Operation Cold Hands

[DerArknight]

((Dawn Montogomery continued from Movienight in Salem))

One thing Dawn loved about the practical workshop was how chaotic it appeared at first glance. No matter if one looked at the randomly placed tables, the shelves stuffed to the brim with the most different equipment - some of which Dawn couldn't even name - or the students running and sitting around, all that first-timers saw was an unorganized brouhaha.

But if one was to take a closer look, patterns started to worm their way into the light: Some tables were more damaged than others. Some tables had more people. Most tables had students working with the same equipment. And a few tables stood a little bit more offshot and closer to the the shelves that had the best equipment. This were the tables used by the seniors. Underclass-students often shied away from even approaching them. This hierachy wasn't enforced by the teachers but had come to be naturally.

While Dawn found this to be kinda weird, she had no qualms about making use of her privilege. It hadn't been long since her senior year started, but she already felt home at this tables. She made her way to the tables of the seniors, giving the overseeing teacher a friendly nod while passing him.

Her mission today was clear: In around two weeks, Ethan's mother Ute had her 50th birthday. Therefore, Dawn planned to knit her a pair of new gloves. Now she just needed to find a good table. The senior area was well-visited, but she wouldn't mind joining a half-full table.

Working was more fun when done together, after all.

[ViolentMedic]

((Roberta Chen: Pregame Start.))

Generally, Roberta preferred to work at home. She knew her tools better there, and there was a lot less noise. But her other options when she had time at school were, well… sit in the library, sit out on a field, boring stuff like that. This was one of the few rooms where she could do anything interesting, even if she had to put up with five hundred noises to do it.

Right now, she was just using a chisel to carve some detail into a wooden duck. Wooden ducks were classic, and admittedly she had far too many of them at home. No limbs to fuss around with. This was basically whittling with fancier tools and wood that she hadn’t found lying around. She supposed that was the point where whittling became carving, but who the fuck knew.

There wasn’t a lot of mess being shed during this careful chiseling, and most of it was falling onto the desk as planned, where she could tidy it up once she had to wrap up for the day. But, like any sane person, she had the plastic goggles on just in case, and the knitted headband her sister had given her pushing back her hair.

As she gave the chisel one firm tap, trying to carve in the eyes, her hand slipped slightly and chipped it the wrong way, skewing upwards and making it look like the duck had an angry eyebrow.

“MotherfUCK--” Roberta swallowed the swear just a moment too late, though it had been muffled enough by the noise that the teacher hadn’t heard and kicked her out of the room for swearing. Again.

Calm down. Calm. Calmy calmy calm. She glared at the duck like it had pissed on her greatest hope and dream—which in the moment was to make a really nice duck.

...Whatever. Ducks could have angry eyebrows, who was Roberta to say they couldn’t? It was fine. Finefinefine. Fine.

...Fucking christ.

She kept her head down, not looking up as she started chiseling an identical chip in the duck’s other eye.

[DerArknight]

Without issue, Dawn located the knitting equipment in one of the shelves. With knitting being far from popular on JEM, the equipment was sparse, but in better condition than most other stuff in the room.

After taking out some needles and wool, Dawn looked for a good table when she heard a scream that was cut off but still identifiable as “MotherfUCK--”

A look to the right revealed Roberta Chen, a girl Dawn didn't know that well despite being in the same class for years. Roberta was working on something wooden. Out of worry that Roberta might have hurt herself, Dawn got closer.

No, judging from the fact that Roberta resumed work on the wood after a few seconds, she seemed fine. But Dawn wanted to make sure. Especially since her picture of Roberta was that of one of the toughest girls on the school, meaning that Roberta might be the kind of person to downplay or ignore her own problems.

"Roberta? Is something wrong?" She asked, standing maybe two meters behind the other girl.

[ViolentMedic]

Roberta didn’t immediately absorb the sentence, just mostly it being noise behind her. Only her name registered immediately. What was wrong this time? Was it about the swearing?

“What?!” A little loud, confused, frustrated and borderline aggressive as Roberta turned to look at the girl behind her, still holding the duck in one hand and the chisel in the other, poised like she was in the middle of brutally murdering the duck with it.

The rest of the sentence caught up just a moment after she’d turned.

“Oh! Uh, yeah!” Still too loud, and the remnants of frustration still in her tone. Roberta dialled it down a bit. “S’fine. Just a duck-clusterfuck, that’s all.”

Who was this, anyway? Roberta tilted her head, squinting for a moment as her mind picked up details. Face was familiar. Class? Sunny? Oh, Dawn. There was a presentation about masks in there somewhere, wasn’t there? Health stuff? Other than the health thing, Roberta knew fuck all.

She returned her attention to the duck, jabbing the chisel in near its other eye again as she worked on the other eyebrow.

[DerArknight]

For a moment Roberta snapped at Dawn, but then the other girl calmed down something and explained that she had made a mistake in crafting the duck. Dawn never had tried woodwork, but she knew that one mistake could result in having to start over from scratch, so she understood.

"Okay. Then good luck." She told Roberta. Roberta only looked at her weird and then turned back to the table.

Maybe she is the kind of person who gets hyperfocussed on her work and hates to be interrupted? Dawn wondered. But even then, she didn't regret talking up. It could have been something more serious, after all.

Since she was close to it already, Dawn decided to sit down on Roberta's table to start her own project. Of course didn't sit down right next to Roberta, giving her classmate some distance instead.

And this was were the fun began!

Dawn quickly found into her rythm. Knitting was satisfying and calming to her, even in such a loud invironment.

Without noticing it, she began humming a melody while working.

[ViolentMedic]

Roberta heard Dawn sit down at the same table, but didn’t give it much thought for now. She was still attempting to fix her duck. Anger at this dumb, wooden fucker with his stupid, angry eyebrows was still going ba-dump-dump through her goddamn veins, though. Fuck, how hard was it to not have eyebrows?

Roberta needed to chill. Right. The duck was just making her angrier right now. Five minute break. Put it aside. Put it over there and relax, and remember that it’s just a fucking duck.

Roberta, seemingly abruptly, put her chisel and her duck down, sliding the duck to one corner of the table. Far away from her. She draped a bit of sanding paper over its face, to cover those dumb eyebrows and shame it for its annoyance, before glancing around for something to look at while she calmed down.

Oh yeah. Dawn was here. Knitting a… something, and humming a… tune that Roberta didn’t recognise. Roberta looked down at the piece of knitting.

“What are you--?!” Oops. Loud, still irritated-sounding. Dawn would think Roberta was yelling at her. Roberta paused, wrinkling her nose, taking a breath. Quieter. Inside voice. Shhshhshh. “Uh, sorry. What are you making?” That’s better.

[DerArknight]

All of a sudden, the tables had turned and Dawn was the one interrupted in her work by Roberta. Not that she minded.

"Oh, that?" She asked with a wink of the still barely-formed left glove. "Ethan's mother has her birthday soon, and since freezing runs in their family, I decided to knit her some new gloves for the winter.

"Don't worry, I have done stuff like that before. They will look great." Dawn had no problem with stating her confidence.

[ViolentMedic]

Ethan… which one was that again… ugh, names were hard.

“Cool. Probably will.” Roberta had started lightly marking some areas on the sides of the duck where she wanted to try adding some detail, though maybe when she was alone and in a quieter area so she didn’t make a scene if it went wrong. She wasn’t looking up much, even as she spoke. “Warm’s good even if it’s ugly. My sister, uh… crochets? She does presents a lot. People like it.”

Knitted and crocheted items worked better than wooden ones, sometimes. If only because you couldn’t fold up a piece of wood and put it in a drawer when it wasn’t being used.

[DerArknight]

Dawn smiled at Roberta's comment.

And then she asked a question she tended to always ask when talking about knitting.

"Would you also like some?"

[ViolentMedic]

Roberta had been listening. Totally. The problem was that half her focus was on the duck, and sometimes words just slipped by. Especially when she was focused on duck feathers, and thinking about if adding a duck moustache to go with the duck eyebrows was appropiate, and--

Look, sometimes words just fucking slipped by, alright? Fuck off.

Anyway, mostly she just absorbed, “Would you--” and then something something something. Would you ever learn how to knit, maybe? Or crochet? Probably nothing weird, like ‘would you like to meet up at a local factory and smoke something illegal,’ Dawn didn’t seem like a Curtis-sorta-gal.

She could have asked, but ugh it was just such a short sentence and it was embarrassing to not have absorbed it. So she did the ol’ stand-by of pretending like she’d caught the whole sentence.

So after a slightly awkward pause, Roberta nodded and said, “Yep.”

[DerArknight]

Dawn's smile grew wider.

"Super! You can look forward to them."

Then she realized that she didn't knew Roberta enough to make her gloves. She needed some measurements of the other girl's hands.

But that was no problem. Dawn just laid down her knitting equipment and inched a bit closer to Roberta, who was still marking the duck. Roberta's hands were moving, but not fast enough to hinder Dawn from getting a look at them. Details like how long the fingers were or the width of the palm were stored in Dawn's memory.

In order to get the best results, she looked very intendly.

[ViolentMedic]

Look forward to them? Oh, dammit, Roberta had missed some part of the conversation. Well, whatever, it wasn’t going to be anything too weird. If Dawn was offering something sketchy, Roberta just wouldn’t take it. Easy. And if it wasn’t sketchy, then it’d just be awkward later.

...The hell is her problem? Was it the duck? Or was it her hands? Roberta looked down at her own hands. With how she was holding the chisel, there were a number of thin, pale scars visible. Roberta scowled. She didn’t like the scars to begin with, they were mostly just a reminder of how goddamn dumb she used to be. She didn’t need Dawn staring at them.

Roberta put her chisel down and covered the back of one of her hands, though this only exposed the other. Goddammit.

“Take a fuckin’ photo, why don’t you?” she muttered.

[DerArknight]

Getting a closer look at Roberta's hands also revealed the scars to Dawn, but she didn't paid attention to this detail. The scars had no influence on the gloves she planned to make.

Roberta helpfully got into a position that gave Dawn a better look, so she quickly realized that Roberta's hands were very similar in size to the hands of a girl she had made gloves not too long ago. A little bit longer would suffice.

"Thanks. I will see what I can do." Dawn said while sitting back. With that, she started working on Ute's gloves again.

Roberta mumbled something, but the room was too loud for Dawn to understand it. She figured it was nothing important.

((Dawn Montogomery continued in Ain't Nobody Home Tonight))

[ViolentMedic]

Roberta had lost complete track of the conversation.

Oh well. Dawn didn’t seem upset at the snipping, and maybe pressing further and asking why Dawn was staring at her damn hands wasn’t a good path to take. If Dawn got pissy, Roberta would get pissy. And if Roberta got pissy, she didn’t JUST get a little pissy. She got goddamn tidalwave levels of urine is what she got. Which was a gross metaphor, but would cause just as many problems as a metaphor than if Roberta was being literal.

So, whatever. Roberta re-focused on her duck, and didn’t say much else for the rest of the time she spent there.

((Roberta Chen continued in what you are in the dark.))