Kress Chapter
The Competitors: Kress, Borgick, Midnight, Stan, Ellenell
The Assistants: Blue, Marigold, Carl, Gareth, Burgandy
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Kress and Blue stared at the pile of sand. Stunned. Timmy had separated them by colour, which was nice… but it was a ridiculous sight. The sand was sparkling in places and covered a whole range of colours. Heck, there were three varieties of blue that Timmy had found in just five minutes. It wasn't a small amount either. Each pile was large enough to build at least two miniature houses by Kress' estimation. "Damn, I almost want to use some of these for the castle…" mumbled Kress.
Blue looked over the sand, some of it soaked through already, making it clear that it came from the ocean. Honestly, Blue was more confused as to where the dry sections of display came from. Still, it WAS impressive to look at. "I… I think you might be right. Getting enough sand will have to be Timmy's job… but it just looks so stunning that I don't see any other way to go about this. If we didn't make the castle out of the good stuff… it'll look awkward by comparison,"
Kress nodded, agreeing with everything Blue was saying. "I think we might want to spend a bit of time mixing some sands together, find the right balance of colours and then make the castle out of that. Timmy! I need you to gather as much sand of the colours you've already found as you can in… I'll give you another five minutes, but we might need more later. Sound good?" responded Kress.
Timmy, once again, saluted Kress before vanishing. *You know I wonder if I should be worried about what I've just done. Perhaps 'as much as you can get in five minutes' is going to be a bit extreme… but I don't see what else I could've done. We're going to need more colourful sand. This is just the beginning.*
"What sort of mixes are you thinking of using?" asked Blue.
Kress looked over the veritable rainbow of sand in front of him and frowned. "That's the real kicker isn't it? So much of this looks great. Part of me wants to just pick the sparkly purple and only use that for the castle just to make things simpler… but that would be pretty boring wouldn't it?" asked Kress.
Blue nodded, "Yes I believe it would be. We could possible make the colours line by line. I'm sure Timmy could stack them all properly for us… but perhaps doing a mix of sand JUST for the castle might make it stand out properly? Perhaps we try and mix three or four colours, while other big buildings are just a mix of two?" suggested Blue.
Kress looked over all the sand before nodding and said, "Yes… yes I think that will work out for the best. With that in mind… I'm thinking we go for a sort of… mixed sunrise? Purple, orange and a few blended colours between that? Might need to ask Timmy for more of a few specific piles, but I think it could work,"
Kress was telling the truth with the amount. They had plenty of darker purple sand but they barely had a handful of the slightly lighter purple stuff. If they added pink they'd need more of that as well, but they had plenty of oranges of all shades. So that wasn't a colour they were worried about.
"Shall we get started on the mix?" asked Kress. "Once it's done we can just get Timmy to copy it… then we'll have to deal with wetting it all appropriately,"
"Sounds good," confirmed Blue. Once that was said, the pair got to work. They split the sand piles into the smallest segments they could, which sadly for them was only quarters. They really needed more light purple sand. Still, four attempts was enough for two each and they got to work immediately.
Kress started by trying to use what sand they had the most of, just for testing purposes. It very quickly turned into a complete mess so he discarded his efforts quickly. Blue took the time to balance the colours as best she could. Letting them flow from one sand type to another. It looked amazing in her hand… but Kress had to point out a major problem. "That looks lovely, and I can see that you arranged that with care… but that's not what we want. We'll be mixing all the sand randomly to stop it taking forever. Still, it's a good start,"
"Right… my bad, I guess I got too focused on making it look nice," said Blue with a sigh.
"Hey, it's ok. I does look really nice. If we were just sticking with the castle we could spend hours blending it in perfectly, and maybe in another world that could win us the game… but I really don't want to spend that long working on just the castle," said Kress.
Blue nodded in understanding… but before she could return to her work Timmy returned and dumped a massive amount of sand on the pair. Kress felt his jaw drop. Timmy had separated the piles well, probably with magic, but now even the smallest one was easily as tall as Kress was. The largest of the piles, one of the piles of green sand, was taller then both Blue and Kress put together. "Holy shit," said Kress… and Blue. Though Blue's words were a lot quieter and lost in Kress' own, allowing her to avoid being overheard.
"Right… um… shit… what do we get Timmy to do while we're mixing this sand?" asked Kress.
"I… I don't know? We're only like… ten minutes in! I didn't think the Timmys would be so efficient!" insisted Blue.
"Well neither did I. Heck nobody thought they'd be this good I bet… the real question is… what do we do to make the most out of him?" said Kress.
"I… we could… we could get Timmy to work on the ravine maybe?" suggested Blue.
Kress nodded, "I could see that working. You seem to have a better eye for colours then I do. Shall I mark out space for the ravine while you mix up a good colour for the castle?" suggested Kress.
"That's fine with me," confirmed Blue.
Kress nodded and headed off, "Timmy follow me!" said Kress. He walked a bit of the way down, not wanting to cause too many problems by leaving a big ravine in the middle of the marked area that they'd constantly need to jump over. Kress ended up choosing a spot about halfway down the square, and slightly off of the centre. "Timmy, without using magic I want you to dig a ravine that's twice as wide as I am and deep enough to go up to my shoulders. I want you to follow the line I'm making and use that as the centre for the ravine. Can you do that?"
Timmy saluted Kress, and he got to work, sketching out a mostly straight path for the ravine that went from the start down almost to the bottom of the right side of the square. Timmy was doing quick work… but it was visible now. Kress could see it would take Timmy a while to dig it all out. Perhaps close to twenty minutes.
*Probably for the best that it's actually going to take Timmy some time to do this. Timmy can do insane stuff… but it seems a good chunk of that is related to the magic he can use. Without magic Timmy is a very diligent, but still mortal worker. Very useful, and primed to save us a bunch of time, but I don't have to worry about explaining everything to Timmy. That's good. Hmm… maybe I should also start on the designs for the standard houses? That way I can ask Thyme for a bucket, and get Timmy started on that next. Hmm… best to check in with Blue first.*
So that's what Kress did, he checked over the progress Blue was making. He could see quite a few discarded mixes that had been dumped off to the side… but they were getting increasingly similar as they went on, and it was somewhat hard to tell just how many iterations Blue had been through to get to this point. "How are you going with that?" asked Kress.
"I feel like I'm just a few dashes of colour off from it being perfect," insisted Blue.
Kress nodded and said, "I can see that. You look like you're getting close. So… if you don't mind, I'm going to leave that with you and try to work on getting a basic house done. That way we can get Thyme to make a bucket to match my basic house so we can just copy them all over the place. We can make them all different colours to spice things up, but it will be a good project for Timmy to work on once the ravine is done. That's going to take the little guy a while… but not more than twenty minutes,"
"Yes sure, I'm so close to getting this done. Just leave me to it," said Blue distractedly. Kress just nodded and walked away. Not entirely sure Blue had even been listening but that was fine. She was doing good work, and he had a house to design.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢