RP:Books Are For Reading (Not Scratching)

Summary: Forced on bed rest due a broken ankle, Aira attempts to occupy her mind by reading a book nestled in front of the hearth. After finishing the necessary chores around the lodge, Orikahn joins the huntress and attempts to use one of her books as a scratch board. After saving the poor tome from a disastrous fate, Kahn begins to inquire about the words and a spontaneous phonics lesson ensues.

Hunter's Lodge

Aira hated being on bed rest. She was never one to be idle, even with injuries and illness. However, a broken ankle was proving to be a bit more difficult to maneuver, what with the huntress unable to bear much weight upon it. And she couldn’t exactly traverse the wilds of Frostmaw on a pair of crutches! Surely with Orikahn’s help she had splinted it the night she returned to the lodge, and had since used the ever present snow to pack it to keep the swelling down, as well as resting it as much as possible. She’s not happy about it, if the scowl on her face is any indication. Presently, she lounges in a little nest by the fire, her leg propped up on several folded animal skins, and a book in her hands. She hadn't done a lot of leisurely reading since her escape from Rynvale, but what else was a little vixen to do when she couldn’t hunt?

Orikahn isn't long catching up on chores. After all, he can't stray very far from the lodge what with Aira bedridden. There was wood to chop, but now it's piled neatly by the smokehouse. There were hides to tan, but now they're stretched wide on tanning racks. The reindeer are all out on their daily grazing, and Kahn's catch of grouse are all plucked, cleaned, and smoking. The salmon are skinned, filleted, and frozen. Kahn's coat is gleaming, as is his armor, as are his skulls. Now Kahn sits cross-legged on the leather floor in the warm light of the fire pit. In one hand, he holds a wicker scratching mat--this he scratches at with his other hand. The mat is looking quite well worn (Kahn's had this one for a while) and by his quiet growls and humming, Aira might guess that he's losing patience. "Fie," the old cat finally pronounces, and he tosses the mat into the fire, where it brightly erupts into flame. What does he reach for instead? Why one of Aira's books, of course! His fingers stretch, and his claws flex in eager preparation. Yesss, yes, this will do very nicely...

“Tss, tss!” Aira hisses at Orikahn before her scowl dips down even lower. “Don’t. Even. Think about it,” she chastises before bending the corner of the page she’s reading and closing the book in her hands. There’s the sound of rustling hides as the huntress shifts and sits up, narrowing her gaze at the sabercat. “You’re supposed to -read- that no scratch it!” she breathes out with a huff before realization hits her and she winces. “Sorry,” the vixen murmurs quietly, remembering that Kahn didn’t know how to read. Hadn’t he always left the correspondence to her? She considers him thoughtfully for a moment before reaching out to pluck the book from his hands. “It’s upside down,” Aira tells him in an unusually gentle tone, returning the tome to him right side up.

Orikahn snaps his head toward Aira, startled, and he flattens his ears, looking ready to give her a piece of his mind until, quite unexpectedly, her demeanor changes. Kahn is taken off guard, even to the point that he forgets to swat at her when she grabs his book. "Upside down?" He laughs at her. "Well aren't you picky. I imagine it'll scratch as well whichever way I turn it." Still, it makes him pause in curiosity, and he looks at the peculiar markings on the spine. "Are they magic or something?" In the firelight, the embossed letters gently shimmer as Orikahn turns the book this way and that. Obviously, there was some secret he was missing here. He'd guessed as much before, sometimes watching when Aira laid his dictations into a letter, knowing vaguely that the esoteric marking somehow held the meaning of his speech. How was merely another of life's great mysteries; like reading star charts or tea leaves. The art was never really his. "I suppose you were born with eyes for this, hmm?" Kahn squints closely at the spine. "Like with your ghosts."

Aira tilts her head to the side, a half smile touching at the left corner of her lips. “There are magic books but not these. I’m not magically inclined,” she says with a small shrug. “No these are just stories, tales that were written down for others to enjoy.” Aira’s tail gives a small swish as she glances towards the fire pensively. “I’m sure you must have told stories to your sons when they were little. Great tales of mighty hunters who slain great beasts? Cautionary plots to teach life lessons in a way they could understand? These are much of the same only they are written instead of spoken.” When he asks about her eye for it, the vixen furrows her brow. “No Kitty, I had to learn. My governess taught me how to read and to write.” Aira pauses. “I could...teach you if you wanted?” The huntress sucks in a breath, hoping the great sabercat didn’t take her offer as anything but genuine. She would never pressure him to learn, try and change who he was, but if he desired to...

Orikahn slides Aira dubious sideye. If the cat doesn't understand something, there can be little explanation except that the thing is magic. "Of course, but those are stories. Anyone can tell stories. That's normal, but these," he opens the book and turns it this way and that, letting the pages flutter, flipping past as they fall, "are just like a bunch of ants or something. Sometimes there's a picture." He stops at the opening of a chapter, a page with a heavily illuminated letter "T" complete with vines, doves, and flowers. "Like that, but they aren't even doing anything. They're just hanging around that tower with the heavy top." Despite these protests, Aira can see that she's managed to fan Kahn's curiosity. "So these magics can be taught? Show me." Clearly expecting a demonstration, Kahn gets on his knees and turns expectantly to offer the book back. "Make me see what you see."

Aira watches with curiosity as Orikahn fans out the pages of the book, the resulting flutter causing some of his fur to stir. “That is just an embellishment,” she says, her finger tapping at the decorative 'I'. “That is the letter 'I'. Like in Aira or Orikahn,” she explains with a surprising amount of patience. As Kahn turns towards her eagerly pushing the book back in her hands she cannot help but giggle. “You have to start off small before you can read books like these. Hold on.” With a grunt, the vixen pushes herself to a stand and, bracing her hand on Kahn’s shoulder until she finds her balance, hops over to the far side of the room to grab a messenger bag. She once more hops over to Kahn and throws herself on the ground without much grace and dumps the contents of her bag out in front of them. The sabercat would see a great map of the sea near Rynvale, marked up with lines and symbols to indicate the journey Aira had plotted for the Adventurer's Guild. But she quickly turns this over to the blank side, and picking up a piece of graphite, begins to write in larger letters across the top: O-R-I-K-A-H-N. When she’s done, copper eyes seek out his face as she points to what she wrote. “This is your name, written out. Orikahn.”

Orikahn watches quietly as Aira explains, looking attentively between the elf's face and the illuminated letter. "The letter eye." He repeats after her, not understanding, but still patient enough to wait and see how the whole mess comes together. Like with Aira or Orikahn, yes, they both have eyes, that makes perfect sense. As the vixen goes to fetch her bag, the great cat gives the book another quick study. Well those are like mouths, he supposes, and those might be arms? It's a start, he promises himself. The scratching of graphite on paper snatches his attention back again, and he watches in perplexed wonder until, just as he is about to ask what it is, Aira tells him. Orikahn's expression falls flat. He purses his lips, studies her writing again, then gives Aira the dryest look he ever has. "It look *nothing* like me."

To her credit, Aira does her best to keep her expression stoic, to keep her tone even. However, humor bubbles up inside and overflows so that she is laughing while simultaneously waving her hand and apologizing for it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She gasps, covering her mouth with her hand in order to calm herself down. It takes a few moments for her to sober, but she eventually exhales deeply, her eyes shining with mirth. “I wasn’t laughing at you, I promise.” And in a genuine show of affection, the vixen tilts her head to the side and nuzzles against her mate's arm. “Okay, let me think of how I can explain this.” Aira falls quiet for a few moments before nodding towards Kahn’s quiver of arrows near the door. “An arrow is made up of several parts, right? The fletching, the shaft, the arrowhead. They all make up an arrow. The words we speak, and we write, are made up of letters. You must first learn each letter, and how they sound, in order to put them together to form words. Does that make sense?” The huntress’s metallic eyes flick up to Kahn’s face searching for comprehension.

Orikahn isn't sure whether Aira is laughing at his incompetence or her own. Ah, the former. He folds his arms over his chest and waits for Aira to find again her classroom decorum. Kahn's curiosity will only float his patience so far, after all. "But go on," he prompts in reply to her apology and does his best not to crack a smile at her nuzzling, "your pupil is waiting." He needn't wait long. Aira's arrow example has his gears turning, and the cat looks to the ceiling. "Orikahn. Orikahn. Ori-Kahn. O-Ri-Kahn. Yes. O-Ri-Kahn. Ka-nuh. Anyway," his three eyes meet Aira's coppery two, "alright, speech is made of sounds that come strung together, like in a song," he sings whimsically, "Chase the grouse around the house | and catch it by the feathers. | Tie his feet in bundling twine | and hang him with the heathers." The ditty complete, Kahn scratches his chin and hums the melody through a few more stanzas, stewing on it all. "So you make them speak." He looks down to his name again in the graphite and taps it with his index finger. "So make that speak my name. O-Ri-Ka-nuh."

Aira looks prideful as Kahn begins to sound out his name, pronouncing the syllables just so. His little ditty is met with an amused raise of her eyebrow but she says nothing of it. “No, no. The words do not speak to us. We look at the letters and sound out the words. Once we begin that we put the words together to make sentences...or songs. It’s like what you just did, but in your head.” Aira returns to her scribbled word and begins to explain what each letter is, how the sounds are made, and how to bring them all together. Once he seems to comprehend that she writes A-I-R-A. “Now, these are all letters in your name. Try and sound them out and speak the word.”

Orikahn follows along as Aira explains. It takes a bit of memorization, but after a few run-throughs, he's able to sound out his own name using the letters on the paper. Now what's this? "Ah. Ih. Rih. Ah." There's a pause. "Ah-ih-rih-ah. Aaairrih-ah." Kahn's ear twitches and he suddenly snatches up the paper to squint hard at it. "Aira. Aira! Hah! I'm right, aren't I?" A fanged grin flashes across his maw, and he looks to his mate for confirmation. "Aira?"

Aira grabs some folded up hides and gently angles them under her foot as her ankle gives a painful throb. Despite what she shows on the outside, and how she might act while out on a hunt, Aira is the epitome of patient in this lesson. She gently corrects Kahn when he mispronounces a letter and falls silent when he works on getting through her name. When he finally gets it right and turns to her for confirmation with a grin on his face, the vixen’s heart swells and she nods. “Yes that is exactly correct,” she tells the sabercat, nuzzling against him once more. “Shall we do some more?” Should he agree, Aira could continue writing words that first use the letters of their names before adding in some more that relate to their lives such as “bow” and “arrow” and "game".

Orikahn is quite self-pleased, and he raps the paper lightly with the back of his knuckle in triumph. "Well, then!" Setting the paper down, he takes a moment to scritch over Aira's ears in answer to her nuzzling. "Yes, more," Kahn eagerly agrees and grabs a pack of provisions. In no time, they're settled in for a long winter's afternoon of lessons--with a bottle of mead and a pile of jerky to share, of course.