Chapter 167: Day 166

Day 166,

I went to talk to Melaina today about making an umbrella, or at least the shaft and frame.  At first she asked me why I would even want such a thing.  People get wet when it rains, that’s how rain works and it never hurt anyone.  Or if keeping your clothes or something dry really is a problem, why not just wear a cloak?

I said that as Archivist I sometimes need to take books back and forth between the library and my house, or to people that requested them, and while a bag or box can help, sometimes water still gets in so best to keep it off altogether.

I’m not sure how convincing my argument was, but when I showed her my (somewhat damp from the trip over) sketches, she was intrigued despite their roughness.  With the multiple thin and interlocking moving parts, if the blackboard had been an interestingly novel project this was something even better; a challenge.

That said, she did still view it as something of a novelty in the less positive sense of the word.  We ultimately agreed that she’d work on it essentially for free with the opportunity to do something really interesting and different as payment in and of itself, but she’d be treating it as a personal side project so any other regular jobs that came in and needed doing would take priority.  I was fine with that, even with the further caveat that with that in mind plus the complexity it might not actually be done before the current rainy season is over.

We probably spent a good hour or so - longer than either of us intended at any rate - going over details about the design.  I don’t claim to be an expert on all the inner workings of umbrellas (that center connecting piece in particular sort of mystifies me), and my sketches were all derived from an already fuzzy memory filtered through an unsteady drawing hand.  The idea of making the canopy out of a circular fan of thin wooden slats was thrown out pretty quickly though.  On top of being an impractical number of moving parts on an already complex and unfamiliar mechanism, even with the workshop’s machinery able to cut surprisingly thin it would still be extra weight on top of what was already going to be a heavy device.  Melaina frankly wasn’t convinced that I - specifically me - would be able to easily carry it one handed like I had been describing and pantomiming to her.

That last’s been sticking with me all evening.  I am kind of weak.  Maybe I should start working out in some way?

Maybe if I weren’t so weak I wouldn’t have been dragged and tossed around by the nature sprite like that.  No, no use going down that route.  That thing is inhuman, I doubt anyone could physically overpower it.

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