Just doing my job [tag: N'rak]

[weetia]

3.07.3189

Kalena pushed the last scrap of paper away. The children of the Weyr were ahead of most holder children when it came to their memorization of songs about dragons and their responsibilities (no surprise there), but several of them were woefully behind with their figures. She was going to make them stay for extra classes if they didn't start improving, and she knew the kids would hate that. Really, she knew they expected to be dragonriders and have no need for multiplication, but even dragonriders needed to be able to do basic math while they weren't fighting thread. At least the misspellings were no worse than she was used to from previous teaching assignments, and were just as occasionally amusing. The story that one little girl wrote about a 'hackling' dragon was worth at least a chuckle, especially since aside from the rampant misspellings it was quite good for a child her age. Kalena would have to see if the girl had any musical ability, since a talent for storytelling was well prized among harpers.

All her official work was done for the day, though, and she looked worriedly over at the first 'report' she was writing. Really, this few days into her stay, at least she wasn't expected to have uncovered anything interesting or useful. She wrote a letter detailing the apparent health of the hatchlings, and the fact that the weyrlings seemed determined to support each other, regardless of color or size. Admirable, really, though she did not include that opinion in either copy of her report. The two mutant dragons were never left alone, not even with other dragonets. There were always a few weyrlings with the dragonets, even when they were asleep one of the kids found a reason to work on something in the barracks.

The weyrlings certainly stuck together a lot better than apprentices did. By now, if something this scandalous had befallen one of the apprentices at Harper Hall, someone would already have sold his classmate out, or just spread vicious gossip without even the promise of a reward. Surely dragonriders anticipated competing with each other just as much as holders and crafters did? While they had to protect each others' lives in threadfall, didn't they also compete for wingleadership, and ultimately weyrleadership? Maybe the riders of females could be expected to support each other, but the bronze weyrling was just as likely to be watching the bismuth's back as any other weyrling.

Kalena peeked under her cot at the little nest she had made for Haki, checking to make sure her tiny bronze was still asleep. She had filled his belly that morning, hoping he would sleep all day, and it had worked, but she had no idea how long it would be before he wanted to be active during the day while she was teaching classes. Hopefully, she would be able to train him to stay hidden. Surely fire lizards were no harder to teach than holder children who thought that they didn't need to be able to read when they only wanted to raise and breed runners? She shook her head then, stroking his neck a little before replacing her blanket. She left her room on a mission: she needed to have a conversation with the Weyrlingmaster.

It actually made sense no matter how you looked at it: the Masterharper wanted to know about the mutations, so that his harpers could have information to help counter the wild rumors that were spreading. Kalena took a deep breath, smoothing down her well-worn tunic. She knocked at the man's door calmly, with a fixed smile. At least for this step she didn't even need to hide the fact that she would be picking his brain.

[Rust]

It was thankful to have some rest. Weyrlings were always a little difficult to handle, especially at first, but those two mutations... Ronith and Lycath ... had certainly changed the dynamics of not just the weyrling group but the Weyr itself. He had made the choice to support them, despite the nagging fear and anything Sa'kor or anyone else had said, but that didn't stop it from being difficult. As far as N'rak was concerned, being afraid of what those two could mean for their future was more sharding logical than just blindly supporting them with no doubts.

N'rak was laying on a section of cold stone floor, near where Keth usually slept, finding the chill comforting despite the fact that the air still had a chill to it. Besides that, sometimes the stone was more comfortable than a cot, especially on the back. He wondered idly when Keth would come back from sunning himself, but he could feel that the dragon was just as comfortable on the stones outside in the sun as N'rak was on the stone floor inside in the dark.

The knock took him by surprise for a moment. Why would anyone come to bothe- oh yeah. There were plenty of reasons for him to be a point of interest right now. As N'rak started to feel annoyed at the interruption, Keth sent vague feelings of comfort back to his rider.

After turning his glowbaskets quickly to let in light, N'rak hurried to the door. The woman he saw standing there was familiar. She had recently come to Sunset, right? It was hard not to notice a new person at the Weyr after the last hatching, for obvious reasons. There was a good chance that this was exactly what this was all about, but he was unsure what her position in the Weyr was. Probably better to avoid letting her know that he couldn't remember that.

N'rak gave her a smile. It was a weird combination of forced and genuine. After all, she was young and pretty enough. Hard not to at least smile at that! "You're, uh... Kelena, right?" N'rak asked, slightly mispronouncing her name, since he had only overheard it a few times and never used it himself. "Want to come in?"

[weetia]

"It's Kalena," she corrected gently, smiling warmly at the bluerider. "But I'm surprised you got it that close. I would like to come in, thank you," she added. She bit her lip unconsciously, a little nervous. She should probably just be direct, since it was probably already obvious what subject she needed to talk about. "I am sorry to take some of your time, since I know you are very busy right now, Weyrlingmaster" she told him, formally.

"I'm sure you realize that there are already rumors flying all over Pern about two of the weyrlings," she said, delicately. "The Masterharper wants me to learn what I can about them, as he believes that people have less reason to be afraid when they have facts." She shruggged, ruefully. "Of course, I'm sure that he's right about that, though I suspect there will always be people who don't want less reasons to be afraid. Still, I'm supposed to find out what their real differences...and similarities...to other dragons are."

Kalena pushed some hair back from her face as she spoke, "I'm a little hungry, maybe we could talk over dinner," she suggested, shyly. He seemed pleasant enough, and she really should get to know some of the riders, even if the ones with rank did make her nervous.

[Rust]

N'rak listened politely as he let Kalena enter and made sure everything was shut well behind her. A look of vague irritation slowly found its way back to his face; his being right about her was a disappointment. Without Keth's help, he brought himself back and away from the pitfall of frustration and irritation that had been more and more frequent lately.

"Discussing it over dinner might be a good idea," N'rak responded, still standing beside his door. "I'm sure a private conversation would be better. I could get someone to bring us something, but I prefer to get the items myself," N'rak always felt like service right to a personal weyr was something for bronzes and golds, despite his near-constant frustrations with the ranking system. Besides, he could pull his own weight. He didn't need to be served like he was more important or less able than anyone else.

He crossed the room to his table of papers. He shuffled through them briefly, finding the couple that he wanted. He offered them to Kalena with an explanation. "You can read these when I'm getting dinner, if you want. It's just notes on the atypi- " Ronith and Lycath Keth interrupted with a scolding tone. If your grandkids were strange would you want people calling them names behind your back? N'rak frowned, and told Keth, I wouldn't. I apologize. He refocused his eyes at Kalena and smiled. "Sorry. Notes on Ronith and Lycath that I've written down."

The papers were in a scrawling, awkward handwriting that could be difficult to decipher at times. Besides that, the organization of the sheets was terrible. A list of what seemed to be names (all crossed out and illegible) was in the upper right-hand corner. Toward the bottom was a very rough sketch of what could only be Ronith, based on where the lines across the body were drawn, and the color labels given to each portion, not that the picture looked much like a dragon. The rest of that sheet was covered in observations about Ronith, including rough calculations of approximate full-grown sizes.

The second sheet was more empty, but had notes on Lycath that were quite similar, but lacked the attempt at a drawing. It also had the crossed-out list in the corner (bottom right this time), which was slightly shorter.

[weetia]

Kalena sat down with the sheets of paper, smiling a little sadly as she heard the weyrlingmaster correct himself with the dragonet's names. Obviously there was a little trouble accepting the two mutated hatchlings even within the Weyr, even with people who mostly felt they should accept them. "I would appreciate that, thank you," she said. Internally, she was wincing, since a private meal would make it impossible to squirrel away a little meat for Haki. Keeping the lizard hidden was going to be hard enough without people noticing how much meat she seemed to eat. Luckily, she wouldn't need anymore before the next day, and she could probably snag some meatrolls on her own. She glanced down at the notes, and winced more obviously.

Kalena hadn't heard anything against the weyrlingmaster's teaching methods or results, but his organizational skills were apparently a bit...lacking. She smiled ruefully. Even among other harpers, she was considered a little obsessive about lists and details. She could probably get something out of this, but it would take a while. She pulled out her own paper and ink to start making a set of her own notes from his more haphazard ones. "Do you make notes on all the dragonets?" she asked, curiously. "I would be able to make more sense of this if I knew what you write about the more common ones."

Without waiting for an answer, she started reading the observations N'rak had made on Ronith, and trying to mentally organize them before she rewrote them. She looked at the drawing for a long moment. She had seen felines with an apparently random pattern of color, (though she was pretty sure they were all female) and it wasn't exactly a scandal. How much did color really affect anything about dragons anyway? Obviously it was associated with size, and definitely determined fertility, but if that was all it did, she didn't see the big deal.

[Rust]

Before he had left, N'rak answered her question about his notes. He was a little hesitant; he couldn't help but feel weird for treating the weird hatchlings as weird. Still. "Yeah, I do sometimes take notes on the other hatchlings. Just observations for teaching and wings they could join." He explained, motioning vaguely at his table of papers to indicate that it was in there... somewhere.

N'rak came back after a while with a small assortment of food: meatrolls, freshly cooked tubers and some klah. Not an extravagant meal, but good enough for the discussion. He pushed a few papers aside on his table, proving that his awful organizational skills didn't limit themselves to the contents of his papers.

"Here's some food," he said as he grabbed a chair and pulled it closer so he could sit. "I hope you can read those," he added, pointing to the notes. "I took a lot more notes on the... on Ronith and Lycath than the others. I have to prove that they're either harmless or they're dangerous."

[weetia]

Kalena nodded idly. She really wasn't the right person for any of this, since she didn't know all that much about dragons. At least it was an excellent excuse for being a little slow at the 'job' she really didn't want. She looked in bemusement at his table of papers. How could he work like that? Her head hurt just thinking about the time involved in finding a specific record on demand. She knew from experience that some of the teachers who were most effective in the classroom were terrible at keeping track of their paperwork, so she wasn't passing judgment on his skill at training weyrlings. Still, he wasn't making his own job any easier.

Her dismay was probably pretty obvious, but she was also thinking now, about something other than her tasks involving the two hatchlings. She hadn't needed much time to make sense of the previous harper's records for his classes, but that disarray was nothing compared to this. "I can read them," she answered, "though I'm going to need to reorganize the information. I'll also need to ask you to clarify some things that probably only make sense to someone who knows more about dragons than I do." Kalena took one of the meatrolls, relaxing a little as she took a large bite of it. She had been a little bit hungrier over the day than she normally was, since she had to keep some food aside.

She looked at the pile of papers again, but focused past them for a moment, as she came up with an idea. "You probably can't know that much about the hatchlings yet, anyway," Kalena acknowledged. "I mean, they're less than a month old. Obviously they grow faster than humans do, but I would bet that right now they all do very little besides eat and sleep." She was going to have to pick N'rak's mind frequently over the next few months, as he learned more about the dragonets. "I'm probably going to beg for your nonexistent free time quite a bit, so maybe I can help you with something to make up for it," she offered, a little nervously. Really, she was probably making this offer as much for herself as for him. She just couldn't handle knowing that this mountain of chaos existed without doing something about it. "I could organize this for you, if that's ok," she said tentatively, while she copied the notations N'rak had made over to another sheet of paper, with much more careful penmanship.

Kalena had never been the kind of teacher that students were excited to see, or even the kind that inspired students to push themselves beyond what she demanded. She made no claim to being a perfect example of an educator. One thing she was good at, though, was record-keeping. She was even rather good at recognizing patterns, and had figured out the causes of a few students' problems. "Obviously I can't help you teach, since I know less than your weyrlings," she wrinkled her nose, "which is something I definitely need to fix if I'm going to be living in a Weyr," She shrugged then. "But that will take time. I can definitely help you with your records, though, and I'm actually very good at that. I even enjoy making things orderly." Of course, she would probably learn a fair amount about young dragons while she worked with his notes, even if he wasn't there. It would help her just as much as it helped him.