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Post by Noa on May 12, 2019 21:16:57 GMT -6
When he thought of it, he was surprised it hadn't occurred to him sooner. Those damn brambles... They had caused him so much grief, they might as well be good for something after all this.
Would that Summer were here. She would have been able to lift the lot of this stuff and just set it down where he needed it. She might have been close enough for him to call for anyway, but in the end he decided against it. If she was doing her own thing, then he wouldn't disturb her for such a small task as this.
Heading over to the brambles he had cut away, he picked up a piece gingerly, careful to avoid the thorns. "Feel free to help out," he said to the Evergreen, before carrying the piece of bramble to the gap in the fence and depositing it down so that it occupied that space.
(40)
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Post by Jack on May 12, 2019 21:21:17 GMT -6
This is the most natural looking beanpod we've ever seen!
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 18:07:33 GMT -6
Not that he was really holding out any hope on that front, though it would be a nice idea if it did happen. Fortunately he hadn't cut up the brambles into very small pieces, or else they would be a good deal harder to transport now. As it was, however, he figured he wouldn't need all that many pieces to fill in the gap in the fence. He was not as unfortunate as he could have been in the sense that the gap wasn't all that big, and even when he was doing a proper job of making the repairs later, he probably wouldn't take too long at it.
Well, then again, if he had the luxury of anything these days, it was time. Say what you might about the lifestyle here, rushed wasn't the word for it. It was a little like being in the countryside, actually, in a lot of ways.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 18:10:27 GMT -6
For one, there was all the animals. Of course, even in the city there were animals, because that was just the kind of place this was. If you didn't have some kind of creature in your life, you were the odd one out. It had struck Aster as sort of strange when he had first arrived, but he had adapted in due time. A lot of them were useful in various ways, and though they weren't necessarily essential in the sense that you couldn't get by without them having them around could be--- and often was--- more convenient.
It took a lot of work training them for that convenience, but when you had to make your living doing something, creature trainer wasn't a bad job. Aster made a passable go of it, anyway, and he was much better a trainer than he was a gardener. There was no debate on that one.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 18:15:14 GMT -6
Plus they made for good companionship, especially if you have the funny little problem of not really being able to tolerate human companionship anymore. In fact, Aster was aware that his situation was a bit severe, but it seemed that many people with a less... thorough aversion to human contact sought it out less here than they did elsewhere. Probably because you didn't really need to here, not as much.
Aster heaved the bramble into place, then dusted off his gloved hands and went back for another. It wasn't a pretty arrangement, and maybe it wouldn't work all that well, since the brambles weren't so heavy that he couldn't move them... which meant that someone else could move them too if they really wanted to. But he was banking on the fact that no one really wanted to get into his garden, because there was nothing in here to steal or do anything with.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 18:19:34 GMT -6
Heck, if they wanted in badly enough to go to all that trouble, then maybe he wouldn't begrudge them a foray into his territory. Maybe they just liked walking through places that looked kind of sad. His point stood. There was nothing here but brambles, so his makeshift fence was a pretty accurate preview of the contents, at least.
He surveyed the surrounding area and sighed. This was the other way in which it was like the countryside: farms and gardens as far as the eye could see. There was a city downtown, and that downtown had shops where one could do one's shopping, but the territory around the Labs in general sprawled outward in a great lazy web of small farm holds and rambling properties, mixed in with some truly opulent houses. Aster's own home was at the fringe of even this, and he saw the whole range of situations in his walk to town.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 18:23:09 GMT -6
It wasn't a walk he made very often anymore, but before he had gotten Rabbit, when he had to make each trip by himself and in person, he made them often enough that he knew it pretty well by now. Not a lot had changed since then, at least not in terms of which houses were there and who owned them. That was the kind of thing that changed slowly in this area, which only contributed to that sense of being somewhere rural.
He was about to go back for another piece of bramble when he turned around and found himself face to face with the Evergreen. At first Aster thought it was merely curious about what he was doing, though privately he also thought it ought to be apparent... Though, then again, maybe not. After all, the reason as to why he was doing it wasn't necessarily obvious if you didn't understand the point of a fence, or the idea of a territory.
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Post by Jack on May 14, 2019 18:55:27 GMT -6
What a cool golden cherry!
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:07:49 GMT -6
A lot of animals understood at least one of those concepts, but maybe not both, and he wasn't sure if these Evergreen guys did or didn't either. There was a lot he didn't know about them, though if they ended up spending a lot of time together here, maybe that would change.
But the Evergreen must have cottoned on to some part of what he was doing, because it had turned up with some brambles in hand.
Funny how the thorns didn't seem to bother it--- or at least it wasn't holding the stuff as gingerly as Aster had to, but maybe it was only because the Evergreen, as a fellow plant who understood the inner workings of plants, knew where to hold it without having to worry.
Maybe it was the tough bark skin. Maybe you just didn't get pricked and bleed when you had skin like an Evergreen's skin.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:08:41 GMT -6
"Huh. Glad to have you on board, I guess," said Aster. The corner of his mouth was tucked slightly upward into a small, wry smile. It seemed as though he would have some help after all, despite the fact that he had pretty much given up on the idea at this point.
"Well, put it over there then," he said, and indicated where he had put the bramble that he had carried. The Evergreen... probably hadn't understood his words, but his gestures were enough in this case to convey his meaning. It did as he instructed, settling its armful of brambles down on top of Aster's.
The wall was already looking kind of imposing. He certainly wouldn't have walked through it with shorts on, and it was getting to be almost tall and wide enough that he couldn't have stepped over it either, at least not with confidence that he would escape unscathed.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:13:04 GMT -6
Actually, the brambles looked a lot more imposing than the actual fence did at this point. Anything old enough to break all on its own had to be pretty old. He had no idea whether the wood that they had originally used for it was any good, or if it was just a cheap city development project where the local government or whomever it was decided to cut corners, but just by the amount of weathering on it, he could say with confidence that it had been a long time since any of this had been new.
It wasn't all that tall either. It came to about his shoulder, but an athletic person could scale that with ease. Aster knew it well, since he figured he could vault it himself without too much effort.
But again, the point stood: why would anyone want to do that in the first place anyway?
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:23:55 GMT -6
That was the case right now, but it was true that eventually there might be something worth stealing in here. He wasn't so stupid as to leave a valuable and sought after creature like the Evergreen here, but once he planted something for real, it wasn't like he could just uproot it every night and... Well, maybe he could; there was plenty of magic around here so there might conceivably have been a solution to this.
But a much simpler solution would have been to just install better fencing. And on that note, it might be better yet to ditch the fencing entirely and put in brambles, or something similar, the better to deter any would be thieves.
Of course, his garden plot neighbors might not be so keen on that idea. But Aster had never been the type to convenience others very much, and he wasn't about to start today either.
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:26:59 GMT -6
Which wasn't to say he wanted to go out of his way to be an asshole, but... Hey, if he kept his brambles within the limits of his own land, what could they do about it?
It was still just an idea, but he was thinking about it pretty seriously, anyway. A natural solution to a man made problem. Even if the problem happened to be other, er, men.
"Come on, we're not done yet," he said to the Evergreen, before walking past it and to the pile of discarded brambles once more. He picked as large a piece as he thought he could carry, then began lugging it over to the gap in the fence. He would leave the smaller pieces for the Evergreen, who didn't have to worry about holding a whole armful of the stuff. Aster could only place his hands strategically, and if he had to do that, he wanted to transport as much as he could in one go.
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Post by Renathan on May 14, 2019 19:29:51 GMT -6
A pretty pink flower lay discarded upon the ground, but it was still quite pretty!
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Post by Noa on May 14, 2019 19:52:04 GMT -6
It was quick work between two people, or two... individuals. Aster still didn't know what he ought to be calling the Evergreen. It probably wasn't a person, but it looked just enough like one that his sense of... he didn't know, propriety or something, was confused. What use he had for a sense of propriety in his current situation, he didn't know either, but even street rats learned some basic level of human respect.
Maybe it was just that he didn't want to call it a thing. He had been a thing himself before, at one point, though it wasn't really something that bore thinking about very closely.
Before too long though, they had made a fairly respectable wall gap filler out of the discarded brambles. It helped that all the spines helped lock the pieces into place with one another, and they still had the rest of the fence to lean on too.
51 <Count to here>
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