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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:13:39 GMT -6
The pup was picking things up at a respectable pace. They weren't exciting creatures, but fortunately they weren't aggravatingly dim either. Gods and angels, Noa couldn't imagine trying to train an elemental golem. He probably could, if he had to, and if he decided it was worth it, but he want to, and if he didn't have to then he certainly wouldn't.
Noa studied the pup for a moment, and the pup studied him right back. She cocked her head to one side, as if asking him what he was looking at, long ears flopping comically with the movement. Maybe she really was wondering, or maybe it was just a funny coincidence.
How exactly did he teach her how to 'forage'?
Well. "Watch over her for a bit," he said to the gargoyle - never one to pass up the opportunity of roping in someone else to be his assistant, if they were clever enough to understand him. The gargoyle was surprised to find himself so addressed, but after a moment he came forward slowly, and took the leash that Noa had clipped to the pup's collar. Noa smiled. "Good. No peeking, now."
With the gargoyle minding the pup, Noa began hiding more of the mushrooms. He had taken several expressly for this purpose, and now he hid them over a wider area, going further afield than he had been before. After all, the idea with foraging was for the pup to stay at it on her own, over a wider stretch - possibly for quite some time.
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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:13:51 GMT -6
And sometimes they wouldn't find anything - but they would get to that later, once the command was better established. For now, he simply widened the area of dispersal and hid several mushrooms in different areas.
Once he was done, he returned to the gargoyle, and took the leash from him. "Thanks," he said. The gargoyle inclined his head, though he seemed curious almost in spite of himself. "I don't mind if you watch, but it's really not going to be that exciting," Noa informed him.
The gargoyle gave a shrug, so Noa said, "Suit yourself then." To the pup, he debuted the new command: "Forage." But right now she had no idea what that meant, so Noa took her leash and walked around with her. The pup was happy to walk around, with him, and Noa deliberately meandered, so that she would wander because he was going too slowly for this to be a nice brisk walk. And what would you know, she caught the scent of that same mushroom she had been picking up all day. Tail wagging, she went for it, and Noa went with her.
When she found it, he asked her to bring it to him, and offered her a treat. Then he took the leash again and said, "Forage." Their walk continued, and after a while she found another mushroom... And another, and another.
Once she had found the last one that Noa had hidden, Noa handed her back to the gargoyle, and started another round.
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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:14:03 GMT -6
This would be the last one for the day - he just wanted to reinforce the idea just enough that she would remember it the next day. But he thought they had been down here long enough, and this didn't really feel like the sort of command that he could get her to learn in a single session, the way the other two had been.
This time he left bigger gaps between the mushrooms, and went a further distance. This time, when he said, "Forage," she sometimes had to look for quite a while. But already the pup was cottoning on, and she seemed to be more focused, not merely wandering around for the sake of exploring the area, but beginning to look as if she was actively trying to find something.
She found all the mushrooms in the end; and the gargoyle, having grown bored with the repetition, found some more rocks of value. Not so many, and not so much value, but still better than nothing, right?
Just as they were about to leave, the little feathered creature in Noa's pocket finally woke up, but fortunately by that point Noa was done with anything else that might monopolize his attention. He gave it a few soothing pets, which it seemed to like well enough, then let it run its beak over his fingers while he packed up the things he had brought with him.
"Let's come back to this cave again tomorrow," he said to the gargoyle as they began to make their exit.
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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:14:24 GMT -6
"I have more practice that I need to do with the pup."
The gargoyle didn't seem to mind, so Noa considered the matter settled. They would continue the next day.
And continue they did - the next day, Noa did two more rounds of the same 'game' for the 'forage' command, with the gargoyle as his assistant for the phase where he hid the mushrooms. It took a little bit to jog the pup's memory at first, but then she was performing about as well as she had been the previous day when they had left. That same sense of working focus was on, and she was hunting with a purpose for the mushrooms now that the rules of the game had been reinforced more strongly in her mind.
It was time for them to move on to the real test, which was finding mushrooms out in the wild, rather than where Noa had hidden them. Noa took them to the cave where he had first picked the mushrooms, then said, "Forage!" The pup wandered around slowly, not as sure of herself, since this was unfamiliar territory. The gargoyle had shown up to watch this, since finally Noa and the pup were doing something new; and maybe he wanted to know, too, if the pup could actually do it when Noa wasn't guaranteeing her success.
But there were mushrooms to be found here, and they weren't even all hidden from sight. Once the pup found her first mushroom, her confidence returned.
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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:15:12 GMT -6
She searched with more enthusiasm when Noa gave her the command again, bolstered by that confidence boost and the knowledge that there were in fact mushrooms here to be found, just like there had been the last time she had been given the command. They found several mushrooms in this way before Noa decided that was enough, and the lot of them walked, after a little coaxing, deeper into the caverns.
It was just as well; they had really picked this area clean of gems, and they needed to move on to someplace new where the gargoyle could find more gems. Noa found another likely looking cave, with the right conditions to have some mushrooms in them, and had the pup forage through this one too. She didn't find as many mushrooms, but she found a few, and that was good enough, for now.
Over the course of the next few days, Noa took the gargoyle, the pup, and the little feathered creature out with him on several mining trips. During those trips, he had the pup practice foraging for mushrooms by scent. On occasion there really were no mushrooms to be found, but he encouraged and praised the pup for trying anyway, and simply moved on somewhere else if she didn't find any mushrooms in a particular area.
The pup's focus and persistence improved, and after it had happened a couple of times, she no longer got too discouraged either when her search didn't turn up what they were looking for.
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Post by Noa on May 19, 2021 19:15:49 GMT -6
By that point Noa felt like she had more or less learned what he had set out to teach her. She could forage now, and that was good enough for him. It would make for an interesting show when he had to present this in a show ring, but it was better this than more basic obedience, if you asked him.
He also had way more mushrooms than he knew what to do with, but as far as problems went, at least it was novel. And it wasn’t as if he hated eating this stuff, so maybe it would just be a part of his meals for the next few days.
They hadn’t made out badly either, since these were mining trips that he was consistently going out on, even if the only one doing any real mining as of late was the gargoyle. Ah, the poor gargoyle, working hard while Noa busied himself with other things… But now that Noa was done with those other things, the gargoyle could take a break too.
“Time to pack it up and go home,” Noa declared at the end of the final trip. He gathered up all the things he had brought with him once again, and with his companions in tow, they set off for the cave entrance. It had been a productive last few days, and he was ready to shift gears and focus on something else for a while. You could only explore caves for so long...
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Post by Nadia on May 20, 2021 3:58:14 GMT -6
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:11:12 GMT -6
Noa was back in the mines. It was starting to feel as if he lived down here, with all the time that he was spending here lately, but unfortunately for everyone, magical crystals didn’t pay for themselves. And so he had to spend his time underground mining for the stuff that a shopkeeper would take in exchange for those goods. Well. ‘Had to’ was perhaps an exaggeration. The choice of simply not doing so was always present, but was so little appealing that it barely bore thinking about, in his honest opinion. After all, he wasn’t going to cure himself by standing around and waiting to die, was he? And having already exhausted the breadth of apothecary research and experimentation, both through consulting his family’s collection of work and through his own inventions, he was left with magical means as the last frontier. Perhaps even his ailment was magical in nature. Curses did exist, and there was some evidence in the prevalence of such a trope in folklore that such curses can be placed on entire lineages. And so magic it was. In particular he was interested in light magic, as the family with the most curative properties among its known spells. 1
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:13:09 GMT -6
The trouble with that had been the difficulty of amassing the crystals required, but at least the fact that the Underground had started dealing in them helped amend that particular difficulty.
Which brought him back to the mines… Bother.
It wasn’t even a nice day out. It was raining and dripping and dreary, and despite casting a spell to keep himself from getting wet, Noa nevertheless found himself almost glad to take cover under the shelter of the first cavern they spotted. There would be no fuss about finding a place large enough to fit a Sarane this time around - though there hadn’t been for a few trips, since his companions to the caves as of late have mostly been on the small side. But they had passed a couple of smaller tunnels, which might only have comfortably fit a smallish Kapper or a young child, before finding one that Noa could duck into as a grown man.
“Who do you think dug those caves? No, nevermind, it’s the work of gargoyles, isn’t it?” Noa said. The gargoyle he knew was only about half his height, so it made sense that the tunnels they dug for themselves would be smaller.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:14:08 GMT -6
Having arrived at this conclusion made him suddenly more curious about their contents, but he had no desire to dig through the rock until he reached a cache at the end, if indeed there was one. Gargoyles were made for digging, anatomically speaking, and Noa certainly was not. He didn’t even have an Earth Node, which might have permitted him to move rocks more easily through spellwork. It would have been a tiresome process, without even a guarantee of prizes at the end. No, much better to just explore tunnels for creatures of his own size, the regular way. The ratio of effort to reward had to be considered.
The one he was speaking to was Rhys, of course - already spelled to have his senses about him for gems. Noa was getting faster at the casting, and seeing the weather, he had prepared most of what was needed for the spell in advance. Now his whiskers waved about, busied with the task of trying to sense anything in this place.
Noa had only one other companion with him this time, since he wasn’t raising any baby creatures as of late, and the gargoyle wasn’t here on this occasion either.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:14:40 GMT -6
Or rather, he should say that he wasn’t raising any other infants, considering the little feathered creature was almost certainly not a fully grown specimen. They had the capacity for more growth, certainly. It had gotten a little heavier, but not much bigger, despite its voracious appetite. Thus far, the only thing that seemed to have been produced by all the food that it had eaten was an equally tremendous amount of poop.
Fortunately it was mostly Rabbit’s problem. And when it wasn’t her problem, he had spells for clean up, or for outsourcing it to magical and temporary constructs. Others, for whom magic was a more precious resource, might have cringed at his using it for such mundane things as conjuring food or doing chores, but for Noa… Well, it was a resource, and by now he had some abundance of it, so why not use it to expedite the processes that were tiresome and a waste of time for him to personally attend to?
The one thing that magic couldn’t do for him, of course, was train his creatures… Though he supposed it also couldn’t mine for him, or at least not at this juncture.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:15:30 GMT -6
It could make mining easier, or grant the ability to sense crystals and the like to a creature that otherwise didn’t have it, but he still had to come to the darn caves himself. Not even Rabbit could do it in his stead, lacking the skills and knowledge to be effective.
“Do you sense anything?” Noa said to Rhys, who was still looking this way and that.
{Hmm… We had better go further in,} Rhys replied. That answer didn’t surprise Noa at all. It wouldn’t have been as easy as finding a valuable stone immediately at the cave entrance. It almost never was. So with Rhys’s instruction, he began to head further into the cavern, turning his flashlight on right away.
Usually he wouldn’t have had to turn it on until they were some ways into the cavern, since the light from the entrance was enough to see by for a little bit. But today it was raising, and the sun didn’t manage to break through the cloud cover very strongly, so it was already quite dim even when they were outside. Now that they were within the cavern, needless to say, it was even darker.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:16:27 GMT -6
It was always dark in the mines sooner or later, but they were still near enough to the entrance that he could hear the sound of the rain, and for some reason that made the whole situation gloomier. Rain always made him feel sluggish, even though it didn't really make any aspects of his ailment worse than they already were.
It didn’t help that, despite the fact that spring was almost over, the rain brought a certain chill with it that Noa also didn’t care for. Some of it was his own fault for not having dressed for the weather, but he had thought that having a spell to prevent himself from getting wet would be enough. He was wrong on that front, but too stubborn to go back home and change, and now it was too late to do so anyway. They had already arrived at their destination, so whatever he was wearing now would have to do.
The tunnel they found themselves in had a slight upward incline, which on another occasion would have made Noa quite unhappy to discover. After all, walking uphill took more exertion, and physical fortitude had never been his domain to excel in.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:17:03 GMT -6
But on this occasion he was forced to be glad for it, since it kept the water from coming into the cavern with him, and getting underfoot even as he wandered deeper in.
As soon as they had gotten a little ways away, the ground was dry - rocky, but dry. The loose rocks crunched underfoot as he walked, making the footing a little tricky, but anything would have been better than mud.
As they got deeper in, Rhys eventually signaled for them to stop, and stop Noa did. There wasn’t much to look at in this particular stretch of tunnel, but if Rhys said there were rocks to be found, then there were rocks to be found, no doubt about it. It wasn’t, after all, as if Noa himself could sense the stuff, so even if Rhys was wrong, he had to rely on the Faeron’s sense. “Where do we dig?” he said, halting the buggy and opening one of its compartments so he could retrieve the tools within.
{Here, I think. Not very deep, so you might not need the pick.} Rhys had never formally been shown all the mining tools and what they did, so to speak.
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Post by Noa on May 27, 2021 16:17:39 GMT -6
At least, he hadn't been shown them in the way that Noa had introduced them to the gargoyle when the two of them had first started working together, but he had figured it out through observation.
Well, maybe he had skimmed through Noa’s mind a bit to do it too, but Noa didn’t mind. It was easier and faster to let him do that than to explain, and Rhys had been inside Noa’s head for most of his life anyway. It was a little late to be quibbling about it now, if he was going to be fussed about it.
Noa made a wordless noise of acknowledgement, and set the pick down again. He was just as glad not to have to use it, since it was heavy and required a lot of strength to swing around to its full effectiveness. You could use it with less power, but then it wouldn’t do as much, and what was the point of that?
Besides, if a situation called for the pick, then it was pretty much guaranteed that the gem was buried deeply into the rock, and that always meant more work, regardless of what tool was used.
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