tail, and four nubby wicker legs poking out. She even stuck a little leaf on the head like hair, and if you nudged it the limbs would move. She spent an embarrassingly long time on it only to find the end product was not as good as she'd liked. A minor disappointment.

Two or so more to go.

Up next was the bone cart. Sharp made a cart at just one cycle of age, so a small toy one would be no big deal. This time though, she was going with a little figurine at the front instead of a handle. Assembling the bones, holding it all into place... it slowly became a repetitive drone she did automatically while her mind wandered. Thinking about her children-- were they off exploring the festival? Last she left them they were still goofing around in the jungle, finally old enough to take care of themselves. What of their friends? What of her own? She recognized a few familiar faces walking around-- James for one, and the wolf Comet-- but many of the others were nowhere to be seen.

Oh! She didn't realize she was done and accidentally tied the same knot over in her thoughts. Silly Sharp.