hello! I'd love a scene where Penetinos shows how smart he is, if you feel inclined. Thank you!
Here is Penetinos geeking out over some mysterious old vases.
Otilia stopped to wipe the sweat from her brow. The last gasps of summer were fading now, soon to be swallowed by chill autumn winds and, in time, the grasp of winter, but the sun would not accept its fated diminishment with grace and now blazed down upon the village of Nituru with fiery vengeance. The villagers were all in their homes, huddled in the shadows, their only respite from the harsh light of mid-day. Or at the very least, most of them were.
Penetinos sat, his legs crossed in the style of a scribe, upon a slab of red sandstone. Resting on his legs was a wooden writing board, and spread across it was a length of Apunian paper, gifted to him almost assuredly by one of the pirates. A primitive canopy of oak limbs and pine boughs sat above him, shading him and the two figures that lay beside him, Sihunu and Dati.
“I’ve got your medicine!” Otilia called as she approached. She lifted the small copper bowl that the plantbrew had given her. Inside of it sloshed a brownish-green concoction of garlic, juniper, mustard seeds, thyme, honey, wine, and sesame oil, among other herbs, fats, and other substances, including a small pinch of red soil.
Penetinos hardly looked up from his work, the nub of charcoal in his trembling hand unceasing. He was muttering under his breath, periodically shaking his head or clicking his tongue as if caught in some sort of fearsome disagreement with himself. As a fellow Korithian, Otilia could understand most of what he said, of course, but his archaic southern dialect was still strange to her. As she drew near, the old sage held out the hand that was not preoccupied with his work.
“Haruhi says to drink it slowly this time.” She set the bowl in his open palm.
“Does she now?” Penetinos grumbled as he eyed the mixture distastefully.
As the old man choked down the sludge, Otilia addressed Dati.
“Good to see the old folk all enjoying each other's company.”
Sihunu opened one eye; her gaze could have frozen the sun, but Dati merely laughed.
“It is, isn't it? I couldn’t stand to be in the house. I'm still not used to it, I suppose.”
The forestfolk's tail swished lazily as he spoke; his eyes remained closed, his head resting against Sihunu's shoulder.
“And Ninma and Narul are still unloading the Westwind.” Sihunu sighed as she closed her eye once more.
Otilia glanced toward the docks and spotted Narul’s lumbering form as he walked across the deck of the ship, carrying the booty the pirates had seized during their last expedition. Ninma was seated high above on the yard of the mast, her feet kicking lazily as she gazed southward at the Sea of Apuna. She was growing up fast, having grown nearly a foot in the two years since they had arrived in Nituru. When Otilia had pointed this out to Narul, the giant had been on the verge of hysteria. "She'll be a teenager by next week! I don't know how to take care of a teenager, Otilia! I barely know how to take care of her now! I can barely take care of myself!" The memory of the demigod pacing back and forth, waving his hands about, and bombarding Otilia with question after question about what to do in just about every imaginable circumstance made Otilia smile. The hulking giant, whom the poets and bards of Kishite now sang of, was terrified of just thought of a teenage girl.
“Where’s Istek?” Otilia asked as she looked over the occupants of the canopy. There was no sign of the captain, who would, in most circumstances, never have given up the opportunity to curl up beside his two partners.
“He’s fetching me some specimens.” Penetinos sputtered, having just finished choking down the last of the unpleasant potion. He set the bowl down beside him, wiped the grit from his lips, and went back to his work, his eyebrows knitted in concentration. He pointed out at the sea, where just then Otilia noticed the old sailor emerging from the sea, something cradled in his arms—precisely what she could not make out.
Penetinos turned fully from his work now for the first time, and in his eyes there blazed an almost childlike excitement.
“Are you aware of the vases?”
Otilia tilted her head and chuckled. “I was the daughter of an oil merchant and the wife of a wine merchant; I’d say I’m familiar.”
"No, no, not vases, the vases. Here look.”
He moved his paper closer to her. Amongst the crooked lines of Korithian script was a drawing of what appeared to be a large pithos, its bottom swallowed up by the ground, and its shadowy mouth pointed skyward. From the opening, Penetinos had added what appeared to be stars or balls of fire. Otilia could not tell whether they were emerging from the massive vase or returning to it.
“Have you had a chance to read the accounts of Taruku?” Penetinos asked.
“I doubt it; I didn’t do much reading for pleasure.”
“A shame… You should, if you get a chance. If I still had my copy, I would lend it to you, but that's besides the point. Of the Fifteen Wonders of Taruku, the Vases of the Stars, as he called them, are perhaps the most mysterious.”
Otilia smiled and sat. She knew from experience that this would be a long lecture.
“They were first found—or, should I say, rediscovered—by the heroine Seha during the first expeditions of Tamel in these lands. Right over that way.” He turned and pointed a skeletal finger westward, past the cliffs and hills that protected the village. “By the time they were found, they had already been half buried, long abandoned by people. Great stone pithoi, as big as a man. The black stone is unlike any that you could find in the plains. And stranger still, each pithoi is home to hundreds of tiny fire spirits, spirits that are visible even to non-sages like you.”
He lifted one hand and demonstrated, producing tiny glowing orbs of light that circled and bobbed around his hand before slowly blinking back into oblivion.
“ Really? Do they make themselves visible intentionally?”
“No one knows! There are so many things that we do not know about these vases!“ He gesticulated wildly with his hand, enraptured by his own sense of wonder. “Sages have attempted to communicate with the spirits, but they never respond. No one knows where those spirits come from or why they live in those vases. Scholars have made identical pithoi from other kinds of stones or clay to see if the spirits will live in them too, but they never do. They have moved the vases, and the spirits will merely move with them.”
Otilia turned her attention back to the illustration. Just barely visible on the side of the pithos was what she took to be writing of some sort.
“And what about that? The writing?”
“The only clue we have as to who made them. We don’t know what they say, only that the script seems closest to that of the Rechiru.”
“Yes! Desert dwellers from Jezaan, far away from here, almost in Apuna! None of the old tribes or forest folk have any memory of the Rechiru being here. There are no Rechiru ruins or other signs of them here. Just these vases. And no one knows why they made them. Personally, I believe they were for burials—a place to house the dead. You know our ancestors, the Arkodians, did much the same thing.”
Otilia sat in silence, trying to absorb all that the old sage had said. After hearing Penetinos' story, she could vaguely recall seeing some mention of strange Kishite vases in the back of some book of poems that she had read as a girl.
“But what does that have to do with specimens?”
“Ah yes! I told you that they could not find the stone that these were made from, yes?”
“While I was wrong! They did find the stone here on the southern shores of Kishetal. They call it nightstone; it is black and smooth, almost like obsidian, but unable to hold a cutting edge, and it doesn’t reflect light. In our day, we have only ever found it in small pieces, no bigger than my fist, and they have found them nowhere else in all of Kobani. Some people think that it comes from deep in the depths and that those small pieces are merely what the tides are able to cough up. There are all sorts of stories as to what its origin could be. Some people suggest that they could be coughed up by some sort of underwater volcano; can you imagine that? Some people think that it might not truly be a stone at all but instead might be some sort of metal. I once read of a Baalkic sage who thought the stone came from the moon.” He chuckled. “Moon, volcano, strange metal; the real question is, how did the Rechiru get pieces big enough to make their vases, hmm?”
“I don’t know.” Otilia said with a bemused smile.
“Exactly! No one does! We also don’t know why lesser spirits seem to love it so much. It is magic like a dragonclot or ri-stone, but unlike those stones, it doesn't release magic of any sort. Theoretically, you could make an entire home out of it. You see, it doesn’t produce mutations or affect nearby plants and animals like most kinds of magical stones or materials would. Some people have compared it to Arkodian Bronze in that sense, except that it is useless for tool making. Try and melt it down, and it melts away like ice in a furnace. Try to hammer it into shape, and it shatters like cheap pottery! The only way to shape it is with a chisel and a very steady hand. Entire tomes have been penned just trying to understand those vases and the stones that they are made from.
Now, I haven’t had the chance to see the vases yet. I've wanted to since I was a boy. But now I'm here, and perhaps I can convince Narul to carry me there since they are so close to us now, assuming my health permits it. But until then, I would love the opportunity to study the stone myself; perhaps in doing so, I can find something that my predecessors did not.”
They were interrupted by the approach of Istek, still dripping, his arms filled with dozens of stones. He smiled first at Otilia and then at Penetinos.
“Are any of these what you’re looking for, old man?”
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