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Post by Nadia on Nov 23, 2021 18:46:45 GMT -6
Feeding the koguma has endeared you to it. The throwing of the gourds was deeply unpleasant at first, but now they're being left for it, it is quite happy to gorge in peace. Well... looks like you've made a friend, whether you were wanting to or not. [Congratulations, you have successfully tamed the creature!] Except that isn't the end of it. Not by halves. Before the next week is out, another visitor is coming, lured by the free food - though it looks like it wants to tussle with the other koguma, not share. Oh dear. To tame the creature: Make at least 3 RP posts interacting with the creature and trying to tame it. At the end of your taming attempt, make your last post with [done] and wait for staff approval.
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Post by Briar on Nov 25, 2021 16:42:15 GMT -6
But things couldn't have ended so easily for Briar. No sooner than did he resolve the issue of the first Koguma than did a second appear. Apparently the word had gotten out somehow, in the way that information spread among the wild things here, that this was a place to find food. Maybe Briar shouldn't have been surprised when the greenish one showed up to make trouble, both for himself and for the purple Koguma, but...
When he happened upon the two of them fighting over the pile of gourds, the first thing Briar wanted to do was to wash his hands of the whole affair. If they got themselves caught for causing a disturbance, it wasn't Briar's fault, and it rightly shouldn't have been any of his business either. He had tried to do something nice for the one, but it had turned out like this, in the end.
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Post by Briar on Nov 25, 2021 16:42:25 GMT -6
... But no, he was the one who had set out the food. And he also didn't want to think about what Noa's idea of pest control might involve. A fast death, or would he let those monsters of his hunt these creatures for sport? Briar would really rather not find out.
Yeo-reum lunged at both of the Koguma, startling them both enough to disengage from one another... Only to unite them against him, chattering their mandibles angrily. Yeo-reum snarled and swatted at them, but they were actually quite clever about how they dealt with him, one darting in while the other darted away in the opposite direction. It frustrated Yeo-reum to no end, but it did give Briar the necessary distraction for him to begin leaving two different piles of gourds out, one for each Koguma to eat at.
It was a good thing Noa wasn't terribly interested in his own vegetable garden.
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Post by Briar on Nov 25, 2021 16:42:58 GMT -6
The new Koguma was more suspicious of Briar's little peace offering than its brazen predecessor, but the first Koguma's presence seemed to assure it somewhat that there was no real danger. After all, if that purple fellow was eating as well as you please, then there was no reason that the green one couldn't do the same.
The green one did occasionally look as if it would try and steal food to make trouble again, but surprisingly, Yeo-reum kept them in check without Briar having asked him to... Although, then again, considering how loud their squabbles could be, maybe it wasn't that surprising after all. The axe might not fall on these creatures alone if their ruckus caught the wrong type of attention. After all, Briar was the one who worked in the garden to take care of it, and the things that went on here were technically his responsibility.
33 [done; if unsuccessful, I'm ignoring the encounter to move on]
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Post by Briar on Nov 25, 2021 16:43:28 GMT -6
With the matter of those two Koguma finally settled, Briar could return to what he had been working on before -- aside from the actual work of gardening, of course. He picked up trying to teach Yeo-reum to sign again. Fortunately the Tat remembered all the signs that Briar had taught him before, and upon reproducing them, actually did a pretty good job of maintaining their proper form. At least they wouldn't have to go over those again. But his knowledge was still limited to essentially a bunch of nouns around the garden, which didn't help much when it came to conversation.
Briar taught him a few verbs now, mostly the ones that were convenient for him to demonstrate. If he was weeding, he showed Yeo-reum the signs for shoveling, pulling, throwing, with demonstrations of the action after each sign. If he was watering the plants, he showed Yeo-reum other signs.
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Post by Briar on Nov 25, 2021 16:44:06 GMT -6
Filling, picking up, carrying, pouring -- Briar walked Yeo-reum through these one by one. And so on and so forth, until Yeo-reum had a smattering of those words too. And at the end, when Briar was finished with his garden work, he sat with Yeo-reum for a time, making short and simple sentences that the Tat copied.
There was probably a better way to teach Yeo-reum grammar, but Briar couldn't really think of it. At least if he knew the important building blocks that went into the sentences, he could probably puzzle out what the sentences themselves meant -- especially since he already knew one human language already. That was Briar's hope, anyway. He couldn't know for sure until Yeo-reum had enough independent grasp of the language to demonstrate what he knew, beyond simply copying what Briar signed at him, but with any luck that day wasn't terribly far off in the future.
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Yang
Flea Market Artist
Posts: 1,001
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Post by Yang on Nov 26, 2021 21:21:20 GMT -6
Munch munch munch; an idle stranger in the bushes, hardly aware of its immediate surroundings, enjoying a rather lush feast of the few green-leaves that still sprouted from a variety of plants here & there. There weren't a lot around, and the numbers continued declining as the bug munched on, but that didn't deter the beast- it'd move on to the slightly-less-than perfect leaves after all, and even turning to the yellower-ones after that! Heck, there could be a few treats along the ground if it knew which bush to stick its head into...
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Post by Kadin on Nov 27, 2021 23:22:01 GMT -6
[Congratulations, you have successfully tamed the creature!] And, it looks like one of them found some more fruit, too!
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:42:32 GMT -6
Briar kept up with Yeo-reum’s signing as much as he could. The Tat took to it with a sort of grim determination -- wanting, Briar thought, to talk again. It was abundantly clear that Yeo-reum had a lot to say, and the fact that he hadn’t been able to express himself more precisely up until now was a source of deep frustration for the Tat.
It made Briar wonder. There were plenty of Tats out there, but most of them didn’t have the means to talk to people, one way or another -- be it signing or one of those collars of speech that he had seen Noa putting on one of his creatures. Were they satisfied with their lot? But then, some of them didn’t have people, or at least not people they deemed worth speaking to. In that sense, Briar supposed he ought to count himself lucky that he was in Yeo-reum’s confidence.
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:42:54 GMT -6
But Briar was just as certain that Yeo-reum had nothing good to say to him. The Tat-lung’s simmering anger, in a general sense, was evident even without the eloquence of words. Maybe being able to sign would ease it somewhat, but Briar had a feeling that Yeo-reum’s ran deeper than that. Still, they had begun, and Briar knew firsthand what a cruelty it was to be unable to express oneself when one felt a need to. Each day in the garden, and whenever else Briar could spare it, he went over the signs that he had taught Yeo-reum. A few days into it, Yeo-reum started bringing him new signs, and Briar realized that the Tat must have snuck into town, or at least some other populated place, and watched other people at their conversations. Some of these signs might have been ones that Briar had shown him before, that Yeo-reum was now replicating from memory.
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:43:24 GMT -6
And indeed, he did recognize a few of these, like ‘stop’ and ‘calm’. But others were not ones he used often, nor ones he thought would have seemed particularly memorable to Yeo-reum; and a few were expletives, which he hadn’t used at all. There had been no sense in cursing with his hands, and there had never been anyone in his acquaintance whom he could converse with that would have stood for that kind of language from him.
It was difficult, especially at first, to explain some of the words to Yeo-reum. Pantomime and sketching things in the dirt only got them so far. Briar was obliged to ask the TROD to translate for them sometimes, as Yeo-reum did understand Common. Briar always felt… if not guilty, then at least uneasy when he did so. Noa had not forbid such things, exactly, but it wasn’t as if he had given Briar free lease to make use of the TROD’s services for Briar’s own ends.
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:43:50 GMT -6
Briar held no love for Noa, but he never knew when the master of the house might make an appearance, and if he took umbrage to this sort of thing, then he might see fit to mete out some punishment.
That day never came to pass, however, and as Yeo-reum’s vocabulary expanded, Briar was better able to explain things to him through sign alone. They began to have real conversations, simple things at most, niceties or questions about mundane and common subjects. And then other things -- the more complicated aspects of garden care, what this or that plant did, things that Yeo-reum saw in town or around the property. The Tat was given to wandering now that it became clear they were here to stay, at least for a time. Noa had not, for whatever reason, seen fit to place demands or restrictions on the Tat and his comings and goings,
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:45:01 GMT -6
And so Yeo-reum enjoyed a degree of freedom that might have given him great joy, once upon a time. No longer, now -- his nature had long since been soured by mistreatment, and anyway he and Noa had met under distinctly hostile terms.
And, of course, Yeo-reum complained.
Briar had known that this was coming, and did little to stop it. As the Tat’s fluency grew, his complaints increased in frequency and variety, as did his urgings for Briar to leave this place. But Briar took it in stride and chose to see it as a sign that Yeo-reum really was fluent now, paying it no more mind than he had to. And that frustrated Yeo-reum too.
-I’ll tell you why one day,- Briar promised. It was as much as he could do for now. Later when it was all over, he knew he owed Yeo-reum more than that... But first he had to know what he was dealing with here.
5 (end with Yeo-reum)
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:49:24 GMT -6
It was winter now, well and truly winter, though the first snows hadn't quite reached the grounds of the estate just yet. Briar could, nevertheless, feel it in the way that the cold settled into his bones. Winter wasn't his favorite season; everything was cold and dead, with a sort of finality that autumn lacked, being a more transitional phase in the process with its own sort of beauty. Some people said winter was beautiful too, in its own way -- some people honestly prefered it to other seasons. But Briar felt that it was too stark, too intensely barren, for him.
Yeo-reum didn't care for it either, which seemed fitting, given his name -- even if that name had been given to him by someone who hadn't really cared to know what he was like. It was too cold, and he was inclined to be stiffer and more irritable than usual.
6 (start with Thistle)
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Post by Briar on Jan 22, 2022 19:49:41 GMT -6
Whereas normally he would have accompanied Briar to his work in the gardens, today he opted to stay indoors near the hearth. His terse signing had said something to the effect of keeping an eye on household matters, that he might fill Briar in when Briar returned, but Briar suspected it had less to do with that and everything to do with the brisk wind and the biting frost outside.
Well, never mind. Briar didn't lack for companionship, not in the winter. There was one King of Evergreen that made its home here -- or perhaps two. He had his suspicions but he had never seen two at once, so for now it remained a mystery. But there was one he knew, from having tended it before. It had been his duty last year, and they had had their fair share of trials at the time, unfamiliar as he had been with the care of such creatures.
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