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Ara was working on yet another piece, though this time it was a bit more complicated than her normal work. Currently, she was painstakingly dropping small rocks into different jars of paint before fishing them out again and laying them out to dry. When finished with this, she intended to arrange them into a picture in a clearing where she had stripped a large area of ground of grass. The idea was to push them into the ground so they would stay in place without the use of any type of glue, which she did not have at present. Probably she could trade for some, but she liked the idea of the more natural decay of such a piece.

Her face was covered in paint splatters, as was the rest of her. Unfortunately, the only way she could recover the stones once dropped was by grasping them with a tong-like device a resourceful native had made for her. It was really just a piece of wood treated in a fire and slowly bent into the shape of a tong. It had cost her a lot of small trinkets from her hoard to trade for, since the process took some time. The thing was worth it though, as it made projects like this possible. Sometimes she cursed not being born with thumbs...

At that, the last of the stones was soaking in white paint and she set the tong down to survey her materials. Most of the rocks were dry or drying now, sitting in neat rows in the sunshine. Over three quarters of them were white, with the rest being a mixture of black, red, and yellow. Another pile of stones was glinting in the sun, but needed no paint to alter their color. Tiny lumps of pyrite sat in a neat pile, waiting to be put into her satchel and transported to her prepared clearing.

When it was finished, her work would be a huge geometric design centered in a clearing in the woods. Whorls of black and red would end on points of yellow and gold like sunbursts. She couldn't wait to start putting it together, it would be funny to see the reactions of random soquili and humans that stumbled upon it in the days to come. A mysterious design of colored rocks pressed into the ground as if by the spirits...

'I hope I'm around to see at least a couple of reactions!' she thought to herself with an amused grin.

As Ara was literally watching paint dry, a pebble came skittering across her field of vision and knocked into the dish with the white paint in it. It sloshed a bit, but none spilled and for that she was thankful. Paint was expensive to trade for, and hard to make herself without any thumbs. She was already wearing more than she was comfortable with and the ground really wouldn't benefit from a watering of that kind.

She looked for the source of the disturbance and her eyes settled on the dark creature that had crept up on her. He was big, she thought, though the wings made him appear bigger than he might truly be. Either way, he was taller than her which was saying something since she had inherited her mother's draft height. His eyes were a piercing red and she found herself confused as to which breed he might be. The wings indicated angeni like herself, but the spaded tail she saw flicking behind him made her doubt herself.

Either way, she figured she should say something instead of just staring, which is what she had been doing for the last couple minutes as he made his way down the hill.

"Hey, what are you doing here?" she asked, looking away to check on the progress of her rocks.

Her day which had been going so well, seemed to be about to take a downturn if the attitude of the stallion currently invading her space was any indication. Gone was her initial embarrassment for staring, replaced by annoyance at his tone. Of course the area was open and not truly hers, however a little decorum would be nice, and perhaps he could have NOT kicked a stone at her bowl of paint...

"Well, of course it's not a closed clearing. You could be a little less rude about it though." she replied, frowning.

When the other started nosing around at her stones that were still wet, she scowled and went to push him away from them. This stage of the project had taken almost the whole day, not to mention all the things she'd had to trade for the paint. There was almost no red left, and she'd have to scrape the bottom of the bowl with a paintbrush to repair any damage to the even coating that was on them now.

"Don't touch those, they're still wet! I'm working on a project, if you must know." she exclaimed protectively.

Ara continued to scowl, heedless of whatever danger she may have been in. The way the stallion looked down on her grated on her last nerve but she took a deep breath and decided to try to avoid a big fight over not much at all.

"Well, see, I'm painting these rocks. I've got another clearing further off that I already stripped of grass. When all of these damn rocks have finally dried, I'm going to cart them over to it and set them out in a pattern. I'm not sure what it will be yet, but something...geometric. Something you wouldn't normally see in a forest clearing, see?" she paused, eying the rocks some more. They were nearly dry, so whatever danger of smudging them this rude stranger posed was diminishing.

"Well, when I'm done it's gonna be pretty cool. I'll probably stick around long enough to see a couple of reactions to finding something this awesome in the woods and then leave to whatever I decide to do next. That good enough for ya?" she finished with a cocked eyebrow, blowing a piece of hair out of her face.

A small part of her wondered where her familiar had gotten himself to. It was not unusual for Silk to stay gone for days at a time. The snake had disappeared as soon as he heard there would be paint involved, preferring to find a nice cool rock to nap under or something...and that'd been two days ago.

Ara eyed the stallion who was questioning her work. Her father had warned her that art wasn't for everyone but she'd not believed him until now. Oh well, he at least was not brandishing that knife of his anymore. That was enough for her, for the moment. Maybe if she continued to explain he would begin to understand her brilliant piece.

"Well, because it's fun. And, it will be funny to see the reactions of others who stumble upon something so strange alone in the forest, don't you think? They might think it was from the spirits themselves, even." she explained, mischief dancing on her face in her smile and her eyes.

At that, it might even still be around next time she came through. It would be interesting to see if the painted rocks could stand the test of time. The clearing she had chosen was somewhat well traveled, with trails through the grass (before she'd stripped it all) had indicated as much. Turning away from the stallion again, she considered his final question while delicately poking at the most recently painted rocks to see if they were dry.

"You can call me what you like, though crazy art mare is way more syllables than Ara, which is my given name." she replied, satisfied that all of the rocks were dry at last.

Turning to him once more she returned the question, "What can I call you? Or shall I simply call you Cleaver?"

She watched, somewhat mesmerized by the movement of the stallion...Zacharael's tail through the air. That was so cool! It made her wish she had one of her own, or perhaps a tentacle or two like her sister. Or...thumbs. Thumbs would be nice, they would make art easier...but that was a daydream for another time.

"Well then, it's...nice, to meet you Zacharael. And your knife too." so saying, she turned to her rocks once again.

It was time to start transporting them to the clearing, so she went to a pile of soft cloth that turned out to be a rather large satchel and flung it over her head. The tong she had been using was on the ground next to it and she picked it up again with her teeth in preparation to start picking her rocks, "You can follow me if you like, but I need to get these rocks moved by the end of today. I already spent more time than I thought getting all of them painted."

With that, she began picking them up one at a time and dropping them into her bag. White first, since they were the most numerous.

Ara shrugged stiffly under the weight of all the rocks in her pouch but nodded. Stay, go, it didn't matter to her at the moment as her full concentration was on the task ahead of her.

"As I said, feel free to tag along. I don't mind, just don't touch anything..." she trailed off as she noted finally that her familiar, Silk, had been in her bag the whole time. A pocket on the front of the satchel had been about to be filled with black painted rocks when she noticed him sleeping within.

"Dumby..." she muttered under her breath, "what if I hadn't noticed you? That would be a terrible way to wake up..."

Satchel mostly loaded up, she decided to leave the snake to his nap and make an extra trip. What was one more among several anyway?

"Let's go then!" she said impatiently, starting off in the direction of her clearing.

It wasn't long before they reached the clearing, and Ara's head was in the clouds thinking about her ideas for this project. The clearing was about 30ft wide and about the same amount across. The goal was not to cover the whole clearing, for that would take days - weeks even - to accomplish. Instead, she wanted to get the design as close to the center of the clearing as she could manage.

Bonus points if she could observe someone walking by later and get them to think the spirits had placed the stones in their pattern...or even aliens.

"Here we are," she threw over her shoulder absentmindedly, considering where to put her burden.