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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"Oh, yeah, that's what it's called. So the Osirioni government are artificially making food scarce? Why and how?"
Not just food, it's—
Keep her on the food.
"Very happy I can feed you food the way I can't feed you information like that.
It's a bunch of interlocking layers of bullshit described by proprietary languages, which changes every season to deter people who have actual jobs from participating."
She starts holding bows up to Katie for size checks, considering.
She wants to hug her.
Instead she selects a bow that looks like about Katie's size and just beyond her weak draw strength [ the most pliant one they have ], says "you won't now", takes hold of her hands and guides her from behind on how to nock and draw, aiming at a target painted on a thick thatched mat on the wall.
Eeeeee Taz's hands are so strong. She follows her movements and breathes deeply as she lines up the shot.
Her hands clamshelled around Katie's, she mocks releasing the nonexistent arrow, visualizing the flight and miming the release with her whole body. "Think you can remember that?" she breathes near Katie's ear.
"I'll do my best." She's not sure if her flusteredness will make it easier or harder to remember.
She steps away and watches. Katie's flusteredness is adorable and means that Tazich is doing a good job.
Katie awkwardly struggles to mimic the movements Tazich showed her in the manner of a newborn fawn taking its first steps.
Drawing clearly isn't easy for her yet, so they'll have to keep the number of reps low. But she doesn't need to hear that right now, it'll just make her start biding the brief minutes until the next activity instead of focusing. And she . . . clearly has no mind's eye, she'll need a prop arrow. Tazich lays eyes on a quiver of feathered wooden rods of the right size.
Clearing of throat.
Her voice is harsh after Katie's initial display, as was intended from the beginning. Everyone must be ruffled a bit at the beginning of this, must be lulled into false confidence and then made aware of how short they are falling.
Tazich has heard of combat training programs where they teach primarily by demonstration, and is of the opinion that it's a load of stuffiness-motivated pageantry. How can you know what it feels like to make a motion without feeling your own muscles move? But she does demonstrate for Katie, with her own bow and perfectly-mimed mock arrow, now. Her draw and release is leonine but precise.
"Keep it straight on, left to right. You can worry about pitch later." Another demonstration. "No yaw and keep your motions clean. Just focus on that for now. Don't worry about fast. Move at a slug's pace. You must be clean." Demonstration. "If you don't get the motions right, speed won't help anything. And I changed my mind, you should use these." She holds up the dummy arrows. "But wait for me to close the barrier curtain."
It's heavy and white and hangs from the ceiling and has a reinforced hole for Katie to shoot through. The target isn't all that far away. A few medium-sized rooms? But it's a bit convex, so dummy arrows are unlikely to ricochet directly backward.
And the bow Katie is practicing with really is quite weak.
She hands over the dummy arrows and stands right behind Katie. She considers telling her to imagine it's someone she hates, but Katie doesn't seem ready to bring emotion into this like that, no matter how motivating it would be.
"Hit the target."
"Pitch is this way—" she swings an arm up and down in front of her "—yaw is this," she swings it side to side in front of her, keeping it level.
It's kind of difficult to imagine how a literate adult could not know that, but culture gaps are hard and the River Kingdoms sound lovely overall. She bites down on her curiosity in the middle of the lesson, but hopes she'll remember to figure that one out later.
"Again, yaw" —she moves the arm back and forth again"—is the one you can't have. Pitch—" up and down "is the one you don't worry about for now."
What a hypnotizing concept! She just barely stops herself from looking around for the soup before realizing it's supposed to be a baseline for tremor comparison.
"Oh. I hadn't noticed that! Shoot, go on."
Katie makes a valiant effort, but the positioning of her arm is off and the string strikes it, causing her to drop the bow and wave it around in pain. The arrow does hit the target though, for what it's worth.