Building a House [Open - Training Thread]

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

Today, Luke was building a house.

A thoroughly useless house.

Although he agreed, in principle, to the idea of creating structural reinforcement and buttresses to existing buildings, the creation of a new one seemed to require far too many resources, and worse its very blueprints included ridiculous vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities had questionable structural integrity and absolutely no uses besides providing filtered daylight which could easily be replicated by other means or smaller holes. Clearly they hadn't the faintest clue what they were doing.

"Luke, a house needs windows," his older sister informed him tartly, voice suggesting some long-suffering 'why-can't-you-see' quality that she usually started getting after three or four hours without coffee. Holding the construction blueprints down so that the winds that blew through East City wouldn't just send them flying she waved off his protests. "Like it or not, you agreed to this."

He had. For the promise of pastries. Pastries which - as it so happened - were only involved after this particular edifice was constructed. Curse their clever ways!

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"I will say 'I told you so,'" he threatened, tamed(ish) bird sitting on his shoulder, top hat still riding his head. He held a hammer in his hand which he wasn't sure what to do with - he could pound nails in with his fingers alone and easily - but apparently it would reassured others to see him construct a house with the appropriate tools.

Cecilia waved him off and Lucas trundled off towards the construction site, disgruntled.

"Alright, this is the easy part," his sister called out authoritatively. "Just... clear away all the stuff on top but don't touch the bottom."

Quite obviously few had the expertise to build an actual house from scratch, what they did in the East was reuse buildings that had solid foundations and erect walls and a roof above it. Not the most elegant of creations but they worked.

However, as one of the most highly paid and sought for assassins in the East (and that was no mean feat, assassination was a competitive market these days) Lucas thought that his skills could be put to better use than mere demolition but began kicking and hammering down the walls of the existing, and clearly rather dilapidated structure.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

As Lucas continued to demolish the crumbling edifice (working from without to within) he realized that the endeavor was of a certain intellectual value. After a few solid hits he began to see where and how the damage that the building had already incurred from previous battles added up and how that sort of damage could created weak spots and stress points that were not immediately visible.

Poking his finger into the wall he was gratified to see the entire room begin to crumble. Then he realized he was still in the crumbling room (when had that happened?) and immediately leaped out, just before the ceiling caved in on him. Dust, ash and grit went flying everywhere, coating him in layer of fine particulate matter.

His tamed(ish) bird had apparently had the brains to be out of the house before it came tumbling down. No doubt it would return. Sooner or later.

His sister coughed meaningfully as she watched him get up. "Luke, are you alright?"

"m' fine," Luke coughed. Entirely true. The lapse in concentration was probably inevitable. He had a frightful case of tunnel vision when the winning condition of a particular exercise did not actually include his own health. A fight to the death involved one by definition. Here though... well. He'd have to try to remember to take himself into account more often.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"All done," he reported, patting himself down, trying to get rid of the dust and wood chips. As if rushing to obey him, the house behind him fell apart completely, roof caving in, walls leaning out at unexpected angles before splintering, the entire thing sending out an enormous cloud of wood chips and dust.

It wasn't like he had done much: the building had already, more or less, been demolished. He had just given it the last few necessary pokes. Literally.

Although to be fair, his pokes could perforate inch-thick steel doors.

Cecilia gave him an elegant eyebrow, muttering: "This is why no one wants to work with you, you know" which seemed to Lucas a somewhat puzzling a statement as he didn't precisely appreciate the company of others and could very well do without them. Oh well, Cecilia could be like that.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"Here, I'll give you a hand with the mess," Cecilia told him, anchoring the blueprints by the expedient of shoving it under a piece of debris and rolling up her sleeves.

Lucas found the sleeve-rolling a strange practice (was it not there to keep the dust out?) but didn't comment. Now that the building was effectively demolished...

Well. He was going to have a significantly harder time figuring out how to do things. His brain just didn't seem to come equipped with a creative impulse. Building a house was closer to art than it was to a game and as such - well, he'd appreciate his sister's help, to put it simply.

Also, he was getting hungry. Any help was good help.

Carrying out the timber and bricks by the truckload (Hargraves were, for some reason, much stronger than normal humans) the two of them quickly began clearing an area. While Lucas just grabbed stuff and dumped it on the side of the road, Cecilia somehow managed to organize her various piles of debris into 're-usable' and 'junk' piles. Lucas, quite honestly, could not tell the difference.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

It took hours.

Even carrying the bricks out in burlap sacks and carts, the amount that could be carried was limited by what the sacks and carts could hold, not what the humans could and neither of them wanted to risk seeing one of their beloved trolleys fall apart due to excess weight. Arms, after all, could only hold so much volume.

Worse, though, Cecilia had her own quirks. She wanted the foundation perfect before construction could begin and thus even after they had cleared away mostly everything, Cecilia demanded they keep going. And going. And going. And-

"That'll do," she finally said, after the foundation had been revealed to be squeaky-clean concrete blocks. "Thanks Luke~ why don't we take a break and eat?"

His growling stomach answered that question.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"How was West City?"

Between stuffing himself with the most exquisite muffin-things this side of the world, Lucas carefully answered certain questions that Cecilia was not supposed to know.

"My assignment was completed satisfactorily," he told her, spraying out crumbs that he unconsciously reached out to grab so that they weren't wasted.

She laughed. A rare in sound in East City. "Idiot - that's not what I meant."

After a moment of profound thought, he managed: "I met someone who helped me to my destination."

And after that he killed a scientist and stole a top-secret device.

Cecilia clapped her hands. Somehow, she ate without ever seeming to. A strange technique. "Oh, you mean you made a friend?"

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

Lucas considered that idea.

A... friend? Well. Perhaps. He had certainly heard a lot about friendship from Cecilia, before the era of human rule had ended she was as bright and vivacious a child as any. Perhaps more so than most - even now, fifteen years later, she had not quite lost the glow.

And it was not easy, living here. Watching her family turn into crooks and charlatans.

And in one case, an assassin.

She didn't look away though. She wanted details. She always wanted to know. But for some reason though, even though he would not prevaricate or dissimulate from anyone else Lucas was strangely reluctant to just tell her what he did for a living.

"I'm not sure," he admitted, wolfing down the last muffin and getting up. "But he was... interesting."

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

Cecilia wrinkled her nose at his answer but then shook her head. Apparently she was just happy knowing that he had human interaction that didn't involve blood and money. Climbing to her feet she affectionately patted him on the head: an old habit from their childhood years when she had actually been taller than him.

Now, of course, she was almost an entire head shorter but she hadn't lost the habit. It was kind of why he had gotten a hat in the first place but she still somehow managed to do it.

"Alright then," she said cheerfully. "Ready to build a house?"

"No," Lucas replied, an ever-honest deadpan.

"It'll be fun, I promise!"

Lucas doubted this statement with some considerable force but in the end, knew he was outmatched and decided to cut out the arguing portion of the day. The sooner they started the sooner they'd end. Hopefully. Even with two humans with superhuman strength and speed, bricks had to be placed one-by-one.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

He was right: it wasn't fun.

Although they had begun early and breaked for lunch, the sun had risen and its glare had made the temperature rise to uncomfortable highs. He would strip off more clothes if he wasn't already wearing a thin sleeveless t-shirt and light pants. Even if each brick barely weighed anything, slathering the mortar on the bricks, making sure they were perfectly aligned, slowly putting together a wall - that involved a posture and mental exercise that were exhausting.

Fortunately he did work twice as fast as a normal worker. And his sister worked five times his speed so it was almost as if they were a dozen people, really.

Still, a dozen people would take days to finish this and in the interim, putting a brick onto another brick and place it just so was an exercise in boredom that knew few equals. And worse, at a certain point he would have to set up proper walls and since he couldn't fly he'd have to get a stepladder... ah, the inconvenience that all this presented.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"So~"

Lucas recognized that tone of voice. He nearly froze before deciding that this was the sort of conversation that became inevitable once his sister became involved. Actually, given that they had been working on this project for several hours it was a mystery how it hadn't occurred sooner. He continued putting brick onto brick, vaguely aware that the houses he was familiar with were not made solely of brick walls.

Ah well. Brick walls, in a pinch, would probably do. Certainly, they held up to bullets better than fragile human flesh.

"Did you meet a girl during your trip~?"

Technically? Dozens. But not in the manner that his sister was suggesting, certainly. Two or three were among the security guards and when the police had arrived it'd been in the black armor that he was unfamiliar with and their gender was impossible to determine from external cues. Not all of them were dead. He'd held back. That had been part of his contract. Blanket statement: minimize casualties. An odd request, but he'd adhered to it as best he could.

"A few," Lucas said, laying a careful brick onto another careful brick. "I do not think they liked me very much, though."

One almost shot him, in fact.

"Aw, my widdle brother, still so unpopular."

Lucas checked her progress out of the corner of her eye. Even during the banter she seemed several times faster than him. Perhaps he could try picking up his pace. What could it hurt?

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

His hands were a blur. Perhaps his work was getting sloppy but his speed was steadily creeping to more acceptable levels. It occurred, somewhat belatedly, that this was an interesting form of hand-eye coordination. Not proper training, exactly, but an interesting way to pass the time and keep in shape. Hadn't a famous warrior once said that everything was martial arts?

Or maybe that had been a movie he'd been forced to watch with the young ones.

Speaking of which.

"How are the children?"

"You're changing the subject," Cecilia accused but answered regardless. "They're getting better. But you know how children are at this age; once one of them start coughing they all do." Her tone was light but Lucas could read her better than most and there was still that undercurrent of anxiety. She was more than just an 'Auntie,' for many she was everything but their biological mother.

"I can get them medicine-"

"We have plenty," Cecilia said. "It's just the flu. It'll pass."

And like that, the conversation was quite solidly killed and they continued working in a ponderous sort of silence, Lucas making his shoddy wall with surprising speed, Cecilia making her much more rigorously precise one with, well, even more surprising speed.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

By the time the sun had started heading towards the other horizon, they had, as much as it pained Lucas to admit, reached the stage where it was necessary to start adding points of strategic vulnerability.

Windows.

Although he wasn't someone who could be easily qualified as 'brooding,' perhaps his sister mistook his facial cues for that plebeian sort of irrationality because she spent a great deal of time rolling her eyes at him as they worked on together (she didn't trust him to do it alone) on the various windowsills.

Although he wasn't the one that usually broke the silence he finally said: "What."

Cecilia acted perfectly and totally innocent. "What what?"

"The eye thing," Lucas managed to grit out. Social cues were confusing enough as they were, his sister didn't have to try to manipulate him by knowing that he tended to interpret them in a singular manner regardless of context. "What are you trying to say?"

"That you should lighten up! These windows will be fabulous, I promise."

Lucas greatly doubted this but he had been, sadly, overruled. People liked windows regardless of how... ridiculous the entire concept was. Honestly, what good were windows? Poke a hole in the roof and put a bottle of chlorinated water through. That would let the sunlight in and act as a bloody lightbulb - it's what they did here already. No need to get all fancy-smancy with this window talk.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

Once the - argh - area of vulnerability had been made for (it wasn't like they had glass panes lying around, that would be a little too luxurious they continued bricking. It was as boring as it had been before, albeit Lucas had managed to fall into a perfectly serviceable routine and was breaking even with his sister's old speed.

Cecilia, never one to be outdone, was still going proportionally faster than him. So now they were closer to, ah, sixty or so workers. It took them a gratifying little amount of time to finish up the walls outer walls, maybe an hour or so, and then consider the issue of, well, a roof. Obviously it couldn't be finished today - they'd have to get at the walls on the inside first and it wasn't like the mortar had dried yet, but...

"It's a one-story house, it doesn't require an attic," Lucas argued, wishing he could read blueprints. Right now, he was taking it on faith that what Cecilia described to him was accurate.

"No no, it says so right here. A-T-T-I-C. See? The rules say so, so we're building it."

That sounded needlessly complicated to Lucas but then again this entire exercise had been needlessly complicated. A hole in the ground covered with tarp, a shack made of corrugated metal, a freaking cardboard box - all of these things and more had made perfectly serviceable shelters as they all knew very well.

And besides, other than the minor issue of never knowing which building's floor was rotten and which set of stairs was about to collapse, West City had never lacked buildings, per se, merely the occupants. Due to, y'know, the war and everything.

But since Cecilia had her heart set on this goal... well, apparently that's how it was going to be, attic and all.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"So, whaddya think?" Cecilia asked, breathless from the... whatever it was sense of accomplishment that one got from wasting an entire day on a futile endeavor.

Not that he'd say that, of course. He'd already made his opinion on this exercise clear, no need to reiterate himself. That would just make a pointless waste of time articulating his opinions even more pointless.

"I think I want more muffins," Lucas suggested, not even bothering to look at the drying, red-brick structure and its ugly, ugly holes where the windows would one day go only to be boarded up when they were shot up, of course. That was how windows usually ended their days and Lucas was not clear on the logic that made removing the subsequent steps unnecessary.

Ah well.

"Yes, I think that's a wonderful idea," his sister agreed. "Meet back here tomorrow? Mortar should be dried and we can dig out a cellar, put in flooring, make the attic, put up a roof-"

Yes yes yes. Of course.